Adventures in Fiction Writing! Part Eight: GRADE MY HOOKS!!

When you're attempting to have your novel traditionally published, your query letter is the most important part of your submission package. And your HOOK is the most important part of your query letter.

I know not everyone agrees with me but everyone else is full of shit and that's fine. My journey is my own, and your journey is yours. I don't have all the answers just most of them.  But I DO know this: the HOOK is the opening of your query letter, and it's how you suck potential agents and publishers into your story. 

In other words, the HOOK is how you reel 'em in. And remember, the agent or publisher you're courting will likely read 67 other query letters the day he/she reads yours, so you wanna make sure your HOOK is damn good.

And now I'm asking for your help. Before I throw my query letters out to the universe, I want to make sure I've dotted all my T's and crossed all my I's and written the hook-iest hooks possible. So I'm posting them here. Read them, love them, hate them, laugh at them, be intrigued by them. AND THEN TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK OF THEM. Leave me a comment or 2 or three. Which hook is the best? The worst? WHY? 

Then find me on twitter (right here!) and tell me there, too!

Remember when I wrote that it takes an army to publish a book? (Adventures in Fiction Writing! Part 7) Well now I'm asking you to enlist. Will you be my literary soldier?

Okay! Here we go....HOOKS:

(1) All hope is never lost. Not even in Nowhere.

(2) No one in Nowhere can exist without hope, even if that hope is stolen.

(3) When children go missing, it's assumed they're Somewhere. But what if they were Nowhere?

(4) The road to Nowhere cost several lives, but saves many more.

(5) More than the contested Roy G. Biv highway separates the free citizens of Somewhere from the Lost Children of Nowhere.

(6) To save an army of Lost Children, Amarillo Saffron uncovers hidden secrets and battles real and figurative demons, armed with nothing but her unwavering hope.*

(7) The road to Nowhere means freedom for the Lost Children, death for the evil Mayor Blue, and an unceremonious end to the nefarious goings-on at the Ardor Labs corporation.*

(8) Cerulean and Amarillo Saffron are sisters separated by guilt, regret, and a nine-year-old secret. Only hope can reunite them and save the Lost Children of Nowhere.*

Got wordy there at the end, didn't I? Hmmm... Wonder what that means. Now! GRADE MY HOOKS!!!

*This hook was shortened for twitter.

BOOK REVIEW: Paper Towns by John Green

Today I review Paper Towns by John Green.

Here's what I'm not doing:

1. I'm not reviewing The Fault in Our Stars
2. I'm not commenting on John Green as an individual
3. I'm not commenting on the so-called 'John Green Effect' in YA publishing (You can read about that here, among other places.)

Why am I not doing those things? Well, I'm not reviewing The Fault in Our Stars because I haven't read it. And to be honest, I haven't read it yet simply because everyone else in the world has. I discovered John Green through Looking for Alaska, and when I did I felt like I should give his other, not-fault-in-our-stars books some attention. Because they're probably jealous of how everyone dotes on that other book.

I'm not commenting on John Green either as an individual or as a force in publishing because, frankly, I feel like enough has already been said about how awesome/dangerous/well-meaning/privileged/white/male he is. And furthermore, although I love writers (I am one!) and I understand that books come from writers, it is my fervent belief that books should be judged on the basis of their own merits. A good book should never suffer because it was written by an asshole. On the same token, a horrible book should never be lauded just because the guy who wrote it is super cool and everyone's best friend. 

So, without further ado, here is my review of Paper Towns:

(Naturally, SPOILER ALERT)

Paper Towns might be one of the best books I have ever read. (Is that a fangirlish enough start to this review?) The plot is so simple: childhood friends and longtime neighbors Quentin and Margo enjoy a night of vengeful revelry in the last month of their senior year of high school and then Margo disappears and Quentin devotes the remainder of his high school career to finding her. That's really it. But it's also so not it. Because the story is about so much more than that. It's about:

• Margo's imagined relationship to her childhood memory of Quentin
• Quentin's imagined relationship to his childhood memory of Margo
• Margo and Quentin's actual relationship
• Margo's fractured relationship to her parents
• Margo's parents' idealized relationship to the daughter they wish they had
• Margo's relationship with her hometown of Orlando
• Quentin's relationships with his friends Ben and Radar
• Quentin's relationship with his parents, who are both therapists
• The image Quentin holds in his mind of Margo
• The image Quentin holds in his mind of himself
• The idea that how people imagine one another bears little resemblance to the way people actually are
• And so much more!!

I could go on for days about the intricate and hugely meaningful ideas that form the foundation for the story behind Paper Towns. I'm convinced that it is the simplicity of the plot that allows room for the rich character development in this novel. Paper Towns is the kind of book that I believe would make a horrible movie. Because not a whole hell of a lot happens. After Margo and Quentin's all-night life-changing vandalism spree there's just not a ton of action. But please don't confuse that lack of action with tedium, because if you did you would be so wrong.

Paper Towns is witty. Early in the book I came across this line: 

Both my parents are therapists, which means that I am really goddamned well adjusted. 

And I knew I was in for a treat. 

Here's the set-up:

The protaganist, Quentin, is the only child of therapists. He's not exactly a social outcast, but he is the kind of non-band-geek who only hangs out with band geeks. He grew up next to Margo Roth Spiegelman in a sprawling Orlando suburb that was mostly indistinguishable from all the other sprawling Orlando suburbs. And, Margo, well...I should let John Green tell you about Margo. Because whatever lame summary I come up with couldn't do her justice.

...She was the only legend who lived next door to me. Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose six-syllable name was often spoken in its entirety with a kind of quiet reverence. Margo Roth Spiegelman, whose stories of epic adventures would blow through school like a summer storm: an old guy living in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, taught Margo how to play the guitar. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who spent three days traveling with the circus--they thought she had potential on the trapeze. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who drank a cup f herbal tea with The Mallionaires backstage after a concert in St. Louis while they drank whiskey. Margo Roth Spiegelman, who got into that concert by telling the bouncer that she was the bassist's girlfriend, and didn't they recognize her, and come on guys seriously, my name is Margo Roth Spiegelman and if you go back there and ask the bassist to take one look at me, he will tell you that I either am his girlfriend or he wishes I was, and then the bouncer did so, and then the bassist said "yeah that's my girlfriend let her in the show," and then later the bassist wanted to hook up with her and she rejected the bassist from The Mallionaires.

The stories, when they were shared, inevitably ended with, I mean, can you believe it? We often could not, but they always proved true. 

Quiet Quentin, practical Quentin, smart Quentin, grew up in awe of Margo Roth Spiegelman. And he loved her in a sort of hero-worshipping way. But Margo always traveled in cooler circles. That is, until the day she found out her boyfriend had been cheating on her. Then Margo Roth Spiegelman had to have revenge, and she needed Quentin to help her exact that revenge. As she told her confused friend: "I have to do eleven things tonight, and at least five of them involve a getaway man."

There I go quoting the book again. But that's the problem with books that are as amazing and quotable as Paper Towns. When you read them they fill you with such evangelical excitement that all you want to do is quote their lyrical lines to everyone you know so they, too, can be filled with the same excitement.

Margo and Quentin's epic Night of Eleven Probably-Illegal Tasks was a wild success. And of course, when Quentin went to school the next day he harbored unspoken hopes that his relationship with Margo was changed. Maybe now they'd be more than neighbors and sometime-friends. Maybe she would actually talk to him in public, maybe in front of the cool kids. Maybe she would even kiss him. But that wouldn't happen, because Margo was gone. It wasn't the first time she had disappeared. But it would be the last, because Margo Roth Spiegelman wasn't coming back, and in the space that was created by her absence, everyone and everything changed.

About halfway through their Night of Revenge, Margo Took Quentin to what she said was one of her favorite places in town: the Sun Trust bank building downtown. Quentin thought it a weird choice, but of course followed her all the way up to the conference room on the top floor, from which they had a view of all of Orlando through the floor-to-ceiling windows that lined one wall. Quentin called the view beautiful, but Margo scoffed:

"Here's what's not beautiful about it: from here, you can't see the rust or the cracked paint or whatever, but you can tell what the place really is. You see how fake it all is...It's a paper town. I mean look at it, Q: look at all those cul-de-sacs...all those houses that were built to fall apart. All those paper people living in their paper houses, burning the future to stay warm. All the paper kids drinking beer some bum bought for them at the paper convenience store. Everyone demented with the mania of owning things. All the things paper-thin and paper-frail...I've lived here for eighteen years and I have never once in my life come across anyone who cares about anything that matters."

In the days following her disappearance, Quentin thought about this and other statements Margo made that night. They suggested a level of unhappiness within her that he would once have thought impossible. But now he was confronted with the truth of it and he took it upon himself to save her.

I'd like to take a break here, to share a few words not only about Margo Roth Spiegelman, but also Alaska from Looking for Alaska, and the eponymous Katherine from An Abundance of Katherines.

I won't lie. I have a full-on awkward teenage crush on ALL of the troubled heroines I have encountered in John Green novels. My crush started with Alaska Young, continued with the final Katherine in An Abundance of Katherines, and reached a climax when I was introduced to Margo Roth Spiegelman in Paper Towns. When I read John Green's selfish, reckless, devil-may-care heroines I become a goose-pimply, heart-fluttery, stammering teenager. I wrote a love letter to them. Read it here. 

So Margo disappeared, and partly because he couldn't imagine life without her, and partly because he didn't want to, and partly because of the sad-and-enigmatic things she had said during their night together, Quentin vowed to save her. And in so doing, Quentin grew beyond himself. He grew more into the person Margo had always imagined him to be. And in the end, he did find her, but he also found that she didn't need to be saved. Moreover, Quentin discovered that Margo Roth Spiegelman was both MORE and LESS than the image of her he had carried in his heart. 

At the end of Paper Towns, Quentin and Margo Roth Spiegelman say goodbye to each other and also to the paper images they had created of one another. And they prepared to go out into the Great Beyond that awaits after childhood's end.

I truly cherished this book, and I highly recommend it. Have you read it? Share your thoughts with me in the comments!

My Love Letter to The Troubled Heroines of John Green Novels

Dear Katherine, Alaska, and especially Margo Roth Spiegelman:

I love you. I love your cleverly-disguised awkwardness. I love the masks you wear to hide your self-consciousness. I love how you curse and quote books above your reading level to express the feelings you can barely stand. I love how you lie. I love that you smoke, and drink, and lead impressionable boys on. I love that you find the future--and all life outside your borders--at once terrifying and impossible to resist. I love that you flirt with running away as easily as you flirt with suicide. I love that you treat philosophy as seriously as most girls your age treat college applications. I love that you scoff at such mundane things as college applications. I love how you collect ideas the way others collect stuffed animals and make-up. I love your daring. I love your recklessness. I love your careless disregard for other's feelings.

I. Love. You.

Adventures in Fiction Writing! Part Seven: AMASSING YOUR LITERARY ARMY

If it takes a village to raise a child, then it must take an army to publish a book. An army of dedicated, bespectacled, grammar-correcting nerds who come out under the cover of darkness to further their nefarious literary schemes.

...I wish.
That would be cool, wouldn't it? Sword-wielding publishers? But alas, the reality is much more mundane than that. It DOES take an army of dedicated folks to publish a book, but it's an army of regular (albeit bookish) people. There are no moonlit meetings or secret codes. Publishing folk connect through query letters, conventions, and the occasional twitter pitch party (see #pitmad, #askagent, and #twitterpitch among others).

Finding and reaching out to your literary army can be daunting. It's time-consuming and more than a little bit intimidating. But there really are no shortcuts. Well, at least not for regular people. There have been a few previously self-published authors who achieved such stunning success on their own that agents literally courted them. (Amanda Hocking is one, Ania Ahlborn is another.) But they are the exception. Most of us writerly types have no choice but to roll up our sleeves, swallow what's left of our pride, and query.

If you've been following my Adventures in Fiction Writing series from the beginning, you'll already know how I feel about query writing. I'm sure many of you feel the same. But we need to get over ourselves. Literary agents are not monsters. And believe it or not, they want us to succeed just as much as we do. It's true! Our success is their success. Without writers, there could be no literary agents.


So take a deep breath and get ready for the query-go-round. Here's how I'm doing it. This is just my way. There are a million others. And I'm new at this, for all I know, my way might suck. But I'm giving it a go.

(1) Research literary agents who accept submissions in your genre.
(2) Make a list of 20-30 of those agents, noting their contact info, websites, and social media reach (especially twitter!!)
(3) If you're not already on twitter, GET ON TWITTER.
(4) Follow all agents you plan to query on twitter. 
(5) Write your query letter.
(6) Write it again.
(7) Write it some more.
(8) Show query letter to beta readers.
(9) Rewrite query letter.
(10) Begin submitting.
(11) While you wait for responses, follow all the writerly types you can find on twitter. Follow all the writerly hashtags. (#writetip, #wordmongering, #NANOWRIMO, #JUNOWRIMO, #pubtip, #AmWriting, etc, etc). You WILL NEED the moral support, and you may learn of a twitter pitch party you can take part in.

A word on twitter pitch parties.

Think of these as the cyber version of an elevator pitch. It's your opportunity to grab the attention of a bunch of literary agents with one well-crafted tweet. Think it's hard to write a 140-character hook for your book? Hell fucking yeah it is! But it's not any easier to write a query and synopsis. And how often you can pitch a whole mess of agents at the same time? These are fun, low-pressure ways to query. DO IT.

Sometimes I think I sound like the PR department for twitter. Oh, well.

Anyone out there struggling through this stage of your adventure in fiction writing? Leave me a comment and tell me how you're dealing with it!

Adventures in Fiction Writing! Part Six: 20 Things to Do to Kill Time While Waiting for your Beta Readers

Originally this post was going to be an introspective look at how impatient I get while waiting for feedback on my #WIP. But then I said to myself:

"GRRRL, nobody wants to hear you whine."

And I was right. Nobody does. Especially not me. So instead I put together a list of things impatient bitches like me can do to distract ourselves while we wait for that all-important reader feedback. Hopefully it will help some of you. I'm pretty sure it prevented the untimely death of my lovely and infuriating teenage daughter.

(1) Bake a banana bread. It's widely regarded as impossible to be anxious or angry while mashing bananas.
(2) Read someone else's book. But nothing serious. Choose something light or fluffy or fantastical. You know what I mean: the sort of literary junk food you usually deny indulging in.
(3) Get all your friends together--NOT including any beta readers who also happen to be your friends--for a night of drinking and gaming.Cards Against Humanity is stupid fun. It's pee-your-pants-because-you're-laughing-so-hard funny.
(4) Go smurfing for pseudoephedrine. It worked for Walter White.
(5) Forget that. Spend a weekend binge-watching Breaking Bad instead.
(6) Try a new shade of nail polish. Try a different color on every finger. When people ask about it, respond with something completely irrelevant and judgemental, like:

"I hope one day you can grow beyond your racism."

(7) Spend an afternoon reconnecting with your younger self. Pull out that old box of toys from the attic. Play with your barbies. (Or GI Joes if you're a guy. Or a woman who played with masculine toys as a child.) Name one after that rumor-spreading bitch at work. Play through a scenario in which she develops cancer of the everything and then give her "treatments" that consist of you dousing her with gasoline and lighting her on fire.
(8) Research literary agents who represent books in your genre. Make a list of those who are currently accepting submissions.
(9) Stare at your list in despair. Cry a little.
(10) Tell yourself to man up. Expand your list to include details about what each of the agents likes to see in a query letter. Then pour over websites that offer advice on how to write winning query letters.
(11) Pour yourself a glass of red zinfandel. Take a sip. Then knock back the rest of the glass because no one could possibly write a query letter as well as the examples on the website.
(12) Pour yourself another glass. Wonder for a moment how good it would feel to write a different kind of letter to all those literary agents? One in which you tell them exactly where they should shove their submission guidelines.
(13) Throw your glass across the room. Drink the remaining wine straight from the bottle.
(14) Doodle ugly pictures of your Beta readers. Be creative with the details: give one boils and another an unfortunate facial scar.
(15) Ditch the wine. 3 am pity parties call for whiskey.
(16) Come to terms with the fact that each and every one of your Beta readers hates your guts. Or worse, hates your book.

Because that's why they haven't responded to your emails and calls. They hate your book so much that the mere though of talking to you sends them into fits of rage.

(17) Cry yourself to sleep. Wake up the next morning with a hangover. Call in sick to work.
(18) Spend the day in a bubble bath. Renew your promise to yourself that you will chill the FUCK out.
(19) Bake chocolate chip cookies. Eat the cookies in bed.
(20) DO NOT CHECK YOUR EMAIL.

It's Not Me, It's You

Once upon a time I had a kick-ass therapist.

She was wonderfully grandmotherly. Her hair was curly and gray, she had deep smile lines that framed her mouth, and the couch in her office was covered in doilies that I just knew she had knit herself.

My therapist understood me. She called me on my bullshit. And, because she knew that I process things better when I write about them, she encouraged me to journal our process together. I wrote her hundreds of pages of my overly-dramatic ramblings and she read them. ALL of them. And on her own time. At the end of each of our sessions I would hand her a new stack of pages and she read them over before we met again, and then we'd discuss them.

My therapist was with me before I broke up with my ex and after. When my friend Cari thought I needed a safe place to retreat for a few days, my therapist secured me a spot in the county--ahem!-- "resort" for a 5-day observation period. And she was there for me when I was released.

We worked together for YEARS, my therapist and I, until one day she decided to call it quits. She said I hadn't done anything wrong. She said she still liked me. She said she still believed that I could one day find peace. But she also said that there was nothing else SHE could do for me. She had tried everything she knew. She had provided me all the study material she had. But there was just no more. She knew I needed more help, but she didn't have any left to give.

I was devastated. I couldn't imagine my future without her. I wasn't ready to do it on my own. 

She said she had a friend. A smart friend. Someone who might better be able to reach me. She could arrange a meeting if I liked. I said yes, thank you, and we set things up. Her friend WAS smart, and nice, and she and I got along well...But it wasn't the same. I stopped seeing her after awhile.

That was a few years ago. I haven't tried a new therapist since. But I'm really feeling like I should. My head can be a dark place. It's easy to get lost in there. A good therapist is like a guide, shining light in the dark corners and offering a change in perspective.

But what if I can't find someone like her? Are good therapists like soul mates: only one per person??

God that would suck.

Adventures in Fiction Writing! Part Five: Queries

Whenever I think about querying I want
 to shoot myself in the eye.

There. I said it. It's out in the open. I'm a PUSSY when it comes to the topic of querying. And I know I'm not the only one. Who invented this shenanigans? It's horrible. It's a veritable creative rape of your mental processes. You write a book and then you're asked to justify its existence to people you hope will become champions for the book but in order to do that you have to strip yourself and your work down figuratively naked. 

And you're standing there, naked, begging these people to like you. 

"Tell me I'm clever," you say. 

It's GOD AWFUL. 

This is how I want to query: