Learning the Writing Business from Book Agents and Editors :: English Literature Essays

Learning the Writing Business from Book Agents and EditorsSo, you just wrote your first science fiction novel. Your friend evince it and told you that you were the coterminous Ray Bradbury or Gene Roddenberry. Your fertile mind fantasizes your name up there on a Borders wall poster right next to images of Isaac Azimov and Jules Verne. Before going off the deep end and equating yourself with Hemingway and Steinbeck, give your ego a stiff reality check. Few of us mortals are literary Mozarts that can plop down in front of a computer screen and author a perfect manuscript the first time around.. permits get one thing straight right now. You wrote a manuscript and not a book. After an author takes the time and care to read, rationalise and rewrite the manuscript at least five times, the work has finally evolved into a publishable book manuscript.Literary agents have represented my books. Truthfully, I neer erudite too much from literary agents except that they will show a strong in terest in you and your work only if publishers and film producers do. If the baron brokers in the literary world think your work is marketable, then you are a viable commodity. If you have no track record in the make industry, then forget all about your friends praise and about your inflated ego. Youre going to have to accept criticism from your surenesss editors, compromise ideas and plots in your artistic masterpiece, rewrite paragraphs, sentences and pages to conform to editorial evaluations, admit making errors, learn from these mistakes and avoid them when constructing future manuscripts.Although I never learned too much from my literary agents, I absorbed plenty from editors I had worked with. It took me three years to finally master what the editors considered the mechanics of the writing craft. I reluctantly learned that good writing involves much more than the demonstration of grammar, spelling and punctuation skills. I picked up a hundred or so suggestions from my liter ary editors, and I will share some of them now.To facilitate good transitions and chapter integrity, dont begin sentences and/or paragraphs with pronouns (when writing in the third person). Stay forward from lazy sentence patterns such as starting out with There are or There is. And above all else, if you plan to be passkey and creative, stay away from using stereotypical cliches and hackneyed idioms.A good sci-fi novel or any other genre novel should first be a love story at its core construction with the genre decoration adroitly wrapped around that core.