Hien Nguyen Writes

Hello all! By now, my agent announcement is live, and I continue to be in shock over the whole thing. If you are looking for an in-depth "how I got my agent" post, you can find that here .  This week has been quite heavy, and oftentimes continuing with other things feels sad and strange. However, I've realized writing (about craft or my stories) has helped me focus my energy in moments of heartache. I hope you are holding yourself in care, and allowing yourself grace as your focus your energies in ways you feel are productive.  Today's post is focused on something a bit different. I did want to discuss my querying journey within the context of an "atypical" story.  The manuscript I got my agent with included: dual timelines/a non-chronological story structure  a prologue a tense  and  POV shift in the climax And, in addition to all those choices, this manuscript was: a literary/speculative genre blend a story that despite...

 This will be quite long, FYI. And I also want to highlight two caveats to this “how I got my agent” story: 1. In the grand scheme of things, I had an easy querying experience. This is my first completed manuscript, and I had been querying it for exactly 35 days before I had an offer of representation in hand. I fully recognize that timing and luck were on my side. 2. This story is also intimately tied with grief. I don’t share this to somehow try and make my querying experience seem tougher than it was. It wasn’t. I had an easy querying experience, and I was also grieving during it. Those are just two co-existing facts. If you don’t want to read about all the heavy grief stuff, I’ll share my stats below and you can skip the rest.  The Stats 51 total queries 13 full requests, 1 partial 26 query rejections 9.8% request rate before offer nudge/27.5% after 11 passes on the full/partial 11 CNRs on query, 1 on full 2 offers of rep I) My Writing History I am somewhere between ...