posted
guess... I attended the Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers Convention a few years ago and if I remember correctly one of the speakers told us that roughly 6 million manuscripts were submitted every year while only about 120 thousand made it to print. They also said that the vast majority of the rejections were due to a failure on the part of the submitting author to follow the simple submission rules.
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posted
I generally am with Brad on his points as to what "dooms" a fledgling writer. I just scanned through the comments but here are two things I'd like to emphasize:
1) Storytelling vs. writing. In my opinion, an average writer who is a great storyteller will get published over a great writer who is a average storyteller. I think there are many more great writers than there are great storytellers. Some folks may look at the prose line by line and think "why is this guy/gal published and not me? My sentences are much more elegant!" and then go home ruminate on the injustice of fate. The problem is they have looked at the trees and not the forest. To some extent, we live in an analytical society, one that believes things must be diagnosed under a microscope and that the "devil is in the details." While the details of sentence composition and efficient writing are important, I think some new writers will miss the concepts of good story-telling. I know I did not give it much attention in my first piece and had to do a wholesale restructure, slashing much and reorganizing entire scene orders to create a more coherent narrative. The review of this story before and after from my critiquers were like night and day. It went from a story that had the potential to be powerful to one that they said WAS powerful.
2) BART. Thats business and art. Many writers do not succeed because they think the a magic ferry will bless them with publication just because they have written good prose. They forget about things like following submission guidelines (my story is too ground shattering to be hampered by pithy formatting issues!). They do not want an objective editor who to make changes to their works.
posted
DRany- I have seen some agents post stats on why they reject and some will have 90% be avoidable things- like query letter was a political rant, not a query letter, huge grammar mistakes, etc. When you factor in all the idiots out there, you really are competing with a lot less people than you think. REading hatrack, it is easy to think a lot of unpublished writers are quite skilled and professional, but then go to like the nano boards and read them- very different perspective. Also, consider the whole NaNoReMo of December (national novel rejection month)- enough people honestly think one month is enough to write and polish sufficiently to submit for first novel.
Posts: 232 | Registered: Apr 2010
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quote:When you factor in all the idiots out there, you really are competing with a lot less people than you think.
I'm so glad you said this, Esteemed Miss Yip (yip, yip!) because its very true. Most of us here are already at least a cut or two above the bulk of the slushpile just by virtue of being properly formatted and with absolutely minimal typographical errors.
posted
Uh, I'm pretty sure NaNoWriMo is in November.
But more on point, I think a bunch of people want to have been writers. They want the rewards of having a good book without really wanting to do the work of getting it done and published.
posted
I've done nnwm I never thought of it as seriously trying to publish something. I thought the whole Idea was to just write your brains out for the month, and reach 50,000 word count. Your suppose to let go all the technical aspects and just write without worrying about errors. I can believe people think that its about being published but really not suppose to be. It's really a marathon of if you can actually write 50,000 words on one idea which actually most fail. For us here I believe if put to the test could do what they do in two weeks, just by the fact of length of short stories here and how fast there put out, if you didn't have the constraint of proper structure and punctuation most could do it here, but why bother, it's a test of quantity, not quality. To think your going to get published, well, like you said kind of foolish.
But on the flip side I have heard of people pounding out a genius Idea in a short amount of time and it getting fasttracked.
posted
Um, actually, I thought NaNoWriMo/NNWM was National Novel Writing Month, though it later went international. No mention of November there, though that IS when it takes place.
The lightly ironic mention of December as NaNoReMo was explained in the post if one actually cares to read it properly.
posted
Interesting... It's been a few years since I did it last. '2005' So I must have got the name mixed up. I could of swore November was part of the name, but as I like to say, "Time kills all brains cells"
posted
I think sometimes we see work that we feel needs to much more talent or effort to make the story even come close to being readable. We see these poor attempts and we're reminded of the fear we have that what we think of as our good work is actually as bad as the piece of crap some newbie (or even not-so-newbie) had us read. We see the amount of work the story needs and it makes us upset because we're so uncomfortable at such a poor result.
When we know someone is doomed to fail, what is it in that person's work that scares you?
posted
I think the two things that I see that make me genuinely cnocerned someone is "doomed to failure" are:
a). A fundamental lack of understanding of grammar and sentence structure.
b). The use of an utterly pedestrian voice and vocabulary.
Either of these things make me suspect that the would-be writer in question is not noticing things as a reader which are vital to the understanding of what entertains an audience, and if you don't notice them as a reader then I don't believee it's possible to incorporate them as a writer.
I see a lot of other "new writer" issues, such as not knowing when/how to start a story, which are not remotely insurmountable.
Very few new writers scare me. Existing and successful ones do. I read Catherynne M Valente's new Clarkesworld piece the other day and was blown away by both the imagination and the emotion in her writing. The imagination I believe I may be able to match on a good day. The emotion, I fear I can't, and that may be what dooms ME as a writer.
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