Natalia M. Sylvester

Meeting publishing pros at writers conferences is something that can’t be duplicated no matter how many agent blogs and tweets you follow, so imagine my excitement when agent Colleen Lindsay posted a contest on her blog, The Swivet, for a scholarship to the Backspace Agent-Author Seminar in NYC! It’s a chance to have your query letter and first two pages of your manuscript read and critiqued by agents and editors! Sign me up! Right now!

Right?

Maybe not so fast. All excitement put aside, I know my manuscript just isn’t ready yet. I’m still in the revision stages, and you know rule number one about querying: Don’t do it too early. This also happens to be one of the rules in the contest (only finished novels!), which confirms my suspicions that these contests are plagued with premature works constantly.

Putting your work in front of an agent before it’s as close to perfect as it’ll ever be is kind of like an actor stepping onto the red carpet without their best outfit on. You can’t risk making a bad impression, unless you want to be the literary equivalent of Bjork’s swan dress:

Source: Marie Claire's The Oscars Best and Worst Dressed List

That was 2001, by the way, and we STILL haven’t forgotten it, because poor choices in how you present yourself and your work leave an impression ten times more easily than good ones will. Most literary agents agree that if they’ve turned a work down once they won’t reconsider re-reading even if you’ve revised. Even if you’ve taken off that swan dress and slipped into Jennifer Lopez’s green Versace.

Of course, if you’ve got your query letter and manuscript ready to go then by all means you should enter the contest, and any other contests that pop up occasionally on the publishing blogs that I’m always tempted to enter before I slap myself on the wrist and say: “One day, oh impatient one, one day.”

If not, be a sponge in the meantime. Learn everything you can about the writing and querying process so that once you start it, you don’t shoot yourself in the foot. There will be plenty of other contests in the future, and the best time to enter isn’t now, but when your work is at its best.

The key to giving a great writing critique isn’t pointing out the problems in the work–it’s trying to figure out why they’re happening. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done when you’re dealing with something as fluid as writing.

It’s not like a math problem where you can trace a person’s steps and see where they put in the wrong number. If a character has no character, there’s usually no easy fix. And if the story is just coming off as boring, there’s no easy way to tell a writer that. So can there really be a formula for giving constructive criticism? Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago I posted about the difficulties in making a writers group work. Getting a group of like-minded writers to commit to meeting periodically and coordinate their schedules can be challenging, but it’s worth the effort if you can get it to work. And if you can’t, it’s really not the end of the world.

In one of my writing groups, after several attempts at meeting, we decided to embrace our aversion to scheduled meetings. Now every first Thursday of the month (used to be the last, but we switched it) we get together for “non-meetings.” Not everyone shows every time, and there are no hard feelings. We don’t turn in work to critique because not everyone has something ready to hand in, and that’s okay, too. The point is to get together with other writers and do writing exercises on the spot, so even if we came in with no new work we may walk out with the first paragraph of something great.

So basically, we took all the rules for forming a writers’ group and did the exact opposite. It’s now the longest-running group I’ve ever been in. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought long and hard about whether or not I should make my first post this nice little welcome/intro/about me post. Then I thought, “No, that’s why I spent the last hour editing and tweaking the ‘about me’ section,” so better to dive right into what’s going on today in my writing life.

I have my first meeting today with a new writer’s group that I was invited to join when I attended The Writer’s Institute in May. It’s a newly-formed group, with four fiction writers total, all of whom have joined other groups in the past that later fizzled out. I’m trying to figure out why this is such a common occurrence with writer’s groups and hoping that it won’t happen again. The last workshop I joined was full of excellent writers, but we just couldn’t get our schedules to coincide. The one before that had a couple of members who didn’t take (constructive) criticism very well. Still another one had writers who just weren’t writing; after a few meetings, they’d run out of work to submit.

Read the rest of this entry »