Where to Find Ideas for Your Novel

I'm thrilled to launch my Better Fiction Blog Tour from right here at Query Tracker.

The following is part one of a series of guest posts by Janice Hardy, the founder of Fiction University, a website with "over 1,000 articles to help you take your writing to the next level!"

Where to Find Ideas for Your Novel 

By Janice Hardy, @Janice_Hardy

Although ideas may come to us at any time, creating a novel idea on demand is often difficult. No one can truly tell you where to begin—they can only offer only suggestions on where to look for inspiration. I know what works for me, but if you're the type of writer who always starts with characters, giving you a plot point to brainstorm with will probably get you nowhere. If you build up from a premise, giving you ways to create cool characters might muddle your brain.

One thing is consistent though. No matter how you develop an idea, something triggers that first spark of inspiration.

Here are some common activities that can spark inspiration:

Do Some Research

Try reading newspapers, blogs, magazines, or web sites. Look at material that supports the type of novel simmering in your mind. If you think you might try writing science fiction, look at science magazines or science websites. Even gaming or comic sites could work.

Explore newspapers or news sites if you’re considering a mystery or police procedural. Unsolved crimes could also spark ideas, or even famous crimes with well-known criminals. What might have happened if a few key details had changed?

Totally stuck on what to write? Try the weird news sites, or humor sites that collect funny or odd posts from all over. When something piques your interest, keep exploring it until an idea forms in your mind, or you decide that’s not the way you want to go.

Do An Image Search

Look for photos of characters or places for inspiration. An unusual emotion on a portrait might make you wonder more about that person, or a beautiful or unique setting might feel like the perfect place to set a novel. Images can be powerful triggers since they can draw us in the same as a novel draws in a reader.
Even cartoons or memes can spark ideas. Create a file of images that appeal to you or bookmark them online. Mix and match characters and settings, emotions and moods, until an idea forms.

Play With Names

Naming a thing has power, and the perfect name can make a character blossom in your imagination. Search through baby name sites for names that inspire characters. Street signs can also be fun places to find names. Exit signs on highways often put two names together that could become a person or an interesting place.

People Watch

Find a seat and watch the world go by. Malls, stores, and parks are common areas where people of all types gather, and some of them might catch your eye. What about them is intriguing? Make up stories about them, or imagine how you might turn them into a character. While you don’t want to eavesdrop on private conversations, listening for dialogue or snippets of conversation can also spark ideas.

Play With Poetry

Poems can inspire ideas as well as emotions. Look for themes or imagery that you might want to explore, or even consider the type of character who might read or feel a connection to that poem. Think about what cultures or societies might be created if you used the poem or something within it as a foundation.

Listen to Music

Music can be powerful for a lot of writers, creating moods, inspiring imagery, or even creating a character. Pick a random song and imagine the type of character who would use it as her theme song, or pretend it was the first song a couple ever danced to.

Riff Off Favorite Books

You don’t want to copy someone else’s work (that’s plagiarism), but a favorite book—or even a book you disliked—can be used as a jumping off point to your own original idea. There might be something about that book you find compelling and want to explore in a different way, or maybe you would write that same idea from a new angle. You might even take your three favorite books or movies and pick one element from each to create your own plot.

For more inspiration, here's an exercise from Planning Your Novel: Ideas and Structure:

1. Pick three news articles or blog posts that intrigue you. What about them do you find compelling?
2. What location have you always wanted to visit? What secrets might it be hiding?
3. Pick your top ten images. What about them do you find captivating? Why?
4. What are your favorite names? Why? What happens when you turn those names into ones that would fit another genre, nationality, or ethic group? 
5. What are your least favorite novels, TV shows, or movies. How would you write them differently? 
6. What random conversations or person caught your eye recently? What about them was memorable? Why?

Next, list five combinations from these six questions you might want to explore further. Mix and match and put together the story types you enjoy with the topics that interest you. Use as many or as few as you’d like.

For example:

• If you want to write a thriller, try picking a news article that sounds intriguing, then set it in the location that most appeals to you—such as a medical thriller about stem cell research set in Taiwan.
• If you love heist capers, pick your favorite art piece and figure out how your character would steal it—such as an art thief tries to steal the Mona Lisa from the Louvre. 
• If you love stories about redemption, try choosing a news story about a truly despicable person and come up with a way for her to redeem herself—such as a woman who killed her children tries to make amends by saving a family in trouble. 

For those really stuck pick:

• One genre or novel type that most interests you (For example, a fantasy)
• One type of plot you most enjoy (For example, a heist)
• One type of character you’re most drawn to (For example, a dark hero)
• One theme that appears most often in the stories you enjoy (For example, a personal sacrifice)
• One setting you’d most like to write in (For example, the Arctic)

Then put it all together:

A fantasy heist plot set in an arctic environment, with a dark hero who will have to make a personal sacrifice.

And brainstorm away! Keep mixing and matching until the right idea gets you so excited you can't help but dive right into planning it.

The struggle for ideas hits everyone at some point, at all stages of their career. If you're banging your head against the keyboard and feeling like a hopeless newbie, know that somewhere, some bestselling author is doing the same thing.

Where do you get your ideas?

Win a 10-Page Critique From Janice Hardy
Three Books. Three Months. Three Chances to Win.
To celebrate the release of my newest writing books, I'm going on a three-month blog tour--and each month, one lucky winner will receive a 10-page critique from me.
It's easy to enter. Simply visit leave a comment and enter the drawing via Rafflecopter. One entry per blog, but you can enter on every stop on the tour. At the end of each month, I'll randomly choose a winner.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Looking for tips on writing your novel? Check out my book Planning Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, a series of self-guided workshops that help you turn your idea into a novel, and the just-released companion guide, the Planning Your Novel Workbook.

Janice Hardy is the award-winning author of The Healing Wars trilogy and the Foundations of Fiction series, including Planning Your Novel: Ideas and Structure, a self-guided workshop for planning or revising a novel, and the companion Planning Your Novel Workbook.  She's also the founder of the writing site, Fiction University. For more advice and helpful writing tips, visit her at www.fiction-university.com or @Janice_Hardy.

Keep at it.

She told me the editor made her cry.

This is not a joke, and not an amalgamation-type person, but I'm obfuscating and declarificating her identity because I don't want to identify her. She has a career in publishing now. But she nearly didn't.

She sought out a well known publishing individual at a conference and asked for that person's opinion, and the person told her flat-out that her work was awful and would never get her anywhere, and she should stop. This person told me that she started to cry, and she never wrote again.

I'm writing this post because she's not alone.

Person #2 showed her work to a writer she greatly admired. That writer brushed her off, said her work was amateurish and clumsy, and she shouldn't keep writing.

Person #3 went into a conference and chose her conference track specifically to interact with one individual. That individual couldn't make it at the last minute, so the conference assigned her to someone else, and that individual trashed her work, called it juvenile, said no one reads that kind of stuff, and told her to stop writing.

Are you mad yet? Because I'm mad.

Person #2 kept going and is doing great. Person #3 stopped writing for two years and then one day woke up with a character who demanded to be written. She's now published a series starring that character. Person #1 works in publishing but is not herself a writer. They'll all be okay.

Some people won't be.

If someone has derailed your work, I want you to step back and take a deep breath, and I want you to consider picking it up again. Maybe not that story. Maybe it will be the next story. But you have a voice, and I want to make sure no one silences it. Keep speaking. Keep writing. Advocate for yourself. Learn everything you can.

And keep this in mind: someone who attacks you for not being good enough is saying more about herself than she is about you.

Get up. Keep going. Gird yourself and prepare to work harder.

If you are the person others come to for advice, here's my advice for you: find the good. You don't know how much effort it took this fledgling writer to approach you and ask for help; hold that manuscript like an egg, and breathe gently. Give a few suggestions that are encouragement rather than detraction.

Is the writing stilted? "Keep at it. Sometime, when you're home alone, read it out loud to yourself and listen to your own rhythm. I think that's really going to help your prose sing."

Is the dialogue trite? "Keep at it. When these guys talk to each other, try to step back and make each of them say things in a slightly different way. Try to make it so if you pulled this one line out of the whole book, the reader would still know who was speaking."

Is the idea overdone? "Keep at it. I like this story, but I suspect you could do a lot more with this idea. Try turning it inside-out and maybe questioning some of the things you assume. Throw out your first and second ideas and try the third one instead. Because there's a lot of fertile ground you could cover here, and I'd love to see what you can do with it."

See the thread? Ask for more. When someone is fragile, rather than criticizing, show them how to go for the gold.

Ask them for more. I want to see more depth here. I want to see more time transitioning between scenes. I want to see more description of the surroundings. I want to feel more of what this character is feeling.

Ask for more. You'll get it. We're writers, and we hunger to create. Sometimes we just need better direction and a little guidance for the journey.

Seven Questions Authors Need to Ask About Copyright

Writers beginning their journey to publication will eventually have to think about the issue of copyright protection.

When my first novel came out, the small press who published it took care of copyright registration. There wasn’t a heck of a lot for me to do. I saw the little copyright symbol in the front of my book and thought, Well, that’s one less thing for me to worry about.

However, when I self-produced my novel THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, I was on my own—so I needed to know what the details were.

New writers should be aware what copyright is and what it does so that they can make informed decisions regarding their work. Much of the information presented in this article comes from the Wikipedia page (noted as [1]) as well as Copyright.gov (noted as [2]).

Which leads me to the big looming disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I don’t pretend to be a lawyer. This is not legal advice. If you need legal advice, consult a professional. This article is for informational purposes only. Visit copyright.gov for the laws and regulations and processes regarding this topic.

Ok, let's get to the important stuff. Here are the questions you should be asking (as well as some answers. I have nothing against cheat sheets.)

1) What is copyright?

“Copyright is a legal right created by the law of a country that grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights for its use and distribution.” [1] It protects both published and unpublished works. [2]

Basically, it states that, if you create it, you should have the rights to it. For authors, this means that your book is your book and you control the rights to it. It also means that if you plagiarize another person’s work or distribute it without their permission, you are in violation of their copyright. You cannot copyright material that belongs to someone else.

However, there are shades and degrees all sorts of nuances. For instance, through coincidence, two people may hold copyright on substantially similar ideas and still not be in violation of copyright as long as it can be determined that one did not copy from the other.

2) What does copyright protect?

“Copyright is a form of intellectual property, applicable to certain forms of creative work. Under US copyright law, legal protection attaches only to fixed representations in a tangible medium.” [1]

Creative work includes far more than literary creations but, for us authors, we are most concerned with works such as novels, stories, poems, plays, and articles. (For an in-depth answer to this question, look at this document.)

3) What does copyright NOT protect?

The Wikipedia page lists several exceptions to what copyright will protect. Copyright will not protect:
• Names of products
• Names of businesses, organizations, or groups
• Pseudonyms of individuals
• Titles of works
• Catchwords, catchphrases, mottoes, slogans, or short advertising expressions
• Listings of ingredients in recipes, labels, and formulas (although the directions may be protected by copyright)

It also doesn’t protect facts or ideas. [2]

Copyright is not the same thing as a patent or a trademark. Those distinctions are described here. 

4) How is copyright enforced?

Copyright exists the moment an author puts work in a tangible form. In other words, he prints it out. You write a book, print it out, boom. You got copyright!

Enforcing it, on the other hand, is where all the work comes in. An author must register the work with the copyright office. Doing this is easy enough: go to http://copyright.gov and fill out an application.

You send in the form either by mail or electronically (faster) and follow up with snail-mailing a print copy of your book. They mail you a certificate once the work is registered. If you then find that someone has violated your copyright, you can take legal action.

5) What does it cost?

Registering a work with the copyright office isn’t very expensive. For a single author/single work, it costs under 50$. The fee list is here.  (The costs associated with taking legal action will vary.)

6) What is a poor man’s copyright?

It is thought that if one were to print out their manuscript, seal it in an envelope, and mail it to themselves, it would protect their work in the matter of what some call “a poor man’s copyright". If left unopened, the date on the postmark should be enough proof that the work was put into tangible form by that date. Right?

Wrong. This process won’t protect the work in the event of a copyright lawsuit. All this process does is make a nice souvenir. But you already knew that copyright exists the moment you print your work out. (If not, go back and read #4.)

7) Do you need to register your copyright?

And that’s the million dollar question. The answer is: only if you want copyright laws to back up your claim should you head to court.

Will you actually need to go to court? I hope not.

It’s kind of like auto insurance. Are you definitely going to get into an accident? I hope not. But that’s why we carry insurance. It’s protection in case an if becomes a when. What stops a person from driving a car without insurance? Nothing, really, except the threat of legal ramifications since it’s the law to maintain car insurance. But no law says you need insurance to publish a book.

So…maybe it’s not like auto insurance. Maybe it’s even more confusing.

Think about you, your book, your goals as a writer…then do your own research. You already own the right to your work. Do you want the laws to protect it for you? I guess that’s the question you need to ask.

And if you want to see copyright in action, here are some articles about important copyright infringement discussions:

J.K. Rowling wins copyright infringement case

When Does a Movie Infringe a Novel's Copyright?

The Shadowhunters vs. the Dark-Hunters

Authors published by traditional or small presses most likely will have their registration handled for them, as mine had been with my first novel. Indie authors who are self-producing their work will have to register their work with the copyright office on their own.

I chose to register THE HEARTBEAT THIEF because I wanted to ensure I crossed every t and dotted every i (something that, ironically, I often fail to do when handwriting. What a weird cliché for me to use.) It was only 35$. I figured it was worth the cost of insurance. Once I had the print book formatted, I printed a proof copy and mailed it in (so, another 10$ or so).

For me, it wasn’t difficult or and it wasn’t expensive...and it’s one less thing I need to worry about.

Good thing. I don’t need to spend my time worrying about things like that. I’d rather spend my time writing my next book.

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

When the "Show, Don't Tell" police come knocking

Every writer, at some point, has heard the phrase, "There is too much telling." Perhaps the critique came from a well-meaning critique partner, or even that rare agent who offered a personalized rejection. Unfortunately, that advice has become so common that it can be about as useless as the also-ubiquitous, "Passive voice is bad!" mantra.

So what exactly does it mean to show, not tell? And when is telling better than showing? Here are some tools I try to keep in mind when editing. To digress a moment, I don't recommend going through this process while you are churning out your first draft. It's called a crappy first draft for a reason.

When you see a long expanse of text with no dialogue, and no "short action" paragraphs to break up the action (like, "the cell door slammed shut"), ask yourself if the passage is lacking some description of a person's body language as well as other sensory elements, such as touch or smell that could convey the same information, or whether the same scene could be conveyed better with dialogue rather than description. If the passage if merely a character's backstory, does it read like an information dump or can you weave in some of the back story in later chapters if it doesn't have to be established up front?

By way of example, here is some "telling."

"Mary was very angry. Her husband was late for dinner again and despite several text messages and voice mails, he hadn't bothered to tell her if he was on his way home or not. To make matters worse, her teenage son had wolfed down a dinner she had carefully prepared from scratch. He had eaten quickly while standing up and then immediately dashed out, not even bothering to tell her where he was going. Mary wondered if she should just give up. She began googling divorce attorneys."

Here is how the same situation could be more "showy."

No new messages.
"Inconsiderate jerk," Mary muttered. She punched Joe's cell number with her thumb as she ladled the congealed remains of her signature lasagna into a plastic containers with the other hand. The remnants of fresh basil, oregano and garlic wafted through the air.

Straight to voice mail. Mary clicked End Call. She tossed her phone on the counter. The dog she hadn't wanted looked up at her hopefully with a leash in his mouth.

"Go walk yourself. I'm done being everyone's maid," she told him. "Jake, where are you going?

Her son barely looked up from his phone. He opened the side door. "Out."

"But you barely touched your din-"

The door slammed shut in his wake. Mary scraped the remaining food into the sink and put it down the disposal. She opened up her laptop, poured herself a glass of wine she'd been saving for a special occasion, and typed. A few minutes later, she clicked on Schedule a Free Consultation with one our Board Certified Divorce Attorneys.

In the first example, the writer is simply telling the reader what the reader needs to know about Mary. She feels unappreciated, put upon, and has simply had enough. The second example shows the reader things Mary does and says, and how she reacts to what other people do through action and dialogue. We don't need to be told how she feels because we can see it.

This is not to suggest that "telling" is always bad. Sometimes, telling is better than showing. Consider this "all tell" passage from Dress Her in Indigo by John D. MacDonald:

"T. Harlan Bowie had to be prybarred and torch-cut out of his squashed Buick, and there was so much blood the rescue people were in a big hurry. As it turned out, they would have done a lot better taking it slow and easy rather than turning him and twisting him and working him in muscular style out of the metal carapace. Nobody could prove anything afterward. The lacerations were superficial. But there was a fracture of the spine, and between the second and third lumbar vertebrae the unprotected cord had been pinched, ground, bruised, torn and all but severed. Nobody could ever say whether the accident had done it, or the rescue efforts."

You can't convince me that there is a better way to convey this information about poor Mr. Bowie than to just say it. There is no need to draw it out with "showing" techniques because the reader only needs to know Mr. Bowie's predicament in order to set the stage for actual plot, which doesn't really involve how he became physically disabled. Stephen King similarly introduces us to retired Detective Hodges in Mr. Mercedes by just telling us in straightforward, unembellished  fashion, about how he spends his days post retirement watching television and gaining weight.

So when to show and when to tell? That is often in the eye of the beholder. But say that Mary in our first example is a fleeting character in a slasher novel who gets killed off rather quickly at the beginning. Maybe a little "tell" works better because we don't really need to know the details of her lasagna and her kid. But if Mary is the main character in a chick lit novel, then yes, we need to be able to identify with the every day experiences of feeling overwhelmed and under taken for granted. In that case, the second example works better.

In your own writing, if you notice a lot of first-version Mary writing that goes on for pages and pages, this should be a red flag to ask yourself a few questions. Can I write this scene referencing facial expressions, glances, smells, or by use of dialogue?  Instead of  saying "Lady Macbeth was convinced blood was everywhere and on her hands and she couldn't get clean," show a character scrubbing an already immaculate surface until her knuckles bleed while someone pleads with her to stop.

The next step in editing is to identify  the filler words we all use  when we try to "show, don't tell."  My writing's  worst offenders are eye rolling and shrugging. But that topic has to wait until next month.

Happy show and tell until then.

Kim English - is the author of the Coriander Jones series and the award winning picture book 'A Home for Kayla.' Her latest picture book, 'Rolly and Mac' will be released in 2016. Her website is Kim-

Hello! Again.

This is the second time I have made this introduction, but for those who have never heard of me (in other words, all of you except Patrick) I will do it again.  If you are so inclined, you can go all the way back to 2007 to view my first introduction.

My name is Jason Robinson, and I have been with Query Tracker in some form or another since its inception.  Pat and I have been through the pain of writing and mailing query letters.  Yes, actually putting letters in envelopes, sticking stamps to them, dropping them in a big blue box, and then waiting.  And waiting.  And waiting some more.  It was a trying time for us both, but pain accompanies every birth, and it was through this pain that Query Tracker was born.  No more would struggling authors have to keep handwritten lists of agents they had queried or run the risk of making themselves appear unprofessional by querying the same agent twice.  No more would they be stuck in query limbo, never knowing if their query had been rejected or if that full request had just been lost in the mail.  No!  We would create a tool to make this process less painful and less confusing.  We would give authors the resources they needed to first find literary agents and then target their queries to the right agents.  Ah, yes, we would bring new hope to the next Stephen King and JK Rowling.  Well, Patrick would.  I mostly just cheered him on.

It is important to note the motivation behind all this.  Patrick gets asked all the time, "How can you offer this for free?  What's in it for you?"  The answer is pretty simple.  We wanted to help people.  There were plenty of sites and services out there that were happy to take advantage of writers who didn't understand the industry, and in the beginning, we waded through all that muck and tried to figure it out on our own.  That wasn't fun.  We passed along what we had learned and at the same time tried to make querying just a little bit easier for those whose pain we understand very well.

So, I will be around here to present my musings, share my struggles, and offer advice.  I am excited to once again be a visible member of the QT team.  Lurking in the shadows was fun too, but that's a story for another post.

Keep rewriting,
Jason

Plagarism and the Indie Author

Recently I read a disturbing article about an author who’d discovered that someone had plagiarized her book, causing such substantial physical and financial distress that she eventually pursued the offender in court.

Plagiarism is not a new concept (in fact, you can revisit Carolyn's article here) but it seems to be finding a new group of easy targets: self-published books on Amazon.

If a thief tries to steal a traditionally published book, you can bet that the legal team employed by the Big House will descend like bees on a honey-stealing bear.

But self-published authors don’t necessarily have that back-up plan. And Amazon is full of self-published books, ripe for the plucking.

This isn’t an article meant to deter writers from choosing self-publishing. Many writers seeking agent representation still opt to self-publish other work not deemed generally query-able: short stories, anthologies, or poetry books...

...and, yes, novels, usually those that failed to find their footing with agents or editors. Those books aren’t automatic failures—they are just projects that didn’t get picked up. That’s not necessarily a condemnation on quality. That's why many authors pursue publication for those novels on their own.

In fact, putting forth a great self-published book can be a stepping stone to finding a dream agent because it provides an opportunity to start building an audience. An established audience is a huge enticement for an agent.

So self-publishing, when done well, isn’t the kiss of death. But it does open up an author to the plague that is plagiarism.

The vast majority of self-published novels on Amazon is romance fiction. Needless to say, those books are often the most plagiarized. (That doesn’t mean that everyone else is safe, though.) The market for romance fiction is massively huge, making it easy for a copy-cat to find a niche and sell well without being discovered. And that’s the problem—those copies have to be detected, discovered, and decried in order for Amazon to take them down.

While Amazon will take down individual offending books, so far they do not have a policy in place that will take down an author’s entire list if any of their titles are plagiarized. It’s up to authors to protect themselves when putting their products out for sale.

Here are a few things an author can do to reduce the chance your work will be plagiarized.

• Enable your Digital Rights Management (DRM). Kindle publishers should activate this safe guard , which limits the devices upon which the book can be viewed. By doing so, you limit the ability for a person to lift your book, drop it into a word processor, and use it as their own. (There is a downside to enabling DRM, as many readers like to read between multiple devices, so do your research before making the decision that is right for your situation.)

• Register your work with the US Copyright office. It gives you legal protection and the ability to seek damages. It doesn’t keep your work from getting stolen, but it really helps deliver the payback by giving you a case in court. (I'll be discussing Copyright Registration in an upcoming post, so stay tuned.)

• Use websites to find your lines online. There are a few sites that scan the internet for you, such as Copyscape and Plagiarism.org using the “check for plagiarism” button. What else can you do? Author Ally E. Machate recommends using Smart Google Search to be the watchdog. Simple enter in a few random lines from your text and, if a new page pops up with those words (or very similar), you get an alert.

• Protect your blog! May authors use their blogs to provide fresh, enticing content to keep their readers on the hook between books. Post copyright notices on your web pages and disable the right click copy function to prevent easy lifting. Use Java code as discussed in this article or look at this Java-free method tutorial. The addition of such coding helps to deter a plagiarist from lifting your blog and copy-pasting it to their own document. You can also go so far as to register your blog with the US Copyright office.

• Watermark your images on your blog and the pages of your review copies. Adding a transparent copyright notice catty-cornered across the pages of your PDF review copies will also make it harder for pirates to throw your book up on the torrentz.

Keep this very important thing in mind: there is no way to prevent your book from getting plagiarized. Deterrence and vigilance is key.  Authors must do all that they can to post copyright notices and to make it harder for work to be swiped. Monitor the internet periodically for evidence that someone is passing your work off as their own. Obtain copyright registration so that, if you find it, you can fight it and claim your damages.

Authors put in immeasurable amounts of time and effort into creating their work. The same should go into protecting it. It’s YOUR book. Do all you can to keep it that way.

Ash Krafton is a speculative fiction writer who, despite having a Time Turner under her couch and three different sonic screwdrivers in her purse, still encounters difficulty with time management. She's the author of the urban fantasy trilogy The Books of the Demimonde as well as WORDS THAT BIND. She also writes for YA and NA audiences under the pen name AJ Krafton. THE HEARTBEAT THIEF, her Victorian dark fantasy inspired by Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”, is now available.

Querying: What to Leave Out

I see over and over again templates and suggestions about what to include in a query. For instance, Carissa Taylor posted an excellent blog on pitch as story, including a template and links to other templates (all of which are helpful!). In addition to the pitch, a query can have comp titles and a biography (although whether they are necessary varies on the agent). There is plenty of information on what to include in a query.

But your novel is most likely between 50,000 and 100,000 words. That means a LOT will be left out. What exactly should that be?

As Taylor notes in her post, your novel probably has several moments that could be used as the final moment of decision, from the first plot point way up to the final climax. Which one you choose, Taylor says, should be a matter of which one is the most exciting. Another factor to consider is which one is easier to condense.

Novels are complicated creatures by design. Subplots should roll into the main plot for a satisfying conclusion, where something seemingly unrelated becomes the cornerstone, or the subplots and main plot echo each other in a thematically resonant way. By necessity, this can't all fit into your query.

So, what exactly do you leave out?

First, the logline. With few exceptions, if the first sentence of your query could be read in Movie Trailer Voice (you know the one), it can be deleted and it probably should be. Queries don't need to start with anything along the lines of, "For star-crossed lovers Qui-gon Jinn and Jar Jar Binks, the only thing separating them is 17,000 light years and parents who hate each other." or "Love. Loss. Growing up. In this epic tale of forgiveness and bittersweet romance..."

Instead, start with the characters themselves. Let the words of the plot and characters tell us about your theme instead of spelling it out.

Second, almost every single subplot. A general rule of thumb is not to name more than three characters in a query: the protagonist, the antagonist, and a sidekick or romantic interest. I fought this tooth and nail with the second book I queried. I was certain I needed the three above AND two more characters. I cut it down to three named and one mentioned but unnamed, and while I wasn't happy about it, I know my query was better for it.

Even when I receive the go-ahead on my queries from my critique partners, I usually find them woefully inadequate. But when I read queries for stories I haven't read yet, the effective ones get me excited to read the rest, and pleasantly surprised when the story turns out to be even more complicated and interesting than I had thought based on the query alone.

Instead, focus on a through-line that makes sense. Don't get distracted by details that don't relate to the main plotline. Additionally, keep in mind the third point.

The third thing you can leave out is the whole truth. I hate to be the one who breaks this to you, but queries sometimes lie. When you leave out subplots and characters, the way that something actually happens likely isn't exactly the way you're going to describe it. There is a fine line between including every detail of an intricate plot and only saying "One thing leads to another," but it's okay if that line doesn't say something exactly. If it's a minor character who shows your protagonist the key to solving her dilemma, you aren't going to introduce the minor character for just that moment.

Instead, use passive voice. I know. I'm crazy. But when it comes to simplifying things without being too vague, it can work. Instead of "The protagonist gives up and sits down for a meal at her favorite diner. To her surprise, the waitress mentions a hidden trail near the top of Mt. Hood that is just the clue the protagonist needed to set out toward the third act." Write, "When the location of the hidden trail is revealed, it's the final clue she needs. But at the top is a fork in the road and she must choose: go up and chance running into Bigfoot, or go around and risk the landslides that have been plaguing the mountain." This gets us to the important part--the choice she has to make--without bogging us down in too many details (Although the rough draft example I provided probably still has too many details.)

Finally, irrelevant biographical information. Unless an agent specifically asks for it, your biography can be nonexistent.

Instead, any information in your biography should be directly relevant to writing and/or the subject of your book. If you have an MFA or are working toward one, say so. No need to mention your five pet dogs or the amount of time you spend on Tumblr. However, if your character is a web designer and you spent ten years in the business, that's something relevant you can include.

What things are you tempted to include in your query that would be best left unsaid?