✨Marie Rutkoski Shares Her "Questionable" ( 😉) Secret to Hooking Readers and Driving Plot✨

Also inside: Query letters; writing duo Alison Hammer and Bradeigh Godfrey (aka Ali Brady) share our Q&A hotseat; and Mark Stevens fights failure with persistance—and wins!

Happy Tuesday, writing friends!

Last week was 📕Books with Hooks 🪝week on the podcast, so you can find Carly and CeCe’s written critique for the query they discussed below (along with the successful query shared by last week’s bonus podcast episode guest Noreen Nanja, author of The Summers Between Us. Want access to even more queries and critiques? Paid subscribers can find them in our archive on Substack!).

Anyone querying (or, come to think, going out on sub, a process equally, if not more, fraught) will also want to read today’s essay by Mark Stevens, author of Failed Novel Number Four (or F.N.N.F. for short). Never heard of it? Maybe that’s because, nearly a quarter century after it was finished (and then rejected, and then put in a drawer), F.N.N.F. was just released under the rather more appealing title No Lie Lasts Forever. Mark’s funny and insightful essay recounts the long and winding road F.N.N.F. took to publication, highlighting the steps he took along the way to up his writing game and get others to believe in his book as much as he did.

In today’s video, Ordinary Love author Marie Rutkoski goes in depth on the importance of planting questions in your readers’ minds, breaking down how she did it using concrete examples from her latest. We recommend watching it, then picking a book off your own shelf and noting what questions you have while reading the opening pages. As readers we often don’t notice them on a conscious level, but by paying attention to the questions that intrigue you as you read, you can start to see how easily they can be woven into your own pages to make them come alive (a question doesn’t have to be on the scale of “Who’s the murderer?” to be hook your reader).

Today’s Q&A is with Alison Hammer and Bradeigh Godfrey, writing BFFs who publish under the pen name Ali Brady (their latest, Battle of the Bookstores, is out now!). They share the advice from others that helps them write a chapter a week, the advice they’d give themselves if they could go back in time to before they were published, and how they find time to write in between juggling full-time jobs, solo writing projects, child-rearing and menagerie tending duties. It’s not always easy, but they (and we!) want you to know it CAN be done.

You’ve got this, friends. Thanks for reading! ❤️

❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team