When I was in college, there was a girl who called herself a writer. She carried around a little notebook (like 4″x6″) in which she hand wrote “chapters” of a vampire story, stream of conscious. She never edited or revised, so far as I could tell, and once when she asked me to type up a few of her “chapters”, they turned out to be no more than about two pages each. (Her “novel” was about 15 pages long in total.)

Her friends who were asked to read her work said, “It’s good” and handed it back. Then she asked me to read it.

I have long been of the belief that when someone asks for criticism (this goes for me, too, folks) you are NOT doing them a favor by sparing them. In the realm of physical activity, you can’t argue with results; unless you’re running a certain speed, or winning by a certain number of points, it’s hard to fool yourself and others that you are. It’s much easier to convince oneself of being a good writer or painter or musician even if the opposite is true.

Imagine if a basketball was visible only to your eyes, and a potential player kept asking you to evaluate his game. If he consistently misses the basket, are you doing him a favor by telling him he’s hitting it? What’s going to happen when he goes to try out and his form is awful?

This girl’s protaganist was painfully Mary Sue. The writer also portrayed Pope Jean Paul II personally performing acts of intense torture. I didn’t care about any of the characters or events.

As a result of my critique, this girl did…absolutely nothing.

Rewind the clock further.

I’m in high school, after English class. For some reason, I’ve given a classmate a copy of Swordplay, the Neolithic precursor to my amateurish Shadows of Prophecy.

Classmate: This was really good.
Jason: Thanks a lot. Are there any problems with it that I can fix?
Classmate, amazed, glances at the teacher to see how to interpret this request.
Teacher: He really does just want to know what to improve.

Fast forward back to college:

My friend, whose writing I greatly respect, was in a creative writing class. We’ll call her Alice. Another girl we’ll call Betty was also in the class; I was not. This is kind of cruel, but we were young and…well…cruel. Alice was so annoyed at Betty’s horrific writing that Alice would let me read them so that at least someone could share her incredulity. Betty’s writing was full of concepts like half-vampire/half-dragon people. (Traditionally, vampirism is a disease, not a race. Vampires don’t even breed via offspring with each other, much less with other races. “Half-vampire” makes about as much sense as someone who is “Half-Cancer” or “Half-Polio”.) Her scenes were full of Chickification, Purple Prose, Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma, Rouge Angles of Satin, and worst of all, How Do I Used Tense. (Man, I wish I’d known the names of these tropes in college!)

Both of the girls described above are in the same writing-career category as I am:

Unpublished.

(Technically, my non-fiction has been purchased for stock content, but that’s just not the same, damn it!)

If these two young ladies have continued to pursue a career in writing fiction, and I sincerely hope they have, then it likely they are also in the process of finishing and submitting stories — probably to some of the same publications. All three of us write speculative fiction.

Now comes the frustration. Perfect Justice may even sit in the same pile with authors still stuck on How Do I Used Tense. And I’m getting the same form letter in reply.

I take too much pride in my work to think I could possibly be stuck in Rouge Angles of Satin or How Do I Used Tense. I check my spelling and grammar rigorously even for intra-office email. In online venues, I have oft earned the appellation “grammar police”. I’m so relentless, in fact, that it annoys me that “Vampirism” and “Soteriological” are words which spell-checkers think are wrong, even if I have looked up them up elsewhere to make certain I’m not just making them up.

Furthermore, far from avoiding or ignoring criticism, I’ve been seeking extra helpings of critique for as long as I can remember; even before I really took writing seriously myself. The way that Perfect Justice has morphed from its original (annoying) version is proof.

So if I’m not making any of the obvious mistakes, even after multiple revisions (even bestsellers have the occasional misprint or typo), what else is wrong with the story?

Are my characters Mary Sues? Is my conflict boring? Are the characters not identifiable? The situations aren’t suspenseful?

I would assume one or all of the above is true, except that Perfect Justice has given people nightmares and the ending has evoked anger. One person insisted he cried at the end of Woman’s Best Friend, and another has expressed sadness over the fate of a character therein.

I’m obviously connecting with someone. Or is it only because friends, family, and co-workers are too forgiving when they read something by me? Not consciously, perhaps, but sub-consciously?

I’m a good writer. What I mean by “good writer” is not that my work is amazing –  not yet — what I mean is that I’ll do whatever it takes to GET amazing. But when there’s a problem, I need to know what to fix. The form-letter rejection leaves far too much room for interpretation. Apparently my story was just as bad as those full of Rouge Angles of Satin. Or if it wasn’t, it was bad enough to get lumped in the same category.

Ouch.

Now what do I fix?

If you monitor the progress bars to the right (they were my primary reason for creating the whole website, if you’re wondering why I keep harping on them so), you might have already noticed I’ve got the first few scenes of Perfect Justice underway.

PROGRESS!

I was ambivalent whether to start from scratch and write the whole story over, or to simply go through and edit as I read, the way I do for drafts of completed works.

I chose something in-between.

I keep the original version up on my 2nd monitor, and write a new version based completely on the old one. Some words, lines, whole paragraphs get completely skipped. Others are reproduced word-for-word if I can’t think of a cleaner/better way to communicate the same thought.

This is a style of editing/revision I have never tried (or even considered) before, so it’s all very experimental. It has advantages, though, so I may try this again, even for projects I’m more-or-less satisfied with. It seems ruthlessly effective by freeing me emotionally from the original work in two ways:

1. The original version stays untouched, so it’s not as though I’m hacking away at an old friend.
2. The original version feels more like someone else’s work as the new version gradually takes shape, replacing the former in my heart and mind.

However, I don’t know if the new version is actually any better. The content is largely the same. But I can honestly say the new version is a lot crisper. Hopefully that means better chances of publication.

As if getting published weren’t hard enough

You may wonder where I get the images from; I just search images.google.com for the kind of image I’m looking for (hoping that they’re licensed for limited use and in cases where they are hosted by a site who creates images, I link back to them). You can tell I’m a big fan of demotivators, as they often capture the humorous or ironic angle of things.

I was surprised to find today’s demotivator so directly related to writing, so I checked to see where it was sourced:

www.101reasonstostopwriting.com

Woah…what?

Naturally I paid their front page a visit. I don’t have a handle on the whole site yet, but their most recent post caught my eye:

Agents and Publishers are reporting a sharp increase in unpublishable submissions.

Editors and agents interviewed for this story claim that their slushpiles have more than doubled since the 1st of December, a pattern that has been repeating and escalating for the last ten years, and no-one is sure what is causing the increase.

This strikes me two ways:

1. I haven’t been published yet. Could my work considered *gasp* among the unpublishable?

Obviously I hope not. But it seems they’re describing truly unpolished content:

An anonymous literary agent agreed: “Most of the submissions I’ve received this this week are too short to be contemporary novels. Some are only just over 50,000 words, and one I got via email was exactly 50,000, cutting off mid-sentence. Another one had ‘done for the day’ or something about going to bed every 1,600 to 1,700 words or so. It’s a lucky standout that even has an introductory paragraph before the opening.

If I left a note like that in a manuscript I would torture myself in unimaginable ways. This leads from hope to certainty that they’re not describing serious writers like myself. (Right?)

Which brings me to the conclusion:

2. All these other idiots are in my way of being published.

Editors, agents, publishers are overworked and underpaid already. With unemployment on the rise and National Novel Writer’s month last November, more and more people think writing a novel will be their ticket to stardome.

While I have no wish to rain on any else’s parade, I’ve been writing seriously for well over a decade, and from self-evaluation I do not believe my first novel is good enough to publish. I fully expect to earn my day in the sun, but writing is a career like any other, and I’m still lifting myself by proverbial bootstraps from the slums of the starving artist.

I’ll grant there may be some wild talents who score big on their first book attempt, but they’re few and far between.

Now the editor who reads my story is that much more tired, overworked, and annoyed by the time s/he even OPENS my story. Furthermore, there are increased chances that other writer of comparable or lesser talent may just have pitched a story similar enough to mine that the reader thinks, “This again? I just read a story about a dog and woman.” Even if mine was rigorous and well-written, and the other was interspersed with “I’ll finish this scene tomorrow” on the manuscript, chances are the reader will junk them both.

Rejection is hard. Particularly for those of us planning to make a lifetime career out of writing, for no other reason than this is what we are driven to do. Someone hoping to hit it big in one novel may get rejected repeatedly for that work. I’m guaranteed to get rejected for the same work repeatedly and for many different works.

If you’re serious about your writing, please do whatever it takes to get published. I applaud you and salute you on your way to success.

If you’re just filling the hours with a light hobby and hoping to win the “might get published” lottery without having spent years writing and rewriting, studying the work of others, formulating plotlines, asking advice from published writers, and so forth…it’s kind of cruel of you to clog the gears for the rest of us.