Hello, dreamers. The time has come at last. My query prep is finished. My agent list is set. Tomorrow morning, my querying mission resumes at last.

The past week has been an unexpected whirlwind of activity. Despite my original intention to “stand pat”, and simply roll with my query packet as it stood during my last query round, well…I’m me. So early last week, I went ahead and modified my query letter, then turned it over to my critique group. I honestly thought my QL was pretty good (it wasn’t much different from the one I’d used in the last round). But my CPs had some notes, and I ended up reopening things.

What followed was an abbreviated return to the “Query Madness” that overtook me last August: I began writing query letter after query letter, struggling to find a way to break out of the rut I’d settled into. In the end, thanks to my esteemed CP Autumn Bauman, I finally realized what the problem was:

The stakes.

I’ve said it so many times: as a writer, the more you look at something you’ve written, the more you find you can live with it. After putting in so much time and hard work on a project, it gets easier and easier to let “This is fine” become your mantra. As longtime reader will know, I’ve long dreaded falling into what I call the Perfection Trap. After spending all the time and effort needed to write a novel, it can be too easy to keep making very minor changes, always telling yourself there are ways to make it better. Sure there are. There always will be. But if you keep making minor adjustments, you risk falling into an endless cycle where you keep window dressing and never actually take the next step and query a novel.

The thing is, over the past year I’ve come to realize that while it’s important to not make endless minor adjustments, it’s equally crucial to recognize areas where the story needs to be improved. And my fear of falling into the perfection trap blinded me to some key areas where my story could be improved. Particularly the stakes.

So, now that I’ve used that term several times, casual readers may be wondering, “Just what the heck are the stakes of a novel, and why are they so important?”

The Stakes

Most readers probably know the basics in terms of what’s required in a novel. But there are three key features agents look for in any modern novel: intentionality, growth, and stakes. And particularly in modern genre fiction, the stakes are crucial.

But simply, the stakes encompasses what characters risk if they fail in whatever it is they’re trying to do in a story. Every novel revolves around the main character or characters’ journey. They have something to do. And for the reader to get invested in the story, they need to know why that something is important.

In romance novels, it’s usually obvious: the old “Will they/won’t they”. Will the two people get together and live happily ever after? That’s partly why romance novels tend to be viewed as “cozy reading”: the stakes are pretty low. The word “cozy” has come to be used in the modern literary market to describe any story with fairly low stakes. The fate of the world isn’t hanging in the balance, so the story makes for easy reading.

But while there is, in fact, a growing market for cozy science fiction, generally speaking sci-fi isn’t cozy. Sci-fi novels tend to thrive on high-stakes action, with deep philosophical questions underpinning vast plots where the very fate of humanity is at risk.

A good query letter is built around the stakes of the story. I’ve learned a query letter should be a crescendo: each chapter must ratchet up the stakes, leading to the final sentence (I call it the Or they’re doomed! sentence). It’s easy to feel a bit hokey, but again it’s important to remember the purpose of a query letter. You’re not trying to tell an agent about your story; you’re trying to persuade them to read it. So it really pays to be dramatic.

Of course, another thing I’ve learned is that writing a query letter can expose flaws in a story. And while writing my query letter, I began to worry that the stakes weren’t high enough.

Essentially, the main action of Seven Days on Samarkand revolves around a group of three people struggling to survive without support on an alien world, as they survey a forested valley for the site of their colony. Now, looking at the novel from the perspective of someone who’s seen the whole thing, I felt the stakes were plenty high. And readers probably would, too. They’ll become invested in Rand, Nina, and Ford as characters, and once they’re staring death in its toothy, reptilian face, readers will very much want those characters to survive. But I was failing to look at the novel holistically.

The fact is, while no doubt Rand, Nina, and Ford view their struggles as incredibly high-stakes (I mean, everybody wants to not die, right?), for their colonial venture on the whole, their loss would represent only a minor setback. So the first humans they sent down bit it. Bummer. They can just send more. I needed a way to make their mission more pressing; to make the fate of the entire colony mission hinge on their success. And I found the answer sitting right there in my manuscript: logistics.

Throughout the early chapters, I had characters discussing the thin margins of their allotted supplies. Because their ship is an enormous spacecraft, mass is a serious consideration. Thus, the ship is carrying only finite amounts of everything…including food. I’d said it, but hadn’t really expanded on it. So there it was, right there: my high-stakes. Rand and Nina must succeed in finding a site for the colony. If they don’t, all the colonists might end up starving to death in orbit.

So the first step was modifying my manuscript. That didn’t take as much time and effort as I’d expected; as I said, the framework was already there, I just hadn’t made use of it. Once the MS was complete, I got to work on my query letter. The result was a much sharper, more compelling pitch. At last, I was ready.

As a novelist, it’s hard to look at your work holistically. You view the novel as an interconnected series of events. But to effectively sell a novel, you have to view it as an object. It’s not a chronicle of events; it’s a thing to sell. Once you’re able to truly view your work as the sum of its parts, you’re ready to send it out into the world, and see what everyone else thinks. – MK