By Jennie Goloboy
Here are a two queries that I suspect show the influence of video games.
1. Your character has to find something, or solve a mystery, but there is no ticking clock.
What’s a “ticking clock?” A time limit by which the search must be completed, or the conflict resolved, or something terrible will happen. In a novel, no matter how exciting the puzzle constructed, if there’s no time limit, your reader will not care. There can be a video game in which the player has to solve the puzzle before proceeding with no time limit (or penalty) for taking a long time to move to the next level; for the simple reason that the video game is interactive. This approach doesn’t necessarily work in fiction.
2. Your character is a gladiator, and must defeat a series of enemies to win the prize
There are two problems here– the first being that a book is not a visual medium, and no matter how exciting the fight scenes, there are sometimes better suited for a movie. The bigger problem is that I already know your gladiator isn’t going to die, at least not until the final climactic battle, which takes a lot of tension out of the book.
I can think of two novels in which the protagonist dies partway through the novel: one is realistic fiction set in rural Minnesota, and one is a horror novel first published on the internet. (There: no spoilers!) It’s rare enough that I’d personally be shocked if it happened to your book’s hero. And if a reader already knows that your hero will survive to meet the final battle, what’s the point in reading the book?
Hi Jenny, I just want to thank you for this post. It feels as if you just post it just for me, because both the ticking clock and the”gladiator” is in my query and realized what’s missing in my query. Although I have lost what could have been representation, I did gain very valuable advice and thank you once more for bringing that up. You’re an angel.