Since computers have become cheap (you can pick up a laptop for under $300 - I used to pay more than that for a decent electric typewriter!), everyone has one. And since most computers come with a word processing program, anyone who can hunt and peck on the keyboard suddenly thinks they're a writer.
WRONG!!!
Right after I got out of college, I had a part time job writing for a local newspaper. I covered some city council meetings and once a week, they let me write a column. It didn't pay very much, and in fact, I had a full time job in retail that paid the bills.
One of my co-workers recognized my name from the newspaper. He told me that his son (who was a little older than me) had written a book and since I was a writer, he'd like me to take a look at it and give him my opinion.
This is a dangerous thing to ask me. I'm very blunt. That pisses off some people.
He brought me his son's manuscript. It was about a divorce. His son's divorce. It turned out to be a memoir of the first year after his wife had asked him for the divorce.
It was horrid.
He started off this way:
I sat outside on the steps, sobbing. Painful, earth moving, heaving sobs, sobs from the soul, sobs that reached deep within my chest and hurt, sobs that tore at my heart, sobs that ran out of tears long ago. They were aching, afflictive, agonizing, arduous, awful, biting, buring, caustic, difficult, dire, excrutiating, terrible, tormenting, vexing sobs.
Okay, okay already. I got it. He was bummed. I understand.
Then I noticed that all the adjectives describing the sobs were in alphabetical order.
He didn't, did he?
I pulled out my thesaurus. Yep. He copied all the synonyms for painful (well, he left out some after he got tired of them himself) and threw them in front of the noun "sobs."
I couldn't get beyond the first two pages. Every noun had a multitude of adjectives to describe it. There were grammatical errors throughout. He seemed to be particularly fond of dangling his participles.
When his father came back to me one night to get my take on the book, I had to be honest. "Tell (your son) he needs to lighten up on the adjectives and not be so fancy with his sentence structure." Based on just THAT, he father got pissed off at me, and I don't think he spoke to me the rest of the time we were employed by that store.
I wonder how he would have taken it if I'd have said, "Your kid can't write worth a shit!" I'd probably have been fitted for dentures.
That was quite a while back. That was when a writer had to be very ambitious to write. See, we didn't have computers then. We had these funny looking things called typewriters. It was like a computer keyboard hooked directly to a printer. You had to insert the paper into a roller above the keyboard and the thing printed ONE LETTER AT A TIME, and it did so as soon as you pressed the letter on the keyboard.
Oh yeah.... you had to press REALLY hard for the letter to print, especially if the typewriter wasn't electric.
If you made a mistake, you couldn't just press the delete button or highlight the error with your mouse. You had to either use a little bottle of paint (called White Out), or a correction strip that covered up the letter with a chalky white substance that made your paper look like crap.
Of course, after you got done filling the first page with words, you pulled the paper out and looked at it. If you found mistakes, it meant you got to type the whole freakin' thing over again because there was no way you could paint over the word and line it up perfectly to type over the paint.
Most people who thought of themselves as potential writers/authors just gave up at this point. Some lasted a couple rounds with retyping and editing, but most just said, "Screw it," and decided to do something easier like brain surgery or rocket science or something.
But now, everyone thinks they can write, because it takes less effort.
Witness a situation, again several years ago.
I was finishing up my Master's, working full time and going to school part time. I had to support my family. My boss, this time at a restaurant where I was employed, knew I was working on my Master's and asked me to take a look at a manuscript written by his daughter. He described it as a "first rate mystery." He and I had talked about novels several times during my employment with him and we had similar tastes. He was highly critical of some novels, and our tastes ran parallel to each other, so I agreed to take a look, thinking that his judgement wouldn't be clouded because it was his daughter's manuacript.
He was right. It was a first rate mystery. The mystery was trying to locate the plot.
She told the story from a third person omnipotent point of view. You want to talk about omnipotent? This girl told you the inner thoughts of each and every character, even if they were just a character relegated to the background of the scene. Instead of letting us discover things about her characters through their actions or words, she made sure we knew all about them by boring us with stories from their childhood. Her dialogue was stiff and too expository. People just don't talk like she had them talking. For example, she did this:
"Your sister called."
"You mean the one in California who had an abortion last year?"
"No. I mean the one with the raven black hair who dropped out of college to join the Peace Corp, then became a doctor because she was fascinated by the tall, handsome intern she had when she was just 12 years old."
That's not much of an exaggeration. Had I written it, it would have gone like this:
"Your sister called."
"Marge?"
"No. Linda."
If the reader needed to know all the background on Linda, I would have shown it to them later.
I got clear to the end of the manuscript before I discovered that (I am not making this up) zombies were responsible for the deaths in town. NOT ONCE during the entire manuscript had the word "Zombie" been used.
It was awful, but I don't have to tell you that, do I? If I'd have been one of the pages in manuscript, I would have been ashamed to have the ink on me that led to this horrendous writing. If I'd have been the ink, I would have tried to find a way to sneak off the page.
Still, her daddy thought it was great. I'm sure her friends told her the same thing, even if they thought differently. It's really hard for some people to tell someone else that their writing sucks.
It isn't hard for me, and that's what I told her dad. I'll admit, that I made excuses for "not reading it yet" all the way up until I had my Master's Degree in hand, because I wanted to avoid awkward situations at work. When I broke the news to her dad that it needed a MAJOR rewrite, he told me I didn't know what I was talking about and that they had already submitted it to several agents.
NOW you know why some agents are so cranky. If I had to read through shit like this every day, I'd be cranky too.
Oh wait. I DO read shit like this every day. I teach a class in creative writing (in addition to several Lit classes including one on modern novels).
The bottom line is this: I understand that agents are besieged with unsolicited query letters and manuscripts and that most of what they get is slightly less appealing than sewer water. But you know what? THEY are the ones who CHOSE that job. Reading the shit in the slush pile goes right along with finding the next Tom Clancy or the next J. K. Rowling.
And even if they do receive a manuscript that looks like one of the two above, what's the harm in sending out a quick email that says, "Thanks, but no thanks"?
Next time, we'll take a look at one agent in particular who enters our Agent Hall of Shame. See you then, same Bat-time, same Bat-blog.
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