The Manhattan Chronicles: Rise of Ánados

Well, you posted it, and left the comments window open, so I went to amazon and looked. It's been out for a year and you have one comment from someone who reviews lots of books and gives only 5 stars. So, it's likely a paid review.

But I'm not writing this to bash you. Since you'll not address the problem you don't see as being one, I thought you might like to know why no agent or publisher said yes, and why sales are dissapointing — especially, given that the problem is invisible to you.

In fact, you've fallen into the single most common trap for the hopeful writer, what I call the Great Misunderstanding. Simply put, like most of us, you left your school days with a skill called writing, and made the assumption that since you were told no different, it's a skill that's universal to any kinds of writing.

But it's not. Think about it. Are you ready to write a professional level screenplay with no further training? No.

How about work as a journalist? No again, because as a profession, it requires more than the general skills of school. We all realize that we can't work in those fields without more than school-day skills, but somehow, never apply that realization to the profession we call Commercial Fiction Writing. And the pros make it seem so easy and natural that we never realize that all the reports and essays they assigned in school made us good at the kind of writing that most employers need of us, nonfiction. Employers need reports letters, and other nonfiction, not novels and poetry. And the goal of a report? To inform the reader clearly and concisely.

That's how history books are written, and how many people buy them for a fun read?

Fiction's goal: as E. L. Doctorow put it: “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensation in the reader. Not the fact that it’s raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.” And that's a learned skill.

You open with:

• The sound of a hawks cry awakens the young man.

Right here is where this would be rejected, were it part of a submission. And it’s where you lost mose of the readers who check out your excerpt on Amazon. But... because it's your writing, it works perfectly for you, and you see nothing wrong. But you cheat when you read. Before you turn to the first page you know all that a reader needs to provide context: Who we are. Where we are in time and space. What’s going on. You also know the character’s backstory and motivation.

The reader? As they see it, someone not important enough to have a name, who’s in an unknown place, wakes up because a bird, who could be in a house, flying, or on a branch, makes a noise. Who cares? Not the reader, because that have no context. And a confused reader will NOT hang around hoping it will make sense if they keep reading.

• He stands up slowly, ducking as the hawk swoops low over his head.

He could be injured, sick, or rising slowly for a multiplicity of reasons, all relevant to the story. And though you give it importance by mentiong his rising slowly, you don’t say why. More to the point, you wasted the time it took to read about it because it’s a minor visual detail, provided for unknown reason in a medium that doesn’t reproduce pictures.

More to the point, we don’t know why the bird appears to have attacked him, and, it flies away. Again, an irrelevant visual detail, because the bird isn't mentioned again, and had no effect on events. So every second of time it took to read about it has provided the reader with nothing useful so far as plot, setting the scene, or developing character.

And as the paragraphs continue, nothing meaningful to the reader emerges. Our protagonist has no thoughts on what happens. He analyzes or questions nothing. He simply follows a script, and does and says things for no known reason, as do the other characters.

For you, who know what’s going on, it works. But...we're not on the scene with the protagonost. Instead, we’re reading the transcribed words of a storyteller. And that cannot work, because storytelling is a performance art. HOW you tell the story, your performance, matters as much as what you say, because that performance substitutes for that of the actors who are available on the screen AND on the page.

On-screen we’re in the room where the action takes place, picking up a huge amount of detail in parallel. On the page, because of the restrictions of the medium, which is serial, we take another path, and place the reader where film can’t go: into the mind of the protagonist. We calibrate the reader’s perception of what’s happening to that of the protagonist, because the reader learns of everything that happens or is said BEFORE they learn of the protagonist’s response. So if we don’t place them fully on the scene, mimicking the protagonist’s decision-making, the reader will react to what happens according to THEIR life experience, not the protagonist’s.

And that is a story killer, because far too often, the reader will decide on what the protagonist should do, only to find that they do something different for reasons that were unknown as the reader was reacting.

But...if we place the reader into the scene, in real-time, knowing the scene as the protagonist does, in all respects, the reader will react as-the-protagonist-is-ABOUT-to, and so, will feel as if they’re living the scene as-the-protagonist. And THAT is where the joy of reading lies. It’s in being made to feel and care, and to worry about our avatar’s safety.

But that cannot happen if a dispassionate external observer is talking TO the reader about what can be seen as THEY see it, instead of what matters to our protagonist.

In short: You’re writing fiction with the tools of nonfiction. As I said, the problem is invisible to you. But because you'll leave out what seems obvious to you, but which the reader needs... For you, every sentence points to images, action, memories and more, all stored in your mind and waiting to be called up.

The reader? For them, every sentence points to images, action, memories and more, all stored in *YOUR* mind and waiting to be called up. But with you not there when it’s read...

The solution? Acquire the needed skills and make them yours. A great number of them are things that once pointed out you’ll wonder how you could have missed seeing it. But still, they must be pointed out.

I have several suggestions.

First, I’m vain enough to believe that as an overview, my own articles and videos can help clarify why it matters so much.

Next, as a sample of what you need to master, the article I link to below is a condensation of two critically necessary skills that have the power to pull the reader into the scene as a participant. Give it a try. I think you’ll find it a revelation. Then try a bit of writing using the MRU technique it provides.

http://www.advancedfictionwriting.com/art/scene.php

And finally, if the article makes sense, the book it was condensed from is available free on archive sites like the one I link to below. It’s an older book, but still, the best I’ve found at imparting the knowledge of how to give your words wings —and how to avoid a crash.

https://archive.org/details/TechniquesOfTheSellingWriterCUsersvenkatmGoogleDrive4FilmMakingBsc_ChennaiFilmSchoolPractice_Others

So... I know you were hoping to attract readers, and certainly weren’t hoping for this. But as I said, it’s something the author won’t see till it’s pointed out. And given that you’ve worked so hard, and have to be disappointed that it wasn’t better received, I thought you should know.

Jay Greenstein
Articles: https://jaygreenstein.wordpress.com/category/the-craft-of-writing/the-grumpy-old-writing-coach/
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@jaygreenstein3334

Posted 4 Months Ago