Learning Novel' Writing from Agents and Editors

You don’t have to tell them everything and every little detail. Leave some things open for their imaginations to ponder. Don’t over-describe and "overwrite," although this suggestion is easy to give but hard to employ. Your reader will respect you and your story if you reasonably stay within these guidelines.

Finally, this is the hardest part of all. Once you have finished writing your masterpiece, do not run to the post office and send it off to a publisher. Remove yourself (your emotions and your heart) from your work for at least one month. Distance yourself from your marvelous product. Harness your wonderful enthusiasm about your great contribution to literature. Writing is an art, and that’s where the "talent" part is exhibited. Patience and prudence are part of being "talented."

At last you are en route. You are now seriously involved in making writing a "science." And only when there is a true marriage between art and science that your work is ready for public presentation (if you want to distinguish yourself from the 97% of the writers that are crabs in a bushel, crawling over each other trying to get out of their mediocre enclosure).

Put your manuscript on your closet’ shelf. After a full month, take it down and read it from stem to stern. Now you are better able to evaluate your work, your errors, and your departures from good novel’ writing methods that should stick out like ugly thorns throughout your work. You can now be more objective in doing your final revision, which should be a "new vision" of your work as you steer it toward perfection and bring your ship into port. After that is accomplished, it is finally time’ to launch your masterpiece into the literary universe.

Jay Dubya

Copyright, the Hammonton (New Jersey) Gazette

March 29, 2002

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