Querying Best Practices

March 2023 AMA

Welcome to our March AMA! Here are the questions we’re covering this month:

1. Querying Best Practices

   1. When writing comps for a query letter, do I have to include themes? Does the answer change for literary fiction versus genre fiction?

   2. How early in the process should I write a query letter?

   3. Should I personalize every query I send out?

2. General Questions

   1. What is a “half-scene” and when should I use it?

   2. How do I find critique partners for writing? Is it important for my critique partner to be in a similar place in their writing life as me?

   3. Why does a lot of writing advice say to avoid prologues?

Querying Best Practices

1. When writing comps for a query letter, do I have to include themes? Does the answer change for literary fiction versus genre fiction?

This is such an important question. I think the answer is ultimately up to your personal preference. In my opinion, I think it's more important for literary fiction to have theme or craft-related comps than it is for genre fiction. I think this mostly because literary fiction typically isn't high concept, but comping themes and craft elements can help an agent understand a book and know what books it would metaphorically sit next to on a shelf in a bookstore. For genre, the comps often compare high concepts rather than theme or craft elements.

As always, take what's useful from this answer and leave what's not. There's no wrong way to do comps, but concise detail is likely more helpful to an agent than a sparse comparison.

2. How early in the process should I write a query letter?

I actually recommend writing the query letter before you start drafting the novel. I talk about this strategy in detail in this post about querying agents. For me, personally, I will always write a query letter before I start the first draft of any novel. This practice helps me ensure that I have a story concept that has the three most important things for the western market:

1. A protagonist with a concrete external goal

2. Concrete stakes that will cause a literal or metaphorical death if the protagonist fails

3. Strong person vs. person antagonism

If anyone writes a query letter early in the process, let me know how it goes! I’m curious to hear how it helps (or maybe even hinders!) your revision process.

3. Should I personalize every query I send out?

The answer to this question depends on personal preference, and you’ll get a different answer depending on who you ask. When I was querying agents, I only personalized letters for the agents I had met in-person. Here’s an example of one of the personalizations I wrote:

If I didn’t have a personal connection with the agent, I simply opened my query letter with my book’s tagline. For a step-by-step guide on how to write a strong query letter, check out this post. This post also contains the cold query letter that I sent to every agent I had no personal connection with.

Remember to always follow the guidelines on the agency website closely.

General Questions

1. What is a half-scene and when should I use it?

This is my first time hearing the term "half-scene," so I had to do some Googling. It turns out that “half-scene” is another term for the craft concept I learned to call “compressed narration.” I’ve also seen this concept referred to as “summary.”

Let’s go over some definitions so we’re all on the same page:

Story Beat: An emotional turn in the story. In western storytelling, an effective scene has an emotional winner and loser. A beat occurs whenever one character starts winning and the other starts losing.

Scene: A real-time telling of the story beats. The reader is in the moment with the protagonist, seeing the dialogue and action as it happens.

Summary: An overview of the story beats. The narrator covers a lot of time quickly, telling the reader what happened without dialogue. A summary has a similar effect to a montage in a movie. Other terms for this include half-scene and compressed narration.

In a scene, we learn exactly what’s happening in a story as it happens. Scenes are sometimes referred to as "real-time narration."

When it comes to summary, I like using the term compressed narration because it explains exactly what summary does: it compresses several events (story beats) into a single paragraph.

After we finish going over each act in three-act structure, we’ll do an in-depth lesson on scene and summary with examples. For now, here’s some info on when it’s a good idea to use summary and when it should be avoided.

When to Use Summary: