Me, working on my query letter: “Titles Are Stupid,” a 66,000 word novel, is about a girl who loves the winter even though it tries to kill her.— Annemarie Plenert (@amtastical) January 15, 2019
I’m doing it. I’m prepping my finished novel for the querying process.
Querying is exciting and awful; there’s so much waiting, so much rejection, so much hope. People have written so much about how, why, what it feels like, all of that, so I’m just adding to the noise, but I still want to write about what it’s like for me.
I queried my last novel for about six months before the constant rejections overwhelmed me, and my nagging suspicions that despite two years of hard work, it just wasn’t a good enough novel to publish. I stand by that choice. There’s a chance I’ll one day salvage my characters and some of the neat plot pieces, and I do love the sentient house I developed, but that book is over. I got a couple of requests for chapters, and that was enough to encourage me not to give up, so I put all my energy into this book.
This one is much better, but I still worry it isn’t good enough. Writing a novel is a difficult job; I have to keep all the threads in my mind so I can bring them all together, I have to make sure the characters are themselves, I have to make the plot believable but intense enough to keep the reader interested, I want it to be relevant but I worry that I’m writing from a white cis woman’s perspective that doesn’t have the toolbox to write the types of stories I want. It’s a mess of mentally exhausting, emotionally wringing, ego-driven yet self-flagellating work wrapped up into, in my case, a sixty-six thousand word novel about a seventeen-year-old who just really wants to spend her whole life playing in the snow.
Writing the actual query letter is simple, in terms of the instructions: introduce your novel by title, genre, word count, and one line summary. Then expand that summary into a couple of paragraphs that mimic the style of the jacket description, so make it interesting but don’t give it away. The last paragraph is an introduction of you, the author. Easy peasy! Except that in my description I used the exact same words in the exact same sentence structure three times. I can’t figure out how to introduce characters without monstrous sentences containing fifteen commas. I don’t know which plot points are the ones I should use to sell the book and which ones I should keep for the synopsis and actual text, assuming an agent asks me for them.
That is about how it’s going. But in spite of all of it, as I keep saying over and over, I can’t give up. I love my book and I want to see if other people love it, too. So rejection process: here I come!