Multiple POVs in Query Letters

I reference this old post about multiple POVs in a Query letter so often that I decided to put it over here on my blog so I can find it with more ease.  Hope people find this helpful!

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My novel has two main characters--but my query only has one. It wasn't easy to get there. I went through a LOT of revisions until I managed to cut the second MC out. The result leaves out a LOT of the plot, but it still works.

I think the key to remember is that the query isn't really a mini-synopsis at all. It's fishing.

You write a good hook to snag an agent's attention.
You lure them in with unique bait and curious movements.
In conclusion, you reel them in with a solid plot-line and a strong voice.

You only NEED one MC to catch an agent's attention. Once they take the bait, they can be surprised by what you've cooked up. Agents KNOW it's impossible to condense an entire book in a couple of paragraphs. That's not what they're looking for in a query--that's for the synopsis and full requests. A query is only intended to tell them that you've got potential and you're worth the time it takes to read a partial or a full.

AQC Blog Hop Update

Check out some of my guest posts being hosted on other blogs:

Adding Genre Without Switching Genre at Yesternight's Voyage

Transitioning from Fan Fiction to Novels at Writing from the Padded Room

Dealing with Uncomfortable Scenes at Imaginary Friend

Advice for Noobs for Alys B. Cohen

Lessons Learned the Hard Way for Michelle4Laughs

Guest Post: No Flatline Main Characters, Please

by Michelle4Laughs

Check her out at:

It's in the Details blog

twitter    :  Facebook  

Kindar's Cure on Goodreads

So what does that title mean? Flatline as in the heart monitor on a hospital crash cart? Dead characters? I’m going to rant against the rise in the popularity of zombies. Not exactly.

By flatline, I’m referring to a main character’s journey, not their heart rate. No I don’t mean the plot. This is not about plot. A flatline character is one that ends the story exactly the same as they started. They haven’t changed; they haven’t achieved any personal growth. I’ve noticed a lot of published books like this recently. But do those books leave any lasting impression on readers? Will they be remembered?

In my opinion, the best books and perhaps most difficult to construct are the ones where the main character’s personality line arcs over the course of the plot instead of remaining flat. They learn something and perhaps teach the reader as well. The mc grows—subtly, of course. Nobody likes in your face preaching from their reading entertainment, save that for church.

So how does one avoid the flatline main character? How do you get arc in your character’s journey? Does your character have their epiphany in one giant lightning strike of zen? I believe it’s best to tackle a character’s transformation from several different angles. They may have that lightning strike moment, but it better be because a whole lot of somethings guided or pushed them to it during the course of the story. In other words, it takes some planning and tactics.

Guest Post: Hidden Messages in Our Writings

by: T.J.

Check her out at
Writing from the Padded Room

 or @tjloveless 

From the moment humans created a common language among their peers, there have been storytellers. People who carried the tradition of entertaining, and teaching, their tribes. They created stories with messages and handed them down through the ages. Not just, “Hey, killing is bad.” But stories of who did it, why and the consequences. They imparted hard earned wisdom, hoping to keep their audiences enthralled and to take something away from each creation.

As modern day authors, we are no different. And we all have a message to send.

Perhaps it is finding the strength to survive an apocalypse. Or laugh at yourself in order to get through tough situations. To see the world differently, maybe to open eyes about other lives, problems and prompt the reader to seek solutions.

Whether it is memoir, information or fiction, every book has a message – good or bad.

Guest Post: Writing Males (if you're female)

by Clippership

Check out Yesternight's Voyage

Or find her on Twitter @joycealton

 
I love a strong male character in a story. I love trying to write them, too. But, I’m female, so how to go about it? We all know males and females reason differently, act differently, and have different motivations at times. Is your character tough? Does he view emotion as weakness? Is your character sensitive? Will he fly into a temper tantrum if someone interrupts his video game?

So here’s what I recommend:

#1 – Pick a personality, a background, and a motivation. Very first thing you should do. If you don’t take the time to do it, you’ll fall into stereotype land. Don’t worry about how he looks, what fighting skills he has, how he will sweep the heroine off her feet – none of that stuff. He needs to be first.

Example: a practical joker who doesn’t take life seriously, was the middle child of a huge family and felt lost in the shuffle, wants attention. OR – quiet, studious type, was born into poverty, wants to make something of himself by getting an education.

Get a grasp on who your character is. Then you can have fun saddling him with skills, labels, and romantic entanglements.

Guest Post: Using Religion in Fantasy World Building

by Robert Courtland

There are many approaches for weaving religion into a fantasy setting. The one I’ve noticed in many of the books I’ve read is to largely ignore religion. Even though J.R.R. Tolkien essentially created a bible for the residents of Middle Earth to go by with the Silmarillion, there are only casual references to it in The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Terry Brooks completely ignored religion in the early Shannara books. On the other hand, in the Dragonlance Chronicles, the gods are crucial players in the story. It goes from one extreme to the other and everything in the middle.

The first thing you need to decide is the role religion should play in your story and your world. Are you going focus on a secular culture, or the other extreme and have one or more religions dominate. Good historical examples of the latter are the Catholic Church in the middle ages, or the Orthodox church in the Byzantine Empire. In the middle you have cultures such as Japan and China with the constant presence of religion in the background. You also have different levels of religion from a simple tribal religion to the very structured Catholic Church. Even when fantasy authors include religion, it is very simplified, usually one religion per culture. In the real world you have multiple religions existing side by side (or at war) throughout history. You have major and minor religions and different levels of acceptance. Most fantasy authors keep it simple, but a more complex structure could work even better in some cases.

Guest Post: Choices When Self-Publishing With Amazon

by Robert Courtland

Thanks to its impressive scale of business as a bookseller, being the company that made the ereader popular, and having a streamlined process for submissions, Amazon is the leader in self publishing and many authors don’t even explore other options. That makes it vital to understand how to publish your book through Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

The perfect self publishing solution would be a one-stop publishing solution that would distribute to all the major booksellers, but that doesn’t exist. Smashwords comes close, but they are having an issue with Amazon (their competitor) and only distribute to Amazon if your business is above a certain level. So if you are just starting out and haven’t reached that level yet and you want to see your book on Amazon, you have to go through Amazon.

Guest Post: Tips to building a unique fantasy world

Today's guest post was written by Aaron Bradford Starr.
Be sure to check him out on his Blog or Twitter! 


I was asked by my old friend Eli (whom the grim populace of Cavendish Island, where I met her, would always call Penny, to her chagrin) if I would take a stab at writing something of a treatise on the subject of creating fantasy worlds in literature, or something of that nature. As I owe my life to her after our misadventures off the coast of South Abercrombie, I agreed.

Now, as it so happens, I once taught a multi-week seminar on the subject of creating imaginary worlds to the Cavendish elders. Afterward, these wizened natives would wile away their evenings, elaborating on their fanciful creations, and have since self-published a series of short story anthologies which have, of late, set the literary world of their small archipelago afire.

The process I related to them was, more or less, this:

Writing Forums: Newbs Beware

Don't knock the title until you read the whole thing.
/endwarning

Last night, a close friend came over and I allowed him to read the piddly 2k words I've gotten down on paper.  (I know it's not much, but it's a solid start.)  When he finished, his comment was, "I like it, but I don't know why."  For this guy, that was a very strange response.  He reads a lot.  He's very good about knowing what he likes and he can usually tell me why something is set apart from other things he's read.

We talked over it for a while and I asked him some more specific question in search of an explanation for why he liked it.  And, after a while, he made a comment that stopped me in my tracks.  He said something along the lines of:  "I didn't like the other stuff you had me read recently.  That's why I'd get about half a chapter in and tell you I wasn't in the mood to read more.  But this is good.  You had me from the beginning until the end."

Now, to help you understand my position, let me say that my guy friend gobbles down books like I gobble down cheesecake.  In the past, his support alongside my husband's support has given me the confidence to think, "Maybe I really can do this."  He saw talent in me and pushed me to take a chance on writing, which allowed me to find fans that gave me even more confidence.

Under normal circumstances his statement would have crushed me.  I would have gotten into the mindset of "Oh my god, I'm forcing people to read like I'm back in middle school."  I would have thought I had no talent and hung my head in shame.

But it didn't hit me that way, because I already knew I'd been forcing myself for almost a year now.  I think I've mentioned it before, but it's taken a year away from AQC (a writer forum, Agent Query Connect) for my writing style to recover. 

(Before I continue, promise me you'll read all the way through.  This WILL seem like I'm bashing AQC unless you have the full picture.)

Missing Comments

I've been informed that some of your comments haven't been showing up.  I've only got three reports so far, but that's three too many.  I've now altered my blog to give you a pop-up screen to create a comment instead of the embedded comment box.  By all accounts, this should fix the problem.  Please, let me know if the problem reoccurs.

Cliches & rug-pulling...They're not mutually exclusive

This post >HERE< at querytracker.net talks about the way cliches are under-appreciated.  Some of it resonated with me, but I felt one very important detail didn't get a lot of attention.  That detail is called a "rug-pull".

Now, to be clear, I define a rug-pull as a moment where a story acts counter-intuitive to a reader's expectations.  Doing this too much can turn an otherwise decent plot into an implausible soap opera, BUT--

There's always a "But"....

A good rug-pull at the right time (with the right discretion), can alter a reader's psychological stance toward a novel.  And it all starts with a good cliche.  Here, let me give you an example:

The cliche:  Enemies charge into a castle and take over.  (It can also be robbers in a bank, a psychopath invading a home, etc).  The damsel is taken hostage.  The main character of the story goes unnoticed and manages to get out unharmed.

The expected response is for the hero to either go for help OR immediately turn around for a courageous re-entry.  A rug-pull response would be for the hero to suddenly show his dark side by waiting.  Just waiting.  He's waiting for the enemies to kill the damsel so he can inherit full control of everything she owns and have the freedom to turn into a playboy.

Maybe he changes his mind and goes back when it looks like the damsel is smart enough to survive, but that moment of waiting acts counter to reader expectations. To say it more simply...

• Cliches create expectations within a reader.  

• Good rug-pulls play off the reader's expectations instead of popping out of nowhere like ninjas dropping from the ceiling.

Although, you might be asking why it matters.  How this can have an affect on a reader?

Description

The saying is 'a picture is worth a thousand words'
 --But an author only has a paragraph to create it and it's not as easy as it sounds.  Too much description will overload a reader's imagination and turn their brains into vegetable soup.  Too little description will make props seem to appear out of thin air.

One paragraph.  When introducing a reader to a setting, that's pretty much all you get since every word written to describe something is an extra moment where the main character is standing around, doing nothing.

Now, I'm not a published author.  Let me make that clear right now.  All my opinions and advice comes from practice and study.  But there's one thing I know:  being generic isn't a bad thing.

The Vibe

Vibes.  I talk about them a lot.
"I want this kind of vibe in my novel."
"I feel the vibe."
"This is not the vibe I'm looking for."

But what is 'vibe' and what makes it different than 'voice'?  Most authors don't pay attention to their novel's vibe.  Or, more often, they lump it together with voice.  But I don't.  Why?  Because vibe is born from a different womb than voice.

Voice comes from characterization.
Vibe comes from world-building.

The Voice

Everywhere I look lately, I see conversations about 'voice'.  Does my manuscript have voice?  How do I create a voice for my story?  What IS voice?

The consensus is:  you'll know it when you see it.  There is no road-map to writing with a strong voice. 

Bullocks.

The truth is, most writers intuitively grasp voice and use it without understanding it.  Over time, authors formed 'you'll know it when you see it' as a scapegoat, because the recipe isn't straight-forward.  But there IS a recipe.

And here it is:

Fanfiction Pros and Cons

Fanfiction.  It's one of the most despised forms of written entertainment.  I'm not talking about the kind where you get the author's permission and write something worth publishing.  I'm talking about the nitty-gritty, written form of playing pretend by adults who are too old to dress up as their favorite characters on Halloween.  (I still dress up, but that's a whole 'nother issue.)

First off, why is it despised?  I can give the answer with a single word and an acronym:  Sex and OOC (out of character).  Some authors really don't like it when someone 'desecrates' their character by turning them into sex fiends.  They also don't like it when people rewrite the character's personality to fit their own image.

There's a third reason, though.  That's Rights with a capital 'R'.  If the audience foresees the direction a story is going and writes it before the author, then it makes it hard for the author to claim originality.  In other words, there's a possibility of a creative Rights violation--even though the character's creator might not have read the fanfiction in question.

It all gets pretty messy, which is why most people in the publishing industry stay FARFARFAR away from unauthorized fanfiction and treat the word 'fanfiction' like a curse word. 

But let's get this straight:  Fanfiction isn't a lesser form of entertainment. 

A Writer's Face

I titled this post 'A Writer's Face', but I really mean is the expression on a writer's face while they're writing.  I sometimes wonder what my hubby sees when I'm really in the zone.  I don't move out of my chair, but I silently act out dialogue.  I grimace when my character is in pain and I cry with him when his heart is broken.  (Too bad I can't imitate his artful way of creating perfect, sparkling teardrops--my face gets splotchy and my nose runs.)

If you're a writer, then you're probably saying 'so what?' by this point.  It's a daily occurrence.

If you're not a writer, then you're also probably saying 'so what?' by this point. The author's process shouldn't affect your reading experience.

To writers:  This post is just a note to remind you of something:  don't blame emotion for your writer's block.  A lot of writers use this as an excuse to procrastinate:  "I'm just not feeling it."  That's baloney because you're not the one who has to be in the right mood.  Your character does and you must symbiotically sympathize with them.  "I'm not feeling it" is an often-ignored signal that something isn't working in your storyboard.  Maybe the motivation isn't clear.  Maybe the description is flimsy.  Maybe you've forced something to move unnaturally.

"I'm just not feeling it."  An author's job includes the artificial creation of emotions.  Yes, I'll admit--If you're not feeling it when you write it, a reader won't feel it when they read it.  But go beyond that and you have--If the character isn't feeling it when they live it, then an author can't feel it when they write it.  Whenever you hit this snag, there's three things you can do to help overcome it:

Mary-Sue

I haven't posted in a while, but this was suggested to me recently and I thought it might be helpful to other writers out there.

No, this isn't a post on how to identify Mary-Sue or Gary Stu.  If you don't know what a Mary-Sue is, then read up on them and come back.
Clickity


This is a post to list the tips I use to keep my OCs from becoming Mary Sues/Gary Stus:

Tools of the Trade

"Writing is a hobby or a career that needs nothing more than a pen and paper."

After years of practice and honing my craft, I've started to feel as if those words are an insult.  A writer needs a lot more.  First of all, they need an imagination, because 'writers write what they know' is pure naivety.  'Writers write what they can imagine' is far more apt because a writer often researches something they know NOTHING about in order to make it familiar enough for them to imagine accurately.

But, putting that aside for a moment, I've found there is a lot of tools a writer needs to be successful.  Here's my list, along with free and helpful ways to get it: