Thread: Query Letter Rejection Competition

All these agents are strangely nice, yet impersonal with their rejections. What if they told us how they really thought?

I'll start off. Mind you, this is not an actual response. Really.



Dear Mr. Smith,

I would thank you for your submission, but honestly I don't normally reply to "writing" of your caliber. I am making an exception in your case for one simple reason. DO NOT ever send me, or any other hapless agent such drivel. EVER.

Let me phrase this in simple terms that your obviously limited vocabulary can understand. You suck. Your lack of comprehension of basic writing skills is only eclipsed by your naiveté in thinking that any person would want to read such a load of crap. I almost fell asleep after the first page, but fate was cruel and I stayed awake throughout the entire first chapter. It was horrible, like watching a passenger train driven by monkeys speeding by. I knew it was going to crash. When it did, I couldn't pull my eyes away from the literary carnage. I wretched involuntarily, then stuck my finger down my throat to consummate the foul, bile effect.
After rinsing my mouth, I located the manual that came with my Blu Ray player. I read it, cover to cover, to reaffirm my belief that there are capable writers, somewhere

To clarify: If you went (back) to third grade and read a basic science text, you would have a better chance of being awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics than you will ever have of becoming an author.

I wish I could sue you for the emotional distress that I have suffered after reading your "manuscript". Unfortunately, if you are as inept at your main vocation as you are at writing, you are undoubtedly "judgment proof".

I'm off to see my therapist now. Don't go away mad. Just go away. Far, far away.

Regards,
I.M. Pretentious
Gatekeeper Literary Group


OK... Your turn.

My second rejection letter, which I got the other day, was from a literary agency composed of three menopausal women, and their rejection letter was quite stubby. It was perfectly cordial, but still, frosty.
If, as you say, they had written what they wanted to, it probably would've looked something like this:


Dear Felix,

Why? Just why? I mean, here I am, sitting here with my feet up, trying to relax a little bit in this office, and then you send me some material! As if it's my job to read the work of unpublished authors, I mean really! If you thought for even a moment that your backhanded attempts at squeezing out a single smidgen of intelligibility from the sea of idiocy that you are clearly infested with, then you were sadly mistaken. Please, stop. Just, stop.

Kind regards,
Miss. Mimsy Darling LaTouche
PMS Associates

Actually, I have a genuine rejection letter where the agent really did speak his mind (and by so doing, taught me more about writing than anyone I've ever come across). This is a rejection letter from the first novel I've ever written, which was completed long before I joined this forum or ever attempted to write a short story. Not only did he critique my first five pages, he critiqued my query letter as well.

Dear Stephanie:

by the name of Aishe is an example of wordy (weak) writing. Edit your manuscript thoroughly and take out such constructions. If you're going to name someone, simply use their name, for example: The sorceress Aishe is far better than The Sorceress by the name of Aishe.

This is usually a rule applied to non-fiction (where shorter and clearer don't need "art" that sometimes fiction needs) but shorter and less clunky constructions are usually a must for all kinds of writing (even if you're using a stilted prose style for a narrator or character don't put such a style in a query).

lay her eyes upon them. Her tear-filled eyes roamed over the familiar landscape as a desolate feeling of hopelessness surged through her body.
Well, actually, that's exactly how you do write sometimes. You often "over write."

Where the narrative is clearly about a character, you need to pick an active voice and simpler taste for construction.

"through her body" = through her

lay her eyes upon X (something) = looked

The prose is too purple (breathless, melodramatic) for me.

“Hey there, girly,” a man called out gruffly. “I bet you know how to show a fellow a good time.”

That is utterly un-original, isn't it?

You could try to be more subtle even if you posit a character being a chauvinistic macho stereotype--even adding something in his dialogue that is unique to the story instead of giving us some recycled cliche from 1,000 B-movies...I challenge you to find ONE sentence in the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy where a character says something that is cliche or trite or unoriginal.

As she hurried through the tangle of bushes and trees, the echoes of the men chasing her slowly faded to nothing, even before the sun was fully hidden beneath the horizon. There were some advantages to having lived a life as part of a nomadic tribe, she thought with satisfaction. She didn’t tire easily. As darkness settled in around her, she remembered how hungry she was, having not eaten anything since sunrise. The thin sliver of the moon in the clear sky provided Aishe enough light to continue through the forest. She was beginning to grow fatigued but wanted to put more space between herself and the village before she stopped. A thorn snagged on her pant leg and she looked down to see that she had stumbled into a group of blackberry bushes.
This final bit disturbs my sense of "realism" even in fantasy--so Aisha is too weak to throw off the assailant without magic but she then outruns them all without magic? I simply don't believe it! This passage doesn't encourage me to read more, it actually encourages me to want to ask the author questions--and if your readers are asking you questions about what the heck is going on in the action of your story, then you're not even writing A-level college undergraduate fiction.

His eyes bore into her and she turned away.
That is one of those classic, laugh out loud purple prose lines. If you imagine the sentence as being literal, well, it's funny in a Bulwer-Lytton sort of way. http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/

But that's not funny and not what you're aiming for.

Your writing in places is good (such as: Instead, she concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other, knowing that if she stopped, the bleakness would consume her again) that was well-written, and effective as a bit of story-telling. It seemed realistic. You allowed the reader into the character nicely there.

Unfortunately, there's too little of that and too much of the other stuff. I have not by any means noted all my objections in this e-mail. But here's one more.

The stilted prose such as: She paid them no attention. That is one example of you describing something in a slightly wordy stilted way. Why not just say "She ignored them?" Does good dramatic writing always have to sound like Emma Thompson? (or like Emma is speaking in a contest requiring her to use five words where three would do)? Of course not! Especially if you are not Emma Thompson.

If you're going to affect a faux-British accent in the narrative then you'll need to be far better than what you've shown here...one difficulty is that any accent or vocal mannerism has to be done well and done consistently, whether it's the narrator or one of the characters. And if it's not an accent, then it's pretense; some form of the writer trying to inject importance or literary merit by way of style rather than substance.

Sorry but while I'm open to reading more from you--you need to first edit your entire manuscript for these sorts of problems--and show me a first five pages that really "grab" the reader and immerse the reader happily and fully into the "fictional dream."

By the way, if you have not read the book THE FIRST FIVE PAGES, by Literary Agent Noah Lukeman, you really should make that your Christmas gift to yourself this year--and read it before re-submitting anything else here, okay? (If you once read it, you haven't applied it yet to your first five pages of Forgotten Legends).

Don't be discouraged, nearly every published successful author goes through some shredding critiques like this. It can only make you a better writer! I hope you find this helpful. Completing a novel is a big deal. Now taking what you learn from that, and writing a new novel, while writing at a higher level, is probably what most writers do. Few sell their first novels FIRST. You might do well (after you read TFFP) to at least begin an entirely new novel, then come back to Forgotten Legends in a month or two. And see what leaps out at you from your own pages that did not leap out so much before.

-Justin

At the time, ouch. In hindsight, massive thank you Justin. Haha

Justin seems like my kind of fella: straight up, no-nonsense, to-the-point criticism. Very helpful tips there, what a gent.

Hopefully I'll have a scathing letter to post here at some point. Looking forward to it .

Wow, that letter is really something. I'm sure that if I get one like that then it'd get to me for a couple of days, but I think it'd do me a lot of good. If I get that lucky then I'll be posting.

Tiamat, you are fortunate to receive such detailed feedback.

The most thoughtful response I got back so far consisted of: "Here's a link to OTHER agents. Please note that we don't handle YOUR kind of work. Good luck finding someone who does."

Constructive criticism, while painful, is so much better than the stony, cold silence I normally get back. That's why I started this thread. Catharsis.

Wow. You are so fortunate to have your work critiqued in so much details. Normally, editors charge money for this kind of service. Yet, you receive such helpful critique of your work for free. The agent is very kind to look at the first five pages of your work and give you a free critique.

I recommend the book The First Five Pages too. I have read it a couple of times and its detailed and encouraging. It gives good insight to how editors approach submitted manuscripts.

Nice critique. That kind of depth certainly seems out of the ordinary. I got a kick out of his mention of the "fictional dream". He is referencing Gardner's idea there, as put forward in Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist.

He seemed to repeat the same criticism again and again, which is to omit needless words. Maybe Strunk and White were on to something ...

I once got a scathing letter from a prospective agent. Him and his letter are buried in an undisclosed location.