I occasionally see this come up, and as a writer, it’s tempting to use a rhetorical question as a query letter hook. Yet it’s almost never a good idea, and I’ll offer my personal reasons as to why.
- A query letter is first and foremost a business letter. Treat it like you would a job interview.
- Agents want to read a letter, not answer a quiz. Since they read hundreds of queries a week, they want the author to get right to the point.
- Using a rhetorical question as a hook is a pet peeve for most agents, who consider it a tired trope.
- A query should only contain the bare essentials necessary to get the agent interested in reading your novel. Does the question do that? If not, then leave it out.
- Asking a question gets a person thinking inward and not outward. You want the agent thinking about your book, not about how they personally would answer a question.
- Often times the question has an obvious answer. “What would you do if you could save the world?” Ummm… I’d save the world. Next?
- Other times the question being asked is something that would get a different answer from each person that answered it.
What’s the point?
- Last, and most important, the hook needs to entice the agent so that they request the full manuscript. Getting them to think about their own answer to a rhetorical question won’t do that.
Can there be an exception? Sure. If a person can come up with a question that totally blows away an agent, then it may actually work. But I would get the query properly critiqued before even attempting it.
As writers we all want our query letters to stand out from the crowd, but the way to do that is with great writing, a killer hook, and a succinct query.
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