The Word Cloud

Hi cloudies, This is my first blog so please be kind.

It is the feed back I got regarding my report from the Writers Workshop which I thought I would share. 

I have deleted large chunks but it still goes on for four pages.

I definitely think it was worth it and would like to thank Phillip Womack  for his taking the time and effort to read it and to Tom his secretary who wrote up the report. Thanks.

REPORT

Dear J.T

First of all, may I say congratulations on completion of your manuscript. You have clearly put a lot of time and effort into it, and clearly enjoyed writing it. Well done.

Now I would like you to remember that this is a professional editing service, and as such is designed to give you the kind of advice and commentary that an agent or an editor would give you, should they have the time to do so. As such, I’d like you to remember that it is both objective and designed to make your book better and more suitable to the market; and remember, too, that it comes from long experience, of both writing, reading and editing.

I think that your book has a lot of potential to reach the market that you wish for it. What you have here is very much a first draft, and you will need to knock it about a bit – and perhaps consider restructuring and rewriting large chunks of it – in order for it to become presentable to an agent, and then to publishers. Please do remember that it is part of the process of writing to discard, change and rewrite; some authors go through six or seven drafts of their works before they reach the right one.

I recommend that you read my report once, and then put it aside for a bit, and think about what I have suggested; then you will be able to view your book more objectively. We all feel great attachments to our words; one of the things that you learn as a professional writer is that it isn’t so much your own words that are important – it’s how others read them that is.

Your book has all the right elements to be popular and accessible to the market. In particular I liked the chapter headings, which I thought were very evocative; but I think that you will need to do some serious consideration of what it is that you want to write in order to take this book further.

I’ll make some general remarks first, and then look at some more specific ones.

PROLOGUE

Prologues are tricky beasts. A lot of people think that you need them in a fantasy novel – but I felt that yours gave too much away. In order to make it a big revelation, you should consider holding back such information. For instance, it’s obvious almost immediately that C. is magical.

I also felt – and this goes for a lot of your writing – that your prologue was more like someone describing a film or a cartoon than a novel. This has a lot to do with the texture of the writing; I’ll come to that. ( That’s so true when I imagine it in my head it is like a film unveiling so that is how I wrote it down.  I don’t know how to overcome that.  Any suggestions cloudies?)

The register of your vocabulary is something to think about as well..

The prologue gives the game away with regard to who A’s children are. I would consider cutting the prologue altogether.

WRITING

You must avoid CAPITAL LETTERS to denote shouting. It’s very bad writing indeed to do that – we ought to be able to tell from your writing that they’re shouting.

Also avoid repetitions of words – on the first page you repeat “mumbled.”

Try also to make sure your vocabulary fits – you call the tunnel “claustrophobic”; but tunnels can’t be claustrophobic, only people. It could make them feel claustrophobic, but it can’t be so itself. Avoid old fashioned phrases – “a bad old stick” on page 31. When dealing with metaphors, make sure that they fit, too – you write “the pungent smell of danger” – but danger doesn’t smell. Make sure you use correct grammar – on page 5 you write “surprising well” – it should be an adverb, “surprisingly well.” Also you must make sure that you get someone to spell check your work – you have on the same page “handing the situation” - when you mean “handling.” These are small things but they all help to distract from your work, and publishers and agents won’t look kindly on things if avoidable errors such as these crop up enough.

STRUCTURE

This is the main difficulty with the manuscript, as I see it, and I think you need to really consider what you want to do with your characters. At the moment nothing much actually happens apart from two journeys. We need to be thrown right into the action.

It felt to me as if your scenes were constructed on a visual level – ie, that they would work rather well in a cartoon series such as Avatar: The Last Airbender. There is a lot of setting up of things, whereas we need to be thrown in to the plot in medias res (in the middle of things) – which you do by having them first seen in the tunnel, but then the flashback goes on too long.

I think you need to create a lot more tension in the other world.  In your manuscript when I got to page 49 I wrote “Not much has happened by now.” You need to keep a sense of tension and excitement going along. You can do this by what I have suggested above. You also need to build up to the B  a lot more; and make sure it isn’t over quite so quickly. Every scene needs to count in terms of its relation to the plot.

SHOWING NOT TELLING

This is a very important aspect of writing, and one that’s very hard to get right. You must

Show not tell.

The character W

I know that you have introduced W for comic relief, but I felt that his presence was a little annoying. If even C  thinks he’s annoying, then the reader is bound to do so as well. Do you need him? Did you ever watch Thundercats? There was a character called Snarf in it who W reminded me of a lot – it works well in a cartoon setting, but not so well in a book, because what he does for jokes relies mostly on the visual – as in, on page 49, when you say “a gooey look glazed his eyes”, I can just imagine this as a cartoon; all the bumping around and so on is also a visual gag that doesn’t work so well in a book.

OTHER CHARACTERS

For a short book, you have a lot of characters. I’d consider slimming them down a lot. M and C could be rolled into one. You could ditch W.. Get rid of the children’s mother and father, so that they only appear offstage.

Now, as I said before, I think your work has a lot of potential, but I think that it needs a quite substantial reworking. I think however that you obviously have the determination to do so, so I will lay out what I think you need to do in as simple terms as possible. Take in what I have said above. Then think about the following;

(It goes on about things particular to the manuscript so I won’t bore you that).

I think if you implement these changes, you will have a good chance at impressing those all important agents.

A final point: Your letter to agents. Again, make sure that there are no typos in it.  Avoid repetition:  Make sure your vocab is appropriate - instead of "themes", you mean "stories." Your letter shouldn't repeat your synopsis; so cut the second paragraph. Avoid porentous constructions otherwise your letter is fine.

Your synopsis repeats a lot of your letter, which it mustn't do, so avoid that. Your synopsis should only fit onto a page. But I think that you need to rewrite your book before you do another synopsis. What I think you really need to do is to plot out and firm up the other world subplot - and then when you have done that, you will see that you are led into many exciting new territories.

I hope that all this makes sense to you – if you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to ask. I wish you the best of luck with this.

With very best wishes,