Forum: Editors/Reviewers Hangout

I am less thrilled with Aftermath

I couldn't get through the first chapter of "Aftermath." I found it incredibly boring. I kept it in my library in case I wanted to give it another chance and it's been there almost 6 years ago.

ist. For the last couple of years he has been writing stories as T. H. Barker on for pay sites. Some of those are a little too BDSM, but still interesting to read. You can get the first 10% for free to get an idea if you want to pay.

Thanks for this. Not a big BDSM fan, but I may take a look. Two things about "Second Best"-I'm not into the whole slave thing, and after a while I got tired of the mom's complaints about how fat she was and how the tow truck guy couldn't possibly love her. Never mind that we already know she's gorgeous. Enough, already.

What I liked about "Aftermath" was the focus on the good guys vs the gun nuts, i.e., specific defined groups, and the whole who's gonna win thing. OTOH I haven't read much post-apocalypse stuff. Maybe there's much better out there.

My wife's a big fan of The Road. Never going to read it. Never going to watch it, thanks very much.

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Until such time you meet and have to deal with such a nut job.
The one in Aftermath certainly was taken towards the extreme

No question, but he went too far and the characterization lost its punch as a result. Never mind what happened with her later (not mentioning spoilers here).

bb

Reviews ought to, in my opinion, pay attention to the entire story including minor niggling bits about punctuation and whether a new paragraph is needed whenever a character speaks if he or she was speaking in the paragraph before. More precisely, if you give tens to everything you review, unless you cruise the top 50 lists exclusively to review stories that score in the high eights or more, you should save tens for the really exceptional story.

I agree with you, not about the 10 rating, but if you're going to list a story as a 10, a review really needs to qualify such a rating by pointing out the things readers might notice which contradict this. That doesn't diminish their enthusiasm, but it gives a more detailed picture of the story (i.e. that it's the story itself which gets the high rating, and not the quality of the writing.

That said, I'd limit how much detail I went into. Just as you don't send an author a first letter listing everything he did wrong, you also don't list a story's every problem. Instead, I'd only list a few of the more substantive ones to show the story's weaknesses. That way the review doesn't come off as nit-picky, and it doesn't burden the reader with details they might not be interested in.

Rich and hard.

Hard as in rigor mortiss hard = dead - sorry, I want to be soft and alive and able to feel.

Guys are mostly trained not to cry.

I didn't cry when my parents died or when my sister died. So I guess I'm a guy who doesn't cry. I feel sad inside, but that doesn't generate tears. I never gave it much thought as a general rule, though, and in the YA novel I'm writing, my 17-yo hero cries. So go figure.

I just thought of something. I cry when watching movies. At least my eyes tear up. Interesting!

I didn't cry when my parents died or when my sister died. So I guess I'm a guy who doesn't cry. I feel sad inside, but that doesn't generate tears. I never gave it much thought as a general rule, though, and in the YA novel I'm writing, my 17-yo hero cries. So go figure.

I've never cried when a family member has died. Of course, they never died in my arms either. But then, I cry every time I see the movie "Hook", which is basically a comedy for kids!

Crying is a funny things, and despite expectations, everyone responds to it differently. There's also a big difference between 'tearing up' (is that a regionalism) and outright crying (i.e. bawling). Likewise, people respond to trauma differently, with many behaving as expected while others shut down. Essentially, there's one 'one size fits all' emotional response. Still, an overwrought emotional response will stop many readers cold, especially if it comes out of the blue without any build up.

Many authors think that if you can say something in five words, it sounds much more edu-ma-cated to say it in sixty.

I believe that's a major flaw in amateur writing. And maybe why I find so many of the long stories boring. They say the same thing over and over again. They have redundant words. They have stuff that doesn't move the plot forward or build a character -- filler.

Even professionals start out with too much. Stephen King says he cuts 25% out of his first draft (I think that was the number). And one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes was what he wrote at the end of a letter to a friend. It went something like:

"I apologize for the length of this letter. I didn't have the time to make it shorter."

There isn't much market,

You're missing my point. You can have a short story with a single plot that revolves around a single event with 1 or 2 characters. Or you can have a long story with many characters and sub-plots. The second isn't what wordy means.

Wordy can happen in both a short story and a long story. It's when cutting out the extra stuff makes it a stronger story. That doesn't mean eliminating good stuff. It means getting rid of the bad stuff.

It takes more words to show than tell. Those extra words makes for a better story. They're not the problem. But show something AND tell it because you don't trust the reader to "get it" (I've been guilty of that) has extra words and weakens the story. Describing what the character ate for breakfast when it doesn't matter to the story weakens it. Putting a scene in that doesn't really move the plot forward makes the story larger, but weaker. Some people put this kind of filler in simply to make the story longer. Sometimes they do it because they don't really have a plot in mind so the story wanders.

Few Editors, and even fewer Reviewers will tell an author his story is too long. There isn't much market, even on a free site, for stories that say something like "Hero (select short name, Bob is one a superior, prolific author likes) faces difficulties, overcomes them, gets girl, lives happily ever after." We can pad the story length by specifying the difficulties and how they are overcome, how Hero Bob meets girl (or girls, for longer stories with sexual variations), gets girl, may lose girl for a while, for a longer story, gets girl back (or a different girl) and how he ends up living happily. Ka Hmnd used to do this in a final, very short paragraph. Whatever works, works. Move on to another story, or a sequel. If you arrange for Bob to have offspring, you can use them in the next story.

The key isn't word count, it's focus. Many SOL authors, who've read the other long ongoing series, just start writing and keep going, without a clear focus.

But once you begin thinking of stories in terms of books, you focus on the essential conflicts. Each book has a different conflict. You need to clearly identify that conflict, and then cut the chaff which doesn't advance to address that conflict. The story can continue beyond that. Often there are major conflicts (such as Harry Potter and Lord Voldemort), but each book in the Potter series has it's own internal conflict, and you resolve each one separately on the way to the final conflict resolution.

The key, is identifying each new conflict and then writing the text to address that conflict, rather than simply writing the next chapter--which often sounds just like the previous one.

@Graybyrd

Rule #2 of George Orwell's six rules:

"Never use a long word where a short one will do."

Sorry, but I have problems with this. This harkens back to the 'the majority of Americans only have a fifth grade education, so write to them', which misses the point that most readers are largely self-education because of their extensive reading! You aren't writing for the blue-collar car mechanic, you're instead writing (at least many of us are) for the more discerning readers.

The caveat, though, it to fit the language to both the story and the character. You can't have everyone using 10-dollar words when the situation calls for 50 cents. Readers generally know more than we give them credit for, and can follow more than we assume. What's important for us, as authors, is to stay on point. I've always loved long descriptive passes, but I've learned that stories that pack multiple threads into a single sentence are simply hard to parse, and stop a readers as they try to separate each concept out one at a time. Writing shorter sentences that focus on a single concept at a time simply make more sense--even if you toss in more appropriate words to describe the scene.

Where I worked we c o u l d cut our standard 66 page contract to marginally over one page but what customer would accept that it was genuine and enforceable?

A contract is totally different than fiction. Superfluous verbiage in fiction is boring.

Many authors think that if you can say something in five words, it sounds much more edu-ma-cated to say it in sixty.

In a way this is very true, mainly because the education system teaches people to use lots of words. The system also praises flowery writing (which is nothing to do with actual story length). Thus many beginning writers feel they have to use lots of flowery words, but with experience and practice they learn how to cut down to the needed number of words.

When I took over the writing of Shiloh I left the description of everything in the first 25 chapters as they were. The description of one room and it's contents took 3 pages in my story template which is set for a 6 x 9 inch paperback book. Later, after I got The Scot involved in the project again we went over that description together and it ended up as about a third of a page after the excess wordage was removed - 3 pages to describe a home office was a little excessive. The finished result is a much easier and smoother read than the original.

However, one also has to watch out they aren't too brief in what they write as well. It's a hard line to split the difference properly, but, thankfully, it's a wide line.