Submitting your work is like dropping your kids off for their first day at school. You don’t know whether they are going to be bullied, rejected or become best friends with everybody and make a real impression. Be prepared for all eventualities.
OK, let’s defy Wild West tradition and start off with the ugly – and it doesn’t get much uglier than this. Rejection. It’s the word that no writer ever wants to hear, but inevitably will at some point in their career. Unless you are extremely lucky, you’ll have to learn to cope with rejection. It isn’t easy: during the abyss of time between submitting a piece of work and hearing an editior’s response you can’t help but build up your level of anticipation. And if the response comes back negative it can crush your confidence and make you want to throw everything you’ve ever written in the fire.
Don’t give in. I know it can feel like the end of the world – I used to hide myself away in my room for days on end debating various forms of revenge against the offending editor. Put it behind you and try again, with a different editor. Contrary to popular opinion, editors want to open an envelope and be delighted by what’s inside, they want to find material worth publishing – they’re not out to try and crush your self-confidence by rejecting your work.
Rejection can take many forms. More often than not, you’ll get a printed compliments slip with nothing written on it. This is the easiest response for an editor but the most frustrating response for a writer – what did they think? Was it not even worth an acknowledgement? Don’t get too wound up, editors are busy and sometimes they simply don’t have the time (or are too badly organised!) to respond.
Sometimes the printed slip comes back with some scribbled comments. These might be complimentary: ‘good but not quite right for this publication’; promising: ‘please send something else’; critical: ‘good overall but you haven’t quite pinned down the characters’; or just plain derogatory. I won’t give an example of the latter, but they do occasionally happen. If you do get a grumpy response, just try to ignore it (the editor’s probably got haemorrhoids from sitting down all day) and move on.
If an editor sees real promise in your work he may take the time to write a more detailed analysis of this decision. Don’t take this as an insult and bin the comments, or get on your high horse and write a scathing letter back justifying your work. It’s an editor’s way of encouraging you to look at certain elements of your writing in order to improve your chances of publication. Take a few days to cool down, then look at what he’s saying: it may not be relevant, but he might just be pointing out a weakness you’ve completely overlooked. Editors don’t often make good writers, but they do know what sells and what doesn’t. Paying attention to their comments will give you a great advantage next time you submit.
If your work runs the gauntlet and makes it from the slush pile, through the juniors or freelancers who’ll read it first, and past the senior editor who’ll try and sell your book and ‘you’ the writer to the big cheeses, then you’ll get a phone call – quite possibly the best phone call of your life – where an offer is made to publish your book. They might not say this directly, but they will most probably want to meet you to talk about possible changes and to get a feel for how promotable you are as a writer. Once the legal and financial blurb is out of the way, you’ll probably have to wait up to eighteen months before you can visit Borders and start drooling over your book on the shelf. It may seem a long wait, but this gives the marketing department time to work their magic and allows the book to be released at the most opportune moment.
Tuesday, 29 November 2011
Monday, 7 November 2011
Buy one, get everything else free
Having a clear idea of where your work is heading is all well and good, but remember: readers don’t like a giveaway, so keep them guessing by plotting cleverly. Getting the reader to turn page after page is the most important concern for a writer, and the best way to arrest their attention is by raising questions and delaying the answers. If you pose an intriguing enough question at the beginning of a piece of writing a reader will charge through a thousand pages or more to find out what happens – just look at The Lord of the Rings.
Plot, especially in a novel, is like a treasure map. As a writer, you’re guaranteeing to a reader that the instructions you give them will lead them through the dark forest to the golden doubloons at the end – it’s a guarantee that you’re sending them in the right direction, and that whatever lies at the end is worth the trip. If the map you provide doesn’t meet these two requirements, the readers will lose their way, and you’ll lose their trust.
But it’s a little more complicated than this. Readers aren’t just looking for a final payoff – they don’t want freebies. If people were after a quick resolution, all stories would be two pages long; a beginning, then straight away a conclusion. Or readers would skip to the last page of a novel as soon as they’d finished the first. The map you provide has to be one that takes the reader on a number of adventures, that builds up their suspense and relives it bit by bit on the journey to the end. Readers like to be teased. They want to get to the end of a novel (how many times have you cursed yourself for not being able to read fast enough to find out what happens at the end of a book?) but they also want to feel they’ve got something from the whole experience, not just the resolution.
In order to create tension in a plot, to keep readers turning those pages, you need to ask questions and hold back the answers. In most texts, the initiating event poses the big question: readers want to know how a character is going to react, and what the outcome will be. If the uncertainty you create at the beginning of the book is exciting enough, they’ll keep reading until they get to the end, until the question is resolved.
For some, though, the thought of slogging through an entire novel for a final resolution is daunting, so keep up the tension by posing smaller questions in each chapter. Remember, each problem or obstacle you pose for a character is a question raised – every challenge you set a character creates an uncertainty in the reader: will they make it out of this one? Keep your readers hooked by holding back the answer, and posing another question as soon as the previous one is resolved. You can do this at the start of the chapter, or you can end chapters with a cliffhanger, but either way the reader is propelled forwards by their need to find out what happens next. Many thriller writers have got this down to a fine art.
Whether you’re creating a plot from an outline, or leaving it to the actions of your characters, you should be aiming to show how life is a great deal more complicated than a simple story. And in order to do this, you don’t just want to be showing events themselves, you need to focus on how they shape your characters. Plot is a journey, sometimes physically but always emotionally and psychologically. Central characters need to change in the course of a plot: when they arrive at point B they can be anywhere – happier, sadder, richer, poorer, deader – as long as they are not still at point A. Somewhere between each uncertainty and each resolution, your characters change, they evolve. Without this change, for better or for worse, readers will find it hard to empathise with your characters.
Plot, especially in a novel, is like a treasure map. As a writer, you’re guaranteeing to a reader that the instructions you give them will lead them through the dark forest to the golden doubloons at the end – it’s a guarantee that you’re sending them in the right direction, and that whatever lies at the end is worth the trip. If the map you provide doesn’t meet these two requirements, the readers will lose their way, and you’ll lose their trust.
But it’s a little more complicated than this. Readers aren’t just looking for a final payoff – they don’t want freebies. If people were after a quick resolution, all stories would be two pages long; a beginning, then straight away a conclusion. Or readers would skip to the last page of a novel as soon as they’d finished the first. The map you provide has to be one that takes the reader on a number of adventures, that builds up their suspense and relives it bit by bit on the journey to the end. Readers like to be teased. They want to get to the end of a novel (how many times have you cursed yourself for not being able to read fast enough to find out what happens at the end of a book?) but they also want to feel they’ve got something from the whole experience, not just the resolution.
In order to create tension in a plot, to keep readers turning those pages, you need to ask questions and hold back the answers. In most texts, the initiating event poses the big question: readers want to know how a character is going to react, and what the outcome will be. If the uncertainty you create at the beginning of the book is exciting enough, they’ll keep reading until they get to the end, until the question is resolved.
For some, though, the thought of slogging through an entire novel for a final resolution is daunting, so keep up the tension by posing smaller questions in each chapter. Remember, each problem or obstacle you pose for a character is a question raised – every challenge you set a character creates an uncertainty in the reader: will they make it out of this one? Keep your readers hooked by holding back the answer, and posing another question as soon as the previous one is resolved. You can do this at the start of the chapter, or you can end chapters with a cliffhanger, but either way the reader is propelled forwards by their need to find out what happens next. Many thriller writers have got this down to a fine art.
Whether you’re creating a plot from an outline, or leaving it to the actions of your characters, you should be aiming to show how life is a great deal more complicated than a simple story. And in order to do this, you don’t just want to be showing events themselves, you need to focus on how they shape your characters. Plot is a journey, sometimes physically but always emotionally and psychologically. Central characters need to change in the course of a plot: when they arrive at point B they can be anywhere – happier, sadder, richer, poorer, deader – as long as they are not still at point A. Somewhere between each uncertainty and each resolution, your characters change, they evolve. Without this change, for better or for worse, readers will find it hard to empathise with your characters.
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