The Write Slice: Write or Wrong

A couple of months ago in my writing group, we applied the advice by Kelley Lindberg in a query letter workshop. I took in a query letter that I thought was a pretty decent first draft, but quickly realized it needed a lot of work. But doesn't everything? Of course they gave me specifics to fix, but they helped me realize some things that are more general to any query letter. Mostly, through their questioning, they helped me understand my own story better. First of all, I thought my opening paragraph was fairly intriguing, but quickly discovered it absolutely was not accomplishing my purpose. I had written, "Late medieval England is not the place to find a love triangle between a peasant girl, a nobleman's son, and a prince...or is it?" I was trying to show that my character was unconventional, but that opening paragraph did not capture that for my audience. Instead, my group suggested I use a specific scene that would capture her character. Near the beginning ...

I have a friend who got me interested in a graphic novel series: Fables by Bill Willingham. It is a series that supposes all fablekind was forced out of their lands and now have a secret society in NYC. It's a fascinating story, but most definitely for adults. Graphic novels are not a genre I'm terribly familiar with (for those who don't know the lingo think "comic books"). Before this series, it had been years since I had read Persepolis and decades before that since I had read comics. And it is a genre that you read differently from other genres. Because of the nature of the genre, nearly the entire story is told via dialog with an occasional time or place marker. Especially as I started reading the series, however, I read it like a novel. Meaning, I followed along from frame to frame reading all the dialog and forgetting to look at a lot of the pictures. I would kind of have to force myself to actually look at the images. But the interesting thing was, ...