Do You Have to Sum Up Your Book in One Sentence?

Not long ago I believed that if you couldn't sum up your novel in one sentence, you were doomed. If you couldn't do that, you didn't know at all what your book was really about. In several ways, I still believe it, but as I write more and more I've discovered that part of that belief is complete nonsense.

Why a sentence is good
First of all, it's kind of nice to be able to talk about your book in one sentence. You know, when people find out you're a writer and they ask you what one of your novels is about, it's nice to feel confident in that one sentence. I used to hate it when I stumbled and fumbled with my words, trying to think of how I could sum up that huge story into a little tiny description. Now, if someone asks me what Monarch is about I tell them it's about a CIA spy who who has to track down a big-time terrorist, but also save his own heart in the process. The problem? There's so much more to the book than that. There's even more to the book than the back-of-the-book blurb. Lots more. The blurb on the back doesn't even mention the other two huge story lines and points-of-view.

 

Oh, well, though. That's marketing for you! It's also unrealistic to think everyone wants to sit down and talk about all the intricacies of your book with you. What they really want to know is the basic plot and idea, and honestly, if you don't know that about your own book, you might have some problems.

For instance, when I first wrote Monarch, I honestly had no clue what the book was really about. It's about a spy, I told myself. A spy who isn't like other spies. I wanted to take the James Bond character ideal and turn it on its head a little bit. I did, but even after two drafts the focus in my story wasn't clear. So, after realizing this, I finally took the time to figure out where I wanted to focus, and I rewrote the book with that focus in mind. Tada! The book worked. It wasn't quite as easy as I make it sound, but that was the core of it.

Why a sentence is bad

Just like you as a person can't be summed up in one sentence, neither can your novel. There are so many layers, so many characters and intricacies and ideas that boiling it down to one sentence is almost absurd. I've often thought the idea of my books sound absolutely boring when boiled down like that. For instance, Cinders is the story about what happens to Cinderella when she decides her prince isn't who she wants after they get married. Hmmm, interesting concept, but wow, that's missing a lot. My novella Thirds is about a girl who wants the same magic as her two evil stepsisters. That sounds overdone, if you ask me.

What I've concluded is that summing up your book into a sentence can help you in a lot of ways, but I don't think it's absolutely necessary. I also don't think your book is totally lost if you can't sum it up. Some stories are much more complicated than others, and all writers function completely different from one another. I know I've asked my friend, J.S. Chancellor, what her books are about in one sentence, and she told me I was nuts if I wanted her to do that. 

Will learning how to sum up your work in one sentence help you with a query? Probably, yes, but as I've discovered, a query isn't the embodiment of your novel. It doesn't even begin to explain your book to its full capacity. It's more like dangling a worm on the end of a hook, like the back-of-the-book blurb of my novel, Monarch. My publisher and I decided what to focus on, and we ran with it. That book could be marketed probably 80 different ways. The blurb that's there now is the worm we decided to dangle.

It Isn't the Pitch, It's the Story

Last week I had a nice long chat with my agent and we were talking about future projects. I'd sent him a couple ideas via email (including, of course, the joke ideas, like an adventure story where all of the characters are penguins because Penguin Lit is the new Vampire Luv and there's already a major publishing house well-suited to selling Penguin Lit) and we were discussing which books I wanted to work on in what order. I've got my next three novels planned, and a couple other ideas bubbling away in Maybe Someday status. One of the upcoming book ideas is something that he felt was going to be a difficult sell these days, and I thought from the way he was talking about it that he didn't really get what the book was about.

"That's because I did a crappy job of pitching it in the email," I said.

"People keep saying that," he said. "And it just makes me want to bite them*. It's not the pitch, it's the story. If the heart of the story, the real meaning, isn't there, then who cares about the pitch? The book won't live up to it."

And that got me thinking, because I like to think and do it as often as I can and also because it's a good piece of advice that you don't hear much. Especially from agents. People talk a lot (and I mean a lot) about queries and the pitch and while I think that some people don't understand what a pitch is, it does seem that when you look at a great many queries, the biggest problem with the pitch is not the pitch, but the story. The book itself, that is.

Nobody wants to hear this, I'm sure. "You might think about working on the book some more," is something nobody wants to say, either. Well, I might, because I'm a jerk. But I don't mean to say that if there's a problem with the book that becomes evident in the query, it's because the book is stupid or based on a stupid idea and should be abandoned. What I mean is that the writer may not be focusing on the heart of the story.

What do I mean by the heart of the story? I sort of mean something like theme, certainly. But more than that, I think I'm talking about the core value that belongs to the writer which has sparked her to write this book in this way. Cormac McCarthy's book "The Road" is a narrative about a man and his son making their way through a post-apocalyptic America, yes, but the core value that drove McCarthy to write this was paternal love. And I'd bet that if you queried it as "a father's love for his son drives him to walk across America in search of a safe haven in Florida," it would get more agent/editor/publisher attention than "a man fights off roving bands of survivors in a dead land after a violent catastrophe." There are a lot of good reasons for that, mostly having to do with human responses to human emotions and readers caring about characters who are emotionally invested in their own stories. The book I'm revising for my agent is about friendship being tested by opposing worldviews. That's much more human and engaging, I think, than talking about revolution and politics.

Do not think that I mean this as just a different way to pitch the book in a query. Because that's not what I'm really getting at. What I really mean to say is that there is some reason you chose to write the book you've written. There is something that this book affirms for you, or explores on a deep level. (Well, maybe not, and if that's the case, your book likely sucks because it's empty of humanity and nobody wants to read that kind of book. There, I've said it.) Think about that original impulse in you, the thing inside you that responds to the book you've written. If necessary, make that into a more important, more active (but not blatant and in-your-face) part of the story. And when you've figured out what the real motivation behind you writing the book is and you've made sure that your book is actually about that, then two things (at least) will happen: it will be a better book, and it will be easier to talk about in a query. And as a better book that's easier for you to discuss, it should (I predict) be easier for you to connect with an agent, and easier for that agent to connect with a publisher. And in the end, that will also make it easier for your story to connect with readers.

I know--or I think I know--that some types of stories (spy stories especially) don't seem to have anything to do with relationships or really deep characters or emotions, so possibly this advice doesn't fit for all genres. I don't know, because that's way outside my area of expertise (or pretend expertise, at any rate). What do you think?

* Extra points to him for saying he wants to bite people. Seriously, he's so cute sometimes.

Some Third-Hand Advice from the Pros

If you take a few minutes and look here, you'll find some excellent advice about queries and first pages gleaned from the Agent/Author Day at the Backspace Writers' Conference. It's recommended reading.

What I couldn't help noticing is that a lot of writers who are querying agents don't have a firm grasp of basics. Do not be one of those writers. Do your homework. Learn about your genre, learn to write well, and stretch your imagination when you write your book.

And, yes, this post is mostly filler. It's Friday, and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, as I pointed out last week. I was going to write about how some people I know are upset that I don't take to heart their advice the way I do that of publishing industry professionals (like my agent), and how it's likely a good idea to be a bit secretive about the publishing process once it's underway. My best friend Mighty Reader works in publishing, and last week she received a snarky note from one of her author's mothers, sent along by the author. The author is an adult, and the author's mother (even if she is, as she claims, a retired editor) needs to step off. Publishing is a business. Act in a businesslike manner if you want to make this your career. If you're getting paid by a publisher, then being a writer is your job, even if it's not your full-time job. Do you bring your friends and family to the office to argue with the people who sign your paychecks? No? I didn't think so. Anyway, I was going to write about this but as it's Friday and nobody reads blogs on Fridays, I'll just skip it. Have a swell weekend, all.

Query Letters

Since the three of us are in different stages of submitting our novels to agents, we thought we'd offer some general comments about query letters. As always, these are just our opinions.

Davin: At first, I thought my query letter had to be perfect, which was a very intimidating thought. Now, I think of letters as just the door opener: the objective is to get an agent to request a partial or a full manuscript. After that, it's the actual book that they will pay attention to. To that end, present your project clearly and display some proficiency in your writing. Include a brief biography that explains why you are the best writer for this job. Then, let the agents decide if they are interested or not. If you have done your homework and found people who are representing the type of writing you do, they will be interested, even if you have a typo or two in your letter.

Below, Robyn offered up her query letter for a individual critique. Thanks, Robyn! It's almost always a good idea to get some feedback on how your query letter is working, and The Public Query Slushpile is a great place to post your own letter.

It’s summer, and Anna and Claire head out on their first-ever endurance horseback ride alone on the trails of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Anna is excited that she and Claire will be able to share the beauty that lies in the trails that she and her family have ridden her whole life. But a few hours into their ride, disaster strikes: they become lost. With night fast approaching, the insulin in Anna’s pump is almost gone. How will they survive the next seventy-two hours in the wilderness, fighting wild animals, and Anna’s diabetes?

Horse stories are always popular with girls obsessed with horses, but there are few survival stories with girl protagonists. I have combined those ideas and hope you will enjoy reading Seventy-Two Hours, an adventure story for older middle grade girls. It is complete at 34,000 words.

I have written for our state SCBWI newsletter, The Pen and Palette, and I am a member of SCBWI.

Thank you for your time and consideration. I hope to hear from you soon.

Warmly,

Robyn Campbell

Robyn, overall, I think this is a strong letter. It's simply written and presents the premise of the story clearly. We know the characters, the setting, the conflict and the tone of the piece in just one paragraph. We also get some good information about you. I'm missing the characters' personalities. We get a little bit of Anna's background, but I think a phrase or two about each of them could make the book feel more multidimensional. The sentence: "With night fast approaching, the insulin in Anna’s pump is almost gone" is a bit awkward to me. It implies some sort of causal relationship that isn't supposed to be there. The phrase, "Horse stories are always popular with girls obsessed with horses" also isn't working for me yet. It's a reflexive thought that doesn't feel persuasive.


Michelle: My advice is aimed at Robyn, but most of the things I say here can apply to queries in general.

The important thing to remember is, as Davin says, query letters do not have to be perfect. In fact, the more you revise a query, the more I've seen the author's voice and style simply slip away, leaving nothing more than a formal-sounding business letter that doesn't show the agent or publisher what kind of a writer you really are. The sparkle fizzles out. I can feel the sparkle in this letter, but I think you can give it more. More revision, you say? Well, I don't think it'll take much. This letter is strong already. It is concise and tells us almost everything we need to know. It does lack some focus, I think. Here's what I would do:

In my experience (which is limited, mind you), I've found that the section in a query that focuses on the characters should focus on two things: the main protagonist and the main character or force that is stopping that protagonist from reaching his/her intended goals. This focus is essential. Unfortunately, I've seen query after query slip out of this focus. Too may plot points. Too many characters. A query usually doesn't need all that.*

I think your letter is pretty focused, but I want a little more. It could be a matter of a few words. First, I'm almost certain your main protagonist is Claire - but, as Davin says, I think a phrase or two about Anna and Claire would help establish this. (Although you'll probably want less of Claire). Second, emphasize the main force going against them - the wilderness, the wild animals, Anna's diabetes? See, I'm not sure which one it is. . . . Probably a combination of all three, but usually one trumps the others. Too many villains creates confusion.

Remember, this is all my opinion. I've had a problem of too many villains in my current novel, and I'm sure I'll have trouble with that in the query letter. But if you feel that equally emphasizing all three is essential, you may want to leave it close to what you already have.

Nathan Bransford has a great post about the "sweet spot" in query letter word count. He's found that the sweet spot, for him at least, is between 250 -350 words. Yours is 172, so "adding a few phrases about Anna and Claire" shouldn't be a problem. You have lots of room to play around. Although please don't go adding words just to hit the sweet spot. Bad idea, haha. Also, agent Alexander Field over at The Mystery and The Magic recently did a post on 10 things not to do in your query, for anybody who's interested.

Thank you for submitting this! I hope we've helped a little.

*(Lynn, in the Just Ask section, gave you some good advice, but I think the questions she's asking don't have to be addressed in the query. Those are questions you want the agent to ask, in my opinion. All a query letter should do is hook that agent. If they ask for a full synopsis in the query, that's where you might answer those questions)

Scott: I'll repeat what Davin and Michelle have already said about queries not having to be perfect. The query letter I used to get an agent had a typo in it, but my agent never noticed it (or, if he did, he didn't care because he liked what I'd gotten right).

I think that main thing to bear in mind is that a query is a hook, an advertisement for your story. You need to find one or two (but one is better) sentences to "grab" the agent (like he's any other reader) and make him want to read the story. Which usually means showing your protagonist in some sort of crisis. In Robyn's example above, "How will they survive the next seventy-two hours in the wilderness, fighting wild animals, and Anna’s diabetes?" is very nearly a hook, but not quite. I think this would be stronger if it were recast from a question into a statement, something like "Anna and Claire must survive the next seventy-two hours in the wilderness, fighting [really? fighting?] wild animals under the threat of Anna slipping into diabetic shock." Don't make the heart of your story a question, because the reader (that is, the agent) might just shrug and say, "I don't know" and move on to something else. Declare boldly that there is a conflict that demands the reader's attention.

Other things to think about: 1. Your query should be in the same "voice" as your book. If you have written a spare, lean novel, you should write a spare, lean query. If you've written a novel with flowing, beautiful language, your query should reflect that. 2. Don't worry about pub credits and "platform." Just write a good book and be excited about your story when you write your query; let your excitement come through. 3. Be businesslike. This is a business letter. Don't be cute or overly familiar. 4. Don't write a query that doesn't reflect your actual story. 5. Do include the first five pages (at least) of your novel unless the agent tells you not to. 6. Don't query at random; research agents and target them. I only sent out a handful of queries before getting an offer of representation.

When are you ready to query an agent? -or- 254

Litgirl01 asked: How many edits does one usually go through before querying an agent? When do/did you know that your book was ready to send to an agent? I can't imagine ever feeling like I am finished and ready to submit. :-)

Frustratingly, I think the answer to this question is as impossible to know as is the answer to “How many licks does it take to get to the Tootsie Roll center of a Tootsie Pop?” Some people submit before the manuscript is ready, and for those who wait successfully, describing the right moment requires complex calculations that take into consideration tongue surface area and wetness.

But, I wanted to discuss this topic anyway, since I’m currently on the brink of making such a decision. Back in January I initially thought my book was ready to go. I submitted it to three agents, got turned down by three agents, and after discussing it with a new friend, I decided to revise it one more time. Now, once again, I’m preparing to submit soon, and my emotional state is different from what it was back in the beginning of the year.

Put simply, I think I’ve outgrown my novel.

When you’re a beginning writer, as I consider myself to be, the slope of your learning curve is steep. Your brain is picking up new tips and tricks by the minute. Somehow, though, that knowledge doesn’t properly transmit down your neck and arms to the tips of your fingers. Try as you might, you probably have much more trouble creating your own masterpiece than recognizing quality or lack of quality in other people’s writing. So, you revise. You manage to make your manuscript far better than it was. Meanwhile, that clever brain of yours has dared to learn even more. While your book may reflect your best ability from two months ago, it again feels mediocre compared to what your brain actually thinks it can do. So, you revise again, but you’re starting to sense a pattern. If you’re like me, you might even sketch out a graph, and sure enough, it doesn’t seem like the improvement rate of the manuscript will EVER catch up to that brilliant bowl of noodles balanced on the tip of your spine.

While I believe that revision is immensely powerful*, I also believe that some unfixable problems can be introduced to your book early on. By unfixable, I don’t actually mean unfixable, but perhaps the fixing of the problem would make the book so unrecognizable that it is basically a different book. This sort of makes sense, doesn’t it? I mean, you came up with the idea back when your brain was just a fledgling, and now your advanced brain is having to deal with the mess. Ever try to fix a cake that a five-year-old started to make?

At some point, you have fixed your book A LOT, but it’s probably not as good as your brain could make it if it could start from scratch. This point probably coincides with the time when you are making changes in your manuscript and then changing it right back again. You know your book could be better, but at the same time, you can’t fix it without making it into a different book. I think that’s when you stop. Your project reflects who you were, and your next book will reflect who you are.

If you want actual numbers, you may have to start licking the Tootsie Pop, because everyone works differently. I think Scott was on draft 4 or 5 when he landed his agent. Michelle caught an agent’s attention in a contest after just a few months of working on her novel. As for me, my book is over five years old and is on draft 43. But, what I call a draft, Scott might call a sneeze. And, while Michelle’s current book is coming into focus in less than a year, her first book is at least a few years older than mine.

*Scott and Michelle both have great strategies for doing so—myself, I prefer the cat-in-a-rain-barrell approach.

Hooks and Platforms

No, this post is not about fishing (though I have been fishing in my youth; my father taught me to bait a hook and we fished for sunfish and catfish in the shade of some trees along a still river in Georgia during the summers sometimes. I also went fishing for bluegills with a friend in high school once.) but is instead about the terms "hook" and "platform" as used primarily by agents. I'm not an agent, nor do I play one on TV, but I have an agent and I can at least pass on what he's told me about hooks and platforms.

Hooks

There are two different ways this term is used. In queries, the hook is the part of your pitch that catches the agent's attention, that makes him sit up and say, "Oh, that's supercool!" It is the premise, the idea in your story that makes someone want to read it. "Zombie president" is a hook. "Father and son fighting to survive in a post-apocalyptic world" is a hook, if you like that sort of thing. "Innocents venture into hell to save the world" is a hook. "Sleuthing monk tries to solve a series of murders in a monastery" is a hook. Whether or not something is a hook depends a great deal on the agent's taste.

To sum up: a hook in a query is the idea/premise/sentence that grabs the agent's attention. The hook in my own query was "A sideways retelling of 'Hamlet' as told by Hamlet's best friend, Horatio." There was more to it, but essentially that's my premise and my hook. You're either intrigued or you're not. There are no universal hooks.

Hooks in queries are important because they say what's cool and different about your book. They should spark interest and excitement, because you want an agent who is interested and excited about your book. Agents will take their interest and excitement to publishers and hopefully pass along that interest and excitement, resulting in a book deal for you. Which means that you should be interested and excited in your book when you write your query. If your hook doesn't hook you, it won't hook anyone else.

In the book itself, a hook is something in the writing that gets you to keep reading past the first page. This is a very vague area, because there are no universal hooks here, either. Genre, style, reader's taste and more all figure into this. Essentially, though, the hook on the first page of the book is something that gets the reader to follow the writer into the story. It doesn't have to be an event; it could simply be the way the story is told. Though most commonly, and in the broadest sense, the author gets the reader to ask questions about the story, and to demand the answers to those questions. "This is interesting," the reader says. "I have to see what happens next!" Sometimes beautiful, confident prose is enough to hook the reader. Sometimes it takes sparkly vampires. As I say, there are no universal hooks.

Platform

Think of platform in its literal sense: something to stand on that raises you above the crowd and draws attention to you. If you are an expert in a field and write a non-fiction book about your area of expertise, you have name recognition and the authority to write on that subject. Your expertise, your credentials, are your platform.

Are you a celebrity? Your celebrity is your platform and you can get $3.5 million like Tina Fey for your memoir.

If you are a fiction writer, though, platform is a bit more amorphous and hard to come by. Mostly, it still means name recognition. Has anyone heard of you? If they have, that's your platform.

People ask a lot these days if a website or blog is a good way to establish a platform, as it's certainly an easy enough way to thrust yourself into the public eye. The only thing is, everyone else out there has a website and/or a blog, so you've got to have a lot of traffic to have your site/blog considered a real platform. How much is a lot of traffic? Try a minimum of 25,000 regular visitors/followers/readers. Why so many? Because most of your blog readers won't buy your book. Maybe 1 in 10 will if you're lucky, so if you have 4,000 followers, that translates into maybe 400 book sales, which is not an impressive number.

Platform is also recognized authority as a writer, which is a fancy way of saying publishing credits. Have you been published anywhere that has a wide readership? And by "wide readership," we're talking numbers in the range of thousands rather than hundreds. Firebox 5000 or Granta or GlimmerTrain or Paris Review or Asimov's Science Fiction and Fantasy sorts of numbers. However, it's always a good idea in a query to list any pub credits you have, especially if you were paid for it. The fact that someone paid money to print your work is significant, which is also why print media have more weight than web-only publications. No matter what the media, you should try to get something published, as often as you can.

"You're a good writer," my agent told me. "I can't believe you haven't been more widely published."

"Thanks," I said, smug as can be.

"That's not a compliment," he said. "You've been lazy."

"Oh. Well...oh."

I realize that what I've said about platform seems disheartening, but remember what every agent says, and I know it to be true: platform is nowhere as important as simply writing a good book. You should build your platform as you can, but you should focus most of your energies on writing the best book you can.