To Read or Not to Read

Last weekend I attended the James River Writers Conference. I hadn't been for a couple of years, so I wondered if it was as good as I remembered. It was—even better, maybe. It's great to get different views from professionals in writing, editing, agenting, and  publishing.

Speaking of views, here's the view from my hotel room:

Here's a slightly different view:

And here's the view at sunrise:

One of my favorite parts of the JRWC is the first pages critique. A couple of actors read a page aloud, and then three agents tell why it grabs them—or doesn't. Because agents get so many submissions, they must decide fast—like on the first page—which manuscripts to read further and which to reject.

Three agents—Michelle Brower, Lucy Carson, and Melissa Sarver—each gave their view of the pages. Like the three pictures above, their views were slightly different but also similar.

Most of the pages needed a lot of work. A few began with a character getting up and getting dressed. "Begin at the real beginning, not the beginning of a day," Carson said. The other two agreed that starting with a character waking up was a bad idea.

Some pages had a recurring dream—a no-no as far as the agents were concerned, because a recurring dream is "too formulaic."

Other problems were "too much setting,"  lack of dialogue, too much flat description. "Too many adjectives," one agent said, "ruins the cadence of sentences."

"Sometimes simpler is better," another noted. A writer can make a passage simpler by killing the adjectives, adverbs, and passive or static verbs. Verbs such as was, knew, and thought are all static.

This week I've tried to read a book I received in the mail not long ago. I'd liked the opening sentences and figured I'd like the book. But the book didn't live up to the promise of its opening. Here's why:

1. Too much description. This example tells us more than we need to know that a character is wrinkled:

Notice the plethora of adjectives in the example above? And all the prepositional phrases? (One paragraph has eight: into the mold/of its shape/in the folds and creases/around her mouth and cratered eyes/in West Texas/of her sagging, spotty skin/like hairline cracks/in antique wood.)

Excess description bogs down the action. Notice how long it takes in the above example to actually get to the hug.

Here's another description of another character:

Do we need to know this much? (And how does "Indian-reservation turquoise stones" differ from regular turquoise? (We don't need "stones" because it's obvious turquoise is a stone.) Again, excess description bogs down the action.

2. Badly printed. You can't tell from the pictures I took of the pages, but the ink was too dark and hard to read. It was so thick I could feel it. Some of the lines looked weird—too much spacing, etc. See the last line on this page:

Why did the publisher allow the book to be printed with gaps? Had the book been an advance reader copy, I could understand a few gaps here and there. But it was a regular edition.

3. Unpleasant subject matter. I don't like to read about child abuse. When I reached a particularly gruesome description of child abuse (with lots of adjectives, etc.), I stopped reading.

The book had an interesting premise: a woman, who can't remember anything before she was eleven, returns to her childhood home to learn what happened to her childhood memories. However, the book read like an early draft, not a finished manuscript. With a good editor to cut back the excess description and improve the flow of the action, this book might have held my interest all the way through.

But that's just my view. I wonder what the three agents would have said.

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