If you’d like to nominate your own page or query for a public critique, kindly post them here in the discussion forums:
Also, if you’d like to test your editing chops, keep your eye on this area or this area! I’ll post the pages and queries a few days before a critique so you can see how your redline compares to mine.
And, of course, if you need help more urgently or privately, I’m available for edits and consultations!
Now then. Time for the Query Critique. First I’ll present the query without comment, then I’ll offer my thoughts and a redline. If you choose to offer your own thoughts, please be polite. We aim to be positive and helpful.
Random numbers were generated, and thanks to partnerinflight, whose query is below.
Dear {agent}:
The Old Monster, complete at 75k words, is a supernatural thriller with the heart of Fredrik Backman’s A Man called Ove meets Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box.
Isaac, a 93yo WW2 survivor, cannot hear children. It’s a type of selective hearing loss he’s had since the Great War. He considers a blessing. Yet when, following a seizure, Isaac meets Will, a newly orphaned 13yo at the local county hospital, he finds there’s more to his strange affliction than he suspected.
A ghost has been haunting the hospital for many years now, killing male patients via induced heart attacks. The ghost pounces on Isaac, transporting him back to 1941, to a time when he was a partisan fighting the Nazi occupation of Ukraine, and into events leading up to a dark secret Isaac has been suppressing all his life, the murder of his infant daughter when Isaac was 14, and a curse that took children out of his life.
Inexplicably, Will travels alongside Isaac, into a body of an old peasant, a witness to those events. This also allows Isaac to hear the boy, both in the 1941 memories, and in the present. But as the ghost forces the two of them to relive Isaac’s crime, Will gets progressively sicker, leading Isaac to a dreadful realization: if he cannot finally face his traumatic past, the boy whose company he’s come to treasure will die.
Eugene Polonsky lives in Seattle with his wife, two boys, and a floppy-eared non-Beagle. His short stories have appeared in Reed Magazine, Armarolla Magazine, and Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Summarizing is tricky, and often what writers try to do is to zoom out and capture the essence of what’s happening. This often leads to flat phrases like “face his past” in the last line of the plot description. That’s what Isaac ultimately has to do here, right? He’s facing up to his past.
But… what does that even mean? “Face his past” can mean a whole range of activities, so it doesn’t tell us much about the specifics in this novel. Okay, Will is in the past alongside a mysterious boy, what does he literally need to do in order to set things right or save Will?
Instead of summarizing vaguely and packaging things up in an abstraction, be more specific about what the protagonist actually must do. With the specific quest, we’ll grasp that he’s being forced to face his past.
Here’s my redline:
Dear {agent}:
[Insert personalized tidbit about the agent to show that you researched them individually]
The Old Monster, complete at 75k words, is a supernatural thriller with the heart of Fredrik Backman’s A Man called Ove meets Joe Hill’s Heart-Shaped Box.
Isaac, a 93
yo-year-old WW2II survivor, cannot hear children. It’s, a type of selective hearing loss he’s had since the Great War. He considers a blessing. Yet when, but following a seizure, Isaac meets Will, a newly orphaned 13yo-year-old at the local county hospital, heand finds there’s more to his strange affliction than he suspected.A ghost has been haunting the hospital for many years
now, killing male patients via induced heart attacks. The ghost pounces on Isaac, transporting him back to 1941,to a timewhen he was a partisan fighting the Nazi occupation of Ukraine,,and into eventsThe events leading upto a dark secret Isaac has been suppressing all his life,: the murder of his infant daughter when Isaac was 14, and a curse that took children out of his life. [Extremely convoluted and difficult-to-digest sentence, read the original out loud. Don’t worry about spoilers and be precise about what happened]Inexplicably, Will travels alongside Isaac
,into athe body of an old peasant, awho witnessedto thosethe events.This also allows Isaac to hear the boy, both in the 1941 memories, and in the present. But aAs the ghost forcesthe two ofthem to relive Isaac’s crime, Will gets progressively sicker, leading Isaac to a dreadful realization: if he cannot finally face his traumatic past [Be more precise about what Isaac needs to do. “Face the past” is extremely ambiguous], the boy whose company he’s come to treasure will die.Eugene Polonsky lives in Seattle with his wife, two boys, and a floppy-eared non-Beagle. His short stories have appeared in Reed Magazine, Armarolla Magazine, and Kaaterskill Basin Literary Journal.
Thank you for your time and consideration.
Thanks again to partnerinflight!
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Art: Premonition by Henryk Weyssenhoff
One major detail wrong with even the description of the protagonist.
The Great War wasn’t WWII.
It was another name for World War I.
It has NEVER been used for WWII.
(Except by the Russians/Soviets, who referred to WWII as “The Great Patriotic War,” but only because they pulled out of The Great War to overthrow their Tzar and establish the first Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).)
Best,
Terin
One thing that left me befuddled was this phrase: “a dark secret Isaac has been suppressing all his life: the murder of his infant daughter when Isaac was 14.”
The confusion comes from a common mistake: a pronoun always refers back to the character most recently named. So this phrase really says “a dark secret Isaac has been suppressing all [Isaac’s] life: the murder of [Isaac’s] infant daughter when Isaac was 14.”
It’s easily resolved by substituting “the ghost’s” for the last “his”. And as you say, not mentioning Isaac’s role in the murder (when it’s the reason for his disability), just leads to more confusion.
What do you think of the bio paragraph written in the third person? I don’t remember ever seeing this before. It sounds rather stiff to me.