Never the one to take random occurrences as being signs from the universe, I easily shrugged off the arrival of a large male peacock on my roof yesterday evening.
I was home alone, writing a new book (yes... another one), when it happened.
The house was quiet until the peacock showed up. He landed directly over my head, where I sat in my office.
At first, I thought it was a Flamenco dancer with a vuvuzela up there.
That happens to me all the time.
But not a peacock.
He scared the dogs. They refused to come down from the lower deck.
The horses were terrified of him. They ran around in circles, snorting and kicking up dust clouds.
This is what he looked like:
So I said, "You! I am trying to write! What do you think you are doing up there?"
The peacock looked down at me and said, "If you squeeze me gently, a query letter and some gumballs will come out of my ass."
It all made perfect sense.
I was supposed to write a post today about query letters, and the peacock, definitely not anything in the manner of a universal beacon, was there to help me wrap my head around the idea.
"What flavor gumballs?" I asked.
About this query letter thing:
My friend, Matthew, runs a very interesting blog for emergent authors called The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment (A clumsy attempt at making some sense of the sinister submission process). I frequently pop over there and take a look at what's going on.
It's smart and entertaining.
Sometimes I'll offer a comment, too. Not that I know the first thing about crafting a query letter, and I've made that clear.
Because, honestly, query letters really are like peacocks on the roof.
Noisy.
Interesting.
Nice to look at.
Dispensation of gumballs from their ass when you squeeze them.
But they don't really tell you anything about the contents of the house they're sitting on.
And my opinion (and this is only mine) is that too many emergent writers spend inordinate quantities of time and energy perfecting a 250-word (I'm guessing) query letter, when they never spent nearly the equivalent amount of thought or energy on any one 250-word passage of the house their gumball cannons are sitting on.
I say this, as I admitted to Matthew, because my first (and... ahem... only) query letter was total crap. No gumballs there. It was everything you're NOT supposed to do in a query (except there were no spelling errors, that is).
Among other things, it was 550 words in length, and ran its scattered drivel over two pages.
Structurally, it ignored the prevailing hook-blurb-closer architecture of the modern gospel of querydom.
Definitely not a peacock.
I wonder if agents out there are willing to 'fess up that they really can see through the gumballs and plumage and noise, and that (again, this is only my opinion) the most important things are that you FOLLOW THEIR GUIDELINES for querying, sit patiently, and have a nice house under your peacock.
Look, if you wrote a really great book, it doesn't matter if you send over a herpetic albatross (but don't), somebody will be dying to get their hands on it.
Why do I find myself wanting a gumball suddenly?
You can find The Quintessentially Questionable Query Experiment here.
8 comments:
This is a little difficult to admit, but I'm sure you're right.
As a matter of fact I literally had one of the worst queries in the history of history (this was about 2 years ago) and I used it to prematurely query a book that while good (great in some parts, I hope) clearly wasn't ready. It still got requests though. No offers (as I said, it wasn't ready), but requests. Fulls and partials.
There is evidence of it on my blog, but you have to go way back to find it. Please don't look at those posts.
And I think you're right, Drew, if you write a great book, someone is going to want to publish it, but sometimes finding the right someone can be hard. I think it helps to have a great query, but I also agree that we often obsess over it way too much. We should obsess over our real writing more.
*waves to buddy, Matt*
I just popped by to see the photo evidence of The Peacock. Yanno, the gumball dispenser. (on that...ew. if it came out of anything's ass, I'm a firm "no thanks".)
I hope your noisy peacock has moved along to whence he came. And perhaps he left you a pretty tail feather for your trouble.
I hope readers don't take this as being critical of what Matthew does on his blog. I think it's an outstanding blog and very helpful to writers.
But, if you look back a few days, there was a really flattering comment left by Liz S., my editor at Feiwel & Friends, on one of my blogs about being "fully formed" as a writer.
If one were to prioritize the important things required to achieve the goal of publication, then probably near or at the top would be developing a mature degree of literacy. Writing your own material, and developing a great manuscript would be up there, too.
The query letter wouldn't be very near the top for me at all. But it sure seems to be a matter of stress and a focus of priority for a lot of writers, so, what do I know?
The QQQE is a very helpful blog and the advice given is every bit as relevant and applicable as a lot of things emergent writers will pay hundreds of dollars in tuition for at big writers' conferences.
So I urge people who are setting a course toward that goal of publication (or representation) to take a look at what goes on there.
I didn't take it that way, but I'm well adjusted.
*waves to Lola and her killer heels*
And besides, it's true. Most of us obsess over the little things too much. I just took that old past (thank god it's finally past) obsession, and turned it into a way to help others.
I have a critique group where I help people with entire novels, too, but it takes so much longer to do that, I can only handle one at a time.
I've read Matthew's blog and it seems very helpful for a lot of writers out there and it makes me glad I'm not in that field. *Wheeww*
My mom had a peacock show up at her farm once, actually she said it was probably a peahen because she wasn't pretty like a male bird. She also said they bring luck.
I'm not sure about the luck, that bird really scratched the hood of my mom's car something fierce and the damn thing snuck up and scare the day lights out of me. I didn't like her a all and I know that bird knew it.
Then one day she was gone. Lucky for the bird because my mom was tired of finding it on her car and she was ready to haul her off to where-ever you take mystery birds.
Maybe the luck attaches to whoever needs it, the person or the bird.
Sorry for the rant.
Thanks for the photo of the peacock.
I cannot touch the query bits, I am too novice.
Writing queries, I feel, is going to be a pain in the ass experience, regardless of how great my manuscript is. However, penning a great novel is what I'm all about. Therefore, whether my query represents that novel properly is irrelevant. There's no way that it can, and really it shouldn't. I think queries are often highly misunderstood by amateur writers (of which I remain one, at present) and, as Drew has so illustratively pointed out, given far more attention than necessary. Hooks are relatively small things, in the grand scheme. It's the fish we should be more concerned about. (This analogy is piss-poor once broken down!)
eeee hee hee hee hee!!! Now, if peacocks squeeze gumballs and query letters out of their asses, and golden gooses lay golden eggs... what on earth happens with a cockatoo?
Post a Comment