self-critique
Accepting When You’re the Buck-Stopper
You know the saying—the buck stops here. A simple phrase, easily understood. It means recognizing when the responsibility for something lands squarely on ourselves.
In the realm of the aspiring writer, rejection is the norm. We’ll all experience more rejection than acceptance (although hopefully, the magnitude of the acceptance makes up for the sheer number of rejections). There are also a lot of possible reasons for the rejections. Some are within our control. Some aren’t.
When we’re not getting any nibbles, we need to consider all the possible reasons. Here are some that we may like telling ourselves to feel better, and they may even be true.
It’s all subjective. Yes, it is, to a large degree. What one person loves, another may hate. (Just ask my sister.) Maybe the agents you’ve tried so far just aren’t into your premise, but if you keep trying, you’ll find one who feels that resonance.
The agent’s not really looking for new clients. Well, maybe. Kind of. Personally, I think most agents who are open to queries really are hoping to find new clients. BUT … a modified version of this may apply if the agent already has a manuscript to shop that’s in a similar vein to yours.
The agent was in a bad mood when going through hundreds of queries. Possible, I suppose. Call me an optimist, but I like to think most agents are professional enough to keep moods out of it. But they’re human, they’re not perfect, so it could happen. Perhaps more likely is unfortunate timing. If an agent is seeing several queries in a row with similar premises—most of them badly done—and then comes across your similarly-themed query, they might be too burned out on the concept to recognize your fresh take.
All those reasons shift the responsibility away from us. That’s kind of appealing, right? “It’s not MY fault I’m not getting nibbles.” Appealing, but dangerous, because here’s the thing:
The Buck Stops HERE.
Let’s face it. It’s WAY more likely that the reason we’re not getting nibbles is our fault in some way. Here are a few candidates to consider:
The query sucks. This is even more basic than not finding that magical, evasive, perfect query. Glaring errors. Weak writing. Newbie mistakes. Do your homework, get your rear-end kicked by knowledgeable people (such as those over at AgentQuery Connect), and get the basics right.
The premise is stale. Maybe the actual premise isn’t stale, but in the query, it might come across as a tired old rehash of something that’s been done. The query needs to highlight what’s fresh and awesome in your story.
The un-sucky query isn’t doing its job. Getting a well-written query that follows the rules is only the baseline. A query’s job is to COMPEL. It must compel the recipient to read more. That’s probably what I see lacking most often in queries I critique. The writing and set-up are okay, but it leaves me flat. It doesn’t grab me and say, “You must read this!”
The sample pages are letting you down. This is a tricky one, because it can overlap with the idea of subjectivity a LOT. But this is where it all has to come together. Your voice, your technique, your style, your plotting choices, your characters … they all need to sing in gorgeous harmony. One piece off-key can mean a quick rejection.
That last one can be the hardest. It’s easy to say queries are hard. Figuring them out is a whole new learning curve from writing a novel. But it can come down to something as simple and frightening as this:
It might be the writing.
Maybe we’re not ready. Maybe our skills need a touch more development.
We have to be open to this. If we’re not, we won’t take the next step—working harder to improve.
Maybe it’s one of the other reasons—the reasons that are out of our control. Personally, I choose to assume I need to make my work better, because in the end, that attitude will do my writing the most good.
Speak up:
2 commentsThere Are No Rules
Okay, maybe there are rules of writing. But not as many as you think, and very few without exceptions. Everything else could be labeled suggestions, guidelines, or generally good ideas.
If you write a novel completely in Yoda-speak, that probably won’t fly. Can I unilaterally declare a rule against that?
So, let’s look at the so-called rules.
- Prologues are prohibited. I’ve seen many bad prologues – unnecessary, gimmicky, long-winded … it goes on. Some prologues, however, are dynamite and serve a particular function. For a much more qualified opinion on the subject, check out this blog post.
- Avoid adverbs/adjectives. In my cyber-travels, here’s what I’ve learned: It depends. Awkward and pervasive modifiers are a problem. Piling as many as four adjectives in front of a single object bugs me. Audience matters, too. Middle Grade and Young Adult are likely to have more of these words, and particular genres favor them more than others. And let’s face it – sometimes they’re the best way to get the message across.
- “Pass” on passive voice. Constant use of passive voice would annoy me. Even more annoying, though, is when people misidentify something as passive. The presence of a “to be” verb form doesn’t automatically mean it’s passive. Besides, I’ve found sometimes I want the passive form to change where the emphasis is placed.
- Say only said. Dialogue tags are a big issue. Too many kill the flow. Too few can cause confusion. Then there’s the question of what the tag should be. Again, I contend audience and genre are something to consider. I stick to “said” unless I have a reason not to (so I follow the “rule” except when I don’t). I’ve also found when there are more than two speakers, more tags are naturally needed. In that situation, “said” starts to feel really repetitive.
I’m sure there are others, and further comments to make on the ones I’ve already listed.
Does it have to be this complicated, though? Rather than obsessing over “rules” and how to follow them/when to break them, I ask myself the following questions:
- Will the reader spend more time unraveling the sentence than it takes to read it?
- Is anything distracting or jarring?
- Is anything ambiguous or confusing?
- Will the reader look at this section and say, “So what?”
Any questions to add to this list? What are your self-critiquing tips and tricks?
Speak up:
Comments Off on There Are No RulesBlinders
What is it about our own work that makes it so hard to see problems?
Granted, it’s not always the case. I’ll often write a sentence and know immediately that I hate it. If I can’t figure out a better way to word it at that moment, I’ll let it stand, knowing I’ll be able to hash out something better when I return.
Sometimes I read others’ work and wonder, “How could they not spot that doozy?” Yet I’m sure I overlook similar problems in my own work.
Nothing brings you down to earth like having one of your fifteen-year-old students spot a typo for you.
The scientific part of me wonders exactly what’s behind these authorial blinders. In matters of typos and missing words, I’m sure our familiarity with the material causes us to fill in the gaps. What about those big gaps in logic, though? Or glaring inconsistencies?
How do we miss those? And how can we help ourselves by taking those blinders off?