Queries as vision statements

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Maybe you’ve heard people saying that it might be a good idea to write your query before you finish or even write your novel. But maybe you’ve never heard a good explanation as to why that might be a good idea. I want to get into the nitty gritty about that.

For the record, I think this is relevant not just for writing query letters, but for writing an artist’s statement, which is something you might need to do if you apply for fellowships, juried workshops, residencies, or grad school.

When I became an adult and entered the workforce, one thing that tickled me is how obsessed workplaces are obsessed with “mission statements” or “vision statements.” It all just seemed mumbo jumbo to me—after all, all work is just making widgets. But two companies can approach both widgets and how to make them radically different. Consider company A: “Vandalay Industries strives to push the boundaries of technologies in the manufacturing of widgets. We are at the cutting edge of widget technology and serve as an incubator for innovation.” Consider company B: “Niblet LLC is a family owned company that has been manufacturing widgets since 1890 the old fashioned way. We pride ourselves in serving the local community with a satisfaction guarantee.” Same thing, different vibes.

I wrote a query letter for my second book A Step Past Darkness before I wrote my second book. I had an option clause on my first contract, so at some point closer to my pub date my agent asked what I was working on next and I said I already had a query letter that described it. This is the letter pretty much how I sent it to her, with some annotation breaking it up:

I am pleased to introduce you to DARK DAYS, a proposed mystery. I would not call it a horror novel (because I don’t find it scary—but I’m not a reliable judge because I find almost nothing scary), but the inevitable comp is Stephen King’s IT. However, it is not a gory monster tale, and it would also appeal to standard mystery lovers who like the “we have to go back to our hometown” trope. In terms of writing, I think reasonable comps are Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Jennifer McMahon, or Benjamin Percy—upmarket with a genre streak. 

Note I am setting up what is both a feature and a problem: the genre. It’s not quite this or that, but I’m giving you a flavor with some comps and teeing it up as not horror but horror adjacent. I mention the It comp because I have to—the book is a direct homage to It, but also more modern day comps. If you know those authors you have the sense of the vibe. So in this para: I’m broadly setting up the answer to the question “What type of book is this? Who is it on the shelf next to?”

DARK DAYS has dual timelines, six main characters, and is deliberately intended to be a considerably long book that readers can spend time with, as opposed to a book like NSMC that people race through. I wanted a hefty tome for people to get lost in, falling in love with characters, which also includes the town of Wesley Falls, Pennsylvania, a small town somewhere between rural and suburban. My estimation is that the book would be completed at somewhere between five and seven hundred pages, with about 60% taking place when the characters are teenagers in 1995, and the remainder in 2015, when they are 35. While I love the “we have to go back to solve this mystery” dual-timeline trope, I often find that this involves a more interesting storyline in youth intertwined with the  elder characters trying to remember what happened in their youth in order to round out the unsolved mystery of their childhood. I intend to subvert this, flipping between two fully-fleshed out storylines, one where the teens discover a dark secret in their hometown, and a second, where they return as adults to attend a funeral of one of the six, only to discover that she was murdered—a mystery that needs to be solved but that is hinged on everything that happened previously. 

I’m explaining to her what kind of book it is: that is to say, a bigass book, dual timeline, six main characters, page estimation (that was, I must say, spot on a year before even finishing the book- even the 60% thing.) I’m saying how it is different than my first book. Note in the last sentence, I’m explicitly saying I intend to subvert the central problem of dual-timeline mysteries (that the youth timeline has an interesting mystery and the second timeline is less interesting and revolves around the first timeline.) Here I am saying: this is what I am going to do that is new and different for both me and the genre. Here I’m setting out the ambitiousness of my plan. Part of my brand is that I’m someone who understands tropes and plays with them. I’m pointing out “this is what I think is clever here.”

In 1995, our characters are 15, just finishing out their sophomore year of high school. (This parallels my own age, so there will be a lot of 90s nostalgia). As part of a summer capstone program, six students are randomly put together to work on a capstone civics project for college credit. The six main characters are: 

KELLY, a dreamy, forgettably likable girl who often goes with the flow to avoid conflict, who ends the year being outcast from the mean, socially controlling popular group when she runs afoul of MADDY. 

MADDY is the prettiest, most popular girl their year, who uses her social standing to enforce the conformity that dominates the town. She is part of the The Circle, the innermost echelon of the socially dominant Youth Group run by the Golden Praise megachurch, which has its tendrils in all parts of Wesley Falls. 

JAMES is Kelly’s next-door-neighbor and childhood best friend, a trenchcoat mafia kid before Columbine ever happened, a cynical, dark artist type who makes fake IDs and smokes pot, always planning how to get out of Wesley Falls if he doesn’t self-destruct first. 

CASEY is popular and well-loved, weirdly idolized by adults because he is a top prospect for college football teams in a town where football is king, but beneath his goofy demeanor is an intense insecurity about his intelligence and his ability to succeed. 

JIA, a Korean-American, is one of the few minorities in town, and she and her mother run The Gem Shop in town, which sells occult items, making them suspect in the megachurch-dominated town. Both Jia and her mother’s interest in the occult is more than just selling kitchy items. 

PADMA is Jia’s best friend, a second-generation Indian-American, a highly intelligent but still somewhat innocent girl who has a wise understanding that academic achievement is her best way out of a closed-minded town. 

This part here is what I would write in a query letter if I had a bit more space. I wanted to say enough about each character to clearly set up that they are different for each other. One thing I was REALLY scared about was that when we’d present this behemoth to my editor she’d ask me to cut a main character or two. I wanted to set up, no, it’s six, and their relationships to both each other and the town are integral to the book. Also, note that I’m not just saying “Kelly is a bookworm, Casey is a jock”—I’m including enough information that you get a sense of the town, that there are a few interesting threads to pull on. What is this Circle? What’s up with this megachurch?

The unlikely group decides to do their project on the abandoned mine at the edge of town, part of the Devil’s Peak mountain. While at an end-of-year party taking place in the forbidden mine, all six observe a horrifying sight: [huge spoiler.] Over the course of the summer, the six grow closer as they unravel the mystery of the mine murder, uncovering a dark secret about the megachurch and its uber-charismatic leader, Pastor Jim Preiss. Their friendship grows as they realize no adult can help them, law enforcement increasingly tries to pin the the murders on James, and they explore their personal struggles together. That summer ends with them killing Pastor Jim, a secret they carry into their adulthood, and one that forces them to break contact with each other in order to cover up the murder despite the deep bonds of friendship they have formed.

This is a longer version of what would have been the first plot para in a query. Yes, it tells you what happened. But I’m willing to bet that you can read this paragraph and know that I know this town very well. While you wouldn’t necessarily give away huge spoilers in your query, if you were doing what I was doing—which was writing a vision statement for my novel—you would, because it’s telling you what sort of book this is, what it sets out to do.

In 2015, Jia calls them all back to Wesley Falls—Maddy has been discovered dead in their hometown, despite having left it and not looking back decades ago. The capstone 5 are now fully realized adults, entrenched in their own adult worlds, and they each dread going back while simultaneously wanting to see each other again and find out what happened to Maddy. While there, they reconnect, their old lives prompting new revelations about their modern-day problems as they begin to unravel the mystery of what happened to Maddy. Maddy had come back for her parents funeral only to make the bizarre realization that Pastor Jim—the man they definitely killed—appears to be alive and well and thriving . . . and up to the same old tricks. But just as she discovered exactly what it is that he’s doing, she is murdered, leaving the remaining 5 friends to figure out the last puzzle piece before the Pastor can act again. 

This is basically a longer version of what would have been plot para 2 of my query, just with more detail. But note that I’m not just saying “Maddy gets killed and they go back to solve the murder.” I’m again setting out my ambition: what I think I’m going to do that others haven’t— they are fully realized adults, they have their own adult worlds, part of the book is about the interaction between who they were before and who they are now. (I have talked about this at length in another post about dual timelines, but one of my issues with most of them is that timepoint two often has characters who are just “past character + trauma from the past” and human beings are more complex than that.)

While this book is fundamentally a mystery, with the dual timelines, I want people to be unexpectedly surprised that the book has intelligent things to say about aging. I’m 40 right now, and I think a lot about who I was at 15, who I thought I would become by the time I was 40, and how right and wrong I was. What things carried over in my identity, and what faded away; what are the ghosts that keep reverberating no matter how much you thought you got away. What does it mean to come back home, when home was a place that was never safe? 

Jesus Christ I wrote that 4 years ago? Dear god I am old… Anyhow, I’m doing something here you should never do in a real query letter, but I’m including it because this is more of a vision statement. Where is this book coming from? Well, I’ve entered middle-aged-ness and have been thinking about who I was as a teen, and who I thought I would be when I was 40, and what I think about those guesses and how wrong or right they were. The last two sentences are very much tied into the theme.

Consider when you read a lot of queries they read like “Maria is trying to solve the mystery of her sister who disappeared 20 years ago. But as she struggles to confront the past, she will learn secrets she was never supposed to…” or something. If you read what I wrote the the letter, whether its your cup of tea or not, you know damned well that I know what I’m setting out to do. Whether or not you are interested in it is subjective, but there’s no sense of “this person is doing a thing and I’m not really sure what it is or how it’s different than other widgets.” Like the mission statement for a company, I am clearly teeing up what I intend do to: a big, ambitious novel with It vibes, with 6 different characters, hopefully innovative take on the “we have to go back” trope, how and why it is different than my last book.

There’s a ton of stuff here that would not have made it into a query: this is way too long, no one cares about your feelings about your own work, and it’s generally not a good idea to explicitly state your own themes, but the reason why this was useful for me to do was because I was laying down the architecture. I was saying “when I set out to write this book, this is what I’m going to do.” I wrote this letter sometime between March and July and didn’t have the first three chapters of the book till October, so I’m pretty sure I did it after my character generation state and figuring out the plot but before I wrote anything. Writing a book is cooking. Figuring out who your characters are and what the plot is is prepping your mise en place. Doing your vision statement is figuring out what you want to eat. I’m a shitty cook because I don’t really think about what kind of thing I want to eat and then I can’t be prepared for it because I don’t have the stuff, so I just go to the hot bar at Whole Foods. Do you want to write a novel, or do you want to spend 12 dollars a pound for mac and cheese?

I wanted to end with what ended up being the jacket copy of for ASPD. (I wrote 95% of this jacket copy.) Note that it draws pretty heavily from my original pitch, just super pared down. It doesn’t include the thematic stuff, or the “this is what I’m pushing my ambition towards” because that’s more for my agent and potential editors. But it’s very close to the letter I wrote before even writing a word of prose.

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SIX CLASSMATES. ONE TERRIFYING NIGHT. A MURDER TWENTY YEARS IN THE MAKING...

There's something sinister under the surface of the idyllic, suburban town of Wesley Falls, and it's not just the abandoned coal mine that lies beneath it. The summer of 1995 kicks off with a party in the mine where six high school students witness a horrifying crime that changes the course of their lives.

The six couldn't be more different.

• Maddy, a devout member of the local megachurch

• Kelly, the bookworm next door

• James, a cynical burnout

• Casey, a loveable football player

• Padma, the shy straight-A student

• Jia, who's starting to see visions she can't explain

When they realize that they can't trust anyone but each other, they begin to investigate what happened on their own. As tensions escalate in town to a breaking point, the six make a vow of silence, bury all their evidence, and promise to never contact each other again. Their plan works - almost.

Twenty years later, Jia calls them all back to Wesley Falls--Maddy has been murdered, and they are the only ones who can uncover why. But to end things, they have to return to the mine one last time.

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So, if you’re working on a book, regardless of what stage you are at, or maybe even especially if you are at the beginning stages, considering writing a vision statement: what are you setting out to write? What do you want to accomplish? What is it about? What do I walk away with if I’ve read it?

Photo by Jared Rice on Unsplash