I will not read your f*****g script!

[Vertigo]

Tecdavid - I suspect that's a worry that will always be there until people start buying your stuff and giving it good reviews. That's certainly the way I feel and no matter how honest people say they will be there will always be a sneaking worry that they were being kind to me.

Actually you'll probably know before that when the rejection letters start coming in. The only real confirmation that you have something worthy of your (natural) pride will be when a hard nosed publisher who has never met you and cares not one joy about your feelings decides it's worth his/her company spending their money on it.

 

[Hex]

Apparently even Proper Published Authors worry, so it sounds like it's something that doesn't ever really go away.

Having said that, I think it's especially tough at the start before you show your work to anyone else. Once you get feedback from other people, you start getting a clearer idea of what your strengths and weaknesses are.

Being nice is not the same as being dishonest. And it's not nice to tell someone they can write if you don't think they can.

(but yes -- I worry about this a lot)

 

[Vertigo]

As you say, what writer doesn't? In fact when they do stop worrying, they maybe tend to get a little arrogant and their quailty can often fall. Think about complaints along those lines with authors like Heinlein; his latter work became severely self-indulgent and, as I understand it, he wouldn't let editors take stuff out.

 

[Peter Graham]

The critiques and feedback I've received from others has been pretty promising, but I can't help but wonder: "Did they really mean that?"

For what it's worth, I think you can save yourself the wondering. Even if everyone who has critiqued your work thinks it's jaw-droppingly wonderful, an agent or publisher will only take you on if they think they can sell it. Beowulf is jaw-droppingly wonderful, but I wouldn't like its chances of finding a publisher now if it was a new piece of work.

As discussed in earlier threads, only about 3-5% of unsolicited work is up to scratch. For an agency receiving 200 unsolicited submissions a week (not uncommon if their blogs are anything to go by), that still means up to 520 good submissions per annum (to 9,880 bad ones). Constraints of time and budget inevitably mean that only a handful even of that 520 will get taken on.

So, the fact you don't get picked up doesn't mean the feedback you received was not genuine. If you do get picked up, it probably was genuine, but otherwise you'll never know, so there's no point worrying too much about it.

From what the agents say in their blogs, anything up to 90% of the submissions they receive are very poorly written. If you can be sure that you can spell, use punctuation and construct tight, clear sentences, you are already in the last 10%. That's got to be step one.

Regards,

Peter

 

[Vertigo]

From what the agents say in their blogs, anything up to 90% of the submissions they receive are very poorly written. If you can be sure that you can spell, use punctuation and construct tight, clear sentences, you are already in the last 10%. That's got to be step one.

You know I've heard that a few times and I must admit I find it quite staggering, not that people submit badly written stuff, but that such a high percentage do. It seems to me getting that bit right is the easiest part (though I've still a lot to learn there) and therefore it is inexcusable to be sloppy about it. I mean I'm not knocking the difficulty of being a good editor, but ultimately, to me at least, the creative side of writing is the real challenge and to let yourself down with bad writing mechanics seems just plain daft.

 

[Peter Graham]

You know I've heard that a few times and I must admit I find it quite staggering, not that people submit badly written stuff, but that such a high percentage do.

I quite agree. But so many folk in the know say it that I'm starting to believe it must be true. And speaking as someone who would happily run off with a perky gerund with a well-turned ankle, I take some comfort from the statistics.

It would be easy to blame the education system, so I will. Things might be changing now, but for many years there was a reaction against what was seen as prescriptive rote-learning. It was all about self-expression and creativity, which I fear may have given rise to a myth (and it really is no more than that) that all one needs is a super idea and one is a writer. Of course, like pop stars, writers are also "artists"* and, as art is a largely subjective process, being rude about someone else's art is the height of bad manners.

I suspect that writing is also seen as easier than becoming a concert pianist or a sculptor - after all, we can all write, can't we? So if one wishes to leave a creative legacy or scratch a creative itch, writing a book is as good a way as any.

I once went to a gig where the frontman announced:-

"For twenty years i have suffered for my art. Now it's your turn."

Regards,

Peter

* They aren't. Art is produced by wierd alcoholic French painters who die in penury in frozen garretts on the Left Bank.

 

[Hex]

I think there's an issue with judgement -- how does one know one's writing is riddled with errors?

Presumably we all write to (approximately) the best of our ability and it takes someone else to teach us about (to pick something I had no idea about until six months ago) punctuating dialogue or (something I knew already because few students seem to know) the difference between 'their' and 'they're' or where to put the apostrophe in soldiers guns. And so on.

How do you know you need to buy a book on grammar and work through it? We all did English at school, right?

Further, there's the question of when you're ready to submit to agents. It's a terrifying decision and I don't think you ever really know. If I decide to start submitting this summer, that'll have been five years after I started trying to write fiction. It's still too soon, probably, but I bet a lot of people who will ever submit to agents do so within a couple of years of starting to write because it's almost impossible to judge the quality of your own writing. And there's a risk that you'll keep trying to improve forever and NEVER SUBMIT ANYTHING. Sometime it has to be good enough, right? And how do you judge when?

Edit: and I agree it's to do with education. I won't rant but most kids who go to university have clearly not been taught the rules of English (or haven't remembered them), and they're really smart and thoughtful and hardworking, so it's not that they haven't bothered.

 

[Tecdavid]

90%, eh? A little unnerving, don't you think? It certainly unnerves me, but then again, almost everything I'm taught about writing worries me a little. There's always something more to learn, and each lesson reshapes the way you look at writing in general, and how you perceive your own work.
I suppose I never thought of it as such an intricate, well-tailored craft, until I properly gave it a go.
I think that's why I always feel so unsure about my work. I might spend hours sculpting my story, putting words on a page, or redrafting them, but until it's out there, on the shelves (assuming I ever get that far), I'll never know for sure whether I've sculpted, wrote, or redrafted decently. I'll never know for sure whether it's good. And once it's out there, I can't swipe it off the shelves again and make changes. I only get to make one First Impression.
Writing's exciting, but when hoping to do it professionally, it's also rather frightening.

That's how I feel sometimes, anyway.

 

[Venusian Broon]

I think that's why I always feel so unsure about my work. I might spend hours sculpting my story, putting words on a page, or redrafting them, but until it's out there, on the shelves (assuming I ever get that far), I'll never know for sure whether I've sculpted, wrote, or redrafted decently. I'll never know for sure whether it's good.

If it's any consolation* Tecdavid, although I can't speak for anyone else, I'm pretty sure that is how every unpublished writer wanting to be published feels. Definitely me too anyway.

I'd liken it to climbing a mountain blindfolded. You're just never sure at any point in the ascent if you are at, or near the top. You've just got to concentrate on what you are doing right there and then and struggle upwards


* My dad would keep telling me this about things like exams - saying if you are feeling stressed about this, always remember that everyone else is feeling the same way. I'm not sure that this actually helped at all.

 

[RcGrant]

I think you will find there's a fairly large number of people who submit manuscripts simply because they fancy writing a book. How many of us, when telling people we write, get the time-worn response of "Oh, I wrote a book once"/"I have a great idea for a book, maybe I should write it sometime"? I know I have!

Now, there's nothing inherently wrong with this, and books have been published by people who just sat down one day and wrote something in this manner, but on the whole there will be so many things wrong with a manuscript crafted on this basis that I imagine the majority would be instantly rejected.

I think the craft of writing is highly underrated. My own father thinks a novel is a "whole load of filler with a climax" (his words). As Peter said, because words are our method of communication, and the majority of people can pick up a pen and write something down, there is a general consensus it requires very little skill.

 

[Vertigo]

I'm with you completely on that Tecdavid and Hex. Actually Tecdavid you might be interested to take a look at a recent thread on fearful writers:
http://www.sffchronicles.co.uk/forum/536273-if-youre-not-scared-youre-not-doing-it.html
It is interesting to see the different fears (or lack of them) that many of the Chrons writers have.

 

[Tecdavid]

I'm glad I'm not alone in feeling nerves, here and there. Thanks for the link, Vertigo.
And I think that's a perfectly apt analogy, Venusian.

It's also good that these forums can serve as a place to share one's worries or concerns. For me, uncertainty can be a real hindrance, but reading a few rational responses can help calm it down.

 

[TheDustyZebra]

Apparently even Proper Published Authors worry, so it sounds like it's something that doesn't ever really go away.

I know there are some Proper Published Authors who should have worried about this at some point in their careers -- and not at the beginning, either! I hate when a (shall we call them) PPA gets so popular that he starts churning out garbage, which sells just as well because his name is on it. One in particular comes to mind (I believe I've mentioned this in a review on GoodReads) who, from all appearances, simply started lending his name to books written by other people ("with" him) and didn't bother to read what they had written first. Sheer tripe, bearing no resemblance to his previous work.

 

[Brian G Turner]

I think there's an issue with judgement -- how does one know one's writing is riddled with errors?

Same here - I think one of the earliest traps for a writer is to think that just because they can put two words together, that therefore they are on a par with Shakespeare.

And therefore don't need to have multiple writing drafts or editing drafts.

Oddly, my Internet Business portal has received a few submissions for romance literature. I suspect it was linked to from a non-English site because the level of writing in the covering letter and synopsis on each occasion was laughably awful.

As someone once told me, "Everyone has a book inside them ... and for most, that's where it should stay!"

 

[Vertigo]

As someone once told me, "Everyone has a book inside them ... and for most, that's where it should stay!"

Brilliant and quite possibly the case for me but we shall see (maybe)!

 

[Boneman]

As someone once told me, "Everyone has a book inside them ... and for most, that's where it should stay!"

Damned if I can find it, but the professional critique that I had all those years ago was by a guy who wrote a long article (Times or Guardian, I can't remember which) extolling exactly this! Apparently some folk lead an interesting life and people say to them "you should write a book" and lots of them do...

 

[Teresa Edgerton]

For an agency receiving 200 unsolicited submissions a week (not uncommon if their blogs are anything to go by), that still means up to 520 good submissions per annum (to 9,880 bad ones). Constraints of time and budget inevitably mean that only a handful even of that 520 will get taken on.

Which is why it's important to keep on writing and submitting new things over the years. It increases the odds that some time for some agent, your book will be one of the handful.

Many of that top 3-5% don't do that, which is a big reason why they are never picked up by an agent.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

See, they should be too busy making up things to tell to actually lead an interesting life. That's where they're going wrong.

 

[The Judge]

How many of us, when telling people we write, get the time-worn response of "Oh, I wrote a book once"/"I have a great idea for a book, maybe I should write it sometime"?

I think the craft of writing is highly underrated.

I don't know how true it is, but I recently read an anecdote about Margaret Atwood at a dinner party when a brain surgeon told her that as he was just about to retire he was going to write a book. "What a coincidence," she says. "I was thinking of taking up brain surgery."

 

[chrispenycate]

I don't know how true it is, but I recently read an anecdote about Margaret Atwood at a dinner party when a brain surgeon told her that as he was just about to retire he was going to write a book. "What a coincidence," she says. "I was thinking of taking up brain surgery."

So, now I am no longer a studio engineer I should start investigating neurosurgery or nuclear physics, anything rather than try and write, is that what you're implying?