Josh Getzler
This morning I had a fun and instructive Twitter conversation with a whole bunch of people after I read the first page of a query and Tweeted the following (somewhat grouchily)
Writers: There is rarely a reason for "penetrate" in any of its meanings to appear in the first sentence of your manuscript. That is all.
Within a few minutes, more than 20 people had favorite and retweeted the admonition, reaching close to half a million people by the time you count secondary and tertiary viewers. Pretty cool (and I had a couple of brave—and well-published—writers take up the challenge, with admirable results (although “pierce” might have worked as well). So that’s one piece of advice that I hope writers will thank me for this day before Thanksgiving (and the exclusion of which will make me thankful).
Now let me give a couple of additional “don’t”s, which I hope will be as helpful in the beginning of manuscripts and Query letters: (NOTE:This is personal preference with anecdotal backup from my colleagues.)
The first is that we don’t like queries that begin “Imagine you could…(taste fear, see smells, hold your own internal organs, sing flight). Well 12 year old Television Jones can.” We hate that. It goes with the “What if” query (often followed by “The Germans had won World War 2” or “The Cubs won the World Series” or “you could taste fear, etc.”). We understand that it’s a mechanism to separate your query from the other 25 we got today, but ultimately, as I’ve said before on this blog, we really are looking for the basics of genre, time period, who you are, and that you think that we, specifically, would be the right agents for the book.
If you’ve done that, and then I’m reading the beginning, there are a couple of other frequent pitfalls (beside using “penetrate” in your first sentence). The most significant, as everyone who reads this column knows, is starting with weather, particularly bad weather. It’s not that I don’t necessarily want to know what the weather is. I just don’t want three sentences describing it, unless the book is about a meteorologist or a blizzard (at which point short descriptions go a very long way). Similarly overly detailed descriptions of The Important Other Person (and god forbid several people, including unimportant people). Again, there is a difference between giving an initial idea with a truly salient attribute of two and going on about it. You have a novel to describe her. Don’t do it all at once. It’s more interesting over the space of a number of short descriptions.
Finally, and this really wraps the rest of the advice in the bow, is don’t overuse adjectives. I’ve gone on and on about the Modifier Zone, and it holds true as much now as it did a couple of years ago when I talked about it the first time.
OK, so there you go. I hope everyone has a wonderful, happy, safe Thanksgiving (and where appropriate, Chanukah), and back at you next week.
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