Furiouser and Furiouser

This month finally brought a long-awaited event full of family drama, global implications, poetry in motion, and cold Coronas. I am speaking, of course, of the release of The Fate of the Furious, the eighth movie in the Fast and the Furious franchise, starring an impressively diverse array of bald men, beautiful women, and really fast cars. I went to see it on opening night — the best night to see a dumb movie like this, with an audience who’s equally pumped. And I enjoyed it immensely, because the makers of these movies possess absolutely zero shame about shaping the films to please their audience. Have the Rock break a cast by flexing his bicep? Awesome.* Bring in Dame Helen Mirren for a minor role? Damn straight. Let a Lamborghini race a nuclear submarine across a frozen sea? WHY THE HELL NOT. Logic, nuance, irony, subtlety:  If these get in the way of drama or excitement, some chance to make the audience cheer, swear, or gasp, forget it. The Fast and the Furious movies want you to mainline pure emotion, and they will bodyslam anything that stands in their way.

But that utter lack of abashment isn’t the only reason I love this series. At a crucial moment in Fate, a single tear ran down Vin Diesel’s face, and the audience in my Brooklyn theater exploded with laughter, because the poor quality of his acting combined with the manufactured nature of the situation made it impossible to take his grief seriously. (Also, we Brooklynites are ironic jerks.) But he took his grief seriously, and in an ironic age, such sincerity is endearing, even if I can’t help laughing at its ridiculousness. That doubled pleasure lets me be both an insider and an outsider, a person who enjoys the force of the emotion and analyzes it at the same time, and so this series unites my heart and mind in a way more respectable movies rarely achieve. 

Of course, “a person who enjoys the force of the emotion and analyzes it at the same time” is also the job description of an editor. This month, in honor of Vin and the Rock, I encourage you to set aside your inner editor for a few days and max out the emotional content of your work. You’re going to write a first kiss? Then what would be the most romantic scene possible? A major character is going to die? What’s the BIGGEST way you can make him go? Another one is getting fired? Peter Finch should have nothing on her. If you actually love logic, nuance, irony, and subtlety, more power to you, and I’m with you 90% of the time. But unbridled, shameless, heartfelt emotion drove Twilight; it created Celine Dion; and it’s powered Fate of the Furious to more than $1 billion in global box office in less than a month of release. Audiences love to be swept up in it; we love the release of it. Try it, if just for a scene or two, and see what it might do for you. 

At the Pikes Peak Writers’ Conference this past weekend, we editors and agents met with individual writers and reviewed their query letters. This got me thinking about the art of the query, and I ended up writing this guide. 

A good query should be no more than one page, with standard business-letter formatting, and it should pitch only one project at a time. Such a letter generally runs:

• [Greeting]
• [Optional: Introduction, possibly with Keynote and/or Personalization]
• [One to three paragraphs of Descriptive Material; two is usually just right.]
• [Optional:  Keynote and/or Comp Titles and/or Personalization]
• [Biography as relevant]
• [Closing] 

Greeting:  This is business correspondence, so it’s probably best to go with “Dear Mr/s. ______” unless you have met this person, s/he would remember you, and/pt you’re on a first-name basis already. 

Introduction: If you’re submitting to an agent or editor who publishes books in multiple genres or age bands, it’s useful to add a line or two establishing the genre and age band of your project before you dive into the descriptive material, especially if the book switches genres (it starts out sounding like a realistic contemporary, but then you introduce a magical portal halfway through, say). Such early identification lets the publishing pro tailor their expectations to the material. If you don’t do a switch like that or the age band of the project is clear from the Descriptive Material, you can just start with said material. This Introduction is also a place you could include comp titles or word count, if you like. 

Keynote:  The one-line summary of this book; a “meets” phrase or a pithy line that sums up the action. (If you’ve read The Magic Words, this is another term for what I call a saleable premise.) “Kids run away to hide in the Metropolitan Museum of Art”; “a tall-ship sailing adventure for the twenty-first century”; “a chilling examination of mass incarceration on one family through multiple generations.” If you don’t have a good Keynote, skip it and let your Descriptive Material do the work. 

Personalization:  This is where you say why you are reaching out to this particular editor or agent about this particular project — previous books they’ve represented or their online presence or whatever. Do not be creepy about it; it’s a little bit weird when someone says they’re approaching me because of a random personal tweet from three months ago (which has happened), because then you're paying way more attention than my Twitter account deserves. But I love it when writers say they love another book I’ve published and why, because that indicates they’ve gone to the trouble of researching what I actually publish and we have similar tastes, and that makes it more likely I will like their manuscript. 

Descriptive Material:  This should sound like flap or jacket copy for the finished book, setting up the protagonist, the central conflict/mystery/lack, and the stakes. It should also offer some sense of the arc of the book’s action (particularly some action the protagonist takes, and a sentence or two about subplots) and perhaps the thematic questions the text is engaging. Really good queries will also be written in the book’s voice, whether snarky or lyrical or muscular, and thus create a sense of the emotional atmosphere of the project as a whole. If you get stuck while writing this material, ask your beta readers to identify some of the elements above for you, or to tell you everything they like about the book, and work from their ideas. (This old blog post on writing flap copy might also be useful.) Do try to work the word count in here or in the next paragraph if you haven't covered it already. If you have a Keynote down here, that serves as the summary for and crowning touch on everything you’ve just said. 

Comp Titles:  “Comparison titles” are books to which your book might rationally be compared, because of similarities in their action, promise, or overall spirit. They’re often expressed in “meets” formulae, like "Friday Night Lights meets Jane Austen’s Emma" (Kay Honeyman’s Interference) or "Ella Enchanted meets Harry Potter" (Megan Morrison’s Grounded:  The Adventures of Rapunzel), and they're very useful for positioning a project in the reader's mind.  

Biography as relevant:  A summation of your previous publishing history, with specific recent titles in the same category as this book called out; any specific and factual personal connection to the material (it’s about an ecological breakdown and you’re a climate scientist, say). If it’s an #ownvoices project, that is worth mentioning for agents or editors who care about such things. 

Closing:  “May I send you the project?” and a method of contact for a response (either a SASE or an e-mail address). If it’s a simultaneous submission, that is good to say here. (Actually, exclusive submissions are more rare these days, and thus more worthy of remark; but the simultaneous admission is what publishing pros are used to.)  

Writing all of this is damnably hard, I know! (I whine all the time when I’m writing flap copy.) But it must be done, and you can do it. And when you do it well, your copy can not only get your manuscript read, but you’ll see it show up again in your agent’s pitch letter, your editor’s catalog copy, and every blogger’s descriptive review as long as the book exists. For more thoughts on query letters, check out this terrific example and this episode of the Narrative Breakdown. 

As an aside for conference organizers, I LOVED these query sessions with writers for all of the following reasons:  They didn’t require any prep work before the conference (unlike critiques); they’re a form of pitching that allows me to get a sense of the writer’s skill on the page (unlike verbal pitches); they let me talk with writers about the concept, arc, and marketability of the book as a whole (which can be hard to discern from either pitches OR critiques); the writers simply brought their letters in and I read them right there (which was surely easier to organize than regular critiques); and the sessions were concretely useful to the writers, as they left with specific ideas on how to improve their query letters. If you’re planning a conference, keep it in mind as an option.