The Structure Shall Set You Free

Picture from US National Archives

Worked on my pitch this week in preparation for writing my first ever query letter. In the past I have attempted to write query letters and ended up bogged down in the details of my world. This is despite following QueryShark for the past 2 years and reading a ton of blogs about distilling your story to it's key elements and themes. Reading about something and actually doing it are not the same. Who knew??

Lucky for me, I met a fabulous local author at a writing and publishing workshop at the Vancouver Public Library the other week. During the morning panel discussion, I really admired how she was honest, witty and confident in her comments. She was very unapologetic about being a slush pile find and I loved the fact that she was living (Local! Female!) proof that it actually happens. And she was about to quit her day job and write full-time! Her name is Eileen Cook. I purchased one of her young adult fiction novels the other day and could not put it down. Getting Revenge on Lauren Wood - a great read. And she likes Castle too.How cool is that?

And so, the query. With my brain unable to get away from the need to explain the elements of my novel's world first, I sent a 'please help me!' email to Eileen in the form of a big barf of world-building words on the page. And she wrote back.

Structure. Eileen gave me a structure and it set me free. The structure forced me to pick out only the key elements of my story and immediately I saw that I did not have my protagonist making enough choices. Brilliant! Now, because I had a simple, three sentence paragraph instead of a 250 page novel, I could play with the story concept until it worked and not get bogged down in details. Super-brilliant! The body of my query was done. All it needs now is a hat and some shoes, and off it goes.

I am aware that sending a query before the novel is completely polished is frowned upon. But since every writer and agent says new authors should expect to get rejected a lot, then I'm really just getting ahead of the game, right? I'm hoping that my query letter will be good enough to get feedback from agents at least and I can use that to improve my query and my novel.


Conference Alert!

Write On, Vancouver is May 13 - 15, 2011. It is an "Intensive Conference for Fiction and Screen Writers" and comes highly recommended.

The four presenters are: Micheal Hauge, Eileen Cook, Allison Beda and Lee McKenzie.