Here are three things that I find in a lot of Hatrack stories that, IMHO, are going to cause the editor to stop reading your story and reject it out of hand.
1) Stories are made up of sentences. If your first two or three pages have more than two sentence fragments or run-on sentences, the editor will stop reading and send it back. The same goes for bad grammar and spelling. Don't plan on becoming a writer first and then learning basic English. Go to your local college and take English 101. Then write.
2) Stories are best told in chronological order. The following example is a bad way to begin a story:
Jon Eric Snark grabbed the orc by the throat and ripped his head off. Earlier that day, when Jon first rode into the little town of Tumtum on the Piddle on his Snagglebeast...
Tell stories in chronological order. As soon as the editor hits that flashback, out comes the rejection slip.
3) Everything in a story has to be interesting. Telling a good story is partly about putting in interesting stuff, but almost as important is leaving out boring stuff. As soon as your story recounts what Jon Eric Snark had for breakfast, it had better be a very interesting breakfast, or out comes the rejection slip.
I'll go on My first 13 rant in a moment.
First, I want to rant about something related. This is a place to improve our writing skills (Kind-of like a free English 101, only customized toward a goal: getting published.) We're supposed to be a community of Writers helping Writers, no matter what level we have achieved. If OSC, KDW, Christine, Jamie Ford, Spaceman, Sara Genge, and an abundance of other published writers didn't step in to help us, we would all just be at different levels of Wannabe. If you just get irritated at what you see, you may not be as skilled at helping someone learn as you think.
Instead of ranting on what I don't like -- or trying to claim what editors reject and why (though there were some valid points) -- I'm going to mention the elements that compose a good 13 lines. They're no different for short stories and novels.
[This message has been edited by InarticulateBabbler (edited September 15, 2007).]
Some good points, though, IB.
I'm not sure you can, or should, get a true sense of where a story is going from the first 13 though. But at the start of a story a writer does, I think, make a certain "promise" to the reader about what kind of story it is going to be and needs to fulfill that promise--which makes me realize where I went wrong on a certain short story. *light dawns*
[This message has been edited by JeanneT (edited September 15, 2007).]
quote:
1) Stories are made up of sentences. If your first two or three pages have more than two sentence fragments or run-on sentences, the editor will stop reading and send it back. The same goes for bad grammar and spelling. Don't plan on becoming a writer first and then learning basic English. Go to your local college and take English 101. Then write.
Agreed!
You can learn some grammar here. I have learned a few things about grammar that I managed to miss in English class. However, the basics are more of a solitary study. It's been a long time since I was willing to critique a story by someone who had not mastered the most basic elements of writing. It's just not an area where I feel I can do the most good. My value isn't even as an experienced writer nearly so much as an experienced reader, telling other writers how I feel about their stories. I am not an English teacher and correcting grammar is a tedious, often thankless job.
quote:
3) Everything in a story has to be interesting. Telling a good story is partly about putting in interesting stuff, but almost as important is leaving out boring stuff. As soon as your story recounts what Jon Eric Snark had for breakfast, it had better be a very interesting breakfast, or out comes the rejection slip.
I'm not sure if this is how I would have phrased it, but I think I know where you're coming from here. The truth is, though, that there are slower and faster parts of stories. There is description, which can be boring to some. I think the real key here is pacing more than interesting/boring elements. You need to keep the pace of a story moving so that readers will get into a sort of flow. This is a hard one to master, and often requires practice and feedback to get right.
quote:
# PoV. I want someone's PoV to follow into the story.
# Identification of genre. If I can't tell, I don't to read to find out.
# Identify location. (With few exceptions)
# Identify what the story is about. (You don't have to tell everything -- you can't -- but I want a decent sense of where I'm going.
I don't need to know genre up front. I know that as a rule of thumb it's a good idea to try to make the genre plain up front, but I think this would be a huge, even insurmountable challenge for real-world fantasy where the characters don't know there's a paranormal element yet. And that's just one example.
I'm not sure about the location thing. It's probably helpful to have some idea of setting...maybe setting would even be a better word?
[This message has been edited by Christine (edited September 15, 2007).]
The result was a fascinating study of how people have different tastes. For mine specifically, I had some people tell me the first lines left them cold, and other people say the very same first lines really hooked them.
Just because one reader (or one editor) doesn't like the first 13 doesn't make it bad. Not one of the beginnings on that board could be called bad, they just didn't appeal. On the other hand, technical problems can cause a terminal case of form rejection.
Bottom line: you are the final authority on your story. You get to decide. If an editor doesn't like it, get a different editor. If several editors have the same problem with the prose, you might want to consider whether the prose might be your problem. Every reader, critiquer, editor, puts your story through the filter of how they would have done it. You don't have to agree, but it's always worthwhile to evaluate their opinions.
*Give me someone. I like to know who I'm looking at right away
*Tell my why I should care. If I care I'll keep reading.
*
I'd tolerate a flashback---after all, "Casablanca" is one of my favorite movies---though probably not in something under five thousand words...
And I really don't know what motivates editors. I've read my stuff, and some of the stuff they've printed---and I just think they're wrong.
My own belief is that if a story has heart -is alive and breathing to the reader, a lot of other stuff will fly. If it doesn't, it doesn't matter how many things the writer does right, it's still just an exercise.
On the other hand, looking back at stories I wrote ten years ago, I can now see clearly why they were rejected. I think my current crop of stories is an improvement.
InarticulateBabbler, you take me to task for losing patience with some of the people here. I am very patient. I'm willing to help anyone I can help, if they will benefit from my help. That's why I posted my Three Killers -- to help the many rather than the few. That said, I can't teach English here. I can offer a few pointers, but if a person is careless or untutored about English and is trying to be a writer, they are wasting their time. The only thing that will fix that problem is hundreds of hours of intensive study. In fact, I'm not sure it is possible for someone who doesn't learn "proper" English as a child to learn it really well as an adult, which is why I constantly rant and rave about the American public schools, where many teachers are too slovenly, cowardly, or ignorant to insist on "correct" English. I put "correct" in quotes because, as Steven Pinker points out, everyone's language follows strict rules of grammar. They just may not be the "standard" rules. There have been entire books written with non-standard grammar. Clockwork Orange comes to mind. But, being realistic, if your rules of grammar are non-standard, you are not going to convince most editors to buy your stories. If you want to sell, you must change. That's hard.
If it is flat, then I start looking at those other things to see why. They're all important, and they're big factors in generating interest, but I don't feel any one of them is critical so long as the opening grabs the reader.
When I post an opening, I want feedback that focuses on the reader's gut reactions. It usually helps if they share why they had that reaction, but not always.
It doesn't help me to say, "This is an adverb." I know it's an adverb, and if it appears in the first thirteen, I probably gave it the first degree before letting it in. Others might benefit from this kind of feedback; they might benefit from information on why the road to hell is paved with adverbs. So, I don't mind if someone points such things out, as long as they also give me a reaction.
The most important information I want, though, is if it grabbed your interest and why, or who not.
Editors are human. They have preferences and tastes like everyone else. One editor might reject any story about ice cream no matter what, another might accept any story about ice cream no matter how poorly written.
[This message has been edited by lehollis (edited September 16, 2007).]
On a different note, bad grammar, unless it's terrible, doesn't bother me too much. I tend to overlook it, largely because when I critique I look for bigger picture items--pacing, characterization, etc. I figure grammar is the writer's job, unless they specifically ask for a grammar/ style check.
If I seem to harp on this, it is because I have tried to help a number of people who honestly believed it was the editor's job to correct their grammar. If I can't convince them otherwise, I quickly give up on them.
The other kind I've seen are the ones who have a misunderstanding of what we're here to do, as others have said before in this thread, and think we're here to weed out bad grammar. We're not. The worst of it should always be cleared up by the writer first. I think we all have better things to do with our time, and the writer will get more value from the crittique if we don't have to waste time nagging about basic grammar (assuming we are willing to continue crittiquing something in such shape).
Besides, if I wanted to nitpick grammar, I'd have become an english teacher or a copy editor.
I'm annoyed by the occasional statement in F&F to ignore spelling and grammar. Usually they say they have a friend that will help them with it later. To me, that's like saying, "How's my driving, don't mind the steering. A friend will help me with that part."
I feel grammar is the heart of a story, while story is the soul. Just my feeling, though.
I think what I am gleaning from this thread is that I'm not the only one. I suspect what can be done that would be most useful, though, is for me to actually post to those threads and mention a few specific examples, offer resource ideas if it's a specific deficiency apparent in the writing, and request the writer to rework it and repost.
I recently read the book BIRD BY BIRD by Anne Lamott. It's a book about writing, really interesting and plenty to learn for a newer writer like me. One thing that really stuck out for me was a scene she described where she was running a writer's workshop and a writer presented a particularly painful piece of prose in her session. Folks around the circle offered tentative critiques before one of the circle members just lit into the writer, explaining how large the pile of dung that he had written was.
Anne Lamott's response was really wonderful. She asked the group, "OK. So now what? Should he (the dung-writer) stop writing?"
It's a good question. And has a pretty obvious answer - of course not. He should keep writing, if that's what he is driven to do. He should try to improve his craft at every opportunity. If he lacks good grammar fundamentals, he should look for ways to fix that. If he doesn't know how bad his grammar is, someone should (with kindness) point it out and offer suggestions for resources.
I remember giving several very long lectures on this forum about verb tenses. You need to be able to at least use the right verb tense, although knowing the name of it is optional in my opinion--helpful if someone tells you that you use passive too much and what you are using is past perfect and not passive, but still optional.
But, personally, I have a problem with commas. I always have. And it doesn't matter how many times I read the rule about using a pair of commas in the middle of a sentence to set off clauses, phrases, and words that are not essential to the meaning of the sentence, I still don't about 75% of the time. *sighs*
Does that make me a bad writer? I honestly don't know and I am honestly not going to worry about it too much. I try to catch them and the ones I don't, well if it puts an editor off, I guess I'll just have to live with it.
Ok, through rambling.
And yes, legs might be a better analogy than heart. To me, it's the heart, though Of course, my writing background is technical writing, and I treated grammar like it was a religion back then.
As an example of just how important this is to a large number of people, consider that "Eats, Shoots, and Leaves" became a best seller.
[This message has been edited by Rick Norwood (edited September 18, 2007).]