A few weeks ago I posted a piece, The Wisdom of Crowds, in which I related
how I shared with my critique group a new opening for my novel. I didn’t
rewrite the lead as much as I shuffled around a few
chapters and opened the
novel with a scene in which the protagonist and his girlfriend visit an
abortion clinic, seeking to terminate a pregnancy. Things take an unexpected turn.
My critique group shot it down for a number of reasons, divided into too major objections—1) It did not allow the reader to get to know the characters and, 2) The subject matter was too visceral.
I bowed to the wisdom of the group. But I still had one last sample out there, which I’d already sent to an advance reader at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. This fellow is a New York agent and I’d already submitted the original manuscript to him. He had sent me a rejection on that submission. When I sat down with him at the conference though, he handed me the new chapter and said, “I like this.” We discussed some other things—my work habits, my social media efforts, my day job—and then he said, “If you get this professionally edited, I think you have something.”
It looks as if the new beginning is a keeper.
I spent part of my remaining time at the conference looking for references for an editor. I have a couple of good prospects. This marks another change for me. I have always looked at editors with doubt. I remembered the words of Lynn Price on Behler Blog:
“. . . Out of literally thousands of submissions I’ve read, I signed one author who I feel got her money’s worth, We barely touched her manuscript when we signed her because it was so clean. And at that, I know the author really didn’t need to hire third party help because I’ve seen the writing brilliance on her blog.”
I did meet several editors who were prospects. I described the experience with my query group to one, who told me what I already suspected, “Query groups often fall in love with the characters in your manuscript. You can’t always take them as the last word.”
Looks as if I have some decisions to make and more rewriting.
See ya’ later.
WhatIfYouCouldNotFail.com by Tim Sunderland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Comments