90 percent of rejections are not due to bad prose

[ckatt]

Interesting article here for those interested in the short form. While for some this may not be news I think it's a good list of things to look at in your writing.

The following writing advice falls under two columns: story element issues and short fiction craft issues. In the majority of stories I read, prose is not the issue. Often, the prose is good, even great, but it’s the story itself that isn’t working. Remember, editing isn’t simply perfecting a sentence, it’s rewriting and the first stage of that should be with a developmental focus.

Writing Advice From A Slush Reader -Evelyn Freeling

I tend to spend a lot of energy agonizing over word choice and sentence structure. This is in spite of the fact that it's one of the things my critiques generally praise about my work.
So maybe it's time to worry less about it. After all, haven't we all read something where the prose was just wretched and left you wondering how on earth it got past an editor?

 

[Swank]

That quote doesn't really say that bad prose isn't an issue. Just that other issues kick in first.

I would agonize about everything if you actually want to get published.

 

[ckatt]

I would agonize about everything if you actually want to get published.

Totally disagree. Agonizing is not healthy, and I probably do it more since I was first published than before. So I can't say it's helping me make more sales.
Still, my point here is about how I spend my editing time and that permutating the same sentence again and again is less useful than some of the other things this slush reader recommends. There are only so many hours in a day after all.

 

[Swank]

Totally disagree. Agonizing is not healthy, and I probably do it more since I was first published than before. So I can't say it's helping me make more sales.
Still, my point here is about how I spend my editing time and that permutating the same sentence again and again is less useful than some of the other things this slush reader recommends. There are only so many hours in a day after all.

Sure. Sorry to use your term "agonizing". I didn't mean dithering about minutia, but if you are going to write something to win the publishing lottery, every part of it ought to be your best work.

I just think they almost never get something in that is brilliant story-wise and the prose is garbage, so the prose isn't the disqualifier.

 

[J-Sun]

"Good writing will seldom sell a bad story, but a good story will frequently sell bad writing." -- Frank M. Robinson (via Dave Truesdale of Tangent)

What kills a lot of stories is one of two extremes of a virtue: a writer has nothing to say (and may try to disguise that with elaborate prose) or the writer has too much to say and only preaches without creating living, breathing characters animated with plausible internal motivations in a logically constructed and inevitable, yet surprising, plot. (In my time reviewing short fiction, the latter was by far the most common problem.) There's no sense in putting lipstick (good prose) on a pig (a bad story). And "good prose" in a vacuum is worse than "bad prose." If you have a lean story machine, it may still run with rough but vigorous prose. However, if you put your track star in a frilly dress, it's not going to run well. Make the tale good; make the prose fit the tale.

 

[ckatt]

@Swank I think your reasoning is sound but does not align with the reality I have experienced. I read most of the pro and semi-pro short fiction mags regularly (Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless skies, Escape Pod etc.) and often find a real stinker that leaves me scratching my head.
I think there is a certain threshold you have to pass in prose quality but after that, there are other things that are more important. I have no idea where you are at in your writing journey so I'm not suggesting you change your prosses if it's working for you.

 

[ckatt]

creating living, breathing characters animated with plausible internal motivations in a logically constructed and inevitable, yet surprising, plot.

Oh gee, is that all you want?

 

[Swank]

@Swank I think your reasoning is sound but does not align with the reality I have experienced. I read most of the pro and semi-pro short fiction mags regularly (Asimov's, Clarkesworld, Beneath Ceaseless skies, Escape Pod etc.) and often find a real stinker that leaves me scratching my head.
I think there is a certain threshold you have to pass in prose quality but after that, there are other things that are more important. I have no idea where you are at in your writing journey so I'm not suggesting you change your prosses if it's working for you.

Let's not make this an argument. I'm sure you are correct, but my reaction to your story is that those authors went and publicly outed themselves as cringeworthy prose writers. The next time they write something, the agent/publisher might already have an opinion and be wary of investing themselves in novel-length heavy editing.

All I'm getting at is the fact that good stories are much harder than good prose, but bad prose is still bad. It is never to your benefit to write anything badly when you are trying to make a sale.

 

[alexvss]

Interesting article here for those interested in the short form. While for some this may not be news I think it's a good list of things to look at in your writing.


Writing Advice From A Slush Reader -Evelyn Freeling

I tend to spend a lot of energy agonizing over word choice and sentence structure. This is in spite of the fact that it's one of the things my critiques generally praise about my work.
So maybe it's time to worry less about it. After all, haven't we all read something where the prose was just wretched and left you wondering how on earth it got past an editor?

I agree with pretty much everything that’s been said in the thread, but I’m leaning more towards swank’s and j-sun’s point: it’s better to have the best of both worlds, structure and story. I also read SFFH magazines a lot, and I agree that they often publish questionable material--but that doesn’t mean that you should just do what others do in order to get published. You should be satisfied with your work; you shouldn’t just try to convince an editor.

Also, a thing about the article that you shared. She talks about the first page of a short-story not being a prologue and, in "Structural Issues", she says "Often stories with structural issues appear as stories which start in medias res, then move backwards to show how the opening event perspired." I couldn’t agree more… but editors seem to disagree with this. I see “short-story prologues” a lot in these magazines. Clarkesworld has at least one story like this per issue. It’s one of my pet peeves.

 

[alexvss]

"Plot is not the story. The plot is not the structure. It's just THE PLOT."

 

[ckatt]

I’m leaning more towards swank’s and j-sun’s point: it’s better to have the best of both worlds, structure and story.

I can't imagine anyone would disagree with that--it's a bit of a truism.

She talks about the first page of a short-story not being a prologue and, in "Structural Issues", she says "Often stories with structural issues appear as stories which start in medias res, then move backwards to show how the opening event perspired." I couldn’t agree more… but editors seem to disagree with this. I see “short-story prologues” a lot in these magazines. Clarkesworld has at least one story like this per issue. It’s one of my pet peeves.

Yeah, this issue puzzles me, (and I think we've discussed it before). It's a bit of a cheap hook maybe, one that you find in TV a lot, so maybe it's something everyone is used to. On the whole, I find that I don't enjoy Clarkesworld as much as I did five or six years ago. Maybe that is part of why.

 

[Mark_Harbinger]

This quote seems relevant—and in tune with the Robinson quote above:

“…I have always been so skeptical of the whole contemporary critical scene, in which the text is regarded as some immutable miracle, to be worshipped or dissected as if it were the story itself. What anyone trained as an editor and rewriter knows is that the text is not the story—the text is merely one attempt to place the story inside the memory of the audience. The text can be replaced by an infinite number of other attempts. Some will be better than others, but no text will be “right” for all audiences, nor will any one text be “perfect.” The story exists only in the memory of the reader, as an altered version of the story intended (consciously or not) by the author. It is possible for the audience to create for themselves a better story than the author could ever have created in the text. Thus audiences have taken to their hearts miserably-written stories like Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs, because what they received transcended the text; while any number of beautifully written texts have been swallowed up without a trace, because the text, however lovely, did a miserable job of kindling a living story within the readers’ memories.”
—Orson Scott Card, from Maps In A Mirror

 

[ckatt]

no text will be “right” for all audiences, nor will any one text be “perfect.”

I think that's a good thing to keep in mind.
"Good" writing is subjective and you can never please everyone.
I belong to a large critique group with writers ranging from the unpublished to those whose work appears regularly in the pro mags.
One thing I've noticed is that the more experienced a writer is, the less they comment on the prose and the more they comment on the structure and the characters, the overall feeling they get from the story.

 

[Christine Wheelwright]

"Good writing will seldom sell a bad story, but a good story will frequently sell bad writing." -- Frank M. Robinson (via Dave Truesdale of Tangent)

That sounds like it should be true. But I can't help believing that good writing is absolutely essential. When an agent or publisher (or any reader) gets hold of your work, they are going to know within a few sentences whether your writing is good or bad. It will probably take much longer to work out if you have a good or bad story. Bearing in mind agents and publishers probably have piles of books to get through, I imagine they are looking for a reason to discard more than a reason to keep reading.

[On the other hand - and as someone above points out - many dreadfully written books have been published and become popular. So what do I know?]

 

[DLCroix]

Well, respectfully I did a panning of the material in the Critiques section and excluding the experiments and excerpts but rather stories that, in effect, start from scratch and just as an average reader should find them, allows me to make a brief diagnosis of what is happening right here:
1. Most authors seem to be completely unaware of the decisive importance that the first sentence or hook sentence has in a story. In this regard, the only exceptions that I detected in my review were:
*) Fantasy Novel Prologue, by @Christine Wheelwright. Strong in style and theme. Heartwarming. Little else I imagined this story narrated with the voice of John Hurt.
*) An old world revisited, by @Jo Zebedee. Also very well written, it gets to the point and immediately lets the reader know that there is a problem, a complicated discussion that I as a reader want to know what it is about. It is an example of a perfectly thought-out hook phrase.
*) Chronicles Of The Shorewalker, by @Shorewalker. Also very well written, you immediately detect a solid story that has been thought out in every detail.
*) And in a way The End of Future Days, by @Cli-Fi. It's a long shot, but the catchphrase is intriguing and that's basically the first thing a story needs to grab the reader's attention.
The first sentence, and by extension the first paragraph, although they are not everything in a story (because it is still possible that the story falls at some point), they are nonetheless vital in the reader's decision to continue reading or not. This, of course, includes professional editors.

2) In addition, many stories tend to start by assuming a lot of information that ONLY the author knows, and on the other hand it is it is not valuable information for the reader. Strictly speaking, one as a reader is always interested in knowing first WHAT is happening (if possible what the conflict is), secondly WHO (characters) and and thirdly WHERE.
This is also a simple writing rule that many seem to ignore. So, we already have two elements that do not have to do precisely with how good each one's prose is, but with KNOWING HOW TO PRESENT the information, especially the second, because, as is known, the opening sentence has more to do with the effect although without it there is usually no reader either.
Then, I think, only then can we talk about how good the story is; if it has a premise treated in a creative way or is just a rehash of something previous.

 

[Jo Zebedee]

The art of storytelling is often overlooked in favour of perfect writing. I’m no great shakes at either but I read a lot of authors not considered great writers who can tell a hell of a story (Stevie King, lots of Irish female writers - Binchy, Keyes - the likes of Lois McMaster Bujold) and they nail the hook.

Critique Corner, an online critique site, used to do a very useful critique event called The Hook. You put up the start, anonymously, and it is critiqued also anonymously to tell you only two things: either where the reader stopped reading and why, or whether they reached the end, and, if so, what hooked them.

for Inish Carraig, a line about a boy thinking about cooking the neighbourhood cat was the hook - I duly brought it up to paragraph two rather than about 600 words in. now I do try to think about what the hook might be, and, crucially, what the early stakes are.

 

[ckatt]

Critique Corner, an online critique site, used to do a very useful critique event called The Hook. You put up the start, anonymously, and it is critiqued also anonymously to tell you only two things: either where the reader stopped reading and why, or whether they reached the end, and, if so, what hooked them.

That sounds like a lot of fun and useful. Too bad Chrons isn't equipped for anonymous posts.

 

[Swank]

That sounds like a lot of fun and useful. Too bad Chrons isn't equipped for anonymous posts.

Easy enough to do through a proxy. Look at the 100 word contest.

 

[DLCroix]

The art of storytelling is often overlooked in favour of perfect writing. I’m no great shakes at either but I read a lot of authors not considered great writers who can tell a hell of a story (Stevie King, lots of Irish female writers - Binchy, Keyes - the likes of Lois McMaster Bujold) and they nail the hook.

Critique Corner, an online critique site, used to do a very useful critique event called The Hook. You put up the start, anonymously, and it is critiqued also anonymously to tell you only two things: either where the reader stopped reading and why, or whether they reached the end, and, if so, what hooked them.

for Inish Carraig, a line about a boy thinking about cooking the neighbourhood cat was the hook - I duly brought it up to paragraph two rather than about 600 words in. now I do try to think about what the hook might be, and, crucially, what the early stakes are.

It is estimated that the time a reader takes to decide whether or not to read a text is just a few seconds, and if the author is not known, then only two elements influence this decision: the title of the story, which I hope we can discuss in another thread, and of course the beginning of this or the hook phrase.
What is recommended?
Analyze the beginning of a story once it is finished and corrected to see if that really is the beginning, because a careful reading can detect that the true beginning of a story is several paragraphs later and even these are susceptible to being eliminated and we discover with surprise that nothing happens, that history does not lose its essence without them.

Sometimes it is better as the beginning a dialogue or an action scene than descriptions or reflections of the character or the author. Still, the problem with starting a story with an action scene is that it should be as short and general as possible; that is, not contain elements that only the author knows.

The hook phrase should have something that refers to the story or asks a question. It is recommended to use strong images, whether they are aesthetic, with great descriptive force or mysterious. It has also been observed that the first sentence of a story is generally more effective as long as it has units of measure such as hours or miles. They fix a parameter that helps the reader to orient himself.

 

[Steve Harrison]

I had a lengthy discussion about this with my publisher (smallish company) a few years ago and his initial approach to submissions (a query and the first 50 pages) is to ask himself some subjective questions:

- Is the idea something of interest to me?
- Is the idea/novel something readers will buy?
- Can the author write?

If the answer is yes to those questions, he requests more or all of the manuscript, which, if those answers are still yes, leads to the final question:

- How much work is required to get the novel to a publishable standard?

I don't know if this is typical of publishers (I only have the one to go by), but he said that last question is the one that leads to rejections of most of the submissions that get past the first hurdle.

Both my novels required what I thought was extensive editing, so I don't know what he considers too much work!