Face-Lift 1470

Guess the Plot

Keys to the Van

1. Indie musician Danny inherits a van from his uncle--just what his band needs for their upcoming tour. Good-natured shenanigans and life lessons ensue as Danny drives his uncle's old ride cross-country.

2. In an attempt to understand why he treats women so badly, an artist drives his VW van from the California coast to the dying industrial towns of the midwest. 

3. Aspiring serial killer Jack Lovett has planned his first murder for months. He's got his weapons, his shackles, and his dungeon. Now if only he could find the keys to his van.

4. Harry has a job offer in LA, but he's in Georgia, with no transportation and no money. So he gets a job with a moving company, and takes a gig driving a moving van to LA. Turns out the moving company job pays a lot more than the job he went there for, but how's he gonna get back to Georgia? 

5. After carjacking a minivan, Rudy stops at a burger joint, but when he returns to the vehicle he realizes it's got one of those push button starters that only works if you have the key with you. Wait, what's this Apple air tag thing on the dashboard? Hey, why are the cops blocking him in? Damn modern technology.

Original Version

The steering wheel spins uselessly on Interstate 5 as Nash splits from his San Diego beach house. [Hard to believe he got from his beach house onto Interstate 5 without a functioning steering wheel.] The twenty-seven-year-old artist grinds the VW down a cement retaining wall, then pawns stolen tools to fix the van [Luckily his van stopped within walking distance of a pawn shop. But he should probably use the stolen tools to fix the van, then pawn them to get gas money.] in his rush to escape the fallout from hurting his girlfriend. Unwilling to admit what he’s done, he alienates all his friends, loses his home, and turns to the only person he can trust–himself. [He's the last person I'd trust.] [Up till the retaining wall, the first 1.4 sentences feel like the first two minutes of your novel instead of the opening of a business letter. The rest of the paragraph feels like the next two months of your novel. 1. Leave beach house. 2. Fix van. 3. Alienate all my friends and lose my home.]

Nash, a resourceful charmer, searches for a new home in America’s underclass of 1991, running small-time scams in Venice Beach, stealing drug money from a San Francisco squat, and making beer runs into Pine Ridge Reservation. He forges new friendships he can’t sustain because he pushes responsibility onto everyone else then splits. He drinks to cover the bleakness of his desperation, echoed by the closed factories and hordes of unemployed he meets in the dying industrial towns of the Midwest. [This house on the California coast has got me down. I need a change of scenery--to some blighted, desolate, dying industrial towns.] [Reading the query is reminding me of the bleakness of my own desperation. If I read the whole book I'd probably be suicidal.] 

On his own, Nash possesses little hope of confronting his inner ghouls and seems destined to drift into addiction and ruin. Yet the hardened goodness of the people he meets offers slim hope by lovingly shoving insight into Nash’s blind heart. ["Offers slim hope" strikes me as negative. It's like saying "I have slim hope of selling my novel." Removing "slim" would fix this.]

I seek representation for Keys to the Van, a 94,000-word upmarket fiction novel about a young man’s journey to understand his treatment of women. [Change his name to J.D. Vance, and you've got a winner.] Set in the early 1990s, it’s a travel story similar in tone to David Carr’s The Night of the Gun and in substance to the flipside of Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us. [Not sure what the flip side of a novel is, but if it means the opposite, that's a weird way to comp your book. You're gambling that the reader has not only read It Ends With Us, but can do the mental gymnastics of figuring out what the reverse of that book is.] [By the way, Ms. Hoover wrote a sequel titled It Starts With Us. Maybe that's the flip side?]

The novel grew out of a half-year kicking around the country in a VW van and what I’ve learned through working with people on restorative justice processes with Symbiosis Revolution. [English, please.] As it is for our protagonist Nash, the long, painful path to understanding one’s rage and violence starts with denial, progresses in fits and starts, and requires input from slews of people. Many men never finish the journey, and perhaps Keys to the Van can provide hope and even a map for readers seeking to understand their behavior. [So, you were Nash, and now you're writing this book to help other Nashes. Unfortunately, Nashes don't read books. Admit it, there wasn't a single book in your San Diego beach house.]

Notes

Italicize all book titles.

I was surprised to find this is about a young man’s journey to understand his treatment of women. There's one brief mention of hurting his girlfriend.

There's no plot. In the query, not necessarily in the book. Though if the book is just a series of incidents connected by them happening to Nash, maybe it's a book problem too. 

Not that that can't be done with success, but if Nash's goal is to understand his treatment of women, I would like to see specifics on what he did to his girlfriend that he's unwilling to admit, and how he is changed by whatever changes him. The only hint that anything changes him is the vague comment that some people lovingly shove insight into his blind heart. 

Also, your main character needs to have some redeeming qualities if you want people to care about him enough to slog through the miserable parts of his life. Women aren't gonna want to read about a guy who mistreats women, unless they know he's gonna be punished in the end, by which I mean physically tortured and then murdered. And women read books.