March 9, 2007 by amanda
I heard somewhere of Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile
so when I saw it on the library shelf I grabbed it. And yesterday during 40+ degree heat, I devoured it. Full of really useful advice, it’s an editor’s viewpoint on what gets a novel rejected – with tips on how to avoid this, of course.
And so that I don’t forget, here are the most important things I should remember:
- When it’s time to send a book proposal to an editor, research the publishing house carefully by checking for similar style novels: and mention this in your covering letter.
- I can’t hear this often enough: use less adjectives and adverbs. Use stronger verbs and nouns instead.
- Read some poetry to get a sense of the sound of language. Read your manuscript aloud or get others to read it. (I read a tip on this somewhere, to get this monotonous internet voice to read it for you, at ReadPlease.)
- Dialogue dangers: not enough attributives, too many attributives (“he said”), too much interruption, too much dialogue without interruption, too commonplace (“I’ll have two sugars in my coffee please”) …
- Avoid dialect (not that I need to remember this, but I wish Irvine Welsh could remember this, so I wouldn’t have to give up his novels because I can’t follow the Scottish dialect)
- Show don’t tell: the most often given advice, but still a good reminder.
- And stacks of other little tips: I must re-read this when I finally have a novel to edit.
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March 6, 2007 by amanda
Over at my Ballerina blog, I’ve already explained my fascinating afternoon with five British and American novelists, and the importance of being reminded that they’re really quite normal people, just like me. Yes, I can also be a published novelist. It was also great to hear some of their thoughts on novel structure – for example, that they might start out writing knowing only the middle of their story, or the varying ways they get inspiration.
But the added bonus of the afternoon was suddenly getting a key idea from my own novel. Just one word from one of the writers popped off an inspirational spark in my brain that has helped me see the storyline of my novel in the context of an overriding idea. Hmm, hard to explain without giving too much detail, but basically I was worried that the storyline was too much just a series of loosely connected incidents; now I have the idea of setting the novel in just 3 or 4 key situations and using flashback situations to bring it all together. Having said that, about the last thing I read in Sol Stein’s Stein On Writing
was that no first novelist should use a flashback. Well, with or without the flashbacks, I think my “keyword” concept has given me a much more concrete idea of how I can write this story. You’ll all just have to wait and see!
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