The query letter gag: an American tale

 

The “sell your novel tool-kit.” The “How to write Irresistable Query Letters”. The “50 Successful Query Letters”.

The flourishing subgenre of advice books for writers is flourishing. It is flourishing way out of sight of literary scholars, even those, like Mark McGurl, who have noticed that this is the Amazon era in his book, Everything and Less.

I have a difficult relationship, an impassioned relationship, a nightmare relationship with the query letter. I feel about it much as Romeo and Juliet felt about arranged marriages – I want to eliminate the middle man, the annoying and deadly dud and dummy that gets in the way between my hot little texts and the functionaries of magazines, newspapers and publishing houses.

At the moment, I am arranging six of my real unreal stories in a book form, and pondering sending them out to some small press. It is migraine work – and like a migraine, it is an obsessive pain.

As a therapy, I have thought about the query letter as a historic artifact. One that somehow emerged, in early capitalism, from the wreck of the patronage system. At one time, among the Atlantic hopping bourgeoisie, there was such a thing as a letter of introduction. The spritely Yankee, released into the Old World, would be supplied with them. The young English earl’s son would have them in his trunk as he crossed the Channel and hazarded the Continent.

This is the distant genealogy, no doubt, of the query letter. Myself, I would begin such a genealogy in America with the year 1920 and the founding of the magazine, Successful Writing, in the most ur-Midwestern of towns, Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1921, it changed to “Writer’s Digest”. The 1920s were in many ways a jump-scare decade – the jump was into a mass consumer society unleashed by the great credit pools that underlay WWI. The radical expansion of media – with movies and radio in the mix – presented a great opportunity for the writer, with whole staffs being stocked with them in Hollywood and Madison Ave.

Zachary Petit, who works at Writer’s Digest, began publishing bits of articles from its archives, beginning here: https://www.writersdigest.com/whats-new/vintage-quotes-from-f-scott-fitzgerald. Unsurprisingly, F. Scott Fitzgerald was the model of “successful writing” in the early twenties. He was a symbol of the mobility and ‘can-do’ that aligned the writer with the inventor and the entrepreneur. Fitzgerald utilized the  binary that was in place from the beginning – advice/rejection. The potential writer was always seeking advice (which is the kind of thing sought by readers of the love lorn columns as well: advice was an ambiguous economic editing, being a thing that was “given” even as its utility was measured by the market, which was dominated by sales), and due to his celebrity – here’s a man whose stories in Cosmopolitan or Vanity Fair were going straight into Hollywood production! – he was pursued by queries for advice.

“A letter from Robert L. Terry, of Revere, Massachusetts, was received by F. Scott Fitgerald, author of the Saturday Evening Post story which is to be done in pictures as “The Chorus Girl’s Romance.” Mr. Terry, a story writer, appealed to Mr. Fitgerald for assistance in the construction of a plot. Mr. Fitgerald replied: Dear Mr. Terry. Your letter was very vague as to what you wanted to know. Study Kipling and O’Henry, and work like Hell! I had 122 rejections slips before I sold a story.”

This banality of this exchange does not debar it from a much greater significance – it is like a founding document for a whole industry. For there are many Robert L. Terrys out there. We all have put down our words on paper, or on screen, and we all want advice from those who have sold their Chorus Girl’s Romance to the studio. Or advice from those who have surveyed the successful writer and have called up or emailed the mass of publishers and agents and know just what they want under the mythical transom. Putting advice giving on a paying basis is as natural, in the circumstances, as industrializing agriculture or installing networks of cut and paste machinery and calling it Artificial Intelligence.

We are all herded. And we have to “work like Hell!” for our meager pickings. Such is life among the  flubs and perpetual false starts of us functionaries in the sphere of circulation. No surplus value for you!