Creating mood through setting and ecology in 1920s Bangalore - Harini Nagendra

This week's topic is a fascinating one. 

Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Can you give examples from books that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it.

My books - The Bangalore Detectives Club series, set in 1920s Bangalore - are all about the setting. For me, the place and setting - 1920s Bangalore in the times of the British Raj - in a princely state, at a time when women were beginning to step outside the home in large numbers - is critical to the story. In that sense, I think of 1920s Bangalore with its bungalows, lakes, trees, monkeys and wildlife - as a character too, one of the protagonists that shape my tale. As an ecologist, of course nature plays a major role in my books. That's why, as soon as I read this prompt, I knew the book I would select as an example. These short extracts are from Sally Andrew's wonderful Tannie Maria series, set in the South African Karoo, a semi-desertic plateau dominated by heat. Tannie Maria is a baker, an excellent cook who writes an agony aunt column, and a woman struggling to come terms with her own traumatic past, as she gets entangled in murders. The combination of local food, ecology and geography that Andrews writes about conjures up a sense of place almost instantly, as the brief extracts below - from her first book, Recipes for Love and Murder - demonstrate.

Extract 1

I shifted in my chair. The shrike flew back up to a branch with something it had caught.

‘I phoned them on Friday,’ said Hattie, ‘to tell them, Sorry we just can’t do it, not right now, I said.’ Her throat became all squeezed like a plastic straw. ‘They said we can cut out the recipe column.’

Her voice sounded far away. I was watching the shrike; it had a lizard in its beak. It stabbed its meat onto a big white thorn.

‘Tannie Maria.’

Was the lizard still alive, I wondered?

‘I argued, told them how much the readers adored your column. But they said the advice column was non-negotiable.’

Was the butcher bird going to leave the meat out to dry, and make biltong?

 

Extract 2

 

The next morning my phone rang. It was Hattie.

‘Have you heard?’ she said. ‘Nelson Mandela died last night.’

When I put the phone down, I made myself a cup of coffee and took two rusks and sat out on the stoep. But before I could bring the coffee to my lips, the tears started leaking out of me.

Mandela was ninety-five and had been sick for a while, but it still came as a shock. I looked out at the brown veld and the wrinkled gwarrie trees and the distant mountains. My tears made it seem like rain was falling, but the sky was wide and empty. I knew that people all over the land were crying with me for Tata Mandela.

And now, for the next question - "please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it." 

Here's an extract from book 3, A Nest of Vipers, out on May 2

The women navigated a muddy river of clayey, sticky slush, balancing carefully on the small slabs of stone as they made their way past the semicircular arena that served as the makeshift parking area of the circus, to the ramshackle homes at the back.

What a contrast the circus grounds were from the last time she had been there. The tent stood in a far corner, covering the stage where the performance was held. No longer exciting or magical, as it had seemed at night, its then attractive bright colours now appeared cheap and faded in the sunlight. The parking lot where they had encountered Pawan’s body was pitted with car tracks, seeming like it had not been swept in years. A high line of eucalyptus trees enclosed the clearing, pale and tall like eerie silver sentinels. The peeling bark on the trees appeared like distorted faces, watching them as they moved. She could not see people anywhere, though as they neared the wicker gate, she could hear sounds. Metal clanked and water splashed in the distance. Women, cleaning vessels and washing clothes, called to each other as they worked.

They had almost reached the edge of the stone path. Once they were out of the clearing, the women entered an area bounded by a makeshift bamboo fence, ill constructed shacks with crooked walls and aluminium sheets for roofs standing cheek-by-jowl with each other.

‘Strange, that a famous magician like Das would agree to live in such seedy quarters,’ Uma aunty said.

Occupied with domestic chores, the circus performers chattered to each other, shouting loudly to be heard above the din. After the silence of the open grounds, the noise seemed deafening.

Muscular grey-haired women squatted next to large stone slabs, taking out heavy bed sheets that had been soaked in large tin buckets. They bundled up the sheets, slapping them against the slabs to loosen the dirt before sluicing them with clean water, squeezing them dry and hanging them out on long clothes lines. Tied to the trees around the edge, the clothes lines dipped drunkenly down to the ground, creating an obstacle course that criss-crossed the clearing. Short and plump, Uma aunty was able to navigate them with ease, but long-limbed Kaveri had to bend and duck to move.

Children capered around playing with cork balls made from the pods of the raintree whose branches shaded them from above, making it even harder for her to get across. Crows cawed, diving down to attack the plates of food that the older children held in their hands as they chased their younger siblings around, trying to feed them. She saw a lot of older people, too, but most of the performers must have left for Mysore.

‘Do you know where Suman is?’ Kaveri asked an exhausted-looking young woman with a swollen belly, one child on her hip and the other tugging at her hand. But she only stared at her with compressed lips, not saying a word.

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How did I come to write this? The Sampangi circus is fictional, but the dried lake in which the circus is situated is real, and has an especially rich ecological history which Hita Unnikrishnan, one of my former PhD students, studied in detail. Through most of the 19th century Sampangi lake was one of Bangalore's largest lakes, a thriving water body used by farmers, fishers, grazers, weavers and potters. But by the late 19th century, the British administrators began demanding that the lake be drained, because water from the lake flowed into their bungalows and breweries (which they built on the lake bed!). The farmers protested, but the lake was eventually drained so that the British regiments could play polo on the lake bed. After the demise of the lake, the grounds were eventually converted into a sports stadium - we documented the sad tale in this short article here, but it was such a fascinating (and sad) story, that I knew I had to work it into a book somewhere! 

The Lake That Became a Sports Stadium

And now, I hope you don't mind the obligatory writer's pitch - A Nest of Vipers is now available for pre-order, so if this excerpt makes you want to read a bit more, here's the link!

A Nest of Vipers: A Bangalore Detectives Club Mystery   

Opening Salvos from James W. Ziskin

Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Can you give examples from books that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it.

Adrian McKinty’s Sean Duffy series has some of the most compelling openings I’ve ever read. They’re visual, gritty, and poetic. The writing is beautiful, and I confess to being envious. I love all seven of the Sean Duffy books, set in 1980s Belfast and Carrickfergus in Northern Ireland against the backdrop of the Troubles. 

Sean Duffy is a detective sergeant in the Royal Ulster Constabulary. But he happens to be Catholic, which means pretty much everyone hates him. His Protestant comrades distrust him, and the IRA wants him dead. It’s a terrific series. The fifth book, Rain Dogs, won the Edgar Award for Best Paperback Original in 2017. (Should I be jealous that my own Heart of Stone was also a finalist for that Edgar that year? Perhaps, but I’m not.) The series concluded last year with The Detective up Late, and I’ll miss Sean Duffy.

I’ve chosen the opening passage of The Cold Cold Ground (book 1), because, for me, it’s a masterpiece of description.

The scene roars to life, blitzing the reader with shapes, sounds, geometry, light, and colors. Flames and improvised bombs. (The use of the word “gasoline” instead of “petrol” intrigues me...) And I was so impressed by the brilliant choice to introduce the police helicopters—not by the beating of their rotors as you might expect—but by their searchlights casting about ineffectually, as they scan the dark, riotous landscape, only to land on others of their kind. But the most powerful image in this passage is that of the men yelling below decks on a torpedoed prison ship. Wow! You can’t describe desperation and panic any better than that. The curt, one-sentence paragraph at the end reminds us that it rains in Belfast. And it rains oily. A perfect codicil.

**********************

As for my own modest efforts to create mood through setting, I thought it would be fitting to offer the opening of Heart of Stone, the very same book nominated for the Edgar that Adrian won. I’ve posted it before, but here it is again.

I remember the cool breath of the night woods on my neck. I see the glow of moonlight on the highest boughs, filtering down in a pale cast, weak and washed-out, fading into darkness. I smell the moss and the decay of the forest floor, heady, damp, musky. And I can taste the earthy mushrooms and bitter berries on my tongue. But most of all, I hear the pines whisper and sigh, their needles, like millions of tiny blades, carving voices into the breeze.

 

—Heart of Stone

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In the Mood

Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Can you give examples from books that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it.

by Dietrich

My idea is to set the mood for a scene with as powerful a description as I can come up with, using the fewest words possible, and always keeping in mind that the story needs to keep moving forward.

To my mind, the master of setting mood was Cormac McCarthy. An example that illustrates this is from The Road: 

“He lay listening to the water drip in the woods. Bedrock, this. The cold and the silence. The ashes of the late world carried on the bleak and temporal winds to and fro in the void. Carried forth and scattered and carried forth again. Everything uncoupled from its shoring. Unsupported in the ashen air. Sustained by a breath, trembling and brief.”

Or how about this from another master of the craft, James Lee Burke. This one from The Tin Roof Blowdown:

"New Orleans: where the dead wear masks and the living wear faces.” 

Or how about this from Toni Morrison from Beloved: 

“It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves.”

The last question asks us to share a paragraph from our own work. My new novel Crooked is scheduled to come out this fall. It’s based on the life and crimes of Alvin Karpis, a man who topped the most wanted list in America in the 30s. Writing it was an interesting process which involved considerable research and the following of actual events while peppering in fictional elements. Here’s an excerpt:

Walking past the crossbuck, he followed the railway line, curly dock and grass tufts sprouting between the rusting rails. Going the way the kid manning the pump told him, the Magnolia station about a mile behind him now, he felt the morning heat rising. Stepping between the ties, going another quarter mile before stopping to shake a stone from his shoe, thinking what the kid at the pump warned him about: a bunch of freebooters working the area, robbing passengers at gunpoint after their tour bus slipped off the shoulder, taking the driver for the fare money and relieving passengers of their rings, wallets and watches. The same gang that hijacked a cab driver two days back, binding the man to a willow outside of town, robbing his pockets and stealing his taxi. Alvin thinking these were his kind of people. 

Setting Sets the Mood

 

Terry here, answering our question of the week: Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Give an example from a book that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it. 

 Setting is more than just place. It’s nice to know a few details about immediate surroundings. Is the action taking place inside or out. If it’s in a room someone is in—are they sitting on a chair or on the floor; is there furniture? Are they alone or with people? Are there windows? What is outside? And if they are outdoors, what is in their immediate area? 

 In a larger sense, setting is also geography, weather, and time. Every element of the story will hinge on when it’s set—the way people dress, the way they talk, their mannerisms, their customs, their government, their beliefs. Geographical setting in the world is also vital. A book set in Japan is going to have a very different feel from one set in Australia. One set in Africa will be different from one in London.

And more immediate geographical setting matters come into play—mountain life is different from life in desert country; life on a beach is different from life in a city condominium. In the mountains your protagonist may be struggling to chase a killer in a snowstorm (Walt Longmire, anyone?). In the city, you face traffic and crowded conditions. In a desert you have to contend with drought and water deprivation. And maybe loneliness. On the beach, you may be subject to hurricanes. If you are at sea, you could have rough seas or utter stillness.

These geographical settings influence personal perspectives. For example, people who live out on a ranch with few neighbors have to depend more on themselves. That will reflect in the kind of people they are-more independent, maybe more worn-down from the rigors of trying to run the ranch. People who live in a community will have different issues—loud neighbors and petty quarrels. 

 One of the questions I get asked is, “Could your books be set anywhere else?” I set my Samuel Craddock series in small-town Texas. As one reviewer put it, in my books, “You can feel the Texas wind blow and the dirt dust up beneath your feet…” Another mentions, “Shames wonderfully evokes small-town Texas life…”

But according to my emails, the books could be set in small towns in other states as well. Maybe even in other countries? It’s more about the small-town ambiance than the broader environment. As another reviewer puts it, “Shames outshines most writers of mysteries with her …understanding of small town dynamics.” In other words, in any small town you have the same petty quarrels among citizens, you have gossip, suspicion of outsiders, worries about the financial viability of the town, and jockeying for power in the political and policing life of town. And even murder. At least in a mystery you do. 

 No matter where and when you set your book, there’s going to be weather. And seasons of the year. One of the best book titles I ever heard was Julia Spencer-Flemings In The Bleak Midwinter. With that title alone, you know you’re going to plunged into dark, cold days.

We were asked to give an example of setting that inspired or moved us and I can think of no better book than Timothy Hallinan’s The Hot Country. I go back to this book and again for its strong sense of place. 

Here’s the opening paragraph: 

 “The dusty braid of Christmas lights in the tiny window has been there for decades and has been plugged in all year round. The original bulbs are long burned out, but not even the occasional, irregular replacements, glowing in faded red and green, can compete with the prisms of light and color created by the big beads of rain on the outside of the glass.” 

 Wow. I don’t know about you, but I’m standing at the door of some dingy, worn-out place and feeling the pull of defeat. 

 I have trouble with writing setting and usually have to go back and fill in descriptions after I have done a first draft. Sometimes I laugh and say, “Where is he? Is he standing in the air?” And when I do fill in descriptions, they always enhance the scene. 

 Here are a few samples from my own work. 

 “Reinhardt is driving faster than he ought to. I watch houses slip by. In this bleak time a few weeks after Christmas, it’s hard to believe there will ever be green in the landscape again. Everything is gray and brown—the grass dead from nights of hard freeze, the post oaks and pecans bare of all except curled brown leaves.” Dead Broke in Jarrett Creek 

 Here’s another: 

 “The rainstorm is over. I had hoped it would bring cooler air, but all it has done is make the air muggy. Hailey and Wendy complain that their hair will be frizzy tomorrow. I file that under things I didn’t know anybody had to worry about.” Murder at the Jubilee Rally 

 Anybody who has been in a rainstorm in the heat knows this itchy, unsatisfied feeling. 

 No matter how you describe the time, the place, the geography or the weather, “setting” is the backdrop for challenges presented in daily lives at home, with neighbors, or in a community. And in Jarrett Creek, the small town where I set my books the petty quarrels can be…well, judge for yourself: 

 “Late afternoon we have a recurring problem to deal with. Pigs have gotten into Mrs. Bedichek’s vegetable garden, so I have to go help the owner of the pigs, Sandy Morton, round them up. When (Sandy) retired, for some reason he decided to take up raising pigs. The problem is that the pigs seem to be cleverer than Sandy…they find ways to get out and raise havoc, either getting on the road and stopping local traffic, or invading neighbors’ yards.” Guilt Strikes at Granger’s Store 

You’re not going to find that at the beach or in a city. And I’ll cite one more passage from one of my books. This can be set nowhere but Texas: 

 “I walk back to the pond where Nonie’s body was found. Most people around here call a pond a tank, from when all these small bodies of water used to be for watering cattle. The word pond conjures up an image from a storybook—a shallow pool with lily pads and nicely kept-up banks and cute little animals playing in the grass. This small body of water is surrounded by weeds most of the way around. There’s an old stump on the far shore next to a big sycamore tree whose branches hang out several feet over the water. Water moccasins like to lie in shady areas under trees like that one, or even in the low branches. There must not be in any in this tank, or they would likely have latched onto Nonie’s body.” The Necessary Murder of Nonie Blake

Setting the Mood

Creating mood through setting is important in crime fiction. Can you give examples from books that have inspired or moved you? Also, please share an evocative paragraph from your own work and tell us how you came to write it.

Brenda starting off the week.

Using setting to set a mood is integral to crime fiction but it's also key to all good writing. When done well, the setting and mood seamlessly flow into the story, like a movie set.

I used to love Gothic romances set in sprawling, dark mansions with hidden passageways, stormy nights, wind-swept moors, and secrets ... lots of murderous secrets. Rebecca, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights -- the setting soaked in grim moodiness, like the characters who inhabited the pages.

Another book where the setting breathed like another character is To Kill a Mockingbird. I still think of the hot, summer nights in that Southern town, people drinking lemonade on their front porches, sparkly fireflies, and the kids walking past the scary house where Boo Radley lived. The Hallowe'en night where Scout is attacked is memorable all these years later.

In the crime fiction genre, a book that made an impact is Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. It's another book I read in high school and the devastating realism of those murders stayed with me for a long, long time. At its best, mood and setting complement the plot and enhance the pathos, or horror, or whatever feeling the author is working to evoke.

In creating mood through setting in my own work, I believe that details should be slipped into the scene without long tracts of description. I use the setting to up the tension, often having the scary bits happen at night, during stormy weather or in an isolated location, such as the woods or an empty house. As an example, here is a scene from When Last Seen:

The road was unpaved but pothole-free. Tony drove slowly while he and Ella peered into the bushes and trees on either side. No sign of a car on the first pass. At the five-minute mark, the road ended at an overgrown driveway that led to a house with the roof caved in, a black, hulking mass set in a clearing now thick with tall grass and bushes. Tony parked and they circled the building on foot, their eyes adjusting to the gloom and moonlight. They met in front of his car. “It can’t be safe to go inside. We should just leave.” He took a last glance toward the house and shuddered as he reached for the car door handle.

When writing works best, setting and mood enhance the plot and evoke emotion in the reader. I've visited several book clubs this past year and am always thrilled and perhaps a bit surprised when something retells a scene from one of my books in detail and talks about the impact it had on them. This really is the objective in my mind -- create a picture in words that the reader sees in their imagination and that makes them feel something.

And to end this post, one last descriptive passage from Closing TIme, seventh book in my Stonechild and Rouleau series:

Kala drove with care through the stormy night, the road slick with rain that puddled on the shoulders and spread in snaky rivulets across the pavement. The light from her headlights pierced through the swirling fog that parted for a moment until she'd passed through and then closed in as if she'd never been.

Website: www.brendachapman.ca

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How to Write a Query, an Outline, or a Synopsis, by Josh Stallings & friends

Q: A query, an outline, and a synopsis walk into a bar, and a writer/bartender has a panic attack. Publishers and agents often want one or all of these thinga-ma-jobbies. Any advice for writers who are flummoxed by how to create them?

A: Truth time, I wrote this question hoping I wouldn’t have to answer it. I have skated by never having to learn how to write a good query, outline, or synopsis. The entire idea flummoxed me. A smart person is one who knows a lot of facts, a wise person is one who knows what they don’t know, and whom to ask for help.

I have been blessed to know many very smart writers and publishing professionals. Here are four brilliant friends who each in their own way tackled these problems and broke them down to simple steps and modes of working. I’ve learned much from them and I know you will too.

From Amy Moore-Benson Literary Agent: 

As an agent – a publishing professional who receives multiple queries a day – the query is everything. And every writer should put the work into getting it right before sending it off. It’s the writer’s one opportunity to get through the door, to make enough of a positive impression to engage an agent, to create a sense of interest and urgency to compel the agent to ask for more. I think of it as the same as the relationship between back-cover copy and a potential book buyer: there needs to be enough plot to make a reader think, “Wow, what next…?” and enough distinctive voice to make a reader think, “I want to experience how this story is told.”

 

The fact that your query should be professionally conceived is a given. Do your research, know what the agents you are querying are looking for, what they’re selling. Make sure that the description of your work is concise and has a narrative flow, not too long (for me, max two short paragraphs), and that it is infused with your voice, your confident and unique writerly calling card. Only use comps if they’re interesting and accurate, and add something biographical that doesn’t sound like a resume.

 

An outline or a synopsis are what I turn to after I’ve asked for the manuscript, after I’ve read enough to know I’m interested in the work to want to know where the story is going. They are a necessary part of the process, but for me, they should be straightforward and logical, and should give me the confidence that you know your story.

****

From Victoria Helen Stone, WSJ bestselling author of Jane Doe. Her upcoming book, FOLLOW HER DOWN comes out June 4th.

I hate writing synopses. Absolutely HATE them. Given free rein, I’ll start writing a book with just a basic idea of where I’m going, because at the beginning, I don’t know these people. I know their backstory and what nightmare I’m going to drop them into, but how they’ll respond? How they’ll think and act out and plan and regroup? I have no idea until I spend time with them.  

Tragically, my publisher doesn’t seem to trust that I’ll (probably) puzzle out the plot eventually. When I’m under contract, they ruthlessly demand blood. And by blood, I mean an outline.  

So here’s my trick: after spending years plodding through ten pages of boring plot points, I’ve started including dialogue. That’s the flavor. The spicy meat of the story. Not point A to B to C, but my actual writing voice and the personality of the people in my head. Instead of describing how the characters react to chaos, I sprinkle in a few exchanges, a few disagreements, some funny asides. This makes it so much easier for me to write, and I assume it’s easier for my editor to read too. 

Now once the publisher has the outline and I get my approval? Well, who’s going to remember the exact story I proposed when I turn in the manuscript six months later? My editor has been living a busy life the whole time. And so have my imaginary friends. 

****  

From Jamie Mason who writes more whydunnits than whodunnits because the why in stories is her favorite part. She is the author of Three Graves Full, Monday’s Lie, and The Hidden Things.

It’s not like writing a novel isn’t hard enough. I understand why we have to write queries. But understanding it doesn’t make me hate it any less.

All the advice I have here for querying probably mostly applies to written queries. It’s the only kind I’ve ever done. In all honestly, I don’t understand in-person pitches for novel-length written material. I mean, it’s great and all if you can conjure up your inner salesperson and put your query material into a competent song and dance. I’m just not much of a performer. Asked to pitch my book out loud and I’m just as apt to swallow my own tongue as getting anything useful out.

It’s always made more sense to me to pitch a page on a page.

But maybe if you get a good query summary written down, you can rehearse it in front of the mirror and find a way to make a short speech out of it.

Anyway.

As far as I can tell, the query serves two purposes: to demonstrate that you actually know what you’ve written, and to show a prospective agent or editor that you’re not a crazy person.

The horrible part is capturing the interest and essence of what you’ve accomplished in 100,000 words in less than two hundred or so.

One thing I’ve found helpful and effective is to go to one of your favorite lines in your story. Something that when you wrote it made you go awwwwww yeah, hell yeah. Revisit it and see if it can be repurposed as an anchor for a recap of what happens in your story. Not all great lines will work, but it’s worth a try. If you can explain what in the story got you to that great line, what was happening in the plot that resulted in that run of seven to twenty brilliant words, you might be on the way to the framework for a query-style summary of your novel.

There’s also a trick that I guess I would call “layering.” But you have to do this one quickly. You can take one straightforward, unadorned sentence to articulate the main problem that incites your plot. Maybe two sentences—absolutely tops. Then come in with the razzle dazzle of how the problem is actually much worse than all that for your protagonist.

Basically, I would say polish the setup and wrap up the query summary with assurances that it all gets resolved to immense satisfaction. Make the problem really sexy and you can exit the query summary with a knowing nod and wink conveying that you sorted it all out by The End, rather than attempting to explain all the twists and turns.

As for the rest of the query—the part where you give the impression that you’re not a crazy person—it’s pretty basic. Don’t compliment your own work. You’ll look like a crazy person. If you have relevant life experience that makes you extra qualified to write the type of story or characters you did, great! If not, don’t try to make it sound so. You’ll look like a crazy person. Probably don’t go on about how much you like to read or how much you’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s kind of a given and if you make too big a deal of the obvious, you’ll sound like a. . . you get the idea.

 

A longer synopsis, if asked for, can be less frustrating than a query, but not by all that much. Some of the same sensibilities that work for querying also apply to writing a synopsis. In fact, last time I wrote out a full synopsis, the first two paragraphs were my query summary and then I just fleshed it out, point-by-point, in the rest of the document. In a summary, you’ll have to describe a little more about how the sausage of the resolution gets made.

I think in a query you have to show some flair. You have to do it in “voice”. I guess that’s why I like to use the query summary as an opener for a synopsis, because then you can switch into a more school-book-report style and just explain what happens. That way, you’ll show what you do artistically and then don’t have to reinvent the wheel of your novel to explain what happens in it.

 

As for anyone asking for an outline, I just have to really, really hope this doesn’t happen anymore. I do outline my work, but for my own purposes and in my own style. If anyone wanted to see that, I might as well send them a paper bag with some onion rings and a few Viking rune stones in it for all they will be able to make of it.


I hope this helps anyone out there in one of these hard parts of this hard business. My heart is with you. Best of luck! 

****

From Lenore Van Horne, editrix extraordinaire:

I have a super foolproof method for query writing, it’s an easy formula and it goes like this:

Paragraph 1: Your name, title of book, word count, genre, is it a series?, one-two sentence longline. 

Why do we need this? So that the reader (agent, editor, whoever) knows a little bit about it, like if they represent/publish your genre, or if you’ve for some reason written a 200,000 word rom-com…stuff that we need to know before committing further to the project.

Paragraph 2-3: Your mini-synopsis. Hold a sec for how to write this until we get to the synopsis part. But a couple of quick notes. Just focus on the protagonist, their wants, the roadblocks in the way, and the overall journey. No detours.

Last Paragraph (or, the “about me” paragraph): This is just a value-add so if none of these things apply to you, you don’t need this paragraph. Just say thanks for reading, hope to hear back, and go on about your life (riddled with anxiety until they get back to you). If you DO decide to include this paragraph, it should only (ONLY) contain the following:

1) Anything that makes you a “professional writer,” you’ve got an MFA, you’ve published multiple non-fiction journal articles (yes, this counts), you’ve won an award, you have published other books, you are the president of your local writing group…this sort of thing.

2) Anything that makes you an “expert” on your topic. Your book is about serial killers and you, yourself, are a serial killer (hopefully this doesn’t apply). Your book takes place in Spain and you spent 3 years there, drinking wine and communing with Guernica. Your protagonist is a lawyer and your parents were both lawyers and you escaped to become a writer…that sort of thing. 

3) Anything that makes you independently marketable. You climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro with Johnny Cash. You won an Olympic medal. Something that if you were being interviewed you could talk about over and above your book. (Hordes of social media followers go in this category, too.)

That’s it. You’ve got your query letter. As an FYI you’ve also got your in-person pitch if you’ve got your query letter. Same dealio, you just sit down and start with, “My name is, I’ve written x book, it’s x words long, and this genre…” and go on from there with your query letter. Just out loud.

Okay, now time for the scariest thing about the submission process: The Synopsis. I’m not joking. This IS the hardest thing for a writer to write. How to condense your brilliant 80k word baby into one page? It’s impossible. So here’s my quick and easy cheat. Pretend that you were up all night reading your own book. It was SO good you couldn’t put it down. The next morning, you’re meeting a friend for coffee and they say, “Why do you look so tired?” And you say, “You have to read this book.” Well… “What’s it about?” Now answer that! First practice doing it with a movie or book you’ve recently read. Record yourself on your phone giving the synopsis to someone else. You’re going to see what you focus on, what you leave out. Then do it for YOUR book. Transcribe what you say. Then polish it a little. That’s all there is to it. 

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It’s Josh again, I wanted to thank these four brilliant creatives for taking the time to help educate me and our readers. All of them are busy people who prove what I discovered a long time ago about the writing community, reach out for help and they will reach back. They pay it forward and backwards and sideways. If you have questions don’t hesitate to ask, if I don’t know the answer I know somebody who does.