Draft Zero to Writing Hero Chapter III: Querying, Revising, and Asking for Help

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"]

Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with Chapter I.

Chapter III: Querying, Revising, and Asking for Help

With my agent spreadsheet made, my query package ready to go, and my stomach freshly emptied of its contents, I began to query my manuscript. I'm an anxious person – and I was even more so at the time, before my anxiety disorder was diagnosed – so it took me a long time to work up the guts to send even one query. In the first four months of querying, I only sent seven emails to agents. Three came back with form rejections, and the other four never got back to me - the "no response means 'no'" situation.

Like most people, I don't take well to rejection. Those few dismissals of my manuscript had me reeling, and after I thoroughly wore out my partner with long-winded descriptions of how complicated querying is, I realized that I needed a support system. I needed other writers. So I headed off to Twitter to see who all was out there, and if anyone was in the same boat as me.

[GIF: Man on telephone in space with text "Is there anybody out there?"]

And hoo boy were there a lot of people in this boat.

So many other people were writing and querying and struggling just like me. Some fellow writers were just getting started, and others had been querying for 10+ years without success. I began commiserating with them on how hard querying was, and congratulating them when things picked up. At last, I had found my people. I finally wasn’t alone in all of this.

As rejections trickled in or never arrived at all, I slowly revised my manuscript, having learned that 170,000 words is far too many for a YA fantasy (in case you're wondering, try to keep YA fantasy to 100,000 or less). And as I worked to reduce my word count, I started to wonder how I could get feedback on my work. I mean, I thought it was perfect, but clearly the agents I'd queried so far didn't agree. It seemed too scary to reach out to complete strangers and ask them to read my writing, pretty-please. But the thought of asking my friends and family was even scarier. So, strangers it was.

Through Writer Twitter, I came across something called #CPMatch or CP Matchmaker. I'd never heard of CP, had no idea what it stood for, and was immediately curious. After visiting the site and reading a bit about the event – in a nutshell, writers can pitch their works-in-progress to other writers who may be interested in being critique partners, better known as CPs (not to be confused with CPS) – I wrote up a few tweets about my manuscript and posted them.

[GIF: Man pressing "Submit" on a computer]

Fortunately, I got a few responses! I exchanged first chapters with about a dozen other writers, and ended up becoming CPs with six of them. Today, I'm still really close with one of my CPs, and I reach out to the others occasionally and keep up with their work. We set up Google Docs with our manuscripts so we could comment on one another’s work and respond to those notes, and on the side we chatted about everything writing-related. After a few months of discussing my plot with my CPs, receiving notes, and bickering about whether that one character was even necessary (which they weren't, my CP was right), I had a pared-down, much more dramatic version of my manuscript. It was almost hard to believe how much my work had changed after just a few more pairs of eyes looked at it.

Not everything with revising was easy, though. Receiving notes, whether it's criticism or compliment, is tough. Nobody wants to delete those words they painstakingly extracted from the depths of their mind. I had to let one CP go because they were only giving me criticism without suggestions on how to make changes. But there was one unexpected benefit that came from receiving so much critique: I became bolder. I began sending off batches of queries, five or six at a time, and keeping meticulous records of everything going on with my query package: 

[Image: Agent spreadsheet]

When I queried an agent, I highlighted their name with yellow in the spreadsheet. If I didn't hear back, or got a "no," I italicized their name and filled in the row with grey. If I got a request for more pages, I highlighted the row with blue. (The colors were just to help me keep track on a more general visual level.) And since a lot of agents will say on their submission page how long their turnaround time is, like "If you don't hear back from me in 6 weeks, I'm not interested," I estimated expected response dates using a time and date calculator. Some agents did take longer than that to respond - I'll get into that in a future post - but for the most part they did reply within that window. 

[GIF: David from Schitt's Creek, "I know, it's a lot to process"]

In the meantime, I looked for help from other sources. I applied to several mentorship programs – you know, the kind of thing where an agented or published writer helps you revise your manuscript and query package – but never got a request for more pages. I tried Twitter pitch events, but didn't get many likes. I even attended a writing workshop in my city where you could pitch to agents face-to-face, and though the two agents I pitched to requested my first 50, I never heard back from either of them again. 

As I hit the 8-month mark of querying, I began to lose steam. I had started with my favorite agents, the ones I really wanted to work with, and as a result, by the time my manuscript was in really good shape I was down to the agents I only felt "meh" about. With each revision, my CPs had fewer and fewer notes to give, and while that's obviously the goal, I was running out of ideas for how to make this manuscript attract agents' attention. Though I was still passionate about this project, something was starting to crack – and it wasn't long before that crack became a chasm.

Continued in Chapter IV...