I went out to lunch with a friend of mine and had him take a look at the latest and greatest of my query letters. He pointed out the ways it wasn't working. This bothered me, because I really thought I had it this time. But despite my pleading, he refused to say it was wonderful and perfect as is. This is why I have him look at my stuff.
So more on writing query letters, because they are essentially writer kryptonite. People can turn out novels that run hundreds and hundreds of pages and then flip about a one page query letter and a two page synopsis, the general industry standards.
I'm starting pretty early with this, mostly because I know that the second I feel completely finished with the book, I won't have the patience to do a good job on the query letter and synopsis. I'll want to start sending it out NOW. So I'm doing this while I have patience.
And since I also know that writing the perfect query letter is writer kryptonite and a writer can become paralyzed at just the thought of doing this task, I have set myself up to write six of them.
Why six? Why not just one and revise it to perfection? Several reasons. 1)When I write something down and then try to revise, I tend to get stuck with the way I wrote it down in the first place. I can't seem to imagine another way to write it. And when it comes to query letters or other things of this nature, the first version will be bad and I'll just be revising bad into mediocre. Where when I start over from scratch, I find other ways of addressing the letter that will be better. Really. Letter 2 was better than 1 and letter 3 was so much better I seem to have forgotten that I meant to write six. I thought I was done. Turns out I need six.
And 2) It gets rid of a lot of the anxiety to set out to write a bunch of these rather than just one perfect one. Gives me room to mess up.
Six is a good number for this. After all, it is only one page, so it's not like this takes tons of time. I'm not just sitting down and banging out six in a row. I'm giving myself weeks to do this. I write one. Stare at it. Write another. Compare and contrast. Wrote the third. Showed it to friends. Took some comments. I'm on to number 4. Now I need to tackle the synopsis just as seriously.
More writer kryptonite. I can feel my powers draining.
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