mmegaera ([info]mmegaera) wrote in [info]query_eagles,
@ 2008-07-10 19:05:00
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Current mood: curious
Entry tags:query proposal

Query Revision: Repeating History
Is it okay to post revisions on a query for critique? If it isn't, just let me know and I'll take the post down. Thanks! Oh, and thank you very much for the comments on my original query. They made all the difference in the world, and caused me to change the second paragraph a great deal to include Chuck's inner journey.

Dear Query Eagles:

They’d all lied. His great-grandfather hadn’t been a hero, in spite of the tales they’d told him all his life. 20-year-old Chuck McManis knew it because he was living those tales. One moment, he’d been strolling the boardwalks at Old Faithful, and the next an earthquake had plunged him eighty years into the past – and into the boots of the man he’d idolized since he was a boy.

No one had said the first word about the terror of wandering the wilderness for days, fighting hunger and dodging bears. No one had mentioned the sheer stupidity it took to get kidnapped by Indians, or the guts he’d had to grow to escape over miles of mountains to civilization, which wasn’t civilization at all by his 1950s standards. Or the courage it took to accept that he couldn’t go back to his own time, to take on his new world, and to live up to Great-Granddad’s legacy. Worst of all, no one had told him that the love of his life was married to another man. Or what would happen to his own personal mobius strip of a life if he didn’t win her for himself.

Then again, no one had mentioned what a pain in the neck his Great-Aunt Ida had been as a kid, either.

Repeating History, a 115,000 word historical adventure novel, is based on several actual events, including the 1959 Hebgen Lake earthquake, the ordeal of Truman Everts, who was lost in the wilderness of early Yellowstone for 37 days, and the 1877 flight to Canada of Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce Indians and the accounts by the early tourists they captured along the way.

I have been researching Yellowstone National Park’s history for many years. My undergraduate degree is in literature and history, and I have a master’s degree in library science.

May I send you more?

Sincerely,

M. M. Justus


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[info]mikandra
2008-07-11 02:38 am UTC (link)
I dunno.

As I said, I liked the tone, but I still don't get a sense of plot. OK, this guy goes back in time and ends up being his own great-grandfather. He finds out life in those days wasn't easy and his great-grandfather didn't lead the life he thought he did. Is that all?

That's what I mean. What important plot device takes over after he's been transported to the past? Or why has he been transported to the past? What becomes his aim once he's in the past?

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-11 03:37 am UTC (link)
He finds out life in those days wasn't easy and his great-grandfather didn't lead the life he thought he did. Is that all?

Is that really all you read out of it?

I'm not sure I could get more detailed without going over a page. I'm bumping up against filling every line as it is, and I'm already hitting the questions you're asking: What important plot device -- "what would happen to his own personal mobius strip of a life" if he didn't fulfill his legacy. Or why has he been transported to the past? -- "to live up to Great-Granddad’s legacy." What becomes his aim once he's in the past? -- again, "to live up to Great-Granddad’s legacy," so that he doesn't break the mobius strip.

Where is the miscommunication taking place? I really want this to work, but I don't understand your point of view. Help?

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[info]mikandra
2008-07-11 04:10 am UTC (link)
Oh.

Like Back to the Future.
Or Groundhog Day
Or Time Past

He's a bad/twisted person and by going back to the past he'll become a better person when he lives the hard life of his great-grandfather, while he makes sure that everything falls into place so his own life can happen.

Maybe I'm looking for something that isn't in the novel, because I've seen varieties on this story so many times before.

[info]mardott might like to comment. In her novel, characters go back to the past and their personal goals became to prevent a disaster happening.

On the other hand, I am not an agent, and I would hardly say that my opinion is standard, but I was looking for something beyond the circular nature of time travel.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-11 04:33 am UTC (link)
Sort of. And, no, he's not a bad/twisted person, he's just got a very bad case of the "I'm not good/smart/etc. enough"s.

It's basically a historical novel with a fish-out-of-water theme, so the something-beyond is everything that happens to force him into becoming a hero. The circularity is just the hook.

Anyway, I do appreciate your input. I just suspect you're not my target audience.

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[info]mikandra
2008-07-11 04:55 am UTC (link)
I read a lot of SF. Is that not your target audience? A lot of people are going to think SF/alternate history when they see this.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the query. I just think that the second paragraph is a scattershot collection of events that, taken together, don't really lead anywhere except that he needs to get everything right. And that precise issue I've seen in lots of other similar stories.

Is there anything specific and historically accurate that you could mention here? Someting like: he must win this battle, but how can he do that while he knows nothing of 19th century weapons and has never ridden a horse?

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-11 05:08 am UTC (link)
No, it's my spin on a fish-out-of-water historical adventure novel with a fantasy element. Not SF, any more than Outlander or many other time travel novels are categorized as SF.

I do appreciate your input. I think we've gotten past the point where it's helpful to me, though. Thanks!

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[info]tesserae_
2008-07-11 04:40 am UTC (link)
What you might do is cut out your two final paragraphs if they're preventing you from giving an agent a sense of the story. Fiction needs *story*, not a platform, is what I keep reading.

And I'm with [info]mikandra - why do we care about his journey? Was his grandfather responsible for some heinous crime (the not-a-hero at the beginning of your query) that Chuck has to struggle with *not* changing, and clean up after? Or does the story lie in how he tries to prevent the heinous crime *without* changing history?

Or is it a classic romance, with the Obstacle to True Love the inherent paradox of time travel - the awful temptation to change history, all dire warnings to the contrary, by marrying someone he wasn't supposed to have?

What's it about, in other words - "Guy goes back in time and stays there" isn't enough, unless you are writing a historical travel book. And what is your theme - what's Chuck's interior journey?

The first two Outlander books, by Diana Gabaldon, are about the power of love and about what people will do to survive - her character *does* try to change things, and the plot's basically that, and of course, it's history, they can't - but they try anyways, because part of survival is surviving with your conscience intact. What is it in your book that pushes Chuck to become a better person than he - or his grandfather - could have imagined being?

(sorry, this got long! But theme is one of one of my interests right now, and how plot & theme weave together...)

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[info]mikandra
2008-07-11 05:01 am UTC (link)
Oooohh! I like the heinous crime!

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[info]tesserae_
2008-07-11 05:08 am UTC (link)
I read and write mysteries. I live for heinous crimes!

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-11 05:23 am UTC (link)
It's an "if I mess things up, will I ever even have the chance to be born" time travel paradox. Personal survival, pure and simple. If he doesn't become the hero he's convinced he can't be, he may well have lost his chance to exist in the first place. Would adding that last sentence help?

I do need a certain amount of platform to get an agent interested in a historical novel (or at least that's what I've read), because of the research that's necessary. I can tell you that earlier versions of the query with the platform got more interest than later versions where I dropped it.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-11 04:00 pm UTC (link)
I should also say that "my" theme (the one that crops up over and over in my writing) is that of second chances. This story is no different.

Sometimes you need a kick in the butt to find out who you really are, is more specific to this particular book.

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[info]tesserae_
2008-07-12 06:07 am UTC (link)
you need a kick in the butt to find out who you really are

Well, yes! And that's something everyone can understand in the context of their own lives. But I think maybe what I'm asking is *what* kicks him in the butt? What does he have to do to to find out who he is, and how does he come to be at peace with that man? Somebody I know says theme is "the one about" and plot is "the one where". So if Outlander is "the one where they try to stop Bonnie Prince Charlie" and Moby Dick is "the one where the guy chases the whale", what's your "one where"?

It seems to me that the agent critiques I've read have been asking that question - not that they want a synopsis, but enough specifics to get a sense of the basic conflicts and the stakes involved.

I hope I'm not just being annoying or obtuse in asking these questions... your book sounds *so* interesting, but I'm feeling like I want to know what the framework is, if it's a mystery or a journey or a romance, you know?

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-12 06:07 pm UTC (link)
*what* kicks him in the butt?

I'm not sure you realize precisely how frustrating it is to have you still asking that question after all this. I've said it as clearly as I can in the query that the kick in the butt is getting flung against his will into situation after situation that are way over his head, and discovering that he can handle it after all. That the man he idolized was only human, because he was that man. That you don't have to be larger than life to be a hero.

But I'm obviously not communicating it properly, because I sent the query off to Jenny Rappaport's assistant, the one who was offering the personalized response to every query until July 23rd, and I got precisely the same response from her last night.

What? Isn't one's own very existence and the existence of one's entire family high enough stakes? I've read wonderful novels where the ultimate stake was far less than that.

You're not being annoying or obtuse, I just don't know what else to do.

As for the framework, it's a historical adventure novel. I say so right out in the query (which was why I was so flabbergasted at [info]mikandra's question "isn't this book SF or alternate history?" since I state the genre in so many words). It's pretty much the opposite of alternate history, and I can't figure out how she could get from my query to alternate history. Yes, it has a romance. Yes, it has a fantasy element. But what it is primarily is the adventures of this man through his own family's past, and what he has to do to keep their future intact.

I am at a complete loss here. Really.

Oh, and Ms. Rappaport's assistant said she couldn't figure out how Chuck's love interest time-traveled. Another thing I really need to know is how on earth Ms. Rappaport's assistant got the idea from the query that Emma had so I can fix that, too.

Help? Please?

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[info]tesserae_
2008-07-12 06:56 pm UTC (link)
I'm not sure you realize precisely how frustrating it is to have you still asking that question after all this

I do, I promise!

the kick in the butt is getting flung against his will into situation after situation that are way over his head

Okay, answer me this: what are those situations, and what/who is the source of the conflict? What do they wake up and battle every day, and what climax does the plot build to?

And since it's fiction and not, say, Into Thin Air, who's the antagonist and what does the antagonist want that conflicts with what the protagonist wants? It's hard to maintain tension in a novel if you are having your protagonist's conflicts come from "nature"; novels where the characters battle a series of floods, hurricanes, plagues of locusts, etc, tend to read like random series of events, even if the personal journey is gripping. It's going to be *more* gripping if the opponent is smarter or more desperate or better armed (or already engaged to the love interest, and determined to keep her because... you see?), because then you are forcing your protagonist to grow as well as survive.

Isn't one's own very existence and the existence of one's entire family high enough stakes

Yes, but it's not a plot. I think your plot may be in the romance angle - tell me what the set-up is with the woman. How does he win her for himself, and does her current husband take exception to that or does he just piss off? What does the woman think? And what's she like? Some random stranger shows up on *my* doorstep telling me we're fated to be together, I'm running for the spray bottle of prozac. How does she respond? How does he persuade her - what throws them together so that he gets the chance to persuade her, rather than ending up with a gut full of buckshot? Maybe she does shoot him, and then has to save his life, and then... Or maybe he hates her at first, but he's got to win her over anyways... Since he's "not a hero", how does that fit in?

Does this make more sense? If it were a movie, what would you tell people about the storyline?

I think you've got something really unique here - I am positive there aren't a lot of time-travel-romance-from-the-guy's-perspective stories out there, but an agent is going to want to see that both characters are well-developed enough to carry the plot, and that the plot is complex enough to give you a good payoff in the end.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-12 09:33 pm UTC (link)
Those situations are, in order, exactly what I said in the query: surviving being lost in the wilderness, getting kidnapped by Indians, escaping and making his way over a hundred miles or so back to civilization (with the woman he ends up marrying and her 13-year-old sister), realizing along the way that he really is when he is and who he is and that he is stuck in this time, struggling to make a success of his new life, and getting the woman he loves (and knows he needs to marry because if he doesn't she won't have his kid, who won't have his kid, who won't have him) to marry him in spite of a number of very stiff obstacles. Then (and this is the part I didn't include in the query, because the query is supposed to be like back cover copy and you're not supposed to give away the whole plot -- in the synopsis, yes, but not in the query), he's pushed into going back to the park by a proposition he can't refuse and a wife who basically had to marry him to save her reputation (she does love him, but he has good reason to think she doesn't), and he almost winds up time-traveling again now that it's the last thing he ever wants to do. And how he discovers that his wife does indeed love him, even after she finds out where he came from. But the thing is, that's the climax of the plot, almost 100,000 words into the story. The story's not about what happened after that, it's what happens after he's flung back in time and how he copes and how he becomes his true self there and then how he fights to keep it.

I know the stakes are not the plot. But the comments I keep getting over and over are that the stakes aren't high enough, and I just don't understand that.

Not every novel has a human antagonist. In one of my alltime favorite novels (Memory by Lois McMaster Bujold) the hero's worst antagonist is himself. There are subsidiary things he fights, but primarily he's fighting himself. Chuck is fighting nature. He's also fighting his own lack of self-confidence and his new world and how it works, and ultimately his ability to take control of his own destiny.

One of the minor antagonists is Emma's first husband, who gets himself shot by the Indians, and is thought dead for a number of chapters before he shows up barely still alive. But he's minor.

And, yeah, even after he's dead, Emma is dubious about Chuck, but there's also her reputation to consider after they've been out in the wilderness together for too long. There's a number of obstacles they have to get through, up to and including the climax of the book. But the romance really is secondary. The ultimate conflict is Chuck against this phenomenon, and how it gives him the chance to be more than he thought he ever could be.

I have a tagline, but it's just more of what you seem to think is inadequate: A young man is thrown back in time into his great-grandfather’s shoes, only to discover that the heroic tales he’s heard about the man all his life aren’t how it really happened at all.

And, yeah, I deliberately set out to write a time travel book about a man getting thrown back in time, because every time travel book I've ever read has been either the woman going back or the man coming forward. Even though I'm female, the male pov comes easier to me, which is why I didn't fling a female forward. That and I'm a western history buff [g].

Thanks for hanging in there with me on this. I really appreciate it.

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[info]tesserae_
2008-07-12 11:09 pm UTC (link)
See, *now* it sounds like a story to me! Maybe the query needs some of what you are describing as your climax, because that bit pulls the stakes out of the abstract and into the world of the story. So, perhaps something like:

*
One moment, he’d been strolling the boardwalks at Old Faithful, and the next an earthquake had plunged him eighty years into the past – and into the boots of the man he’d idolized since he was a boy.

Nobody told him that surviving the wilderness was nothing like the Boy Scouts. There are the bears, for one thing, and the Indians, for another; but just when Chuck thinks he's got his new life figured out and he's ready to focus on getting back to his own time, a chance encounter with a beautiful blond and her obnoxious younger sister lets him know in no uncertain terms that the past is now his country.

Because the blond is his own great-grandmother, only she's married to another man. If Chuck can't persuade her to marry him, his whole family will disappear. But Chuck's great-grandfather was up to more than the family history knew, and when one of those schemes comes to light, Chuck is suddenly faced with the decision of two lifetimes: to head back into the Park and shut the scheme down, or leave the woman he's come to love and return to his own time.
*

Obviously, it's your story, and entirely likely that I'm still misinterpreting the overall idea. But it seems to me that an agent is going to want to see that you've got a compelling narrative to weave your themes and big ideas into - that you've got a story that's structured well enough to carry those ideas. And I think you've got that, it just wasn't clear in your focus on your theme that you had a lot of cool *story* going on as well.

(And yes, I know there are all kinds of books out there without human antagonists. Into the Wild, which is non-fiction, and Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man are also excellent examples of man v. nature stories that also happen to question the myth of man v. nature, which is what makes them far more interesting than they would be if they just told their stories. But if story without theme is one-dimensional *cough*Dan Brown*cough*, you can't have theme without story, either. Or you can, but then you get Henry James.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-12 11:39 pm UTC (link)
Well, something had to be carrying Chuck along for 115,000 (originally 159,000 [cough], not to mention the entire original second half that had to be jettisoned) words. And it wasn't just theme, honest.

No, you're not misinterpreting the overall story (which also bodes well since that means I must have managed to explain it reasonably coherently).

Or you can, but then you get Henry James.

ROFL Speaking as a former English major, heaven forbid.

I'm gonna feel like I'm cheating if I take what you've written and work with it and make it fit the actual story and then repost it here and use it to, er, actually query with. Am I?

Also, someone else commented on the fact that all I say about Chuck is that he's 20 and he's idolized his great-grandfather. I suppose I need to get across that he's got severe delusions of inadequacy at the beginning of the book, since the point of the entire thing is that he's a whole new confident man at the end. Urgh. Would you agree with that?

I know I keep saying thank you, but -- thank you.

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[info]tesserae_
2008-07-13 12:28 am UTC (link)
I'm gonna feel like I'm cheating if I take what you've written and work with it

No, knock yourself out. Let me know if it works!

And as far as Chuck goes, I'd think about maybe describing him in terms of what's put him at a place where he's vulnerable to being dropped back in time - what's he doing in his ordinary world? Where's the insecurity gotten him so far?

thank you.

You're welcome.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-13 12:38 am UTC (link)
Yeah, I had a brain spurt and I think I've got his description down better now.

And I shall. I've already begun. Brace yourself for version #8 in the next couple of days [g].

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-15 10:02 pm UTC (link)
Well, I've been trying for the last three days. It won't adapt. Nor can I seem to start from scratch and come up with anything different than what I already had.

Chuck's story is the one where --

If Moby Dick is the one where Ahab chases the whale, then Chuck's story is the one where he becomes his own great-grandfather. The problem with both of those is that neither one tells what the story is about. And I'm not sure how that's applicable to writing the query.

Anyway, just to say that I have been trying. I was really hoping to have this together by the time I leave for WorldCon on the 27th (with a stop at the Park in between). I don't think I'm going to make it.

Oh, well.

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[info]sodyera
2008-07-11 02:41 pm UTC (link)
"Is it okay to post revisions on a query for critique?"
Hey, it took me seven tries here before I got mine right.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-11 02:50 pm UTC (link)
Glad to hear I'm not the only one. This is actually revisions on the seventh version of this query [g].

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[info]mikandra
2008-07-13 07:20 am UTC (link)
Uhm - *G* - I hope you don't think that any of us writes a perfect query in just one or two drafts? *coughs* I think I must have about twenty versions of the query for one of the books I'm sending around now.

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-13 06:26 pm UTC (link)
I've never written this many drafts of anything before, to be honest. It's got me kind of running in circles trying to bite my own butt.

I'm more a "think this thing through really hard, take my time getting it down on paper the first time, then polish the thing and I'm done" sort of writer. Multiple drafts are not my style.

I suppose I can get used to it, but, boy, I really don't want to.

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[info]talithakalago
2008-07-12 11:56 pm UTC (link)
I love the first line and the last line of paragraph one.

There are a few things you shove in very awkwardly--Eg: the character's age and the year he was from. Also, was there are boardwalk at old Faithful in the 1950s? I have no idea.

The second paragraph is too repeadative. Tell us what happens, what the stakes are and who is enemies are, don't just list a random selection of threats. You have to tell us what the PLOT is. Where is the story?

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[info]mmegaera
2008-07-13 12:22 am UTC (link)
I've been researching Yellowstone's history for nine years. There were boardwalks beginning in the 1940s. And there were tourists as early as the 1870s, and, yes, the Nez Perce Indians actually did cross the park in their flight to Canada in 1877 and kidnap some tourists along the way. I have the primary sources to prove it [g]. [/pedantic former librarian]

Sorry. If I had a nickel for every time someone's questioned my research on this thing, I wouldn't need to bother to attempt publication.

I am reworking the second paragraph as we speak (well, sort of). To do a better job with the story part.

Thanks for the input!

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