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I think that first paragraph is gonna kill you. It’s too thick and nobody really does anything active until the Rain King starts wandering. I know it’s obnoxious and fussy to go after individual sentences in a paragraph but I think a query letter is the one place you absolutely need to use every trick you’ve got it perfect. “The Rain King came back wrong” is a great hook but you make Emwort seem a bit dull - he’s trapped by flooding, forced to question his faith, must decide whether to trust these mercenaries. Is he doing anything? Driving anything? I am so confident he is in your book. But think of this query letter as just a little movie trailer. What scenes have you chosen to sell us on Emwort in this trailer? Wet, trapped, questioning his faith - he sounds like he’s just a sad lump! I don’t want to read about a sad lump! Again, I’m sorry if this is too critical - my feeling is query letters are so important and so fast to iterate on it’s worth really banging on them. And they’re worth thinking about in the most facile stupid “you have ten seconds of attention to sell your entire novel” way.
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Jan 16, 2024 02:56
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Wungus posted:Get prepared for pain lol. The ones that hurt most aren't the form rejections - they're honestly great, because poo poo, at least you got ANY response. Agents like Caitlin Blasdell or Hannah Bowman do it best, with simple one line forms like "Thanks for the look, but I will have to pass." gently caress yeah. The ones that hurt most are the ones where the agent asks explicitly for what you wrote and then says "wow your writing is great and this is exactly what I wanted but I don't know, nah." Seconding this. I had a bunch of rejections for Shadow and only two hurt, really. The first was "The strength of your premise was not matched by the strength of your prose" (ouch!) and an effusive few paragraphs that listed everything they liked, and then passed on it because of "marketability." The other thing I found was that there was no point in personalising the query letters. I think I personalised about a dozen because the agent seemed like a good fit or represented works I really enjoyed, and those were always my quickest rejections. Maybe it was coincidence, but it always left me feeling a little bit worse to put in a bit more effort and get the same kind of response.
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Jan 16, 2024 14:21
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Sailor Viy posted:OK, here's a first draft of a query for my novel. All feedback is appreciated. I want to specifically call out this sentence: "As monsters emerge from the flooded earth and buried secrets are revealed, Emwort and the Sparrows must decide if they can trust each other before it's too late." Because of the vagueness of "secrets are revealed" and "before it's too late." These need to be way more specific to set the stakes. Not necessarily to reveal what the secrets are or the true danger, but what they do to the characters/situation. Also, the passiveness of secrets revealing rubs wrong too. Before it's too late.. and everyone drowns? And everyone riots? The Sparrows are stuck there forever? When we know that the Rain King comes back every hundred years, we know that life eventually goes on, so why is it particularly troublesome this time? How does the King's dotage affect this cycle? And how is Emwort acting/changing to deal with it? How do his hopes change? Sorry for drilling down like this. I suck at distilling all this down to pointed and interesting sentences so I hope this is still helpful.
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Jan 16, 2024 15:22
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How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story.
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Jan 16, 2024 16:41
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It’s become kind of a cliche since…Game of Thrones I think? To show your big spooky thing in the prologue then go to Regular Story and loop back around to the spooky thing eventually. I do get it though. It works on a very basic level.
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Jan 16, 2024 16:52
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Waffle! posted:How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story. Who would skip a prologue? I’m convinced people don’t like reading, they just like saying how many books they’ve listened to.
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Jan 16, 2024 16:52
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Yeah I saw a video that used Lord of the Rings, and Game of Thrones as examples. My other idea is moving that scene later on in the story with the main characters there. Hiding under a tavern table while the only one of them with night vision saying, "You don't want to see this..." It probably makes more sense, with the characters being sent to investigate strange stuff and then witnessing it themselves. Instead of just hearing town gossip.
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Jan 16, 2024 17:07
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Waffle! posted:How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story. I personally love that kinda stuff, and people who skip them—that’s on them. Lemme tell you ‘bout Boat Facts. Lotsa people joke about the Boat Facts in Moby Dick, but the thing is the Boat Facts are the main reason that book has such longevity. People who read Moby Dick now are mostly down with the Boat Facts. It’s part of what makes the novel so much more interesting than novels that were far more popular in their day. A lot of super-indulgent writers end up with a solid core of readers who are in it for the author’s particular indulgences. It ranges from super-niche nerd appeal like Neal Stephenson or K.J. Parker, to the literary richness and research of Emberto Eco, to the trash of Dan Brown just being an excuse to show off his research. It turns out, contrary to what editors tell you in every writing advice platform ever, people love that poo poo. In fact, the only problem with your prologue idea is limiting it to just that rather than going as encyclopedic as Tolkien. Throw in some interim chapters of that stuff like LeGuin did in Left Hand of Darkness, like Arkady Martine did in a Desolation Called Peace, like Douglas Adams did in Hitch-Hiker’s Guide, like Adrian Tchaikovsky did in The Doors of Eden—those were the coolest bits. Indulge yourself. Go ham. Have fun. You can always cut poo poo later if it doesn’t work
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Jan 16, 2024 17:10
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Stuporstar posted:I personally love that kinda stuff, and people who skip them—that’s on them. I read a fun article about this recently: https://countercraft.substack.com/p/your-novel-should-be-more-like-moby
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Jan 16, 2024 18:28
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My latest book is stuffed full of my weird nerd stuff and readers find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! But maybe, like Moby Dick, it will be redeemed
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Jan 16, 2024 19:33
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General Battuta posted:My latest book is stuffed full of my weird nerd stuff and readers find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! But maybe, like Moby Dick, it will be redeemed Can't wait, I read a Goodreads review and went "I don't understand any of wtf this person is trying to explain." Sounds great
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Jan 16, 2024 19:39
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General Battuta posted:My latest book is stuffed full of my weird nerd stuff and readers find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! But maybe, like Moby Dick, it will be redeemed  That’s the good poo pooMegazver posted:I read a fun article about this recently: Thank you! I was thinking of that article but couldn’t find it lol
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Jan 16, 2024 21:45
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quote:The whale fact chapters in Moby-Dick are among the most memorable parts of the book. (Which, if you haven’t read, is far funnier, weirder, and gripping than you likely imagine.) he forgot "and gay", I read it for the first time last year and it's definitely all those things, but also very gay
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Jan 16, 2024 21:48
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Stuporstar posted:Thank you! I was thinking of that article but couldn’t find it lol I suspected! I'm subscribed to the guy, so it wasn't hard to find. His other posts are usually also pretty good, I should get around to reading his novel.
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Jan 16, 2024 21:48
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General Battuta posted:My latest book is stuffed full of my weird nerd stuff and readers find it INCOMPREHENSIBLE!!! But maybe, like Moby Dick, it will be redeemed Are you Hannu Rajaniemi, author of the Quantum Thief? God drat do I love that novel, and how it introduces concepts that I did not fully understand, but kept the plot moving.
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Jan 16, 2024 22:27
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DropTheAnvil posted:Are you Hannu Rajaniemi, author of the Quantum Thief? God drat do I love that novel, and how it introduces concepts that I did not fully understand, but kept the plot moving. he's the baru man, the barunator
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Jan 16, 2024 23:07
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I wish I looked as good as Hannu Rajaniemi/had an advanced degree like Hannu Rajaniemi
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Jan 16, 2024 23:14
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DropTheAnvil posted:Are you Hannu Rajaniemi, author of the Quantum Thief? God drat do I love that novel, and how it introduces concepts that I did not fully understand, but kept the plot moving. I think I read that entire trilogy without understanding anything past the first chapter
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Jan 16, 2024 23:17
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yeah don't be afraid of your own styles or idiosyncracies. Include an index. a dramatic personae. have certain chapters be in a different style. one of my favorite books quotes from the bible and makes a "none pizza with left beef" joke on the same drat page and I love it.
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Jan 17, 2024 00:42
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Waffle! posted:How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story. Oh man I love prologues! There are plenty of ways you can use them, like as a means to info dump outside the main narrative to provide the reader with pertinent context for understanding the story/world or as an exciting/compelling cold open to hook readers. It does seem that the cold open style prologues are what's popular right now, and there isn't anything wrong with them (I quite enjoy them), but I think the best and most effective ones of this type use the prologue scene to not only grab the reader's attention but to clue them in to a major element in the story, like a main plot arc premise, an important character (like the big bad), a core theme, a historical event that has major ramifications in the main narrative, or even as a means to establish a vibe or mood. An ineffective prologue is one, to me, that doesn't offer any unique narrative vantage point - it reads like any of the other chapters and might as well just be positioned as the first chapter. Going off that, a prologue is a good opportunity to do something different from your main narrative, like if your story's all third limited, you could do an omniscient overview, use a one-off POV that's not otherwise in your POV cast, you could do epistolary texts or letters, establish a (lightweight) framing narrative, or otherwise fiddle around with a different narrative voice or vibe for it. One of my favorite prologues (in any medium) is the one in Beauty and the Beast (the good one that was nominated for Best Picture, naturally) in which the movie opens like you're being read a fairytale, "Once upon a time" and all, and tells the backstory in stained glass stills. It does such a good job of not only setting up the premise of the story but also setting the mood, starting all beautiful and fairytale-esque and quickly getting darker as we learn how the prince and his castle came to be cursed, and then it merges with the main narrative/animation style when the Beast slashes the portrait of his former human self. It's just soooo good. I know it's film and therefore has imagery and music at its disposal, but I think this sort of stylistic differentiation would still translate well into a written prologue. For my current fantasy project, I'm not doing a full-blown prologue, just a 300-word excerpt from the in-story Bible equivalent that covers an important historical event/foundational tenet of the main religion (as foundational as Jesus dying on the cross in Christianity) that everyone just knows and therefore would feel info-dumpy af integrated into the narrative (why the hell would my character stop and explain to himself how his own religion works at a fundamental level even though he's been steeped in it his entire life?) The information in this excerpt is immediately relevant, as the first chapter covers a religious ceremony that harks back to the historical event, but also, as the story progresses, we learn that this event may not be quite what it seems. For my particular story, the religious text excerpt works way better than, like, covering some past battle or something and in way fewer words. As for other extras like appendices, maps, and glossaries and whatnot, I'm all about that too. Sometimes it's just nice to have extra information and context when reading something - feels more immersive because you know more things that the characters know and would inform their thoughts and actions. I've been developing all sorts of background information that'll probably not ever be directly addressed or even mentioned in the main narrative, but I need it so I can be internally consistent - this is stuff like family trees, profiles and heraldry for the various noble and royal houses, more religious text (there's a Book of Revelation-like chapter in the holy book that I've been working on writing in its entirety so that I can play around with different characters with different motives quoting/cherrypicking/interpreting it in different ways - way easier to do that if I have the whole text at my disposal), lots of notes on customs in various cultures, multiple religions and how they work, and so on. It's a ton of material that would never fit in the story itself, but since I'm putting it all together, why not publish it, either in appendices or on a website?
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Jan 17, 2024 02:24
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It's me, I skim the gently caress out of anything named prologue and unless the writing is really blowing me away, I tend to skip epigraphs and footnotes and poo poo like that. Some books totally grab me but most, eh. I don't want reading a book to feel like it has research notes, and that's how they often come across to me
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Jan 17, 2024 02:52
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Queen Victorian posted:Oh man I love prologues! There are plenty of ways you can use them, like as a means to info dump outside the main narrative to provide the reader with pertinent context for understanding the story/world or as an exciting/compelling cold open to hook readers. to all of thisI’ve got alien anatomical illustrations, a whole conlang dictionary and more. Way too much to stuff into the back or front of a novel, but a website full of it—I might as well make a wholeass wiki at some point. No one will ever have to read it to get what’s going on in the stories. It’ll just be there for people who wanna nerd out with me cause why the gently caress not
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Jan 17, 2024 02:52
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Stuporstar posted:I’ve got alien anatomical illustrations, a whole conlang dictionary and more. Way too much to stuff into the back or front of a novel, but a website full of it—I might as well make a wholeass wiki at some point. No one will ever have to read it to get what’s going on in the stories. It’ll just be there for people who wanna nerd out with me cause why the gently caress not
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Jan 17, 2024 03:00
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Wungus posted:It's me, I skim the gently caress out of anything named prologue and unless the writing is really blowing me away, I tend to skip epigraphs and footnotes and poo poo like that. Some books totally grab me but most, eh. I don't want reading a book to feel like it has research notes, and that's how they often come across to me Is your problem that you should just be reading better books?
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Jan 17, 2024 03:04
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i skip chapter 13's cuz theyre unlucky
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Jan 17, 2024 03:06
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BigFactory posted:Is your problem that you should just be reading better books?
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Jan 17, 2024 03:10
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Wungus posted:If I had a machine that would tell me the objective truth of my enjoyment of a book before I read it, I'd use it all the time, but you haven't made it yet. I just pass on sci fi and it usually works for me.
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Jan 17, 2024 03:25
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BigFactory posted:I just pass on sci fi and it usually works for me. I'm gonna sci cry 
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Jan 17, 2024 03:57
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Wungus posted:You're annoyingly one of the few people who has got me reading all that extra stuff to absorb more of the book, so like... do what stuporstar does, and if you're going all out, commit and go all the gently caress out lol Probably also helps that my prologues/epilogues are additions to the main narrative that don’t comfortably sit as a chapter because of an awkward time jump, alternate pov, or some other extra bit that shifts perspective or adds context. Kinda like the alt povs you did between the parts of one of your novels that ended up working really well. Bits like that are fun to read cause they’re still part of the story—they just don’t fit in the main story As for all my footnotes, I still do need to cut down on them a bit and make the ones I keep more entertaining lol Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 05:21 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 05:18
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Stuporstar posted:Probably also helps that my prologues/epilogues are additions to the main narrative that don’t comfortably sit as a chapter because of an awkward time jump, alternate pov, or some other extra bit that shifts perspective or adds context. Kinda like the alt povs you did between the parts of one of your novels that ended up working really well. Bits like that are fun to read cause they’re still part of the story—they just don’t fit in the main story I love that poo poo but I'm also the type to read every Mass Effect codex entry and collect all of the office memos in Control etc etc
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Jan 17, 2024 05:21
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gently caress yeah. My favourite book is Always Coming Home which is at least two-thirds 'whale facts'.
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Jan 17, 2024 05:22
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change my name posted:I love that poo poo but I'm also the type to read every Mass Effect codex entry and collect all of the office memos in Control etc etc I’ve read every book in the Elder Scrolls series and written more of them for a Morrowind mod, so I’m all about that poo poo too There’s enough nerds like us to write that poo poo for other nerds like us, so I’m done with writing groups that try to bully people out of their interesting bullshit E. I wanna mention another recent book, Light From Uncommon Stars, where you could tell the author had just obsessed over violins and in a book with demons and aliens, the violin facts were some of the best poo poo in there Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 05:29 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 05:23
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Stuporstar posted:E. I wanna mention another recent book, Light From Uncommon Stars, where you could tell the author had just obsessed over violins and in a book with demons and aliens, the violin facts were some of the best poo poo in there I thought this one was “just alright overall” except for the violin and video game parts, it was clear that’s what the author was super passionate about and yeah, they really stood out as a result. The descriptions of music and how it *feels* are just lovely change my name fucked around with this message at 05:41 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 05:38
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Waffle! posted:How do y'all feel about prologues? I heard some people don't even read them. I had an idea for an early peek at one of the creatures in my story. Nothing as encyclopedic as Tolkien, just something scary and weird to grab attention. It wouldn't be a huge time skip, maybe a month or few weeks before the rest of the story. If your prologue CAN be skipped otoh, like ... just cut it, you've identified something you don't need.
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Jan 17, 2024 08:14
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I personally can't imagine paying £10 for a book and not giving the author the benefit of the doubt and letting them tell the story in the order they want to tell it. Doesn't there have to be a basic level of trust in all media that 'this professional is now going to entertain me, I am in their hands'?
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Jan 17, 2024 09:01
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I'll read a Prologue just fine. But an introduction that's not happening especially if it's some clown shoes mf ten decades removed from the author trying to give me the lowdown on the novel. Homie, I'm about to read it last thing I need is your loving thoughts clogging up the mind palace.
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Jan 17, 2024 09:20
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Gaius Marius posted:I'll read a Prologue just fine. But an introduction that's not happening especially if it's some clown shoes mf ten decades removed from the author trying to give me the lowdown on the novel. Homie, I'm about to read it last thing I need is your loving thoughts clogging up the mind palace. Is this what people who skip prologues think prologues are?
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Jan 17, 2024 12:10
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Milkfred E. Moore posted:The other thing I found was that there was no point in personalising the query letters. I think I personalised about a dozen because the agent seemed like a good fit or represented works I really enjoyed, and those were always my quickest rejections. Maybe it was coincidence, but it always left me feeling a little bit worse to put in a bit more effort and get the same kind of response. This is true. The only time it's worth doing is if you have a real, personal connection to lean on ('we met at [X] conference', 'you liked my pitch tweet', '[your client] loved this and said you might be interested'). Even that won't get you an offer, but it will probably get you to the top of the slush pile so you can get rejected more quickly.
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Jan 17, 2024 12:32
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:So a couple of years back I took a bit of an informal poll of people doing postgraduate publishing and in a class of 20, 14 would skip immediately to chapter 1 upon seeing a prologue. Too small a sample size to make any real determinations of course, but these are people who love books enough to go pro and a majority of them see the word and check out. Anecdotally, it's a sentiment I've been hearing more and more from readers. I personally like prologues, I just call them "Chapter 1" because like ... they're where the story starts, they're not some vestigial thing to be ignored, and if readers ARE skipping them then they're going to be lost. The trick is to not label your chapters and prologues as chapters and prologues. If you give them titles instead, you blow past people’s preconceptions like “prologues always suck and are unnecessary”  Strategic Tea posted:I personally can't imagine paying £10 for a book and not giving the author the benefit of the doubt and letting them tell the story in the order they want to tell it. It feels like writers groups and beta readers always give this kinda advice because they automatically have less trust in what they’re reading, whereas they’re more likely to give a published author benefit of the doubt because they made it through all the hurdles of publishing. Of course if regular readers are skipping prologues, that’s usually a sign that the prologue has been badly abused in that genre (fantasy especially) long enough that readers no longer implicitly trust the author isn’t gonna waste their time. So if you do have some other layer to add on top of the main story, you gotta really mix things up like how The Spear Cuts Through Water didn’t use chapters at all, and jumped from the frame story to the main story whenever it drat well felt right without holding the reader’s hands with flags like numbered chapters and acts and crap Stuporstar fucked around with this message at 16:22 on Jan 17, 2024 |
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Jan 17, 2024 16:12
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BigFactory posted:Is this what people who skip prologues think prologues are? i hope so because it's completely boggling otherwise i also dont read introductions until after i read the book, and then only if i really liked the book. this has only backfired once (lolita)
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