Query Questions 3, 4, & 5

plot, antagonist, and what's at stake

Jun 14, 2024

I didn’t mean to leave you hanging for a month, but I’m just glad I didn’t leave you hanging indefinitely. It’s been a wild and wonderful month full of mostly great stuff and only a handful of agenting emergencies! And I can’t wait to share about some of it here in the near future.

But for now, let’s dive back into queries and how to answer those remaining questions:

3. What are they willing to do to get what they want?
4. Who or what will get in their way?
5. What happens if they fail?

Question 3: What are they willing to do to get what they want?

This is where the plot comes in, and this might end up being the longest answer to any of the 5 questions as a result! By this point in the query I know who the protagonist is and I know their goal or desire. Now you’re going to tell me how they intend to pursue that goal. Are they going to enter a tournament? Move to the city? Put on the best damn talent show this town has ever seen?!

A lot of times plots involve things happening to a character. Someone new comes to town. Someone gets murdered. A secret gets revealed. Even if your inciting incident involves an external event, your character is likely still reacting to that event, and then being proactive as a result. What is that character going to do? What happens after that? Does this bring them closer to or further from their goal or desire?

Going to the pitch example I’ve been using, here’s the answer to Question 3: What are they willing to do to get what they want?

When Jura demands that the rebel movement seeking to overthrow the monarchy be destroyed before his coronation, Teia sees one last opportunity. She’ll infiltrate the rebellion, identify the leaders of the movement…and betray them to Jura, trading their lives for her own. It’s easy enough to convince the rebels of her sincerity—no one hates Jura more than she does herself.

(The eagle-eyed among you may notice that I skipped a bit of the pitch there—don’t worry, we’ll come back to it for Question 4).

So what is Teia willing to do in order to survive? Infiltrate the rebellion. Not in order to help them—in order to betray them. To offer them up to her murderous brother as a bargaining chip to secure her own safety. Ruthless isn’t even the half of it!

While I noted above that this can sometimes be the longest answer to any of the query questions, it can also be pretty succinct, as in this case. I don’t get into the weeds of how she infiltrates the rebellion—they have a common enemy in Jura, and that’s enough for now—because that’s not relevant for this story. In another case it might be! You might need to tell us exactly how your MC is going to go about doing the thing. Remember that the main purpose of the query is to answer questions. There can be a big questions hanging over the end of it all (that’s the stakes, and we’ll get to it in Question 5!), but as a general rule of thumb you want to give us enough specific information to get us grounded and propel us forward. I don’t want to get stuck in the weeds trying to parse vague or unclear information, and I don’t want to be bogged down in tons of detail that doesn’t matter. Make it clear and make it cutting.

Question 4: Who or what will get in their way?

The antagonist of it all! Chances are, your protagonist’s goals aren’t just going to be handed to them on a silver platter. There are going to be obstacles along the way, so your query needs to tell us about them. This could be in the form of a character—an antagonist, a villain, a rival. Or it could be something external—a natural disaster, a ticking clock with consequences. Or it can be internal—hubris, weakness, self-doubt. Sometimes it’s a mix of all three, as is the case in this pitch!

Jura is the only one in all of Erisa more powerful, feared, and despised than she is, and once he is crowned king in a month there will be no surviving him. Not for Teia. Not for anyone.
[…]

But she gets more than she bargained for when she gains not only their trust, but also their friendship. As Jura wages war on his own citizens, burning down villages and threatening children to eradicate all dissent, Teia is forced to agree with the rebels: Erisa would be better off if Jura is never crowned.

Our antagonist is Jura, Teia’s murderous half-brother who has been trying to have her assassinated throughout their lives.

The ticking clock is the count down to his coronation, at which point he’ll be crowned king and will have the freedom to do whatever he wants out in the open. No need to bother with assassins then, when he can just order her death outright or better yet, kill her himself.

And the internal conflict? Teia’s conscience. She had morals once, remember. She isn’t a monster. And while her plan has always been to deceive the rebels and betray them, the bonds she forges with them are real. She has friends now. And Teia is forced to think beyond her own survival and confront the reality that Jura isn’t just a threat to her, he’s a threat to everyone.

Your story doesn’t have to have conflict on three levels (personified, external, internal) but if it DOES, then make sure to show us that!

Question 5. What happens if they fail?

What’s at STAKE? That’s what this question is really meant to answer. What’s the risk, what’s the reward? What if everything goes horribly wrong?

Stakes are what makes your story matter. If I marry the love of my life I’ll lose my inheritance. If I don’t win this scholarship I can’t afford to go to college. If I can’t defeat the coming darkness my loved ones will perish. I have to do this thing OR ELSE. If there is no OR ELSE then what are we reading the book for?

The stakes aren’t always dire. One of the reasons I love GBBO so much is because it’s absolutely low-stakes tv, but it’s so, so, SO lovely! Low-stakes books exist, and are frankly having a moment right now (see: cozies of any genre)! But there’s still something at stake. A mystery to solve, a shop to save, true love to confess. There’s something to be lost or won, and that something—whatever it is—has meaning and lasting repercussions.

Should she help the rebellion in earnest? Perhaps the monarchy is poisoned. Perhaps the Golden Palace should be torn down, Teia’s family legacy destroyed, and democracy erected in its place. Perhaps that would be better than the terrible fate that awaits them all when Jura becomes king.

What’s at stake? Teia’s survival, her newly recovered conscience, her friendships, the fate of a kingdom…

Teia has two options. Carry through with her plan to betray the rebels, thus ensuring her own safety from Jura. Or become a rebel for real and help take him down. If she betrays them, she keeps her title and keeps her family legacy alive—both her parents are dead, remember—but at the expense of the lives of her newfound friends and the wellbeing of the kingdom’s people as a whole. If she sides with the rebellion, she can help stop Jura and make life better for the people through democracy—people who despise her and are openly racist toward her, remember—but she loses her home, her ties to the parents she loved, her title, and the only life she’s ever known. There’s no clear win either way.

Unless…

But then again.
Why should Jura be the one to sit on the throne?
Why not her?

SECRET THIRD OPTION! I just love to leave a pitch on a game changer if I can. And of course, I’m sure you can imagine a million potential downsides to Teia just chucking all her plans out the window and betraying everyone instead of just one or the other—but I don’t need to spell that out for you. For that you can read the book!

No matter what’s at stake in your query, your last line should always be a solid punch whenever possible. Leave me with something so compelling that I have to scroll down and start reading pages.

Next time (which I promise will come sooner than a month!) we’ll wrap it up by looking at the pitch as a whole, and chat a little about formatting, metadata, comp titles, personalization, all that good stuff. And as for what future newsletters will discuss? I have some ideas, but I’d love to hear yours!

Pen & Parsley

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