Tell me why my paranormal story is cliched/boring/cpnfusing.

I've been trying for a long time to figure out just how to sell interest in my story. I haven't actually reached the point of submitting it yet, but it is fast approaching and past and recent query versions and in fact, all attempts at trying to sum it up have elicited responses that are somewhat disheartening. I'm hoping you guys can help me figure out whether the problem is with my story itself, or just the way I'm presenting it.

Here goes:

Cyril is a telepath who seeks to unravel a conspiracy, gets taped evidence that proves it exists and identifies who's orchestrating it... but mysteriously disappears before exposing it. He leaves in his wake, a dead man and a journal with his account on the significance and location of the tapes for the man who finds it.

The book starts here, with the detective investigating the murder of the dead man. He finds the guy's wallet, but the ID inside doesn't belong to the victim. It belongs to the Cyril. Thus, the detective heads to the Cyril's apartment, believing him to be a prime murder suspect. There, he encounters the journal and learns the story of the telepath's life. He finds the material hard to believe, but as the night progresses, and the murder investigation uncovers new and baffling details, he starts to realize the truth in what he's reading. The journal itself is given out bit by bit, starting about 20 pages in, and consists the majority of the book(70-75%). The detective slowly evolves from narrative device to major actor when he finally accepts that he must find the tapes and carry out what Cyril was unable to.

Of course, you don't get close to unmasking a conspiracy without stepping on a few toes. Cyril left something else for the detective - competition. Three other parties want the tapes. The people behind the conspiracy, obviously. The FBI, who Cyril "borrowed" the tapes from, and who have their own reasons to keep the contents confidential. And a group of other telepaths, who introduced Cyril to the conspiracy to begin with and helped him investigate - until he found reasons he shouldn't trust them any longer. These three groups are shown searching for the tapes from the start though their identities aren't fully revealed until the detective reads about them in the journal. However, due to conflicts between the three of them, no group is able to make advantage of their head start over the detective and get the tapes. Of course, Cyril is still around as a wild card too. This all leads to a final four-way confrontation near the end.

This is the the basic set up of the story. Like I said, the bulk of it is Cyril's account of his journey, but the way I have it set up adds a lot more excitement to the story, I think. The journal article and real time events build upon one another, so I can set up good cliffhangers at the end of each scene, both the past ones and the present ones.

Anyway, I ask for you to be as brutal as you can in your critiques of my structure. No one would hate it more than I, if this story came out confusing, or worse unimaginative. I understand I've left out a lot about the nature of the conspiracy(which is actually non-paranormal - how could a telepath spend time in a major city and not come across a conspiracy?) and the specifics of the paranormal activity, and I'll add those later, but for now, any thoughts on the way I've set up the story would be greatly greatly appreciated.

Thanks for the responses. I've heard something similar about the journal format before, but I don't see why it has to be uninteresting. I mean, I know the feeling when shows or movies do the flashback thing poorly and you get a show that is out of order for no reason, or as a cheap method to create tension, but it's something I've tried to avoid here. The book opens with characters conflicting, showing strong emotion over these tapes, but the detective has no idea of their motivation or even their existence. The book is his cliff notes explanation of the strange world he's starting to find himself in. Are there any examples you can think off that do the flashback/journal thing well in your opinion? I'll probably query with it this way to start with, just because so much time went into making it snap, but if it fizzles, I'll just start the book at the first journal entry and go linearly.

I have issues with conspiracies, government agencies and psychics who aren't capable of searching a guys apartment.

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This is just an issue with the summarization. One of the groups actually does reach the apartment before the detective and does find a copy of the journal Cyril left behind on his laptop. The version Burton gets is handed to him by Cyril's next door neighbor, who was given specific instructions to give it to the first cop that came by.

As for the body being revealed as someone familiar issue, well, it would seem a lot more hokey if it was just some random bum pulled off the street. I can definitely understand how it would be cruel if revealing who it is was some big confusion, but that information comes out less than halfway through the book.

The book is really about trust and misplaced trust. A telepath should be able to know exactly who to trust and who not to because he can hear their thoughts, but Cyril finds that's not the case, both at the personal level and at a societal level(which is really what the conspiracy is about, the specifics don't matter, it's really just the nature of it). That's the feeling he passes on to the detective through the journal. The detective both learns why he should trust the words he sees on screen and not trust the people working around him as he reads more from the journal and starts seeing proof around him. The question is, can he figure out who he should help and do it in time?

Whew, more responses. Thanks guys!

Now, if this was just shorthand for the post, that's cool, and I might just be out of the loop as a newbie to the board. But if you have something of the same problems in your query and synopsis, you need to address them before sending it out again.

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Yes, absolutely this is just for the summary. The query starts with the detective walking in on the murder scene, and takes his POV from there. I also haven't really sent it out yet. I'm just trying to absorb early responses about the plot.

But why not make it more cryptic? That way you can mix things up a bit and give your dective a more active role in this story. For example, the diary could lead your detective to other sources who elaborate on the story (a bartender who tells a little bit of the story he's witnessed, or whatever).

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He does do this! He gets eyewitness accounts from people who saw strange occurances related to the murder. He gets bits and pieces from the FBI agents which corroborate what he's reading in the journal. He talks to various CSI techs who have found details that make no sense without the context of the journal.

Have a chapter with the detective trying to solve the mystery (3rd limitedPOV), alternating with chapters showing Cyrus' story (1st POV). The thing is to sprinkle the clues between the two narratives and to link the narratives in some places (Cyrus' perspective on a character or location vs. Detective's)

This can help provide you with some good dramatic irony that will help keep tension in your story.

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This is exactly the story format. The detective is essentially trying to solve the murder with the clues he's getting about the overall case from Cyril's journal. He carries the journal around on his PDA and reads in between new discoveries. Along with his 3rd person accounts, there are interspersed accounts from the other three parties trying to get the tapes. All four of them come into contact with each other over the course of night but they don't come into direct conflict until the last scene. About halfway through the journal the story starts twisting so it isn't clear which of the three groups is behind the murder and who is trustworthy. It isn't until the last entry that the truth becomes apparent and even then the issue of who gets the tape is still up in the air.

Edit: Lol Deleyan, yeah, the detective does have a name. Almost all the characters have names. I just didn't want to make things more confusing than they already were by tossing them in.

Thanks for the summary. Those points are all valid concerns and are addressed to some degree or other(many, knocked out by the fact my telepathy only has a range of about 20 ft and is just the passive hearing of thoughts).

I also promise the ending of the journal isn't something like "And now I am finally ready to tell you, the tapes have been strapped to the dead man's legs all along!" The detective needs to do some detecting by reading what the entire journal has to say. Without forcing him to learn the whole story, he'd be just as likely to return the tapes to the FBI, and anyone else who got their hands on the journal would know exactly where to find tapes from the start.

I always feel unclean whenever I drop the C-word for the exact reason you described, but I have yet to come up with something that saves me about 10 lines of valuable advertising space in queries or other summaries.

For example, this is as short as I can explain it:

The "conspiracy" , a business one, is a scheme to suppress certain(very specific) alternative energy research projects. Cyril gets introduced to it because a professor he is good friends with suddenly vanishes, but only realizes the incident isn't isolated when another group of telepaths tell him. This group doesn't have any personal connection to the project and are investigating it to, let's say, do good. However, they quickly convince Cyril to join even though he isn't keen on their methods, because he does have this personal connection. As Cyril's investigation starts turning up puzzle pieces that don't fit and the FBI's own investigation of the missing professor starts taking an unhealthy interest in Cyril's personal life, he realizes that everyone may have ulterior motives that he's not skilled enough to see. So yeah, Cyril does eventually try to root out the conspiracy, but the real story is about his struggle to get back his life and figure out who, if anyone, he should trust, even when he can supposedly see their innermost secrets. The journal is his way of passing on what he's learned so the detective can finish the job without making the same mistakes. Now, the Detective, as a decent civil servant, has a sense of obligation to find the truth, putting him in the same position as Cyril was at the start. Exactly the same, because he really has no reason to trust Cyril.

The responses I've gotten here so far seem to say the problem's with the presentation. But how would I sum up something like what I have above? If I try to say too much about Cyril, new people worry about a journal getting too much airtime. If I don't say enough about Cyril's story, everything sounds cliche or tenuous - telepaths fighting federal agents fighting masterminds of a conspiracy, with the one good cop trying to unmask a decades old secret and save humanity. The market's saturated with things like that. Even the version above has cliches(an underground society of telepaths, a vast alternate energy conspiracy) that are dealt with in the book, but I can't sum it all up.

I know more talented writers have written far more complex stories with more complex structures, but any way I market mine is either confusing, hackneyed or way too long. Should I just hope that the agent doesn't throw away the letter in disgust and actually reads the 5 pages?

Alright, I'll rethink my strategy. First, I'll focus on finishing the editing. All this summary agonization is drawing time away from actual writing.

Thanks for your insight guys.

This is roughly what happens - that is something happens in the journal which correlates with what something that follows in a real time scene(or vice versa). But no one is actually psychic, they just hear thoughts. Occasionally that level of understanding can help them predict what a person can do next, but it's not actually seeing the future.

I appreciate the advice because it would heighten tension in a story format, but I try to steer far far away from any sort of time travel and visions. Maybe it's because I can never get around the corny ways that these things are accomplished, but I absolutely hated Deja Vu, and Minority Report only had my interest because of the action and Spielberg's visual portrayal of the future. Telepathy, I can accept, as simply a way of deciphering someone's brain signals from a distance. Telekinesis is a bit tougher (mostly because its hard to figure out any limits or control mechanism) but I can swallow it. Time-travel though completely warps the fabric of reality. I don't think we understand the nature of time well enough for authors to employ it, without making it come out like a deus ex machina. That's just my reaction to it at least.