sending stuff off

Oh my god, how I hate writing query letters, hooks and synopses. If it weren’t for the phenomenon of Miss Snark, I’d probably give up. For years I’ve been chasing the holy grail of what a decent query letter looks like, or what a decent synopsis looks like; and hook, what the hell is a hook? Sell it don’t tell it? Jeeze, pass the smelly cheese.In all the past advice I’ve read in writers’ magazines about how to approach an agent, there has always been the stipulation that you must say why the agent is right for you, and say what qualifies you to have written this book, etc. Miss Snark advises against this sort of thing. Perhaps it is all subjective. Perhaps some agents like being arse licked but I suspect that getting over the gist of your novel before the agent tosses the paper in the reject pile is a bit more important. So whilst I’m bashing my head metaphorically over my new lap top and belly aching over adjectives for my polished and completed novel, I am already thinking about what the query letter for my most recent nano novel will look like when I get round to it. I WISH I had had this information (filched from Miss Snark’s blog)  when I first began querying: A hook requires more than “what this book is about”. There needs to be an enticement to read it. What’s the central decision that [he/she] has to make? What are the stakes? You can’t just describe [him/her] like a dossier either. [He/She] needs to have substance so we’ll want to read on …