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Dear [Agent]:
Growing up in Louisville in the 1960s, teenage Susanna has always loved Mama’s adventuresome nature, and she’s been happy to take care of her younger siblings so Mama can be free to spin fantasies and fun – that is, until her sister has a dangerous encounter with drunken Uncle George at one of Mama’s parties. Suddenly Mama’s eccentricities seem irresponsible, even dangerous. Worse, Mama minimizes her brother’s behavior and convinces Daddy to forgive him.
Appalled, Susanna escapes to the farm next door and her friendship with Calvin, whose steadfast nature has been a comfort since they were small. By the time Calvin enlists in the army to escape his father’s control, Susanna has secretly fallen for him. Within weeks, he’s fighting in Vietnam. While Susanna is still angry with her parents, Calvin provides an unexpected source of wisdom – he’s the most principled person she’s ever known, so when he writes of impossible choices with no right answers and how good people can be changed by terrible circumstances, she begins to realize nothing is as simple as she’d once believed.
When Susanna discovers a horrifying secret in the hayloft, she suddenly finds herself faced with impossible decisions – ones that will impact her own beloved brother, a boy she’s loved and cared for as if he were her own child. She must choose between denial and accountability, condemnation and forgiveness, and she’s determined not to repeat her parents’ mistakes even as she begins to understand how they may have made them. And as her relationship with Calvin intensifies, love and life will never be the same.
HIDDEN IN TALL GRASS is a work of women’s fiction and is complete at approximately 118,000 words. I have [credits/credentials redacted].
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Angie H.
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2 comments:
I think the best thing you could do is shorten this up. Try to get the essence of your story with a little of the voice in five or six sentences. That said:
I think I would focus your pitch around the ideas in this sentence:
She must choose between denial and accountability, condemnation and forgiveness, and she’s determined not to repeat her parents’ mistakes even as she begins to understand how they may have made them.
Maybe a sentence to lead to this, and a couple sentences to follow it.
And I would emliminate words like suddenly, and don't introduce more character's names than your mc if possible.
These are just my thoughts. I've been through the query process, meticulously revised my pitch paragraph and ended up with a high request rate and have found representation.
My original pitch was about the same length as yours and I carved away at it and rewote it until it was much shorter.
If you'd like to see it, I've posted it on my blog on the page called Placement.
Good luck with this. It sounds like an interesting story!
I agree with Paul - it really needs to be shortened and then tightened. I lost interest in the first paragraph - there was too much going on for me.
I think the idea sounds really promising and congrat's on writing over 100,000 words!
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