Needed: unique premise and strong voice

Querytracker.blogspot.com had a pitch contest a couple weeks ago. I made a few changes to my pitch and first paragraph for Raining Toward Heaven (women's fiction), felt it was the greatest thing going, and submitted. The day after submitted I re-read it, and groaned. Did I actually submit this thing? It was just so ... blah.
So, no surprise that I didn't show up with the winners. But, I always learn a lot from the winners and from the agent's comments about why he picked them. I learned a lot from the winners at another contest over at kidlit.com (I didn't find out about this one in time to enter).

But there is another contest open now at guidetoliteraryagents.blogspot.com, for middle grade submissions. I will be submitting my pitch and first 194 words of Valley of the Unicorns there shortly, but for the past week everyday I have been eyeing that one sentence pitch and those first couple paragraphs with a critical (sometimes hopeful, sometimes despairing) eye and re-writing, re-wording, and brainstorming.

What I've learned over the past few months from following these blogs and other agents/writer's blogs has made me completely revise my first chapter, twice. Now as I'm working on perfecting my pitch, concentrating on two things that I'm hearing over and over again from agents: they are looking for 1) a unique premise and 2) a strong voice.

Neither of which I have, exactly. But I keep repeating these two facts to myself like a mantra, and brainstorming.

Prologues that aren't really prologues

In my recent analyses of 19 Minutes, by Jodi Picoult, and the Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan, I noticed something interesting...

These two books are written for entirely different audiences, are entirely different genres, and even written in different POVs, but they had one thing in common.

Both start with a very short (less than 150 words) sort of prologue, though it isn't set apart as a prologue.

From 19 Minutes:

In nineteen minutes, you can mow the front lawn, color your hair, watch a third of a hockey game. In nineteen minutes, you can bake scones or get a tooth filled by a dentist; you can fold laundry for a family of five.

Nineteen minutes is how long it took the Tennessee Titans to sell out of tickets to the play-offs. It's the length of a sitcom, minus the commercials. It's the driving distance from the Vermont border to the town of Sterling, New Hampshire.

In nineteen minutes, you can order a pizza and get it delivered. You can read a story to a child or have your oil changed. You can walk a mile. You can sew a hem.

In nineteen minutes, you can stop the world, or you can just jump off it.

In nineteen minutes, you can get revenge.

The beginning of the Lightning Thief:

Look, I didn't want to be a half-blood.

If you're reading this because you think you might be one, my advice is: close this book right now. Believe whatever lie your mom or dad told you about your birth, and try to lead a normal life.

Being a half-blood is dangerous. It's scary. Most of the time, it gets you killed in painful, nasty ways.

If you're a normal kid, reading this because you think it's fiction, great. Read on. I envy you for being able to believe that none of this ever happened.

But if you recognize yourself in these pages - if you feel something stirring inside - stop reading immediately. You might be one of us. And once you know that, it's only a matter of time before they sense it too, and they'll come for you.

Don't say I didn't warn you.

Both of these intros are not scenes, because they don't involve any characters, action, setting or dialogue - they are just narrative. But they both set the tone of the book, reveal the voice, and create suspense that makes you keep reading.I immediately sat down a re-wrote the first 200 words of Valley of the Unicorns, to try to accomplish the same three goals: tone, voice, suspense. I'll tackle Raining Toward Heaven next, but of course it's a lot harder than it looks.

Here's a sort of related article from PubRants that I found helpful: Why Prologues often don't work.

Analyzing the Lightning Thief

The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan.

This is an upper middle grade fantasy, a la Harry Potter except the "school" is for half-bloods - children with one parent who is a Greek God, instead of a school for wizards. My book the Valley of the Unicorns is middle grade level, so I am really studying the craft of this best-seller. I am also eager to read the next book in the series.

What I learned from the Lightning Thief:

Each chapter is its own little mini-adventure. Some monster or bully or god must be faced or fought, some kind of race or challenge won, some friend or family member saved from terrible disaster. Each chapter has a funny title, such as "I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher", and "We Visit the Garden Gnome Emporium."

Coincidently, just noticed an article, Tips on Middle Grade fiction: What Kids Love at the excellent blog, Guide to Literary Agents. I'm glad to see that my observations on the Lightning Thief line up well with the article's.

Humor is rampant, and even if it's not even remotely realistic, it's still fun. For instance:

See, bad things happen to me on field trips. Like at my fifth-grade school, when we went to the Saratoga battlefield, I had this accident with a Revolutionary War cannon. I wasn't aiming for the school bus, but of course I got expelled anyway. And before that, at my fourth-grade school, when we took a behind-the-scenes tour of the Marine World shark pool, I sort of hit the wrong lever on the catwalk and our class took and unplanned swim. And the time before that... well, you get the idea.

Not in every chapter, but in many of them, the author takes a strange, fantastical scene - such as a scene of the dead filing into Hades - and puts a familiar, funny twist on it. For instance:

There were three separate entrances under one huge black archway that said YOU ARE NOW ENTERING EREBUS. Each entrance had a pass-through metal detector with security cameras mounted on top... the dead queued up in three lines, two marked ATTENDANT ON DUTY, and one marked EZ DEATH. The EZ DEATH line was moving right along. The other two were crawling.

Summary: you can get away with exaggerating humor for midde-graders. You have to have constant adventure/action. You have to link fantasy with real-world things.

Analyzing 19 Minutes, by Jodi Picoult

My spring break: relaxing on the beach at Hilton Head, S.C. with the sun on my head, my feet in the surf, and Carey and Anne giggling ecstatically over discoveries of shells and sand dollars and starfish.

The rest of my spring break: reading in various contorted positions (timeshares do not come with comfortable sofas, chairs, or beds). Nevertheless, the books were hard to put down.

19 Minutes, by Jodi Picoult.
Chose this book because I recently discovered that "women's fiction" is a high on the list of genres that agents are looking for. I'm pretty sure my book Raining Toward Heaven falls in the Women's fiction genre, but I figured I'd better start reading heavily in this genre to learn more about it (Also recently finished Lisa Samson's the Church Ladies, another excellent women's fiction book). I'm new to Jodi Picoult, but I'll definitely be reading more her books after this one.

Actually I'm not sure if this book was women's fiction, it really fit more in the mainstream "high concept" category. It's a very well-crafted fictional account of a high-school massacre similar to the one in Columbine, exploring the motivation behind the killer, and the impact of his act on the community, his family, his closest friend, and himself.

What I learned from 19 Minutes:

How characterization, depth and suspense is built in a series of relatively short scenes and shifting points of view. Each scene starts with some simple action that also serves as characterization and provides setting, moves into the character's thoughts, and includes some interaction and dialogue. Sometimes the order is different - sometimes the dialogue comes first, sometimes the thoughts come first. Many of scenes (especially in the beginning) are unusual, for instance a teenager forcing herself to take a scalding hot shower, a midwife delivering a baby, a judge forgetting her backdoor key and having to enter the court building by the front entrance along with everyone else, a professor whose occupation is unusual: he studies the economics of happiness.

Put your characters in unusual situations or situations that are familiar to them, but with a twist.
My other spring break book: the Weight of Glory, by C.S. Lewis. Not fiction, but I took lots of notes anyway. Not that I could ever hope to aspire to this level of writing, because it's just brilliant. I've been reading Lewis for years, but he never fails to amaze me, how he comes up with illustrations of things like faith and reason and writes about them with the same precision and beauty as an artist like Michelangelo paints or sculpts a masterpiece. This collection of essays is the best I've read after his Mere Christianity and the Chronicles of Narnia. Makes me glad that I still have several of his books to read, because I know I have more to look forward to.