Morgan Hazelwood: Writer In Progress
My review of Balticon 51 and the many writing panels I attended there. The panelists were professional writers, editors, and agents.
In real life, people are not necessarily open and honest about their feelings, their intentions, or their actions. Sometimes they try to hide them, and sometimes, they honestly don’t know themselves.
In my 2nd video blog, I discuss:
In real life, people are not necessarily open and honest about their feelings, their intentions, or their actions. Sometimes they try to hide them, and sometimes, they honestly don’t know themselves.
In writing, it adds to a character, helping round them out from 2-dimensions into 3 if you can figure out how to add the sub-text.
Sub-text is how you manage a big reveal or plot twist at the end of your book and have readers go “Oh! Of course!” rather than feeling cheated or misled.
But how do you add subtext to your novel?
Query letters are hard.
They’re a job application to sell a project that you’ve poured your heart, soul, and more-than-just-all-your-free-time into for months, years, or even decades.
But, if you could have told your story in 250 words or less, you wouldn’t have needed to write the whole novel!
The problem is, there are thousands of other writers who (mostly wrongly or naively) think their novel deserves to be published more than yours does. You’re reaching out to agents who’ve seen almost everything and you need to convince them that your novel is different! (Or at least written well enough that readers don’t mind)
Unfortunately, I can’t tell you how to get it right. I don’t know the secret formula either, and I suspect it’s different for every agent, and dependent on how recently that agent had lunch.
But all is not lost!
(Or at least the 1st page)
Let’s take a look at famous 1st lines and see how many of these things they manage. And how they do it…
WRITING TIPS & WRITERLY MUSINGS 