Kristin Nelson over at Pub Rants writes about her contribution to a Writers' Digest interview about what agents hate to read in the opening pages of a submission. She linked to this very interesting piece where her pet hate as well as those of other leading US literary agents appears.
Many of the usual suspects are in there such as prologues, info dumping, too much description and backstory, clichés etc. I must ensure that I'm not guilty of any in my writing, however, I've been waylaid this past fortnight in terms of writing. My pen has been replaced by a paintbrush as I finally got the keys to my new pad a week ago and have been cleaning and freshening the place up. I'm getting withdrawal symptoms from the wip though particularly after all the chatting and note swapping that went on at Caroline Smailes' book launch.
Many of the usual suspects are in there such as prologues, info dumping, too much description and backstory, clichés etc. I must ensure that I'm not guilty of any in my writing, however, I've been waylaid this past fortnight in terms of writing. My pen has been replaced by a paintbrush as I finally got the keys to my new pad a week ago and have been cleaning and freshening the place up. I'm getting withdrawal symptoms from the wip though particularly after all the chatting and note swapping that went on at Caroline Smailes' book launch.
2 comments:
I'm starting to think that this sort of information is both very useful and potentially dangerous (perhaps all information is like this). It's very useful because we all need to know, as writers, what might get us published and what definitely won't.
However, the danger is that we end up trying to "please all of the people all of the time". In other words, try to satisfy all and everybody's rules. That's simply impossible, in my opinion. The best probability for success, would therefore be to avoid the most common blunders - the ones that many agents abhor - and then submit to as many agents as possible.
I should say that having this information is certainly better than not having it, so thank you for posting it. We just need to analyse it carefully before blindly following all of it.
I should also point out that I have no practical experience of trying to get an agent. Yet.
I think that it's helpful to have this stuff out there but agree with you that you're never going to satisfy everyone.
You have to be confident enough to decide what to heed and what to ignore when it comes to these things.
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