Bit discouraged today. The first draft of Jess just doesn't seem to be coming together.
I keep writing myself into dead ends.
I swear -- the next story I try to write I'm going to plot it out first. Plot it right to the feather boa and the last dwarf.
Jo, you are the master of crits at Compuserve! I would pay you $400 if I had it for a crit of my novel-that-keeps-getting-rejected.
ReplyDeleteYou have an agent who loves your book. She'll find you a publisher, I'm sure.
Cat
Hi Cat -
ReplyDeleteGet a chapter of your WIP to me --- either in the Forum or sending it p-mail -- and I will give it a look and see if there's anything I can come up with that would be the slightest use to you.
I wouldn't count on my being able to give any useful advice.
It's pretty basic technical stuff I talk about, as a rule.
(CAN the writer spell; use correct grammar; recognize a sentence fragment; write marginally human dialog; come up with motivation that doesn't come from the land of the zombies; learn not to load backstory in the first three pages; keep hold of POV; put a lid on her participial phrases?)
These are all predictable. All early-stage writer stuff. All curable if the writer sticks with it.
I'm one of many giving advice on this stuff. Good advice, if I may say so, abounds in the Forum.
You (cough) don't need this.
The more advanced stuff ...
(CAN the writer use focus to bring the reader into the scene; suit cadence to pace, emphasis and meaning; control intimacy or 'distance' in POV; write a character not wearily, drearily familiar to us?)
This advanced technique is hard to talk about. I'm figuring it out as I go along. Lotsa times I'm a shade off on how to do this stuff, or just plain wrong.
So I don't know how much I'd be able to help you with any problems you may have.
My own WIPs ...
Often I have worked out what's wrong with bits of my writing. I KNOW that I don't keep my pacing tripping along at a fast clip. I could tighten a lot of the prose. In ANNEKA I lay the dialect on too think in a lotta places. I get my action plotline all tangled up and incomprehensible.
I have some notion how to work with these faults. I don't always do a good job fixing stuff, but I'm not totally clueless what I NEED to do.
But there's stuff I can't SEE myself screwing up
because I just don't know enough. Stuff I could do better if somebody pointed it out to me. Stuff I'm clueless about. Sigh.
Hi Jo,
ReplyDeleteThanks for offering to look at a chapter. I may just take you up on it at some near future time. I don't want to cut into your writing time, knowing first hand how precious this time is.
I had to cut back my already limited visits to the forum because I'm trying to get a website up and running. Though I'm not published, I'll have some excerpts of my novels there.
You're bound to hear good news soon. (Maybe I will, too!)
Cat (foolishly at times, confident)