I was talking to Charity Bradford yesterday, (go check out her blog, you won’t be disappointed), because one – she had some great thoughts on yesterday’s post and two – because my pitch is up for critique today over at Unicorn Bell.

The focus of our discussion…pitches. Go figure ^_^

About eight months ago, I started querying Uriel’s Fall. I was so freaking pleased with myself (which some of you know because I was smearing it all over my blog way back then ^_^). I had honed my query, I had finished my revisions…it was time to go!

Except…the response wasn’t so great. Now, it’s true I think I only queried about 10 or 15 agents. Every single response was a rejection based on the initial query. Every three-five letters I tweaked the query and tried again, and my CP agreed with me that it properly represented the book.

And I couldn’t figure it out. What was wrong with my query? If it was such a great representation of the book, and it was a good book, why was there zero interest?

If you read the number of literary agent blogs that are out there, you’ve probably heard that if you can’t summarize the story properly, the problem may be the story. In fact, Scott Eagan mentioned it just yesterday. “If You Can’t Describe Your Story, There Probably Isn’t A Story”. The title of the post says it all.

I had heard that, but thought “it’s not the story. The story rocks. The story is awesome. I mean, okay, maybe it needs a little cleaning up. Or a lot. Or a ton. Or OML I am never going to finish this in the history of anything even though I thought I was done six months ago this so isn’t fair why me…?”

So…to get back to the original point, I think Charity struggled with something similiar because we had an email exchange a few months back about her query.

What we both agreed on yesterday was that refining that pitch, figuring out what the one key, primary, big plot in the story was, gave the rest of the story focus.

The way I did it was sit down and write what the overall character goals were through out the story. What’s she trying to accomplish at the start? In the middle? At the end?

Only one theme remained the same throughout every list. I like a lot of the other themes. That’s probably why they’re subplots. But they’re not the main story.

And when I look back at my last attempt at querying, I can see that I always wanted to mention this element, but it was the first to get cut if I needed to tighten things up.

Bad. Very bad.

If the overall point is that Ronnie hears voices and wishes she didn’t, then that should probably be the focus of my pitch/query.

Now that I’ve got that figured out, I feel like a little lightbulb has gone on over my head. And I agree with Scott Eagan’s suggestion: “If we are writing a query letter or pitching to an editor, when do we start? BEFORE you write the story.”

Now I just have to learn to tackle the synopsis. Any suggestions?