quote:Welcome to this week's Novel Support Group. Anyone can join. If you're new, tell us a bit about who you are and what project you are working on. Feel free to update the NSG Work in Progress thread with your current projects. Although we can report on any number of things, here is a list of suggestions (suggestions welcomed).
What were your goals last week and did you accomplish them? Describe what you worked on. Set goals for next week. Did you learn something during this week?
Here is a list of things that you can do each week as we work on our novels (suggestions welcomed).
Writing on a novel Characterization World Building Relevant research
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As for me:
Last Week's Goals:
DUAL MAGICS SERIES (THE SHAMAN'S CURSE, THE VOICE OF PROPHECY, BEYOND THE PROPHECY,and WAR OF MAGIC): Social media promotion. Some.
BECOME: TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: Continue writing first draft. Yes, slowly.
MAGE STORM: Read through what I've already rewritten. Not yet.
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Me? I'm old and annoying, and still trying to get it right.
I write sci-fi, mostly, with a romantic bent, but also adventure, spy, and YA.
• Waiting, waiting, waiting, for a response to my query for, Necessity (adventure/romantic).
• Working on removing/smoothing filter/crutch words for, My Father, My Friend (YA) so I can query that. I'm presently working on removing/rephrasing to minimize the use of "was" which seems to be taking forever. Only fifty different words left to go. =sigh=
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• Waiting, waiting, waiting, for a response to my query for, Necessity (adventure/romantic).
• Working on removing/smoothing filter/crutch words for, My Father, My Friend (YA) so I can query that. I'm presently working on removing/rephrasing to minimize the use of "was" which seems to be taking forever. Only fifty different words left to go. =sigh=
I've long since given up querying for the indie route and am much happier for it.
However, this much I remember well:
Don't wait for a response to your query. Keep querying and query widely.
Also, it's usually best to query one project at a time.
By the way, it's perfectly allowable to ask for feedback on a query under the Fragments and Feedback for books forum. Queries are the second hardest thing to write. (Synopses are the hardest.)
Posts: 4633 | Registered: Dec 2008
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I've read that you shouldn't have more than 20 or so queries out at a time on any single project because the industry is so small. I'm not even close to that phase of my career, though I hope to be one day. I do want to go through the experience of querying and trying the trad pub route. I bet it could help refine writing skills in a way that self-publishing or indie-press publishing wouldn't. Or, it could just crush my soul. Posts: 45 | Registered: Aug 2016
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quote:Originally posted by Meredith: By the way, it's perfectly allowable to ask for feedback on a query under the Fragments and Feedback for books forum. Queries are the second hardest thing to write. (Synopses are the hardest.)
And you don't have to limit your query and synopsis texts to 13 lines.
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"Was" and to be verbs in general excesses, includes to have and to get similar usages, indeed. Ms. Dalton Woodbury, independently of other language theorists, proposed here at Hatrack the terms static voice and dynamic voice for this area of consideration.
From time to time, a fragment responder notes a fragment's overly "passive" sensibility due to excess and artless to be verbs, ergo, a need for more nuanced grammar labels and principles when responding to prose.
"Passive," of course, entails a distinct and divisible grammar matter -- grammatical voice -- and the term is easily misunderstood by writer and responder alike. Grammar handbooks explicate active and passive voices' criteria, includes crafty passive voice usage for general composition rhetorical-mechanical functions, little, if any, artful-poetic equipment functions suited to prose.
Passive voice is always static voice, though the active voice opposite is not absolute. Not per se "static" to mean white noise or guff, static to mean a statement of an ongoing state-of-being, of an indefinite time span, in Seymour Chatman's vernacular, also stasis statements as opposed to process statements -- dynamic voice. Chatman's text where stasis statements are explicated: Story and Discourse. Wayne Booth also covers the topic in The Rhetoric of Fiction. The only places I know of outside of Hatrack where those voice principles come up in writing discussions.
E.M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel, also uses the terms "static" and "dynamic" applied to character. Those terms are somewhat related to voice, in that a static character is untransformed by an action; dynamic, of course, is a transformed character. Thus, "transformation" is a criteria worth consideration when grammatical voice is approached.
The "indefinite time span" feature also informs otherwise active voice uses of static voice, and is a useful revision approach to dynamic voice's practical as most definite time span criteria suited to prose. No one reasonable forbids passive or static voices altogether, only that prose's movement needs require timely (sic) and judicious usages thereof and greater active and dynamic voices' emphasis.
Examples: Passive voice; Manny got given a greeting card from Larry. Static and active voice; Manny received a greeting card from Larry. Active voice; Larry gave Manny a greeting card. Dynamic voice; Larry gave Manny a twenty-first birthday card the morning after the age of majority occasion. (definite time specifics -- The "gave" verb could be more dynamic, a more definite time, too. Texted? E-mailed? Mailed? Hand-delivered? Shoved into Manny's hands? etc.)
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I'm picking my novella back up this week, for realsies. My goal is to write something for it every weekday this week (leaving weekends free to write or not as I have time).
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quote:Originally posted by Kathy_K: I've read that you shouldn't have more than 20 or so queries out at a time on any single project because the industry is so small.
Not sure where you read that. There's a lot of querying advice out there, some of it contradictory. There's not a limit on how many queries you can have out at a time. It is better to query in small batches so that you can revise the query if it doesn't seem to be working.
Given that a significant number of agents use the "no reply means no" method, you can't even be sure how many queries you do have out.
Even of those that do reply, when I was querying, I actually had one agent reply (with a no) 43 weeks after I sent the query.
You could easily drive yourself crazy just trying to figure out how many queries were still active. And writers don't need more ways to make ourselves crazy.
Unless you've given an agent an exclusive, there's no reason not to send out another batch of queries the following week. And exclusives should always have time limits.
quote:I'm not even close to that phase of my career, though I hope to be one day. I do want to go through the experience of querying and trying the trad pub route.I bet it could help refine writing skills in a way that self-publishing or indie-press publishing wouldn't.
Not sure why you think that. It's not as if the agents are going to give you critiques. But by all means go for the route that will bring you the most joy or sense of accomplishment.
quote: Or, it could just crush my soul.
You do get used to the rejections. It's a good thing.
Posts: 4633 | Registered: Dec 2008
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