Let’s go back to basics. Query letters. Here are ten opening lines from letters I’ve received or concocted.
Dear Betsy: I am a huge fan of your blog and The Forest for the Trees, which I recommend to everyone I know.
Dear Ms. Lerner: Your agency website says that you like the hard to categorize.
Dear Betsy Lerner: I have written a fiction novel of 130,000 words called The Lost Letter.
Dear Betsy Lerner: Have you ever been afraid, really afraid?
Dear Betsy Lerner: I am a Harvard graduate and a Buddhist.
Dear Ms. Lerner: I am a survivor.
Dear Betsy (if I may): I was about to give up writing until I read your book — I am the wicked child.
Dear Miss Lerner: Part memoir, part travelogue, this is the story of my return to Los Angeles.
Dear Betsy: My novel, The Launching of Fawn Roth, is about a young woman a lot like Lena Dunham.
Dear Betsy Lerner: I am writing to you because of your personal interest in mental illness.
If you were an agent, which one would you respond to?
Anyone want to float their opener?
Filed under: Agent, Authors, fiction, Literary Agent, Protocol, Publishing, Query, Writers | Tagged: literary agent, Query letters, writing | 51 Comments »
Novels are flying at my head. Thousands of pages flapping like seagulls at Brighton Beach. Stories from land locked countries, from the mouths of bats, from trains that never leave the station. From the station itself. How did you come up with so many sentences, so many girls named Cara or Carla or Quintana, or Ray. Did it start on a stair, a hill, a bucket, a pail? What’s it about? Well, that’s a good question. The beach, the mountains, a multi-generational tale of raisin bran. You are nothing like a summer’s day. Why do sympathetic characters bring out the sadist in me? Does anyone really change? Are you my beginning, my middle or my ass wipe? Hi, I’m Betsy and I’m addicted to prose. Oh, Daisy. Grow up. There is a big canister somewhere. Dear Betsy: I am writing to see if you would be interested in my five novels, a 874,000 word quintet about two slugs fucking in a snot can. Do you feel me? Oh mighty novelists with your big boots and musky armpits. Where would we be without you?
Did you finish your memoir, your novel, one lousy stinking poem? Did you read War and Peace? Rescue a dog? Yourself? Did you jump on the Yonana craze? Lose a notebook with all of your best work? Did you pick peaches? Fuck your wife? Fuck up your life? Did you take up cycling? Wonder why you couldn’t write. Did you talk to a woman at the farm stand? Was your family trapped by a rabid raccoon who attacked your dog and bit off half your finger? Did you think about everyone who died? Did you imagine their airless life? Did you give money to the guy at the entrance to the highway because his sign said he was hungry and for once you felt more compassion than fear? What does it take to write the sentences of your life? To live inside the mole hole? And come out with that grin on your stupid dirty face.
I was invited to participate on a publishing panel last week at NYU. The last time I saw that many eyes glazed over is when I was student there thirty years ago. The panel never really came together, and I think I alienated a fellow panelist right out of the gate. He was lamenting the fact that writers couldn’t make a living just writing anymore. If five percent of writers make a living writing I would be surprised. I said that no one invites you to write, no one cares if you do, and that it is against the world’s indifference that you create. If you are lucky enough that the world loves what you write, then perhaps you will be among the few who make their living writing. The rest of us get up at dawn or write all night, or write on vacations, or quit for years and hate ourselves in an even more special way. Is it fair that a thriller writer can make millions and poet basically nothing. Is it fair that a “popular” historian can make millions while a scholar puts twenty years into a book for which he will be paid $5,000? Fair? If my mother raised me on one consistent mantra it was this: who said life was fair? And she said it after I wailed about the great injustices of life: my sister getting a larger portion of mac and cheese, the fact that I had to wear her hand me downs, including a set of faded olive Danskins. Enough said.
Betsy Lerner 