Wordcraft -- From thrilling life to thrills of books

Taylor Stevens has the life easier to read about than to live: brought up in a nomadic religious cult in countries across the world, she escaped the cult at age twenty-nine and became a New York Times bestselling author of the Vanessa (Michael) Monroe series of thrillers.

Would I have killed bad guys with my bare hands to meet her? Lucky for the bad guys (and me--I’d be liable to develop hangnails if I turned bare-fisted assassin) all it took to see and hear Stevens was a visit to Saturday’s meeting of Dallas Mystery Writers.

After escaping the cult, New York-born Stevens and her husband made their way to the United States, where she became the stay at home mom to their two small children. The cult had pulled her out of school after she finished the sixth grade, and the remainder of her childhood was spent doing unpaid labor for the group, including begging. Except for a few children’s volumes from elementary school, books were virtually unknown to her. Back in the U.S., while her husband worked, she became a stay at home mom to their two children, making additional money by reselling garage sale finds on the internet. And she found out about books, at first, “because I could mark them up so much on eBay.”

From buying and selling books, she started to read them. And discovered Robert Ludlum, whose Bourne series thrillers. “This was the first time I realized how intense an experience reading could be. I wished I could make other people have the experience in reading that I had.”

The catch was, she knew nothing about writing novels. After internet searching, she found the Gotham Writers workshop and books, and began writing. Her first novel, The Informationist, introduced protagonist Vanessa (Michael) Monroe. The book became a New York Times bestseller, followed by The Innocent, The Doll, and this year, The Vessel and The Catch.

Unlike most writers, who start with some idea of plot or character, the initial inspiration for her books was a country. (She has lived in several of the African countries that served as settings.) Then, since “everything in a book has to make sense, I started asking ‘why.’ Why do people go there? What makes them stay?” and more such questions to build the story.

They were questions she could answer, because as she said, “I’ve been in a lot of third world countries. I know what it takes for a single woman to survive in those countries.”

Her goal when she first started writing, she said (in words reminiscent of fellow bestseller Diana Gabaldon) was simply to finish a book. But during the writing, she began to research literary agents.

After studying the examples at the QueryShark site, she developed two query letters and told herself, “I’m not even going to sweat it until I’ve had a hundred rejections. I’d send one (query) version to five agents, wait two weeks, and send the second version to five more agents. By the time I’d sent to twenty agents I was getting requests.”

“I was very much an organic writer when I started,” she said. Now divorced, her need to write to support herself and her children has given her a decidedly businesslike attitude toward publishing. “Since then, I’ve become much more of a plotter. Plotting gives me much more clarity. I sit down and tell myself the story, building it off scenes. If you know what the key scenes are, you can get from place to place.”

Stevens will make two more appearances in the Dallas area this month--July 15 at Barnes & Noble in Frisco’s Stonebriar Center Mall, and July 26 at the Lewisville Public Library. For more about Stevens, her writing and appearances around the state, see www.taylorstevensbooks.com/.

And for more about the QueryShark site Stevens used, see http://queryshark.blogspot.com/.

Wordcraft -- Spawn of the QueryShark, part I

Several months ago, I found an article at the DFW Writers Conference site about a query contest. All it involved was writing a purported query to a literary agent or editor for a classic novel. The prize was nice--a free critique of a query letter about the contestant’s real novel by agent/author Donald Maass. And there were no fees. My kind of contest.

I sent in an entry, then forgot about it until May, when I learned from DFW blogger Tex Thompson that my entry was a finalist. In a moment of dazed joy, I promised to post the query and Maass’s comments online for the edification of other writers. I’d thought I’d done a pretty good job. Wrong! But in the interest of helping other writers, here’s the whole thing, with Maass’s comments and what I learned from them.

Originally, Thompson had posted that if contestants really wanted to learn how to craft a query letter, the place to go was the blog of literary agent Janet Reid, a.k.a. the Query Shark, who “ruthlessly (yet generously!) tears apart query letters to help beginning writers improve their craft. Do yourself a favor and read the whole archive.”

I recommend QueryShark.  As happens all too often with Blogger, I can't get a working link to Reid's blog, but you should be able to get it to come up by typing http://queryshark.blogspot.com or http://jetreidliterary.blogspot.com into a search engine.  In the meantime, see what QueryShark has spawned.

　

#

Dear Agent:

What recovering alcoholic Emma Farouk wants more than anything is to keep her disabled daughter, Suzy, safe. She figures she’s on track to do that. She’s been clean and sober for more than a year. She’s now married to a long-time friend. And her first husband, the one whose name is listed as “father” on Suzy’s birth certificate, is recently, conveniently dead.

DM: I like that opening “everything is good” paragraph and the subtle ways it signals that everything is not going to stay okay.

But Emma’s new husband, Dr. Jilani (Jim) Farouk, has problems. Ever since he finished medical school, he’s sent money to Pakistan to support his widowed mother. Now, federal agents have begun to question why he keeps sending payments years after his mother’s death. If Jim could bring himself to tell the truth about the long-ago rodeo accident that killed his best friend, the feds would back off. But it’s a truth that could ruin his career.

DM: Lost me here. The money mysteriously going to Pakistan is great but then…a secret surrounding a rodeo death? Huh? How are those things connected? (You might make the mystery of that connection the point of the paragraph.) Also, you have stopped telling Emma’s story here, you’re reporting a plot complication. Say (briefly) how this impacts Emma.

Then early parole frees Emma’s violent ex-boyfriend--and Suzy’s unacknowledged father--Sherman McMillan. He wants his daughter. He’s not going to let Emma’s new husband or even Suzy’s own fragile emotional state stop him from gaining custody. And that’s the one thing Emma won’t allow.

DM: Villain wants daughter back, big problem for Emma. Well, okay. The problem is sad, and hopefully scary, but also not particularly special. Is there a twist? Is the villain, say, violent in one particularly gruesome way? Also, paragraph 2 and 3 aren’t connected. I feel like this needs one more paragraph to circle back to Emma, her challenges and changes, to tie it all together.

WILD HORSES is an 80,000-word contemporary suspense novel set in Texas and Wyoming and told from multiple viewpoints.
　

#

Maass started out with kind words about the opening paragraph. But as his next comments indicate, my following paragraphs squandered the limited space of a standard one-page query by straying into subplot territory. And of course, I gave the villain too little credit. In the next verstion, I'll to stay focused on the main character and conflict, as Maass suggests in his final “tie it all together“ comment.

I wasn’t the only contestant to receive a critique from Maass. Another finalist, Kim Moravec, also received a critique about her query. Next Monday, she shares her query on her YA thriller, Finnegan’s Awake, with Maass’s comments and her own insights.