Why Are Query Letters So Hard to Write?
So let’s be honest. You have read ALL the How Tos you could find online and you still feel iffy about how to craft your hook and pitch. (Or is it your bio? It’s your bio, isn’t it? I’ll do a blog post about bios soon. Either way, stay with me now.) Writing a query letter can be a very frustrating experience, even for writers who have done it before. Even for those of us who enjoy the entire messy process of writing fiction, resistance can kick hard (IN THE FACE) the minute we sit down to craft a pitch.
The tendency is to think: I just wrote 90,000 words on a single story. I must love writing and be fairly good at it to do that. So WHY on earth is it so hard to summarize my story in less than a page?
Or alternately, you might fold your arms and think something like: Why should I even HAVE to summarize my story in less than a page? My writing should speak for itself. What if my awesome book isn’t picked up because I’m terrible at query letters? This is a dumb rule.
This, my friend, is called resistance, plain and simple.
In terms of consciousness, resistance can describe the energy of a number of disempowered states that are marked by dominant emotions and recurrent thoughts.
But that doesn’t mean that resistance is abnormal in anyway. And it doesn’t even mean resistance is bad.
In fact, I really want to acknowledge that resistance is 100% #NORMAL. And when you’re actively engaged in learning something new, it’s actually healthy. When you’re working out and you apply resistance to a muscle, that muscle gets stronger. In terms of consciousness, wherever there is resistance, a breakthrough is waiting to happen. Resistance can be a sign that you’re challenging yourself and that you might be on the verge of a shift of consciousness. We call the higher states of consciousness flow states. And it’s possible to shift from resistance into a flow state, even if tears are still streaming down your cheeks. Whether creative resistance is destructive or constructive depends very much on the story that you tell yourself about it in the moment.
The stories we’re telling ourselves about our resistance are signs of our level of consciousness. And everyone’s path out of resistance begins with releasing or changing that story to one that embraces their personal power in that moment. This is why the same blanket advice that sounds so perfectly reasonable to one person can be so upsetting or even detrimental to another. Taken out of context, there is no way that it can address every single reader’s unique set of stories.
So without knowing the exact story you’re telling yourself when you’re rage quitting your pitch, I do think there’s one obvious reason why writing them is hard. And sometimes I think it’s so obvious that we really don’t give ourselves enough credit when we’re facing it.
The simplest reason is precisely that a query letter is not fiction. It’s still writing in that it’s WORDS. But the purpose of the words is entirely different. And thinking you should be naturally good at it is just not helpful.
A query letter is a sales letter that is meant to persuade an editor or agent to read your book or request more material. Writing a query letter draws more heavily on your business, sales, and communication skills than the set of creative skills that you draw on to write a novel.
In order to write a solid query letter, you need to practice thinking of your book as a product, rather than a baby or a work of art. This requires a shift of focus, release of attachment, AND a new set of skills. That’s why it’s so hard. You’re working at learning new writing skills. And just like all new skills, you need to develop those skills and practice them using feedback from a person who is more skilled than you. You also need to respond appropriately to your own resistance story. (I’m going to get into a few possibilities in a minute, but again, this can be unique to the writer.)
How do you develop the skills needed to write query letters?
You developed your fiction writing skills by writing stories. Likewise, you need to develop the skills needed to write query letters by writing query letters. You can go one step further and break your query into parts, practicing each part on its own so it’s not so daunting like I talked about in THIS POST.
After writing your draft comes the feedback part. Finding quality critique partners can be a little daunting for new writers, especially with a query. While there can be a benefit to gathering lots of feedback and criticism, during your early learning, I think it’s usually better to have a smaller, more targeted pool of critical partners that include a few writers right at your level (peers) and writers above your level (who serve as mentors, teachers, editors, and such). With peers, once you get to know each other’s writing styles, you will know what they do well and what they have to offer and vice versa. A mentor is usually someone with more experience or training who can offer more of a bird’s eye perspective of your work, based on whatever their specialty is. I’ll definitely be talking more in depth about critiques and workshops at another time, so if you’d be interested, please subscribe and follow me on social so you’ll know as soon as I post it.
In this post, I want to stay focused on responding appropriately to our own resistance, our own disempowered thoughts and beliefs, around learning new writing skills like query writing. Because resistance is actually going to rear its ugly head again and again in the business of writing. And you want to start dealing with it well before you start getting rejections from the people with the power to sell your book for you.
As I mentioned before, a query is a sales tool.
Sales and marketing is a place where a lot of writers run up against BIG RESISTANCE. Again, WHY?
(Coaching is about continually asking WHY until you hit something that feels so soul-baringly true that you can laugh in it’s face because it has no power over you anymore.)
Why DO some writers resist sales writing?
Maybe because sales is about...*dramatic music* *mumbles to self* …making money.
Oh, money. That.
Why would that be a problem for us? When clearly the reason we want to sell our books is to make some money? Why would we feel resistance around the topic of money? We should be diving in and embracing the possibilities, right? Seems reasonable.
And yet the Myth of the Starving Artist is running in the back of our individual and collective minds. This subconscious program, a program that was handed down to us by our parents (or other trusted adults), our culture, or other writers keeps us locked in disempowered beliefs which drive disempowered thoughts and actions.
In other words, our dominant beliefs around making money with our writing can be very messy. So we avoid them.
We believe that writers, on the whole, don’t make money. We were taught that. And let’s face it, we SEE that in our daily lives with stunning regularity. We have evidence, so it isn’t really a fault that we believe it. We learned that writers weren’t valued, so we learned to undervalue writers. But we ARE writers, so for many of us, that means we learned to undervalue ourselves.
And that feels…sticky. Because we’re empowered, and we DO value ourselves, so it must be someone else’s fault that we don’t make money. So whose fault is it? Theirs. Definitely not ours. Because we’re powerless. Because we didn’t choose this. It was given to us.
You see, we have all these conflicting feelings and thoughts and beliefs around money and art and power on the individual level, and on the collective level, we really have manifested a big old mess. It makes complete sense that we would feel a little dissonant, and if we felt dissonant, we might want to step away from it and let someone else handle it. Like, can we just avoid it? Can someone else please clean this up for us so we can get back to writing?
Yet, we know that’s not the way. If we have stuck with it long enough, we know we have to tackle the business part on some level in order to have the dream.
So how do we respond to this INNER DISSONANCE and resistance in a more empowered way?
Empowerment isn’t about beating ourselves up or faking positivity. It’s actually about that moment when we realize we do have a choice and we find the courage to take action, no matter how small it might seem.
So, with that, I want to give you some actionable tips to help you work with this energy if you recognize yourself in any part of this blog post. Because I know there is a part of the collective that feels this deeply. We have years’ worth of evidence built up to support feeling that way. But deep down, we know that in order to change the world, the collective mind, we first have to change our individual minds first.
1. First and foremost, decide to show up powerfully for yourself. You can feel intimidated by the business of writing and still know for sure that you’ll get better at it if you just learn and practice. So say yes to things that help you feel more competent selling your art and managing your financial life as a creative. Choose consciously to stop living in the shadow of your resistance to the thing you fear and step into the light of your choice.
2. Acknowledge and name your feelings of powerlessness when you come across them. We can learn to release those feelings when we’re done with them rather than clinging to them. Therapy is a great help. I know you’ve heard this a million times before, but you don’t have the power to change the past, and the future is an illusion. Meditation is a powerful tool to bring your focus to the present where your power is. Remember that meditation, too, is a practice. It *requires* practice or showing up over and over. If you’ve been practicing clinging for years, expect practicing release to take a little while to catch on. Give yourself time and be gentle with yourself.
3. Know which friends support your growth around this issue and know which ones are likely to use it to drag you back down like that image of crabs in a bucket. I’m not advocating for dropping friends, but it’s wise to know what each friend is good at. Just be mindful who you vent to and who you trust with your goals. If you need to be witnessed, choose someone who can hold space for your growth AND your bummer moments.
4. Journal. What is your own story of resistance between money and art and personal power? What did you learn and internalize about writing and money and power? What is it that people told you about selling art when you were young? What did you hear or see that made you feel like money and art didn’t belong together? What does “selling out” mean to you? Also look for any successful creatives in your life. What do they believe is possible? Did you learn anything from them? Really dig into this and ask yourself if continuing to believe those old stories is helping you or not.
I hope this provided a little peek behind the curtain of resistance.
It’s not always this ugly though.
If you’re not part of this group I’m talking to in this blog post, of course there can be other reasons why you might be resistant to learning how to write a query letter. Sometimes it’s as simple as believing that we’re not good at something. If a writer has built an identity on being a creative person and not being a business person, that might stop them up, too. A writer might also just be afraid of not being good enough or doing it wrong, and not doing it at all means they never have to get rejected. We can have all sorts of self-limiting beliefs that prevent us from moving toward what our hearts and souls desire most. We are strong in our willingness to identify the stories we use to hold ourselves back and rewrite them in a way that lifts us up.
In case you need to hear it, you are a business-savvy writer and you can do this!
If this resonated with you and you want to learn more, make sure you SUBSCRIBE to the blog right below this post, leave a comment, or pass it along. We’re all connected in this collective and never know who you might be helping with a simple share.
Yours in breaking through resistance!
Celeste