As I wrote to a friend today, I recently realized that I haven't ever submitted my most personal work to intense exterior editing. How did I discover this? Reading Anne Mini's blog actually (surprise!) in which she listed the top 74 reasons, or something to that effect, that members of the publishing industry reject submissions on the first page of your manuscript. Depressing thing is most of them will. Reject you by the first page, that is. Unfortunately, I would not list beginnings as my forte in any writing style. Even when writing academic papers, I often end up putting a filler paragraph in the beginning and then coming back to it later, deleting the original, and rewriting. Needless to say, a handful of those 74 reasons can probably be found in my YA manuscript, perhaps contributing to my accumulation of rejection letters.
Confronted with this fact about myself and my work, I frantically began wracking my brains for instances in which I had submitted things to critique - and came up with about five. Each of which took place in a creative writing class, and consisted of my being forced to write a story along a specific set of guidelines and then turn it in to the class for dissection. Obviously that was a bit traumatic, but keep in mind these pieces were not written exactly voluntarily. As well, they were all short stories - a completely different level of attachment from that experienced with the story and characters that inhabit the space of the novel.
This then led me to the next logical thought in this sequence, which is: well, then, I guess that I should get on that.
Thus the title of this blog entry. Intense and uncomfortable terror has transformed me, I say in the interests of being overdramatic. Now to find someone to tear apart page 1.
Have you thought of joining a critique goup? If there isn't one locally, there are a couple of genre specific ones online. My first serious crit group was brutal but the bootcamp experience hardened me to further critiques. Took them less personally.
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