I've queried at least two dozen agents in the last two years, and never got so much as "I'd like to see more" nibble. I've applied for grants. I've requested people I see as belonging to my target audience to read some of the book - and I've been forced to conclude that the first part of the book as it stood was just too offputting, even though I'm certain that they would love the story - or more accurately, the linked parallel stories - once they got into it.
Instead of giving my potential readers an easy way into my book, I've been presenting them with a great big heavy old door, above a far-too-high doorstep, and with a padlock holding it shut, and no key for the lock. It's needlessly ornate, and it's unfriendly.In other words, it's inaccessible.
Where I have been piling up explanations, I should be offering narrative so enthralling that readers cannot help being drawn in, wanting to know what happens next. The explanations, all the hows and the whys, I now see, must come later - when the reader is more likely to want them.
The beginning of the book, my doorway, should open straight into light and air and movement.
The story should run free into this open space. It should fly, and draw the reader's eyes after it.
The unexplained aspects of the narratives, both the realistic and the fantastical, the gaps in the readers' knowledge, unnoticed at first, will gradually become intriguing. Readers will find themselves becoming curious, trying to fill in those gaps, striving to piece together the scraps of information I've offered.
Then and only then, when the reader has begun to develop an appetite for the hows and whys, is it time for me to give them.
So that's what I'm working on now.
