Wungus posted:It's true, you'll fix the writing in any book if you give the protagonist the ability to fly. Every book that doesn't have a flying protagonist has broken writing. And I've just started my final draft, only to find this fixes it entirely! How blind I've been!
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Sep 2, 2023 00:57
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 15:40 |
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My manuscript was 180~ and it was too long despite being well-paced in some of the feedback I got. I've heard that going above 120 is going to make things way more difficult these days. The general rule of thumb I've heard is to not go about 100 for a debut, but I have less experience in querying than others!
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Sep 28, 2023 00:23
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Wungus posted:Get prepared for pain lol. The ones that hurt most aren't the form rejections - they're honestly great, because poo poo, at least you got ANY response. Agents like Caitlin Blasdell or Hannah Bowman do it best, with simple one line forms like "Thanks for the look, but I will have to pass." gently caress yeah. The ones that hurt most are the ones where the agent asks explicitly for what you wrote and then says "wow your writing is great and this is exactly what I wanted but I don't know, nah." Seconding this. I had a bunch of rejections for Shadow and only two hurt, really. The first was "The strength of your premise was not matched by the strength of your prose" (ouch!) and an effusive few paragraphs that listed everything they liked, and then passed on it because of "marketability." The other thing I found was that there was no point in personalising the query letters. I think I personalised about a dozen because the agent seemed like a good fit or represented works I really enjoyed, and those were always my quickest rejections. Maybe it was coincidence, but it always left me feeling a little bit worse to put in a bit more effort and get the same kind of response.
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Jan 16, 2024 14:21
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I tend to skim prologues because they sometimes feel like an author going 'no, no, wait, don't leave - yes, my opening chapters are boring, but there's going to be cool poo poo later, look at my worldbuilding/mysteries!' and it's just like, I don't know, maybe construct things so the early chapters are exciting, too?
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Jan 21, 2024 00:10
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When I think of prologues I tend to like, it's something like Leviathan Wakes. It's a missing girl story, so, here's the missing girl, and here's some basic idea of how the world works, and here's some creepy space horror. It leaves you wondering just what the protagonists will find when they reach Julie, even if I think it's a bit cheeky in how it leads you to believe she's still on the Scopuli. Holden gets on the Scopuli train in Chapter 1, Miller gets on the missing girl train in Chapter 2. I think that's all pretty good, and it helps the twist that that Julie is dead and has been for a while which I don't think would land as well if we'd never met her. When I think of prologues that I tend to dislike, it's like The Emperor's Blades. Here's a guy named Tan'is and he's a Csestriim and he's disgusted by the fact his daughter has a sickness and the sickness is aging and he's dispassionate and emotionless and totally not elves, dad, and he stabs his daughter in the art. I never finished Blades, but my understanding is that all that stuff doesn't enter the story until the next book in the series. So, what's it doing there? I didn't like Blades much, but it didn't help that the prologue felt disconnected from the hero's journey stuff in the opening chapters. I grappled with including a prologue in Shadow, although I never did. The core idea that the protagonist, Sabra, is wracked by nightmares of the end of the world and so a creepy prologue feels like the exact thing you'd do in a novel featuring that. But I've always felt richly-illustrated prophetic dreams are a bit pat, the sort of thing to make the reader feel smart when they go back and see all the 'foreshadowing', and also not truthful to the reality of the worst nightmares I've had which is that I don't really remember them upon waking. And if Sabra doesn't remember them, then the reader shouldn't see them, because I've found that readers sometimes get annoyed when they know things that characters don't. So, no prologue. But on the other hand, conventions are popular for a reason and maybe a foreshadowing-heavy nightmare prophecy prologue might help readers settle in. But on my third hand, the story is more of a thriller about her quest to track down the guy who shot her dad, so, opening the story with apocalypse dreaming might leave readers feeling betrayed. Hmm? Oh, yes. Diet coke is fine.
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Jan 23, 2024 08:32
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I think the second quoted excerpt reads much better, but I think with first person (in general, not about your work specifically) you really need to decide if you're doing it as the narrator recounting events that've already happened (in which case, lots of summary is great) or whether we're going with them as they experience it (which can, as you point out, just feel like third-person with I scattered through it.) I don't write in first person much, but I've always found that ability to summarise and reflect interior judgements to be much neater in that POV than I ever do summarising things in third.
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Feb 28, 2024 05:06
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I'm closing in on finishing out the draft for In Sekhmet's Wake, the sequel novel in my Boys meets Evangelion anticapitalist post-superhero thriller series, and I wouldn't mind some feedback on this quick blurb!quote:The year is 2061 and the world is ending. Sabra Kasembe, erstwhile savior of the world, hones her mind and body for her prophesied apocalypse, unsure whether her dreams paint her as a humane champion or blood-soaked harbinger. When an explosion rips through downtown Geneva, her investigation brings her face to face with none other than her nemesis-turned-ally Jack Harper. I don't know if it should go longer, but Shadow's blurb was about this long and it got a few compliments (including from Peter Watts!) so I'm figuring I should stick with that general idea. Milkfred E. Moore fucked around with this message at 03:08 on Apr 15, 2024 |
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Apr 15, 2024 02:59
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Thank you all for the feedback! It'll give me some good thoughts to mull over as I finish this thing off. Playing with a third paragraph will probably be necessary. The familiarity the ideal reader should have, whether they should have read Shadow before getting to Wake or whether they shouldn't need to, is something I've gone back and forth on.
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Apr 15, 2024 23:24
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| # ¿ May 21, 2024 15:40 |
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I also love PoV swaps, but it feels like the feedback I get overwhelmingly from readers is that they don't like them. So, maybe there's no PoV Police but a PoV Citizen's Militia? For me, the real issue of PoV swaps is pacing, and having each PoV character be as interesting/necessary as the other without feeling like it's two (or more) unrelated stories.
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May 2, 2024 03:48
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