Why oh why aren't agents responding to my query?
Are there secret rules? Are you emanating unintentional stink vibes? Are agents just not that interested in what you have to say? My answer: you're likely asking the wrong questions.
In the past three weeks, two “Glow” readers spontaneously reached out to me with questions—and both, weirdly enough, were about queries.
One came via a shared tweet in my Twitter DMs:
The other came over email:
This is a question that I'm hoping you might consider for your next open question Glow post.
I've been a college writing teacher for a long time, so I know how fixated some people can get on seemingly idiosyncratic conventions such as font, line spacing, and so on. Sometimes those fixations are silly (maybe even maladaptive coping mechanisms), but sometimes conventions are simply useful in ways that newbies haven't yet learned. I'm also relatively new to the game of querying, pitching, and writing outside of the academy, and everything is scary and new. My question is, are there things like what font to default to, what line spacing to use, what time of day/month/year is better to submit or not, etc.?
I know these are all, to some degree, idiosyncratic and ungameable, but I'm wondering about conventions (as opposed to hard and fast rules) that may seem silly or opaque to the uninitiated but that are common enough in the industry that they’re useful for newbies like me to know?
Both of these questions grow from the same subterranean anxiety rhizome, IMO. So, for that matter, does the question reader #1 quote-tweeted in my DMs, asking whether or not it was legit. It’s the anxiety of unknown unknowns.
I’ve felt this anxiety a few times, too. More than once in my career, I’ve sent an email or started a conversation expecting an enthusiastic or at least innocuous reply, only to face rage, tears, offense, shame, or rejection instead. UGH.
This kind of experience doesn’t just feel icky—it’s frightening, like when you’re swimming in murky ocean and your foot makes contact with unexpected sea-creature slime. What is that—a moon jelly? A man-o’-war? Twenty-four square inches of great white shark skin where you know there’s much, much more great white shark skin where that came from, like a whole great white shark’s worth, and an angry one at that?
Why can’t the ocean just be fucking clear? Why does it have to be such a 24/7 uncanny bullshit party??? The ocean and I maybe do not get along.
Anyway—such is the horror of unknown unknowns. It’s knowing your survival depends on your being able to navigate a system whose depth you can’t measure and bottom you can’t see and gravity you’re not evolved to move through efficiently. It’s knowing this place might or might not be full of annihilation monsters out eat you—ones you currently lack the vision and experience to identify at all, let alone within a useful amount of time.
Of course this is scary. It’s vulnerability to the max. It activates whatever impulses toward hypervigilance we have, and most of us have those. Protracted hypervigilance and vulnerability—both of them energetically demanding and painful states—will in time breed irritability, frustration, exhaustion, resentment, rage, depression, and whatever else it is one feels when one has done a draining, uncomfortable activity for too long without rest.
Which, I suspect, is why one sees such things quite a bit in one’s agency submissions box—and in the general online query discourse.
Come to think of it, the querying process really is a lot like swimming through murky ocean, and not just in terms of the terror involved.
Like maximally safe and pleasurable ocean swimming, maximally safe and pleasurable querying does not require comprehensive prior knowledge of all the ocean contains.
Rather, it requires:
a little googling ahead of time to figure out if there’s any commonsense equipment you need to accomplish whatever it is you have in mind
discussing your plans with friends on shore, so they know what you’re doing and will summon help if you seem to be struggling
trusting your gut instinct
respecting your limits
paying attention to your immediate surroundings in the moment. You don’t need to worry about the whole ocean or whatever the weather forecast insisted you’d encounter today; you need to pay attention to your immediate surroundings in the moment.
Finally, both ocean swimming and querying require you to let the hell go when circumstances insist you must. If you ever find yourself and your swimming ambition at loggerheads with the reality of the surrounding ocean, guess who’s going to win? THE OCEAN. Because you’re not Poseidon, Denise.
Capiche?
You’re telling me you don’t capiche how all of this answers the two specific questions those poor people asked me, expecting a direct answer?
FINE, FINE, I’LL EXPLAIN.