Preaching to the Choir, Part Two

Hi Folks,

First, a housekeeping note: I intended for the following post to sound a bit cynical and humorous. When it came out this morning, I heard a note of seriousness in it that I did not intend. Please read beyond the words and take it as a tongue-in-cheek piece. Thanks, Harvey

After I posted Preaching to the Choir and wagged my finger, I guess, at writers everywhere who submit work that isn’t ready to be submitted for contests or otherwise for publication, I received a brief note from a friend. Her note read “Wow! Snarky? You are so correct in all! It is a waste of your time and ours to send our work before we have tamed it for the experts!”

There’s a lot in that note. The first two words (per my perception, not necessarily the writer’s intent) conveyed to me that she was surprised, that perhaps my comments in that post were a little sharp, and that she took them as being snide. I think “snarky” means “snide,” but I have to admit, I’m not certain. The first full sentence and the second full sentence all the way up to and including the word “have” conveys, on the surface, that she agreed with my “snarky” comments. But the end of that second full sentence—”tamed it for the experts”—tells me that maybe she was being just a tad snarky herself, or at least missing the point.

When you submit work to a contest, you aren’t submitting it to “experts”; you’re submitting it to Readers. In every case, the Reader is the final judge, jury and sometimes executioner of your work. Sometimes the reader is also a contest judge. Sometimes the reader is a literary agent or an acquisitions editor or a publisher. Sometimes the reader is not involved in the distribution side of this game but is only a consumer. The point is, in every case, the reader deserves your best effort. If you choose to indicate your disrespect for the reader by submitting work that simply isn’t ready (replete with spelling errors, wrong word usages, tense switches, sentences or scenes that make no sense, scenes that have nothing to do with the story line, et cetera, et cetera et cetera ad nauseam) then you might expect a bit of snarkiness (snarknicity?).

There is some good news here as well though: most readers will not be snarky with you. Most professional readers (agents, acquisitions editors, publishers) will simply return your manuscript with a note that reads something like Thanks for your submission. It does not meet our needs at this time. What they actually ought to write is We’d love to use the paper you sent us, but you seem to have written on it. Snarky? Even rude? Yeah, probably, but such a straightforward response might also be just the thing to wake you up and get you to learn and apply the craft, or at least a little attention to detail. But don’t worry… I can say with relative certainty you will never receive such a frank rejection slip. And those non-professional readers—you know, the folks who spend their hard-earned dollars to purchase your novel on Amazon—well, they won’t be snarky either. Their response is a subconscious two-step process: 1. When they’ve reached their limit, they’ll delete your story or novel from their Kindle or Nook; 2. They will remember your name, and they will never again purchase your writing.

It really is all up to you. You can polish your work to the best of your ability and then submit it, or you can drop a ladle full of your literary soup on a slice of bread, toss another slice on top from across the room, then send it along and hope the reader (agent, editor, publisher or consumer) doesn’t notice how sloppy it it.

But I digress—to the lady who alerted me to the need for this post, I wrote,

This [post] was actually to folks who usually know better. That’s why I titled [it] the way I did. But yes, maybe a little snarky, I guess. Then again, shouldn’t ALL those who call themselves writers know better than to submit anything for publication (contest or otherwise) that’s replete with spelling errors, wrong word usages, and severe punctuation errors (no period at the end of a sentence, for example)? It isn’t that it’s a waste of my time—when I’m reading for a contest and am slapped out of the story by poor writing, I stop reading—it’s that it’s a waste of the writer’s time.

Perhaps I’m “snarky” to expect quality from writers who are submitting work to a no-fees contest, but would you let a surgeon who practices the same sloppiness operate on your loved ones? Would you take advice from an attorney who didn’t know (or apparently care) that his legal briefs are rife with misspellings and wrong word usages? Would you allow a mechanic to repair your car if he mentioned that he used to change spark plugs in diesel engines at a truck stop (diesel engines don’t have sparkplugs)?

I believe the reader, whether a professional reader or a consumer, has the right to expect the writer’s best work, but again, it really is all up to you.

Next time, Preaching to the Choir, Part Three: What about writers who revise, revise, revise but never submit because the work never seems quite ready?

Until then, happy writing!

Harvey