Queries: To Personalize, or Not to Personalize?

I started the query process again this week (after a few months off buried in intensive revisions, thanks to being selected for Brenda Drake's Pitch Wars contest!). As always, I was torn on whether to personalize my queries or just jump right into the manuscript pitch. If you search for advice on the subject, you'll find conflicting opinions. What to do?

One of the biggest proponents of skipping the personalization and getting right to the point is the Query Shark herself, Ms. Janet Reid. She likens querying to calling around to find a plumber—would you tell them all the reasons you're calling them, rather than someone else?

You might also find people making the argument that agents get hundreds (some even thousands) of queries a week. To have the best chance of hooking them, don't you want to lead with your best material? Hopefully, that's your manuscript pitch, not reminding them what their own website or Twitter posts say they want.

On the flip side, querying can be very impersonal. Agents hate it when authors address queries to "Dear Agent" instead of using their name like a person. So maybe it makes sense to humanize yourself right off the bat by proving that you chose them for a reason. In addition, adding reasons why you're querying that agent with that particular project—as long as your reasons are good ones—shows you have some knowledge of the publishing industry and your genre and themes, or similarities between your novel and others. Former agent and author Nathan Bransford admits that he used personalization as a way to flag queries that deserved a closer look.

In the end, I decided to personalize my queries going forward—but only when I have something that legitimately makes me think that agent is a good fit for my manuscript. If the agent doesn't have much online about their tastes, clients, or wishlist, I won't try to make something up. It's easy to tell when people are reaching—and a clumsy personalization seems like it would be worse than none at all.

Do you personalize your queries?

Gearing Up to Tackle Revisions

I'm plugging away on my draft (whenever I can!), and now I'm starting to think about the major revisions looming in my future. I have "to fix" and "to add" documents that I've been keeping up as I draft, but the sheer number of items on each is daunting.

What I need is a revision plan. Luckily for me, there are lots of great resources to help me get organized. One of the absolute best I've ever seen is Susan Dennard's Tackling Revisions post on the Pub(lishing) Crawl blog. She suggests isolating the big-picture issues first, then breaking each one into a series of manageable chunks. One of my favorite pieces of advice from this post is to do an outline of your story after you finish the first draft, and before you revise. This will show you pretty quickly which scenes add to the story and which need to be cut.

(Side note: that Susan Dennard's pretty smart. She's also the author of the How to Write a 1-Page Synopsis worksheet, the only one I've found that actually makes short synopsis writing bearable.)

Marissa Meyer (author of the Lunar Chronicles series) explains her revision process here. She's also a fan of writing out all of your scenes to see which ones are working and which ones aren't. She adds the advice to color-code all of the main plots and subplots. I love this advice! It seems like an excellent way to see at a glance which plots need more airtime and which are taking up too much space.

And finally, former agent-turned-author Nathan Bransford has some encouraging words for the inevitable revision fatigue--you know, that moment when you're so sick of the book that you never want to see it again. Having gotten to this point with all four manuscripts I've finished, I'm keeping that one in my back pocket. The comments are definitely worth a read, too.

How do you tackle revisions?

Is first person really the right choice for your novel?

It's the second week of October already--and you writers out there know what that means.

Okay, yeah, it does mean Halloween is coming. But it also means THIS is coming:

I'm not planning to officially participate in NaNo this year, because I already have about 90% of a first draft written. But what I am going to do is take the opportunity to give myself a kick in the revision pants. What better time than when thousands of other writers around the world are slaving away over their laptops, too?

The first big edit I'm making in this draft is to change the point of view from first person to third person limited. The change will mean hours and hours of painstaking work, but I really think it's the right choice for this story.

Which brings up a good question: how do you know which one is right for your story?

I know I tend to link to him a lot, but as usual, former agent Nathan Bransford has an insightful look at this topic on his blog. His perspective on where the narrative tension comes from in both POVs makes a lot of sense.

My last manuscript was in first person, so it seemed natural to jump right into the head of the main character in this one, too. But in that last manuscript, the feelings, reactions, and worldview of the viewpoint character were a major part of the story. 

This new one is a cross between an adventure story and a coming-of-age story, so it fits this description from this first vs. third person blog post of a good candidate for a third-person limited point of view: "Third-person limited offers a nice balance between a plot-driven story and a character-driven story. It is often a good choice when the outer events of your plot are closely tied to the protagonist's inner growth."

What do you think? Do you prefer the complete immersion in the character's head that first person perspective brings, or do you like a little distance?

Comicon Recap

My first time at Comicon in San Diego and it did not disappoint!  If you think that this is an event just for sci-fi die hards, then think again!  Sunday's schedule was chalk full of interesting YA fiction and writing panels including:

What's Hot In Young Adult Fiction moderated by Nathan Bransford and featuring top YA writers including Ransom Riggs (Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children) and Veronica Rossi (Through the Ever Night). 

Chronicle Books: Behind the Scenes of a Pop Culture Powerhouse

How to Create Your Own Novel: From the First Idea to Publishing, and What You Need to Sell Your Work to TV and Film

and for those Steampunk die-hards there was

Steampunk Generations: Views of a Genre from Both Ends of Time.

Here are just a few highlights (in picture) from Comicon 2013.

Keeping the peace at Comicon

Iron Man...in Lego

Cylons directing traffic

Mmmmm donut ball...

Captain America signing autographs

                                                     

Enders Game Exhibit

Steampunk Panel

Xander introducing Buffy The Musical Sing-a-long.

Industry Month in Review: Smart People, Smart Stories

Welcome to another edition of "Industry Month in Review".  It seems like just yesterday we were at the tail end of May and now voila, summer is officially here!  I have a bit of a loose theme for June's IMIR.  Smart people, smart stories.  You'd think that would be a natural compliment.  Often times it's questionable.  How do you define what's a smart story?  Does a smart story have to be a best-seller? 


In Nathan Bransford's June 11th blog post, Bransford ponders the randomness of bestsellers.  He notes:

"There are more sophisticate and more accessible and more edgy and more simultaneously sophisticated/accessible/edgy books than Girl With a Dragon Tattoo. Why was that the one to take off?

Why was Girl With a Dragon Tattoo such a success? I think it was a good story, surrounded by a good story (sadly the all too sudden death of it's author Stieg Larsson) and a great marketing team. 

That's my two cents.  I'd like to think that my thoughts and writing are smart (or at least can be), but after reading the next article, I'm not so sure.  

The New Yorker recently published an article entitled Why Smart People are Stupid.  

The first paragraph poses the following question:

"A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?"

If you said 10 cents, you're wrong, think again.

The article discusses the many mental shortcuts that we as humans take which often leads us to make foolish decisions.  While the article is science and not fiction, as a writer, I find that it lends itself nicely when thinking about some of the characters that I am developing and why they make certain decisions.

If there's one person that was a smart person and a smart story teller it would be the late Ray Bradbury.  The legendary sci-fi writer passed away earlier this month at the age of 91. This article from the Atlantic Wire sums up Bradbury's venerable career.  

The article quotes an interview that Bradbury did with the Paris Review in 2010:

"Science fiction is any idea that occurs in the head and doesn’t exist yet, but soon will, and will change everything for everybody, and nothing will ever be the same again. As soon as you have an idea that changes some small part of the world you are writing science fiction. It is always the art of the possible, never the impossible."

I couldn't help but think of a recent post I'd seen that ties in nicely with Bradbury's quote (and also made me giggle). 

Finally for those of us who are continuously seeking bits of wisdom in our journey to writing smarter stories, I leave you with this article from io9 where Pixar storyboard artist Emma Coats discusses her 22 rules of storytelling.

Now go forth writers, and prosper. 

 

Industry Month In Review: For The Love Of Fiction

We’re rolling out the red carpet for the first “Industry Month in Review”.  Brought to you every last Monday of the month by moi (curses, there’s that Canadian in me again).

For this IMIR, I’ve chosen an article I found particularly interesting.  One whose question dates back hundreds perhaps thousands of years.

The article is slightly older, April 29, 2012 to be exact but I think still relevant a month later.  It’s entitled "Why Fiction Is Good For You", written by Jonathan Gottschall and published in the Boston Globe.

This is the article you can use as backup when you tell others you’re writing a book - a fiction novel no less and they give you that lifted eyebrow – you know the one. 

Who needs fiction and story telling in their lives?  From the studies in this article it looks like all of us.

Fiction has its haters, as Gottschall notes but new research in psychology and broad-based literary analysis shows that fiction molds us, influences us and for the most part (here’s the good news) for better, not worse.

 “Fiction enhances our ability to understand other people; it promotes a deep morality that cuts across religious and political creeds.  More peculiarly, fiction’s happy endings seem to warp our sense of reality.  They make us believe in a lie: that the world is more just than it actually is.“

Enjoying your weekly dose of Modern Family or Glee?  Gottschall cites studies that show that:

“Reader attitudes shift to become more congruent with the ideas expressed in a [fictional] narrative…..So when we watch a TV show that treats gay families nonjudgementally, our own views on homosexuality are likely to move in the same nonjudgmental direction.”

It’s a feel good read that'll have you singing the praises of fiction and thinking about how your view of the world has been influenced by the stories you love to read and the shows you love to watch.

Still looking for more novel news in review?  Check out Nathan Bransford’s May 15th blog post where he highlights a number of newsworthy items including the cultural phenomenon known as what else, Facebook, a nice debate on the future of publishing and (more good news!) the 72% uptick in Chidren’s and YA book sales (yay!).