A Manuscript Checkup: Are You Really Ready to Query?

I sometimes hear of querying authors lamenting the decline of “editorial” agents. In truth, all agents are editors of their projects. It just depends on where along a manuscript’s evolution do they want to jump in. What these authors aren’t realizing is that they might be looking for representation too early in their writing process. Most agents look for a project in its later stages or last stage of development. And the reason is simple and practical. The sooner an agent can get a project in front of editors, the sooner (hopefully) he can see a paycheck. If he’s very lucky, he might find a project that only needs one round of editing, but most likely, that one round of editing will uncover the need to do more.

I’ve been working on a client’s book project for over the last month. This is my third time going through the manuscript for this editing round. I’m fairly sure this is either my fifth or sixth time reading the novel. One thing is certain, though. I loved this story the first time I read it, and I love it more now. It’s true that with each edit and revision, the manuscript improves. But it’s more than that. While I could see issues when I first read the story, I could also clearly see solutions. And now that the changes are on the page, the story is better than I first imagined it could be.  

Often I'll get submissions that are so early in their development that I cannot even begin to unravel their issues, much less envision solutions. Those novels, while "completed," are not "market-ready.” Occasionally, time permitting, I’m able to send feedback. When I do, I am struck by how often the same recommendations come up.

Even after countless rejections, some authors may still find it easier to keep querying and keep submitting rather than go back into their novels to fix what is not working. Often it’s because they’re too close to the work and can no longer see problems in it. Some do see or sense there are issues but are unable to pinpoint them or don’t know how to solve them, or where to start.

I have put together some questions that you can use as a checklist to see if you should start or keep querying, or use them to jumpstart your next revision:

1. Are the stakes clearly defined within the first few paragraphs, or at least within the first chapter?
2. Are the scenes grounded with specific and unique details that make them tangible and immersive?
3. Do the main characters have inner lives with complex thoughts, reflections, memories, etc.? Even if they do not reveal their fears, faults and vulnerabilities to the outside world, do they let us in to see them?
4. Do we have context to the main character(s) emotional journey? Is there a personal journey at all?
5. Can we clearly envision distinct physical features of the characters that also reveal their unique personalities (or do we only see their hair and eyes)?

If you have answered “no” to any of the above questions, then this could be why you are receiving rejections or no responses at all.

Keep going through your manuscript, asking the next questions:

1. Is there an over-reliance or repetition of facial movement or expressions to portray emotions, such as “sighing,” “grimacing,” “groaning,” and “cringing”?
2. Are there large blocks of dialogue where nothing else is happening in the scene, or it is unclear what the characters are physically doing during the conversation?
3. Is there a lot of expository information (explanation of background, characters,  ground situation, etc.) revealed through dialogue?
4. Are there words, phrases, gestures, physical sensations that are used commonly or repetitively (such as “heart pounding” or “pulse racing”)?
5. Is there filtering language? (for example, a character sees something happening rather it just happens on the page, or rather than saying the thought, the character’s “sees it through his mind’s eye”)

If you have answered "yes" to any of these last questions, it appears, you have some work ahead of you.

Hopefully by going through these questions, you'll have a better perspective on your manuscript, and be in a better place to decide whether or not you should keep querying or look at revising. These questions also aim to provoke ideas on ways to tell your story better, so that the next time you query, there’ll be an agent or editor who not only falls in love with it, she’ll love it more each time she reads it.

Pitch Perfect

With the advancement of the interwebs and social media, the publishing world has exploded with opportunities for aspiring authors to get their work in front of editors and agents. Sure, the tried and true query method still works. But gone are the days of mailing off a sample of your manuscript and waiting six months to a year to hear back.

Oh wait, I lied. Some agents and pub houses still take six months to a year to give you a response. And then, it's most likely the ugly form rejection letter via email. With the influx of querying via email, those poor agents and editors are often inundated with queries. Some getting up to 10,000 a year! And having friends on both ends of the spectrum, I now understand the necessity of the form rejection.

So, what's a poor author to do to get your work in front of those amazing agents and editors?

Well, here's one idea we can explore today....contests. But, where do you find a contest? Your biggest asset in today's day and age is social media. You will find out all about the many contests you can enter. Now, beware. Not all contests are created equal.

Do your homework. Research your options. <----you just knew I was going to throw that in there, didn't you.

There's partial manuscript contests that you can pay to enter a sample of your work, usually the first 5000 words or so. A lot of these are done by RWA (Romance Writers of America) chapters, and they use the entry fees to help support their chapter. So it's a good investment because your partial will be seen by a number of pubbed and aspiring authors in the first round. And if you're lucky enough to make it to the next, your manuscript will be seen by agents and editors!

There's also the free contests around the world wide web. There's query contests, first 250 word contests, Twitter pitch contests. The big daddy of them all, Pitch Wars, run by the immeasurable Brenda Drake, is one you should definitely have on your radar.

Query Kombat, Pitmad, Pitchmadness, Pitchmas, Nestpitch, Sun vs. Snow, Nightmare on Query Street are just a sample of the great contests that you can enter!! Now some of these may have already passed for this year, but keep them on your radar for the next submission period so you can prepare. 

So, that being said, each contest has it's own rules. Some require just a 140 Twitter pitch, like Pitmad. Some require a query and the first 250 polished words of your manuscript. Some require a 100 word blurb only. Some are query only. 

Yeah. What's the difference between a blurb, a pitch, a query?

Well, let's see if we can dissect that.

A query is what you should always have at the ready for your book baby. You'll need it pretty much no matter what avenue you're taking to get in front of an agent or editor. There are so many websites, books, seminars on how to write a good query. The best place I can recommend is Janet Reid's Query Shark blog.

But here's an example of a query from my own WIP, my Space Opera entitled CLANDESTINE CHAOS. I've entered this before in a few contests so if you've run the circuit you may have seen it before. 

Pre-med student Kadence Murphy's sole mission in life: get out of college and into scrubs. Struggling with a hormone-surged roomie, a two-timing almost boyfriend, and financial aid problems, the only thing keeping her from shivving someone is her part-time job in the campus library. She discovers a cryptic book that entwines its storyline with reality.

Kadence drops into Captain Jeremiah Colt's lap, interrupting his latest effort to redeem his floundering business. Now stuck on a dysfunctional transport-ship, Kadence learns she’s in an alternate version of 2013 where Earth collapsed as a result of a global meltdown from Y2K. The survivors took to the skies in an attempt to colonize and sustain human-life on other planets.

Colt itches to dump her aggravating hide on the first planet they come to. Kadence can't last five minutes in his presence without the driving need to stab him with a spoon. A fierce attraction lies beneath their bickering, making Kadence rethink her quest to get home. But a mutinous crew member has other plans, none of which include Kadence, and he isn't above murder to get rid of her.

Now, that's the meat of the query and it's all of 185 words. Agents/editors view so many queries a day, if you can't capture their attention in less than 250 words, you're out the door with a form rejection. So keep it succinct, short, and captivate them to read more. Goal is to keep it around 250 words tops, including your bio & writing credits and cat/genre/word count.

Do not try and turn your query into a full synopsis and hit every plot point and character arc in your story. You want to merely engage the person to request more to read, not shove it down their throat in one fell swoop. You're only asking for a rejection that way.

Ok, well what about a blurb? How does that differ?

Think of a blurb as the back cover info on a book. Short, succinct, overall pitch of the book to make you want to read it. Often it's about 4 or 5 sentences, tops. Something you can recite off the top of your head, not have to write it down to remember. 

Here's my 100 word blurb/pitch from CLANDESTINE CHAOS:

Pre-med student Kadence Murphy discovers a book that entwines its storyline with reality. She drops into Captain Jeremiah Colt's lap, interrupting his latest heist, finding an alternate version of 2013 where Earth collapsed from a global meltdown duringY2K.

Colt itches to get rid of her as soon as he can. Kadence can't last five minutes with him without the driving need to stab him with a spoon. A fierce attraction lies beneath their bickering, making Kadence rethink her quest to get home. But a mutinous crew member has other plans and isn't above murder to get rid of her.

So you start with your 250 word query and narrow it down to the meat of the story. Hit the high points, inciting incident and what's going to make us want to read it? Leave all secondary characters out of it, you can hint at them but stick with the names of only your protag or hero/heroine. What is their goal? What are the stakes? They must be clearly defined. 

Stay away from hypothetical questions in a query, pitch, or blurb. IT IS KRYPTONITE! 

Ok, so then there's the Twitter pitch. You think you have 140 characters to play with. But in reality it's actually less, because often times in a Twitter Pitch party you have to include a hashtag for the agents to peruse like #pitmad, #pitchmadness, #adpit etc. And many require you to put in the category and genre. So you have to get creative. There's some rules here to strictly follow in a Twitter pitch:

1) DO NOT spread your pitch over 2 or 3 tweets. Those hashtags move so fast your first tweet will end up being 140 tweets away from your second. Also, don't make the agent work for it, you need to capture their attention in one tweet.

2) DO NOT try and short spell stuff like 4ever, 2gether, 2night etc. While it helps shorten your tweet, it looks like a damn text message to your bae. It's unprofessional and hard to read. It sucks having to condense your 80,000 word novel into 120 characters. But it can be done. You're the author, get creative.

3) Always have multiple versions of a Twitter pitch. One may not catch a person's eye, but maybe another one of yours will. It's good to change things up and have at least 3 or 4 if you can.

So here's some examples of Twitter pitches for CLANDESTINE CHAOS:

Kadence falls into an alt timeline. Colt can't decide if he wants to kiss or kill her. A mutinous crew member may do it for him. NA #pitmad

Losing yourself in a book has new meaning when Kadence's reality is entwined w/one. Colt wants her heart someone else wants her dead #RTSlap

Firefly meets Outlander. A book dumps Kadence in an alt timeline. Stuck in space, the one man who can help her she wants to kill. NA #PitMad

Hopefully you can take this knowledge into the universe and use it for good instead of evil. May the pitches be with you!

Just step AWAY from the manuscript. **EDITING OBJECTIVELY**

It's not you, Manuscript, it's me. I think we need some space.

You may be asking yourself this same question. But it's true. 

This post is going to let you in on a little golden nugget of wise advice: 

Put a chunk of time and space between you and your manuscript before you edit.

Repeat after me: I will not edit for a minimum of 4-6 weeks. 

Now say it again!

Okay, realistically, this isn't always going to happen. If you're an established author on deadline with your publisher, you may work down to the wire. But even so, if you're an established author, you pretty much know this rule of thumb anyway, and hopefully those are the revisions that are down to the wire, and not the first draft to your editor. Give yourself enough time to let the manuscript sit, settle, and cool off before you attempt any edits.

I know you're looking at me with this face:

TRUST ME ON THIS! You will only do yourself a disservice if you attempt to edit or revise without clearing your head.

The best editing I've done is when I have put at least six months between me and a manuscript. Hell, I've even come back to ones after a year. It's amazing the things you will see with fresh eyes.

When you come at a manuscript while you're still in the heat of the moment, you won't catch things. While the story is still fresh in your mind, you're too attached to your characters to do any kind of edits objectively. In this day and age of instant gratification and technology, it actually hurts us more than helps us aspiring authors. It makes us send things out into the world well before they're ready.

EVERY author will tell you they've queried at least once, often times more than once, way before they should have. I know you want to put your book baby out into the world to be loved by an agent or editor and all your adoring fans just waiting to love on it. But don't put something out there you will regret in a year or two. Save yourself the regrets, and double shots of whiskey, while you're drowning in the query trenches up your eyeballs in rejection letters.

Your story plays out in your mind as you're reading it, so as the author, you have a tendency to gloss over things as you're reading. I guarantee you will miss grammatical errors that everyone else, and their cousins, will catch.

You need to be able to distance yourself from your characters, from your plot, from the way the story plays like a movie in your mind. Readers can't see the movie in your head, you MUST be able to put that to the page. If you don't come at it from a fresh angle, you will never be able to see what others see. And you have to in order to make others see what's in your head.

I guarantee it, plot lines happen in your mind without you even knowing it. A large portion of that never makes it into your story. Coming at your manuscript from a distance will allow you to be pulled into your world without being tethered. Your umbilical cord, for lack of a better term, will be cut and you'll be able to read word for word and see what's missing.

It will also allow you to read through it again as a reader, not as an author. If you find yourself skimming, then you know what you have to do.

When you can pick up your manuscript and say to yourself--"Wow, I don't even remember writing that. That was a great line!" Or, similarly, "Wow, what the hell was I smoking when I wrote this?" You're ready to edit.

On more than one occasion I've caught things in a manuscript after coming at it with fresh eyes and repeatedly facepalm myself. If you don't have any WTF moments when you're editing, you haven't put enough time and space between you and your darlings.

If you read through it and think what you've written is absolute gold, go put yourself in a timeout. Start writing something new, or take a writing break completely and watch some reality TV. That will give you some perspective. But that's another post for another time.

If you've read through the manuscript after letting it sit and you find yourself with a goose egg on your forehead from repeatedly facepalming yourself, get that red pen out and start slicing and dicing.

Also, grab your favorite editing drink of choice, you'll be in this stage for a while.

The thought of having to do revisions can be overwhelming. But every manuscript needs an edit. Every author will tell you that. Even the greats don't make a perfect first draft. A beautiful book baby is a lot of work. The majority of that comes from repeated revisions and letting go of your darlings; from characters to what you once thought were genius lines. 

In the end, you will have a gorgeous book you can be proud of. Nothing worth anything ever comes easy. So why put something out into the world that isn't your very best?

Some books take years of writing and rewriting. Some books come out a little quicker, but still need loving care and genuine, objective revisions. It'll be frustrating, it'll be agonizing, it'll be fun to kill off character, it'll give you pride to know you put your heart and soul into a project to make it its very best.

And then the day will come:

But that's another post for another time.

And for those of you ready to partake in the editing phase, after going through your waiting period of course, here's a link to a great month-long editing course: Janice Hardy's FICTION UNIVERSITY

Happy Editing!

To Was or Not To Was

As a writer, I tend to write my first drafts quickly and without too much thought to craft.  The stories about greats writers agonizing over each word? Yeah. So not me.

The good news is I’m not alone. There’s a large contingent of us fast drafters out in the world, throwing our words, and our ideas, and our plot lines onto paper as quickly as we can type. We shape the broad outlines of our stories as we create out first draft. And when we type the end, it isn’t really the end. Or, it shouldn’t be.

Because that’s when the hard work begins.

Edits are where we sharpen of our prose, and highlight the gems we unconsciously threw out onto the page during our first draft. It’s where we identify the shallow parts of our manuscript, and deepen--deepen until we have fully rounded characters and razor edge motivations.  It’s where we trim the fat from our sentences, cutting the useless words away from the necessary ones.  And it’s overwhelming.  Finding a place to begin can be paralyzing. 

So, here is a suggestion on where to begin.

Start with a search for passive verb construction, and more specifically, for the big, bad, daddy of all passive verb construction: WAS.

Highlight each instance of the word. 

Try not to pass out upon finding thousands of uses of the word was in your manuscript.

You can do this, I promise.

Take a breath, and then try to figure out how to write that sentence more concisely, and without the word was.

Here are some examples from my unedited work in progress:

The small room felt like a cell, settled deep below the arena like it was—cinderblock walls covered with a slick coat of white oil paint.

How can we fix this so that it has more impact?

How about: 

The room sat deep below the arena and felt like a small cell, complete with cinderblock walls glossed over by a coat of white paint.

Play with the words until you have the feel you’re going for concisely expressed in the sentence. 

And remember—"was" is almost never concise.

Another example:

Ramon Garcia was the only thing standing between him and a shot at the championship and he was better than Garcia.

Okay, to be fair, was isn’t the only thing wrong with this sentence. 

But how could we fix it?

How about: 

Only Ramon Garcia stood between him and his shot at the championship. And he could kick Garcia’s ass.

One final easy tip for trimming the word "was" from your manuscript: 

Any time you see "there was" in conjunction, you can almost always eliminate it painlessly.

You want examples? Here you go:

And beat up or not, there was no need for him to be an ass.

Easy fix: 

And beat up or not he didn’t need to be an ass.

Another? Here you are:

He had no reason to care, but there was no way he wanted Nick there when he picked it up.

Easy Fix? 

He had no reason to care, but he didn’t want Nick there when he picked it up.     

It will take patience and persistence, but eliminating the great majority of your uses of the word "was" will help make your writing stand out and resonate with the reader.