Poetica Magazine

“Dear sir or madam, would you read my book?

It took me years to write, won’t you take a look?”

.   - John Lennon, “Paperback Writer”

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I have a serious case of writer’s block. Not the ordinary kind — I’m not struggling to find the perfect couplet to finish off a 14-line sonnet, nor am I wrestling with a plot-line that seems to have struck a dead-end. I’m not chalking up sleepless nights staring into the black abyss of an impending deadline. My block is not about any of these things.

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You see, I recently completed a novel, and now it is time to trot it out before the admiring world. Only ... to do that, I need an agent. And to get an agent, I need to compose (shudder) a query letter.

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This is where I’m stuck. That query letter is crucial, it overshadows the effort of writing the novel itself. If the agent can’t get through my query letter, she isn’t going to read my synopsis, let alone the first few chapters of my book. And she’ll never ask to see the entire manuscript.

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“This should be easy,” I tell myself. “You have a strong product — it’s controversial and current, it has convincing characters and a compelling plot. All you need to do is sell it.”

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This is what I tell myself. But it’s not working.

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Each evening I come home and sit before the keyboard, resolved that this will be the night. I’ll knock that query letter out and have it ready to send off to the scores of agents I’ve already researched. Oh, but first, let me check my e-mail. And Facebook. Oops, now it’s dinner time. And wait, here’s an article in the paper I really must read because it’s all about electronic books being the wave of the future. Look at the time! On second thought, too late to look, the time has flown. All right, this weekend, then — this weekend I’ll buckle my socks and get down to the business of writing that query letter.

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But before the weekend even arrives, it’s booked. There’ll be a show or a concert I absolutely must see, friends who want to go out to dinner, a jam session across the park, and how can I turn any of this down? I call it “gathering material”, because you never know how any of these experiences might turn up in your work, sooner or later. Your work that will never be published, because you will never find an agent for your book, because you never sat down and wrote that query letter.

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The Greeks had nine muses — but the muse I need is the muse of queries. And she refuses to sing. That’s the problem. I expect too much of her. A query letter is a business proposition, not an opera. A query should be straightforward and succinct. Perhaps John Lennon said it best — “Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book?” Actually, he sang it, didn’t he?

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I’m beginning to think I’ve been looking at this from the wrong angle. The challenge is not writing a query that will stand out -- it’s sending out a query often enough, to enough agents, that it will beat the odds. Any novel worth reading has likely been rejected hundreds of times. No matter how fine the book, no matter how compelling the query letter.

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In the end, persistence is what counts. Believe in your project so strongly that you can bear to see it fail, again and again. Each failure brings you one step closer to the goal.

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Thanks for reading JWorld Café, the Poetica Magazine Blog

Luther Jett, Guest Blogger

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W. Luther Jett is currently working to complete a query letter for his novel, And This I Know Is True. He has seen numerous poems published in various print and on-line journals. Some of his work can be seen at http://www.lutherjett.com . His blog is at http://lutherjett.livejournal.com/  – Linda Pressman, Blog Editor