I came across an agent's website the other day, in which she described what she wanted to see in a query letter. It was the standard stuff, until she came to the bio section. She was quite adamant that your query should include why you are the only person who could have written your book.
That line really struck me. I'm no expert in the things I write. I think I'm a pretty good storyteller, but beyond the fact I was the one who came up with it, I couldn't think of a decent reason I was the only one who could write my book. So I started thinking about what I am an expert in. Not much, but there is one thing I do know about probably better than most other writers. And pretty quickly a new story started forming. It's just a lump of wet clay right now, and who knows what it will end up looking like, but I've often thought, if I could include some expertise in my bio, it might make a difference when querying.
Having said all that, I still need to tell a good story. And I still need to love the story, otherwise it won't be very good. So, with NaNo coming up, I may participate after all. Of course, I also have my recurrent check ride, which has yet to be scheduled, but will be some time in November. So I'll be doing a lot of studying, but you can also consider it research for my next book.
3 comments:
That’s an easy question and a hard one. How do you explain that my brain only works for me?
This is kind of a hard question to answer, because often the storyline of the book is just something that came from our head meat, not some thing we're subject matter experts in in real life.
I guess how I would answer that would be to define my facination with the book's subject matter and/or theme. Because really, these things are what connected us to the idea in the first place and then drove us to write the story.
Angela @ The Bookshelf Muse
Hmmm, that's interesting. I'm not sure how I'd answer that. With my current WIP, everything is completely made up, other than the stuff I researched.
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