The Saturday Slash

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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My thoughts are in blue, words to delete are in red, suggested rephrasing is in orange.

A work of upmarket fiction, EKPHRASIS is an empathetic novel about art, inspiration, and love that arrives too late. It will appeal to readers who enjoyed Sally Rooney's Conversation with Friends and Lynn Steger Strong's Want. I have to say that generally I tell queriers to put this information - title, genre - at the bottom, but I love the phrase "love that arrives too late." I think it could be a wonderful hook. I am a little leery of calling it an "empathetic" novel, mostly because you're not stating genre here and "empathetic" isn't a genre.

Wynonna Nichols is not an artist. She just recreates the world's great masterpieces for fun after her two little girls go to bed and her husband retires for the night to grade papers. But when she abruptly becomes the sole breadwinner and her boss at Austin's newest art museum learns her secret talent, Wynonna is flung into the spotlight as the star of wholesome videos where she imitates the paintings on screen. This is really good - you've captured a lot by saying a little - she's a mom, she's married to a teacher, life seems a little boring. I don't have any fixes for you here, although I do think you could use a slightly stronger hook, I don't think what you have is weak, by any means though.

Thrown by its immediate popularity, Wynonna can't believe the climbing view count as she slowly falls for her videographer, Julien, a local who cannot stand the changes to his city. Changes like what? Does Wynonna agree? Are they bonding over this? Their chemistry becomes the key to the videos' success, and as their audience rises out of control, not sure about the wording here, as an audience isn't something you could control anyway they find themselves careening toward one another. This is just a statement that might show my ignorance on the matter, but would a videographer be on screen for the audience to see him interacting with W?

For the first time since graduating college, Wynonna finds herself consumed with passion, both for her work and the people around her, but while the world takes notice, fame takes its toll. Millions of strangers adore her, but remorse threatens to destroy everything she loves when she finally gives in to the affair. While her morality wanes, her success grows—articles in Vogue and free trips to Italy, Julien by her side. Where's the remorse coming from? How torn is she? Does she love her husband? Is this an "I love them both?" or is it "I am in love with one and have duties to another?" I'd just like to know more about what exactly she's balancing, as well as how the kids come into it.

Forced to pick between her idyllic life of finger-painting was her life idyllic though? The first para makes her sound mildly bored at home. I think in order to feel the urgency of the choice, we need to know what's being weighed on each side and the all-consuming fervor of Julien, Van Gogh, and Klimt, Wynonna's life spirals out of her hands.

EKPHRASIS is complete at 83,000 words and ready for your consideration.

I am a fourth-generation Austinite with an MFA in screenwriting. This is my first novel.

You don't mention a genre, which is important. This could be a paperback romance, this could be a literary midlife crisis. What does Austin have to do with anything? You mention Julien's issues with it changing, and your own attachement to the city, so it feels like it's important, but I'm not seeing a lot of reason why in the query. Overall this is really well written, we just need a touch more info about what's at stake, and mentioning a genre would be good. I know your comp titles are doing a lot of work in that arena, but a genre is a must.

Setting Guardrails with Love

Some of the most poignant daily struggles that I have faced as a young writer-mother are the mornings. If I wanted to live my first-choice life, I needed to get ahead in my books in the first hours of the day, before anyone required my energy for anything else. If I woke before the light to do what nourished me, nothing could upset me. It gave me a full day’s immunity to negativity: a shield. By starting my day with writing, exercise, and solitude, I felt impermeable, calm, effective. I felt like my best self.

I would prepare: set my alarm, go to bed early, lay out my clothes—so I could out-wake my children, the earlier the better, and have a quiet two hours to myself to write. But they bested me daily, always in the most loving ways. I’d tiptoe, silent cup of tea in hand, at 5:30 a.m. to my desk—and the huge-diapered, pajama- footed baby would smell me and toddle over, big smile, ready to start the day. I started waking earlier: 5:15, 5. There felt something metallic and unkind about pushing back into the fours, but sometimes I did it anyway.

I thought of my ancestors—coal miners and ranchers—and how this was their morning time to push back into the hard, unforgiving rock or to tend to their hungry animals. Hoping this day would not swallow them. I am lucky, immeasurably lucky, to get to do work I choose (writing) in a place (home office) and time (early morning) of my choice. But I could not seem to get up early enough to do my work—my first-choice activity of what makes me feel whole and happy—before the day and its many demands took over. And as Joyce Carol Oates has observed, “The great enemy of writing is being interrupted by other people. Your worst enemy will have your most beloved face.”

Focusing on writing before spending the day focused on my household felt like the obvious, necessary guardrail—especially since my husband had a more regular daytime work schedule— but I had to stage some ways to make it work. None worked all the time, though each one worked sometimes; I jostled between them.

One was asking my husband to be on morning duty. He always said yes, but morning duty meant different things to us. I felt it necessary to acknowledge our children at the threshold of their waking and offer some form of love. My husband, on the other hand, felt it necessary to sleep past six, so this whole battle went on during his unconscious hours. If I sent the babies to him, they’d return like boomerangs to me.

The second was the most inspired. It was to set up their own desks in my office, complete with art supplies and snacks, and to try to initiate them to the truth that morning is an excellent time for projects, with its own gravitas and its own treats. We even tried using a timer for “work time.” This worked to delight the child and buy me a few minutes at intervals.

The third was to find a coffee shop that opened at 6:00 a.m. This worked every time!

So I bandied among these three, always wrapping by 8:00 a.m. so I could lavish attention on my children for a few minutes before school (my husband took them to school, I picked them up).

And then, to my amazement, the seasons changed and my daughter was no longer my early morning companion—she had learned to sleep past seven—but my son still was. And then suddenly both were sleeping heavy, long nights and no longer desiring to wake early and hang with me. Which, in the dizzy way I remember all things about early parenthood, I found myself missing.

But I have a souvenir from those seven years of trying and failing daily to out-wake my household: I still wake early and write most days before doing anything else. This guardrail enables me to live a full life during the daytime hours—showing up for my kids’ school events, collaborating with other artists, teaching a full course load of writing workshops, seeing friends, going for hikes and spontaneous dates with my husband, and tending to the day as it unfolds.

This souvenir ties me forward to my babies—my catalyst for becoming an early morning writer—and backward to my ancestors, who woke early for their own reasons of survival. I still try to write ahead in my book before anyone speaks my name.

And what is left of our work—if we are lucky, and I mean really lucky—is ourselves.

Elisabeth Sharp McKetta teaches writing for Harvard Extension School and Oxford Department for Continuing Education. She is the author of ten books, including the novel She Never Told Me About the Ocean. Her shorter works have been published widely. She delivered the 2019 TEDx talk “Live Like a Poem.” Elisabeth lives with her husband and two young children.

Miah Jeffra on The Inspiration for "American Gospel"

American Gospel was actually my very first book project, a love letter to my hometown, Baltimore. I wanted to capture its identity crisis—a northern town south of the Mason-Dixon, a black majority city yet with one of the most extreme cases of racial inequity in the U.S. I wanted to also capture its beauty, its corruption, and the racialized violence associated with urban renewal projects. All three of the main characters—Ruth Anne, Peter and Thomas—are a composite and reflection of my complicated relationship with the city. However, the starring character in the novel is Baltimore itself, how it fastens itself to its history, how it stumbles into its future.

Miah Jeffra is author of four books, most recently The Violence Almanac (finalist for several awards, including the Grace Paley and St. Lawrence Book Prizes) and the forthcoming novel American Gospel. Work can be seen in StoryQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, The North American Review, Barrelhouse, DIAGRAM, jubilat and many others. Miah is co-founder of Whiting Award-winning queer and trans literary collaborative, Foglifter Press, and teaches writing and decolonial studies at Santa Clara University and Sonoma State University.