Recently Rejected

I recently rejected a few stories for very specific reasons. You can read my comments below (sanitized to protect the writer's privacy and sanity) and hopefully improve your chances of being published - by me or somebody else.

Make sure your protagonist is directly involved in the outcome.

I got a story from a writer whose main character was in jail when the story started. The primary action takes place outside the jail, which makes it very tough for the protagonist to do anything directly that affects the outcome of the story. In this case, our hero designed and executed a scam that took care of the bad guy. It works, but he doesn't have anything to do with it beyond the setup.

The problem is with structure. Having the protagonist set up the villain from prison isn't immediate or visceral enough, but it would be tough to create a plausible and dramatically satisfying situation that would allow the hero to be on the street again.

There are only a handful of plots that can be built around that isolated environment, the most common being the locked-room murder mystery. Another is the sort of staple horror plot in which the killer/monster is loosed on an isolated group and blasts through them one by one until only one or two remain. The writer chose an environment that didn't match the structure of the story he was trying to tell.

If you're not at all analytical about your process, you might not think about any of this stuff in advance. A lot of writers don't. If you are in the "just let it fly" camp, you'll have to be careful to do some analysis after the first couple of drafts have cooled. You have to somehow get the necessary distance to see your own work and realize that you've inadvertently stuck your main character in a place where he can't be active. The best way to achieve that is time. Let the draft sit for at least two weeks. Some writers go longer. I tend to wait about six weeks, working on other projects in the interim.

We all have such different methods, and our mileage varies so much in terms of how we all work. A lot of my craft education has happened in the last six or seven years, and I've been publishing for almost twenty.

If your character does something inconsistent with his personality, set it up first.

The writer had defined his character as an imprisoned, scheming, conniving thug with no compunction about murdering someone. Before he went to jail, he was a computer geek - at most a felon who got busted because he got mad and hacked the wrong guy. The reader's image of him as a hacker clashes with story action presenting him as a hack drug manufacturer, scammer and conspiracist.

Just the fact that he botched the hack and landed in jail because he was angry is somewhat contradictory - which is not to say we're all straight-arrow consistent; one of my favorite aspects of character creation is building a real person with all inherent complexities and contradictions drawn as realistically as possible.

But if he's going to do something that goes against his perceived character - the way the reader thinks of him - you need to set that up very clearly from the first page. His anger should be his "fatal flaw," the aspect of his own character that he is constantly struggling against. If you set that up and then pay it off with story action that demonstrates its effect on his life, your structure becomes much stronger.

Start with action. Slow down and explain later.

I think I've said this in a previous post, but here it is again. The primary reason for rejection is slow starts - the first page and a half is exposition, dialogue or both, which needs to be better integrated into the narrative.

There are plenty of writers who work well with slow starts (Frank Herbert, for instance), and plenty of editors who obviously don't have a problem with it, but I'm looking for stuff that's pretty quick off the block. It's just a personal preference, but knowing how I work hopefully helps you figure out if your story's a good fit or not.

If you send me traditional sword and sorcery, you have to do a better job than the people who wrote it before you.

With traditional S&S, this is very challenging. Can you write dark, realistic fantasy better than Robert E. Howard? Can you build worlds filled with fantastical creatures better than J.R.R. Tolkien?

There's a Hemingway quote about beating dead men at their own game. That's what you have to do. Writers before you have set the bar. It's your job to raise it.

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