Evaluate Your Manuscript

Somewhere deep in my files, I found a letter the title of which is Questions to Ask Yourself When Evaluating a Fiction Manuscript or a Partial. It’s a list that I use when training an assistant or a reader and I thought it might be valuable for those writers who are having a hard time figuring out what to look for in their manuscripts. If it does or does not help, please comment either way.

Hook—is it real or fake? For those who don’t know, your hook is actually your first few paragraphs. Be honest here. Try to imagine yourself in a bookstore or library trying to find something to read and you’re browsing through the racks, randomly scanning openings (the first few lines of a book) to find something that grabs you. Does your opening grab you? How long does it take? Fake hooks are forced, added to make a person think they’ll like the book—then the story falls flat a page into itself.

Opening—is something happening? Obviously, this would be beyond the hook. Some novels don’t need a very strong hook as they use other devices with which to build interest. However, something should be happening in those opening pages. Is something happening in your story early on or does your reader have to wade through miles and miles of verbiage before getting to the meat of the story?

Setting—time and place. Do you know when and where your story is being played out? Is it obvious to your reader? Time and place are important so make sure your reader knows these vital facts. Cities, countries or even open spaces have personalities all their own. If you can, you might even make the setting a character in its own right. Doing this can add needed depth to your story, so try it.

Cadence—the timing and music of language. Oh my gosh, not only do I have to write a book but also some music too? Yes and no. The written word also has a rhythm in the way that language flows. Some writers do this naturally while others need help. One easy way to create timing in our writing is by varying sentence length—short, medium, long then medium, short, long and so forth. One way to check for rhythmic timing is to read your book aloud. If certain areas are hard to read, they probably are awkwardly written and therefore lack rhythm. Try rewriting, rearranging your sentence structure, then read and rewrite until the passage flows and is easy to read. Think of your words as brain music.

Dialogue. Is conversation between characters natural or forced? Dialogue is difficult. A great study in dialogue is to listen to people and how they talk—I mean just listen, really listen, and when you do you will find that each person has his or her own unique way of speaking. You can close your eyes and picture whose speaking without seeing them. Your dialogue should be this way and it can be if you practice. As I said, each person has his or her unique way of speaking and listening will teach you that difference. Some people talk fast and others slow. Some mumble while others’ speech is clear and distinct. Some sound educated; others use plain language with no frills. Some swear, some use cliché and some leave out words. Make your speakers distinct by writing each person’s dialogue differently—the educated, the one who stumbles, the one who mumbles and the one who uses profanity. If you do this, your writing will become natural and natural dialogue doesn’t need tags.

Voice (point of view)—who is the narrator? If you cannot readily identify a narrator, it’s probably the author and the author cannot be in the story. Many times authors are not aware that they have suddenly become the narrator. So it’s imperative that you, as the writer of your story, stay out of the story. The author’s voice becomes very obvious when everyone is asleep and yet someone is narrating the story. Or someone is somehow narrating in an empty house, in an empty field or empty planet even. Some authors try to use the excuse that they are writing omnisciently and so are to be perceived as God. No, you’re the author and you’re not supposed to be in the story. Omniscient POV used to be the standard, but now it should be used sparingly, if at all. And not at all if you don’t know how to use it.

A character must be present and awake when narration is going on. Also, there are things that only one character can know, like what he’s thinking, seeing, smelling, hearing or touching. When that character is the narrator, he cannot know what others are thinking or seeing or hearing. He can see what others are touching or possibly smelling. He can also kind of know what they are seeing but he has no way of knowing what they are thinking, what they are really seeing, or know anything about any of their other senses. Only the author knows and if he reports on it, the author is in the story.

Uniqueness, originality—forced or natural? Is your story unique or is it like everything else out there? For instance, is your fantasy another Harry Potter or have you put an entirely different twist on the clumsy kid with magic powers who is destined to rule the world—the unlikely hero? This concept is as old at it gets, but putting an original take on it is what a writer must do.

When you finished reading your novel, did you find yourself wanting to read more? This is a hard question for an author. Of course, you want to read more. Are you kidding me? You wrote it and you love it. But would a reader want to read more? The only way to know that is to have someone else read your book and this is where a good beta reader comes into play. See Critique Two here for information on betas.

Marketing—is there a market for this book? This is a tough call. Every writer likes to think that he or she has writing the next best-seller and there’s nothing wrong with that. However, in reality we know that the odds are very high that we might not be able to find a market for what you’ve written. So what is marketable and what’s not? That’s a good question that at times defies an answer. Supposedly, everything that’s well written has a market and that might be so. Yes, there are usually markets for just about any kind of writing if it’s well written. However, those markets might not be with a huge publisher who is going to make you very wealthy by publishing your book. I would advise every writer, first of all, to define his/her reason for writing. If you’re writing to become rich, now is the time to put aside your keyboard and not delude yourself any longer. The odds are astronomical that you will even be published, let alone be rich. So write for the love of writing. If you don’t enjoy it, then don’t write, but don’t write for the wrong reasons.

Count Elusiva

When someone comments on one of our posts, we try not to answer right away. Our reasoning is in hope that others will answer the posted comment and thus get help with other viewpoints beside ours. You might have noticed that we don’t know everything and hearing another side to an issue is very refreshing, in our opinion anyway.

For this post, there is an issue that I’d like to broach and that’s word count.

Many times recently, I’ve rejected books for low word count. Because this issue can be very confusing--as requirements vary so widely--we no longer post exact word count limits on our Web site. Publishers define word counts differently because they look at finished books rather than raw manuscripts. But, if you are a beginning writer and plan to have any kind of shot at finding a publisher or an agent, it would behoove you to understand word count and especially the difference, word count-wise, between a novel, a novella, a novelette and a short story.

Publishers try to get as close to 250 words to a published page (book page, not MS page) because that makes it very easy to convert word counts into page counts. I’ve found, however, if you use the rough estimate of 250 words per page, you come very close just by looking at a manuscript as to how many words are contained within. For example, a 320-page MS is about 80,000 words and this seems pretty consistent. Of course, itty bitty quirky things like narrative-rich versus dialogue-rich manuscripts throw this off, but on an average, in manuscripts in which narrative and dialogue are fairly balanced (as should be the case) then the 320 page equals 80,000 words formula works fairly well. However, nothing beats using a word processor word counting tool. Although this method is not entirely accurate, it’s closer than nothing at all.

Where this really comes in handy—this page to word count stuff—is when you are wandering through a bookstore and you want to see where word counts are for recently published books so as to gauge your own. Knowing this will allow you to understand about where certain publishers like their word counts to be, and this understanding might just move you beyond others vying for those coveted spots on your favorite publisher's list.

This may be a detail, but professional writers have a sense of how many words they need to fit a certain market. Details make a difference and separate those who want to be writers from those who are writers.