Swallowing the Bitter Pill of Brutal Opposition

October 23, 2009

[I have jump shifted nine months from the day I started to write. I will do this every now and then. First time readers of this blog - especially first time writers hoping to glean some lessons learned - should start with the first post as I've only just gotten started with the blog. The chronology of events is important.]


At this point I have finished the Paleopeople manuscript - at least that's what I thought at the time. Ha! My small cadre of Resonators and Opponents had helped me along and I had reached this point with a false sense of security, as it turns out. I thought it was a great story and I was full of confidence, that is until I boldly sent the manuscript to a reader that was not a part of my inner circle. Here are some snippets from her assessment of my book:

"This is going to sound brutal..." (it was, as you'll see)
"If I was a reader at a publishing house, I would have dumped this in the bin after the first thirty pages..." (as it happened, most of them did)
"The Prologue was too long and unnecessary..." (it was)
"The dialogue was flat..." (what there was of it)
"The characters were not fully fleshed..." (I was enthralled with the adventures, not the characters)
"The manuscript is far too long..." (only 400 pages, what the heck?)
"There is way too much exposition..." (first time I'd heard of the word, which meant she was right)


There was much, much more and most of it was bad. I owe her a great debt of gratitude as her criticism influenced me immensely. It only took me three days to get over it. There were some positives:


"Your writing style got much, much better as the book moved along, especially the during the action of the last half of the book..." (that's because I was learning how to write on the run)
"...and then I read this line "From the mouth of the tunnel came a low, agonizing sound, as if the wind carried with reluctant souls on the way to undesired ends." Fabulous." (so there was hope)
"What I was personally hoping for when I was finished with the Prologue and started into Beni's story was an intertwining of William and Big Bill and Hakim's story with Beni's story." (my agent made me do exactly this, many months later)


The criticism hurt. I was dashed, but I had come too far to turn back. I would go back to the manuscript and work on it with everything she said in mind. But there was one little problem and it compounded my feelings of angst. You see, I had already sent out the query letters for Paleopeople to about three hundred agents and publishers. Unless I did something pretty fast, some of those folks were going to ask for the first couple of chapters or even the whole manuscript, and what they would get would be exactly what my fiercest Opponent had read. They would all throw the manuscript in the waste paper basket after the first thirty pages.

Why, oh why, did I sent out those query letters so soon?