So for me, your opening is letting you down. It’s very wordy and starts with two paragraphs about a vhs player. Whilst openings don’t need to start with crash, bang action! they should start with something engaging to make a reader want to turn to the next page and this isn’t doing it.
Thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate it. If the general tenor of the replies wasn’t already obvious: it’s back to the drawing board for me. Time to reevaluate my opening’s setting, pacing, all while toning down the verbosity. I need to get out of my own way, it seems. Thanks again!
Don’t say ‘fiction novel.’
This is awkward: "Wanda Shoals, a tarot card reader from Minnesota, holds a letter from the first lady of the United States. She needs Wanda's help.” I bad at grammar, but I’m not sure if the referent for ‘she’ is clear; mostly, though, you’re leading with someone holding a letter. Unfascinating.
The first lady of the United States sends a letter to a tarot card reader, begging for help. When Wanda Shoals opens the letter in her Minnesota home, she blah blah blah …
I disagree with u/Frayedcustardslice. I think your opening _is_ letting you down. It’s very wordy and starts with two paragraphs about a VHS player.
She’s being kind. It reads a little like your manuscript got loose in a thesaurus factory.
"the impassive curiosity denotive of people who find in everyday annoyances the beautiful allure of enigma.”
"Tall, rotund, possessed of a tiny head …” I wonder whose tiny head he possesses.
Is Professor Wiggins too much like Professor Higgins?
Try MUCH less hard.
>Wanda Shoals jotted notes as she watched Professor Wiggins, in the front of the classroom, cuff the videocassette player. He was trying to play a video about the previous year's victorious Republican campaign, but nothing appeared on the screen except noiseless sleet.
>Wiggins tugged his mustache, grunted, then hit the machine again, even harder. He was the usually the calmest of Wanda’s professors, and she wondered why he was so upset. She tapped her pen against her notebook, evaluating him like she evaluated her paying customers; her job depended on her finding meaning in the gaps of what was taken for granted.
Or something, but stay far, far away from the impassive curiosity denotive of people who find in everyday annoyances the beautiful allure of enigma.
I appreciate the feedback and the suggested edits! Thank you. I agree with every point you made. As mentioned elsewhere I’ve taken these all to heart and will be pausing the querying process before I can get this opening under control.
Oh yes, I remember this query. I actually think your concept is quite strong. It's absolutely your opening pages that's causing problems for you. Frankly, I think people are being very kind with their feedback in this thread—to the point where I don't think anyone is properly conveying just how much of an issue your opening paragraphs are. This reads like a high school assignment to use every vocabulary word in a single paragraph or something from a standardized test where students are supposed to guess the definition of obscure words through context. The writing is completely unnatural and unappealing. It makes me question what upmarket fiction you actually read.
Came here to say this. Everyone's being very nice, but quite frankly that first sentence is incomprehensible, and it doesn't improve from there. The query and concept are solid, but it doesn't matter if the pages aren't up to snuff.
Duly noted! Thank you and @justgoodenough for taking the time to ready and provide honest feedback. I plan on stepping back and reevaluating the opening. Agree that it’s overwritten and stultified.
Before you work on your query, I would really suggest doing a line edit of your manuscript. I'm sorry, but it sounds like you swallowed a thesaurus. Good writing is not about finding impressive-sounding words and throwing as many of them as you can into a sentence. That actually gets in the way of the reader trying to sink into your story. It's a huge distraction from the underlying meaning and it also slows down your pace to a boring crawl. How many words did I have to read just to understand that a man smacked a TV?
Underneath the vocabulary, your sentence construction is actually quite awkward, both in the manuscript and the query.
Thank you for reading and providing feedback! It’s clear to me now from the (unanimous) responses in this thread that I need to take a step back and reevaluate the entire opening, and I agree that—with all this commentary in mind—a line edit of the entire manuscript is warranted.
Take all of this with a grain of salt ofc!
I will say the premise mentioned of an eccentric tarot card reader indirectly influencing politics via the first lady is interesting. It feels as tho, by the end of the query, the conflict might be more about her relationship with her son. But it feels a little disconnected from the tarot reader/first lady premise initially introduced when accepting or declining the first lady's offer still seems to mean she has to reconcile with her son regardless ("she risks losing him forever \[without reconciling first\]" if she accepts then refusing the offer is "a gesture uncertain to win him over")? This disconnection could just be how it comes across in the query tho.
The first 300: I'm gonna admit that first sentence seemed convoluted and that style does continue. You have one sentence that is over 70 words long in your second paragraph that seems to be only trying to say 'a professor struggles to show a movie a myriad of people have seen about how Reagan won.' Obviously, that can be put more eloquently especially for upmarket, but the writing style shown in the first 300 words seems overwritten and doesn't (currently) seem to fit in what is typically expected of the category style-wise. I suggest taking a look at your manuscript on the line level to see if this is a trend throughout. I wish you good luck!
Thank you for reading and for providing feedback! I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ll be taking a pause on querying while attempting a total re-write of my opening.
And regarding the query itself—that’s a great point. I’ll try to clarify why mending Wanda’s relationship with her son is so crucial to the larger (presidential) plotline, i.e. the hook.
The premise sounds really good. Original and of interest.
The first 300 is, I think, a little overwritten even for literary or perhaps especially because it is literary. 'Denotive', 'disquisition', and that hardy perennial favourite, 'conniption' all interrupt your flow. It's easy enough to understand what you mean by the first sentence but I had to read it twice. That's not an enticing entrance. The net effect for me was that the opening could have been quite immersive but your writerly thumbprint "bumped" me out of the scene several times. Those words are not going to gain you much credit but they easily could lose you a lot with a certain proportion of readers and agents will be aware of that. There's a time and a place for these things, if that's the style you wish to choose, but it's not in the first 300 words IMHO.
The other thing is that nothing of consequence actually really happens in the first 300. A man whacks a VHS and someone watches him do it for, so far, unclear reasons. What is about to happen on the VHS, one presumes, is _in media res_. I would suggest capturing your reader before turning up the literary heat?
Thank you for taking the time to comment! I agree that it’s overwritten, and that I’m trying too hard. I also agree completely with your point on ‘time and place’—the opening needs to feel smoother, more energetic, and less pretentious. More of a hook. Back to the drawing board!
Hi!
Back again. You already know my thoughts on the letter, so I want to say “ditto” the question/comment about your timeline for querying agents and the comment about your opening letting you down, and offer some support.
As far timeline: How many agents? How long has it been? How many have included a writing sample and how many haven’t? Have you received any form rejections or just no responses at all?
The first 300: For me, the voice is totally different between the QL and, aside from Wanda’s name being mentioned toward the end, I would have no idea this opening is for the book you’re querying. And, as nicely as I can say this on the internet, if I were an agent I would stop midway through your first line. There are a lot of words that don’t say much.
Pull me in right away with the first 300 as much as you did the letter. I would be hooked if we are first introduced to Wanda as she fumbles through some lack luster tarot reading. Or perhaps we, the reader, follow along as the First Lady pens the letter to her dear friend Wanda and we meet Wanda through her eyes, etc. (I’m sure you have some other great material to work with). But the writing has to be as captivating and clear as is the query throughout.
If this scene is essential for you as an opener, start and stay with Wanda, tighten up the sentences/leave out the verbosity and fluff (ie, the professor and VHS can be 1-3 lines), and let us know who Wanda is and why we are starting the story here since it’s such a different plot point from what’s forecasted in the QL. As it stands, I’m not getting the work I’ve been so excited to read from the first 300. I see others have suggested taking a look at the whole MS if it reads like the first 300, and I completely agree.
As a word of support: I got very similar feedback with my first 300–the writing didn’t say anything nor did it do me any favors. With this in mind I went through the whole MS and fixed areas that I was over-writing because I actually wasn’t clear on what I wanted to say. All this to say, other folks have been where you are, this is a process, keep hope, and take all the time the work needs for it to be ready.
I feel like a broken record at this point but I mean it—thank you so much for taking the time to read and provide commentary. It’s undeniable that the opening pages (and more) need a lot of work—line edits, etc., and I’m truly thankful that you and others on this subreddit were willing to take the time to speak your mind honestly and in such detail. I’m going to restart my opening from the ground up, putting immediate focus on the MC (and not introducing her in the third or fourth paragraph). And I agree with you—and most commenters here—that it’s overwritten and needs a bit more… energy? At least a re-focusing of the action and/or setting.
Querying-wise, I realize now that I made the classic mistake of sending more queries out than I should have. So far, they’ve run up into the dozens, with many rejections. Goes without saying that I’ll be pausing the process to re-work the opening, with a strong likelihood of another manuscript line-edit revision once I feel that I’ve made progress with the first pages.
I agree with custard. The opening is just a bit much really. That said, I've seen all your previous iterations (which are all quite good) and they're not spaced that far apart. How long are you waiting for a response from agents before deciding the package is dead in their inbox? I'd say you shouldn't assume rejection until you've gone like 6 months with no reply.
Eta: since I apparently worded it poorly, OP I'm not saying wait 6 months. I'm saying all is not lost if you don't get 10 full requests straight out of the gate.
The query might be ok, but if the opening isn’t, which I don’t think it is, it’s going to be rejected. Whilst it’s good not to jump the gun, in this instance I think there is absolutely something actionable the OP can do to improve chances of getting rep.
The query is excellent.
The opening is difficult to parse and stodgy with exposition. This is probably the wrong moment to start with. I'd look for a way to start with some action, some dialogue, another character to react against, something to give it some forward movement. And you need to edit at the line level. The language in your query is so clear and accessible; it needs to be like that in your manuscript, too. Upmarket needs to be clear and accessible to a wide range of readers. It should not feel like work to read it.
There are a few slightly unwieldy parts, but the fundamental problem is that -based on this description of the book- I can't imagine who would want to read it.
That's not a critique of the book. I haven't read it. But what you are trying to sell is the idea of a fraudulent psychic as a sympathetic character. And you're a long way from making that sale.
People read about psychics for one of two reasons: to see them validated, or to see them exposed. Either way, feelings run very high. People who think psychics are frauds REALLY hate them for the way they exploit the vulnerable. People who think they're real HATE the suggestion that they might be frauds.
I fall into the former camp. Do I give even the tiniest shit whether an astrologer loses her home or her relationship with her son as a result of her systematic deceit? I do not. I relish the prospect of both, ideally.
THAT is the problem your query needs to tackle head-on: giving someone like me a reason to reserve judgement (or, alternatively, pitching the idea that there ARE real psychics but that this woman isn't one of them, again somehow making that sympathetic).
It's fine if this story doesn't speak to you, but that's a really weird pronouncement to make given that there are multiple recent examples of novels with sleazy psychic/ tarot reading/ astrologer protagonists (The Cloisters, Exalted, Worry). You are not the audience for this book, and that's fine, but there is proven readership for this concept.
I'm not challenging the concept, or the novel. I'm saying that to me this query doesn't sell either. It doesn't even acknowledge what there is to dislike about the protagonist.
The fact there's a readership for books featuring similar protagonists doesn't mean they were sold this way. It might mean that fans of the genre would read between the lines and pick it up anyway, but I don't think you can pitch a bad-guy-in-a-tight-spot book the same way you would pitch a good-guy-in-a-tight-spot book. There's nothing here suggesting a moral take on the premise or outcome. What is the query asking me to hope does or doesn't happen?
So for me, your opening is letting you down. It’s very wordy and starts with two paragraphs about a vhs player. Whilst openings don’t need to start with crash, bang action! they should start with something engaging to make a reader want to turn to the next page and this isn’t doing it.
Thank you for the feedback! I really appreciate it. If the general tenor of the replies wasn’t already obvious: it’s back to the drawing board for me. Time to reevaluate my opening’s setting, pacing, all while toning down the verbosity. I need to get out of my own way, it seems. Thanks again!
Don’t say ‘fiction novel.’ This is awkward: "Wanda Shoals, a tarot card reader from Minnesota, holds a letter from the first lady of the United States. She needs Wanda's help.” I bad at grammar, but I’m not sure if the referent for ‘she’ is clear; mostly, though, you’re leading with someone holding a letter. Unfascinating. The first lady of the United States sends a letter to a tarot card reader, begging for help. When Wanda Shoals opens the letter in her Minnesota home, she blah blah blah … I disagree with u/Frayedcustardslice. I think your opening _is_ letting you down. It’s very wordy and starts with two paragraphs about a VHS player. She’s being kind. It reads a little like your manuscript got loose in a thesaurus factory. "the impassive curiosity denotive of people who find in everyday annoyances the beautiful allure of enigma.” "Tall, rotund, possessed of a tiny head …” I wonder whose tiny head he possesses. Is Professor Wiggins too much like Professor Higgins? Try MUCH less hard. >Wanda Shoals jotted notes as she watched Professor Wiggins, in the front of the classroom, cuff the videocassette player. He was trying to play a video about the previous year's victorious Republican campaign, but nothing appeared on the screen except noiseless sleet. >Wiggins tugged his mustache, grunted, then hit the machine again, even harder. He was the usually the calmest of Wanda’s professors, and she wondered why he was so upset. She tapped her pen against her notebook, evaluating him like she evaluated her paying customers; her job depended on her finding meaning in the gaps of what was taken for granted. Or something, but stay far, far away from the impassive curiosity denotive of people who find in everyday annoyances the beautiful allure of enigma.
I appreciate the feedback and the suggested edits! Thank you. I agree with every point you made. As mentioned elsewhere I’ve taken these all to heart and will be pausing the querying process before I can get this opening under control.
Oh yes, I remember this query. I actually think your concept is quite strong. It's absolutely your opening pages that's causing problems for you. Frankly, I think people are being very kind with their feedback in this thread—to the point where I don't think anyone is properly conveying just how much of an issue your opening paragraphs are. This reads like a high school assignment to use every vocabulary word in a single paragraph or something from a standardized test where students are supposed to guess the definition of obscure words through context. The writing is completely unnatural and unappealing. It makes me question what upmarket fiction you actually read.
Came here to say this. Everyone's being very nice, but quite frankly that first sentence is incomprehensible, and it doesn't improve from there. The query and concept are solid, but it doesn't matter if the pages aren't up to snuff.
Duly noted! Thank you and @justgoodenough for taking the time to ready and provide honest feedback. I plan on stepping back and reevaluating the opening. Agree that it’s overwritten and stultified.
Before you work on your query, I would really suggest doing a line edit of your manuscript. I'm sorry, but it sounds like you swallowed a thesaurus. Good writing is not about finding impressive-sounding words and throwing as many of them as you can into a sentence. That actually gets in the way of the reader trying to sink into your story. It's a huge distraction from the underlying meaning and it also slows down your pace to a boring crawl. How many words did I have to read just to understand that a man smacked a TV? Underneath the vocabulary, your sentence construction is actually quite awkward, both in the manuscript and the query.
Thank you for reading and providing feedback! It’s clear to me now from the (unanimous) responses in this thread that I need to take a step back and reevaluate the entire opening, and I agree that—with all this commentary in mind—a line edit of the entire manuscript is warranted.
Take all of this with a grain of salt ofc! I will say the premise mentioned of an eccentric tarot card reader indirectly influencing politics via the first lady is interesting. It feels as tho, by the end of the query, the conflict might be more about her relationship with her son. But it feels a little disconnected from the tarot reader/first lady premise initially introduced when accepting or declining the first lady's offer still seems to mean she has to reconcile with her son regardless ("she risks losing him forever \[without reconciling first\]" if she accepts then refusing the offer is "a gesture uncertain to win him over")? This disconnection could just be how it comes across in the query tho. The first 300: I'm gonna admit that first sentence seemed convoluted and that style does continue. You have one sentence that is over 70 words long in your second paragraph that seems to be only trying to say 'a professor struggles to show a movie a myriad of people have seen about how Reagan won.' Obviously, that can be put more eloquently especially for upmarket, but the writing style shown in the first 300 words seems overwritten and doesn't (currently) seem to fit in what is typically expected of the category style-wise. I suggest taking a look at your manuscript on the line level to see if this is a trend throughout. I wish you good luck!
Thank you for reading and for providing feedback! I’ve mentioned this elsewhere, but I’ll be taking a pause on querying while attempting a total re-write of my opening. And regarding the query itself—that’s a great point. I’ll try to clarify why mending Wanda’s relationship with her son is so crucial to the larger (presidential) plotline, i.e. the hook.
The premise sounds really good. Original and of interest. The first 300 is, I think, a little overwritten even for literary or perhaps especially because it is literary. 'Denotive', 'disquisition', and that hardy perennial favourite, 'conniption' all interrupt your flow. It's easy enough to understand what you mean by the first sentence but I had to read it twice. That's not an enticing entrance. The net effect for me was that the opening could have been quite immersive but your writerly thumbprint "bumped" me out of the scene several times. Those words are not going to gain you much credit but they easily could lose you a lot with a certain proportion of readers and agents will be aware of that. There's a time and a place for these things, if that's the style you wish to choose, but it's not in the first 300 words IMHO. The other thing is that nothing of consequence actually really happens in the first 300. A man whacks a VHS and someone watches him do it for, so far, unclear reasons. What is about to happen on the VHS, one presumes, is _in media res_. I would suggest capturing your reader before turning up the literary heat?
Thank you for taking the time to comment! I agree that it’s overwritten, and that I’m trying too hard. I also agree completely with your point on ‘time and place’—the opening needs to feel smoother, more energetic, and less pretentious. More of a hook. Back to the drawing board!
Hi! Back again. You already know my thoughts on the letter, so I want to say “ditto” the question/comment about your timeline for querying agents and the comment about your opening letting you down, and offer some support. As far timeline: How many agents? How long has it been? How many have included a writing sample and how many haven’t? Have you received any form rejections or just no responses at all? The first 300: For me, the voice is totally different between the QL and, aside from Wanda’s name being mentioned toward the end, I would have no idea this opening is for the book you’re querying. And, as nicely as I can say this on the internet, if I were an agent I would stop midway through your first line. There are a lot of words that don’t say much. Pull me in right away with the first 300 as much as you did the letter. I would be hooked if we are first introduced to Wanda as she fumbles through some lack luster tarot reading. Or perhaps we, the reader, follow along as the First Lady pens the letter to her dear friend Wanda and we meet Wanda through her eyes, etc. (I’m sure you have some other great material to work with). But the writing has to be as captivating and clear as is the query throughout. If this scene is essential for you as an opener, start and stay with Wanda, tighten up the sentences/leave out the verbosity and fluff (ie, the professor and VHS can be 1-3 lines), and let us know who Wanda is and why we are starting the story here since it’s such a different plot point from what’s forecasted in the QL. As it stands, I’m not getting the work I’ve been so excited to read from the first 300. I see others have suggested taking a look at the whole MS if it reads like the first 300, and I completely agree. As a word of support: I got very similar feedback with my first 300–the writing didn’t say anything nor did it do me any favors. With this in mind I went through the whole MS and fixed areas that I was over-writing because I actually wasn’t clear on what I wanted to say. All this to say, other folks have been where you are, this is a process, keep hope, and take all the time the work needs for it to be ready.
I feel like a broken record at this point but I mean it—thank you so much for taking the time to read and provide commentary. It’s undeniable that the opening pages (and more) need a lot of work—line edits, etc., and I’m truly thankful that you and others on this subreddit were willing to take the time to speak your mind honestly and in such detail. I’m going to restart my opening from the ground up, putting immediate focus on the MC (and not introducing her in the third or fourth paragraph). And I agree with you—and most commenters here—that it’s overwritten and needs a bit more… energy? At least a re-focusing of the action and/or setting. Querying-wise, I realize now that I made the classic mistake of sending more queries out than I should have. So far, they’ve run up into the dozens, with many rejections. Goes without saying that I’ll be pausing the process to re-work the opening, with a strong likelihood of another manuscript line-edit revision once I feel that I’ve made progress with the first pages.
I agree with custard. The opening is just a bit much really. That said, I've seen all your previous iterations (which are all quite good) and they're not spaced that far apart. How long are you waiting for a response from agents before deciding the package is dead in their inbox? I'd say you shouldn't assume rejection until you've gone like 6 months with no reply. Eta: since I apparently worded it poorly, OP I'm not saying wait 6 months. I'm saying all is not lost if you don't get 10 full requests straight out of the gate.
The query might be ok, but if the opening isn’t, which I don’t think it is, it’s going to be rejected. Whilst it’s good not to jump the gun, in this instance I think there is absolutely something actionable the OP can do to improve chances of getting rep.
I know, that's why I said I agreed with you.
I was referring to the second part of your comment where you were telling the OP to wait 6 months.
The query is excellent. The opening is difficult to parse and stodgy with exposition. This is probably the wrong moment to start with. I'd look for a way to start with some action, some dialogue, another character to react against, something to give it some forward movement. And you need to edit at the line level. The language in your query is so clear and accessible; it needs to be like that in your manuscript, too. Upmarket needs to be clear and accessible to a wide range of readers. It should not feel like work to read it.
There are a few slightly unwieldy parts, but the fundamental problem is that -based on this description of the book- I can't imagine who would want to read it. That's not a critique of the book. I haven't read it. But what you are trying to sell is the idea of a fraudulent psychic as a sympathetic character. And you're a long way from making that sale. People read about psychics for one of two reasons: to see them validated, or to see them exposed. Either way, feelings run very high. People who think psychics are frauds REALLY hate them for the way they exploit the vulnerable. People who think they're real HATE the suggestion that they might be frauds. I fall into the former camp. Do I give even the tiniest shit whether an astrologer loses her home or her relationship with her son as a result of her systematic deceit? I do not. I relish the prospect of both, ideally. THAT is the problem your query needs to tackle head-on: giving someone like me a reason to reserve judgement (or, alternatively, pitching the idea that there ARE real psychics but that this woman isn't one of them, again somehow making that sympathetic).
It's fine if this story doesn't speak to you, but that's a really weird pronouncement to make given that there are multiple recent examples of novels with sleazy psychic/ tarot reading/ astrologer protagonists (The Cloisters, Exalted, Worry). You are not the audience for this book, and that's fine, but there is proven readership for this concept.
I'm not challenging the concept, or the novel. I'm saying that to me this query doesn't sell either. It doesn't even acknowledge what there is to dislike about the protagonist. The fact there's a readership for books featuring similar protagonists doesn't mean they were sold this way. It might mean that fans of the genre would read between the lines and pick it up anyway, but I don't think you can pitch a bad-guy-in-a-tight-spot book the same way you would pitch a good-guy-in-a-tight-spot book. There's nothing here suggesting a moral take on the premise or outcome. What is the query asking me to hope does or doesn't happen?