Questions about query letters

brandileigh2003 said:

1- Using a question in your hook- is it taboo or personal preference of agent? "They" say never to use questions in queries. That being said, I've seen countless "winning queries" where there were questions. My opinion? Don't do it. For many, it's an instant turn off = rejection.

For example- How can love be a good thing when it hurts more than helps?

2- Is a hook necessary, or again is this preference? I have heard many say that your first sentence should be a hook, something to immediately draw in agent, and others say you should begin
--Title is a 100k fiction...
Or, I met you at ABC conference...

A hook is preferred, but again, there are plenty of queries that don't have them. I advise to go right into the query and put personal info, word count, etc. at the bottom. Again, it's not a terrible idea to have a short blurb at the top if you've met the agent before. For example:

Dear Agentwhosgonnarepme,
We met at X conference last year and you mentioned you loved mss with talking animals and aliens.

And then go right into the query with personal info / word count at the bottom.

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Good luck! I'm sure you'll get a plethora of contradicting advice because truly, there's no right way.

I agree with Cricket. Query Shark and other query advice blogs are very anti-rhetorical question and pro-hook upfront.

Personally, I'm including a concise introductory sentence ("Dear Ms. Agentname, I'm seeking representation of MY NOVEL, a 100,000-word literary thriller" - then launch into hook) just so that essential info is there right off the bat. You could work it into your hook. I've read quite a few agents expressing a preference for getting this info at the beginning rather than the end of the query.

The trouble I see in so many of these hooks (at QueryShark and Evil Editor) is that the questions are badly worded or the only answer to the questions is "Who cares?" e.g.

What would you do if the only thing you believed in turned out to be the very thing that your mother told you on her deathbed was the thing you should never believe in?

or

What are the limits of science in determining love vs. evil in context of the acquisitive impulse as witnessed by the industrialized conscience?

You REALLY have to write a question that makes the reader wonder.

Miss Plum said:

What would you do if the only thing you believed in turned out to be the very thing that your mother told you on her deathbed was the thing you should never believe in?

or

What are the limits of science in determining love vs. evil in context of the acquisitive impulse as witnessed by the industrialized conscience?

You REALLY have to write a question that makes the reader wonder.

Click to expand...

Wah?

Okay, believing that the examples above are very much tongue-in-cheek, a comment from the world of screenwriting:

"How can love be a good thing when it hurts more than helps?"

Is not a hook. It is a tag line, the kind of thing a marketing department comes up with to put on the one sheet (movie poster). It is not the sort of thing that makes anyone want to see the movie (or request a partial) because it doesn't mean anything. It could apply to a thousand different books or movies or TV shows. It sounds like a line of dialogue from Friends.

A hook is the one line that describes your plot and makes your would-be reader or viewer or agent say "that's interesting, I haven't seen that before, I have to know how that story turns out." A hook, in other words, is high concept. These are terribly done, but you get the idea:

-A young boy discovers he's a wizard and is sent to a secret wizarding school where he learns he's the only survivor of a deadly spell.

-A girl returns to her family home to find a cure for a curse that is causing her feet to turn to glass.

-A five-year-old boy raised in a single room must escape from the man who has held him and his mother captive.

-A young woman falls in love with a man who travels through time uncontrollably.

All are novels, obviously, and most literary fiction. It can be done. A hook is what is driving your book, the underlying question that must be solved. At their best, they give the reader an idea of a unique problem that is big enough to drive an entire plot and get them started thinking about how they would handle the same issue.

As a side note, it's not necessary to have a high-concept hook. In a novel they can be much softer:

-A young man rides his horse away from his troubled family and tries to build a new life in Mexico.

-A man tries to reclaim the love of his youth, having waited sixty years for his beloved's husband to die.

Note that these softer plots may be of less interest from a beginning writer. An agent reading your query letter might not trust that an unknown writer will have the chops to pull those two stories off as well as Cormac McCarthy and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

In short, a good hook makes an agent think your book can be marketed, has a target audience, and will sell.