Don't be afraid to ask for help with the most critical first step of your writing journey - the query.
I’ve been blogging since 2011 and have critiqued over 200 queries here on the blog using my Hatchet of Death. This is how I edit myself, it is how I edit others. If you think you want to play with me and my hatchet, shoot me an email.
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Imagine if Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was thrown in a blender with New Orleans voodoo and queer characters. The result would be a magical mix of adventure, curiosity, loss, belief, and family. We all think we know the story of Alice and perhaps we do, but what we don’t yet know is the story of AMARYLLIS LIDDELL, a queer multiracial girl living with her single mother in Brooklyn, NY. A young adult version of the classic tale blending fantasy and realism, THE TRIALS OF AMARYLLIS LIDDELL is approx. 79,000 words.
What you have right here is more of an elevator pitch, or a mashup. You're taking a concept (Alice) and adding the spice of the other two elements. It's not a bad pitch, but I don't think it's a hook for a query. A mashup is by nature broad, but a hook is very specifically pointing to an event or element in your book that makes it different from other books. Definitely think about what the defining element of your book is, and try to work that into a hook, rather using the language of a mashup / elevator pitch for a query.
THE TRIALS OF AMARYLLIS LIDDELL introduces us to an Alice different from the one we already know. Right now the language that you're using to compare your book with Alice is making it sound more like a retelling than anything else, and with the elements I see in front of me within the query, I'm not sure that's accurate. Feel free to ignore, is that is the gist.
Amaryllis is curious, much like Alice, but she also wishes so strongly that she were brave. Why? What is she scared of? Overall, Amaryllis’ life isn’t so bad. She loves her books, her girlfriend, the city, and all the possibility it represents. She could, however, do without the fights with her mother and the nagging feeling that she wants more from life. She wants adventure and purpose – and most of all, she wants to belong and feel understood. Everything that you're saying so far is very typical of just about any / all YA literature. For a query you want to extrapolate on what makes it stand out, what makes it different. Nothing listed abobve fulfills that.
At the end of her junior year of high school, Amaryllis looks forward to spending her summer running around the city with her girlfriend SOFIA You only capitalize characters names within a synopsis, not a query and to spend her free time with her nose buried in a good book, specifically the many old texts on voodoo, herbal remedies, and charms that have been mysteriously showing up at the studio apartment she shares with her mother, HARRIET. Also, make sure you are a person that can write about voodoo respectuflly and with an understanding of all the cultural connections.
On a sweltering summer day, after a particularly nasty fight with her mother on the subway platform, tragedy strikes Amaryllis’ life. As Amaryllis storms away from her mother, angry about what’s been said, she hears screams and gasps from behind her. Harriet has fallen onto the tracks and died. This is reading way more like a synopsis than a query. It all seems like a freak accident, one that Amaryllis is sure she must be at least partially responsible for. Amaryllis’ whole life turns into a whirlwind of emotion and change as her long-lost aunt shows up to bring her back home – to New Orleans, that is. While in New Orleans, Amaryllis discovers her family’s connection to voodoo and that it was, in fact, her aunt who had been sending her the books all along. Amaryllis makes it her purpose to dive into the art of voodoo and find a way to work through the grief of her mother’s loss. And what better way to cure grief, she thinks, than to bring her mother back from the dead? Good news. I found your hook - it's all the way down here, at the bottom.
As an avid reader of the young adult genre, I set out to write the book I wish had existed when I was a teenager. I wanted Alice to be queer (#ownvoices), to be a person of color, to exist in a world that I recognized – this is how I created Amaryllis Liddell. She is everything I think a 2020 Alice should be and encompasses much of what I think queer young people want to see in their storytelling. Amaryllis suffers enormous loss in more ways than one, which gave me the opportunity to write about a topic that’s so close to my heart. I too, have suffered losses, and so have many other readers in the YA market. They need stories that speak to them, that aren’t afraid to show the pain that accompanies loss and what one young woman is willing to do to fix her pain. Everything before this, (with the excpetion of the #OwnVoices mention) isn't useful in a query. Cut to your accrediations, below. I hold an M.F.A. in screenwriting and currently teach creative writing as an Assistant Professor at Western Kentucky University. My tv pilot script, ‘Til Death (a queer drama), earned an honorable mention at the University Film and Video Association conference during the summer of 2019. I have published two poems and two short nonfiction pieces with small presses, and I was the screenwriter for the short film Five, which premiered during the African American Short Films Series from Badami Productions in 2016. Most of my work centers on queer women and trauma.
Great bio if you take out the more personal elements noted above. Also, you are clearly aware of #OwnVoices and are illustrating your fitness for this story in terms of queerness. If you have something simliar to put up front in connection to the multi-racial and voodoo elements, I would advise that, as well.
As I noted above, this is reading more like a synopsis than a query. Get the trauma of loss and the idea of resurrection in there way earlier. It feels like more of a hook than the Alice comparisons. Also, some indications about whether or not this is a good idea (or a bad one), would be great. You say your MC wishes whe were brave, but not why she thinks she isn't, or why she wishes she were.
Writer's Digest shares a series of successful query letters on their site, with feedback from agents who signed the author, and why the query works. Read through some of those to get a better idea of what a successful query should look like.
Mine can be found here.
