A B N A Vets Forum Ms assessors and others

I was wondering if other people have used manuscript assessors  or who they have used for 'professional' review.

I found I could not get enough feed back from friends and family. My wonderful husband is dyslexic and although he has read what I have written, he just loves it without any real feed back.

A few years ago the agent I hope will one day represent me recommended a ms assessor who had once worked with her. I sent my ms to her and a large sum of money but was ultimately disappointed. Although some of her comments were useful, she obviously did not read the whole book and did not understand fantasy. My book is set in a medieval fantasy world but she made comments like "People didn't use to live that long" (He was only in his seventies! Later characters are almost immortal) and "They would not wear that." It's my world and they will live for as long as I want them to and wear whatever I wish!

Undaunted I sent it to another agent. He read the ms, loved what I wrote and has written a glowing recommendation which I hope will sway the agent I want to reconsider my ms. He told me about the ABNA competition which brought me here.

I would be interested to hear of others experiences.

Gayna

 

Hi there Gayna,

I am not sure about manuscript assessors, but it sounds an aweful lot like an editorial letter to me.

Most good editors get paid to know things about history that the common person has ever thought of. Ex: "The dinosaurs ran across the grass." -- This may sound really simple, but I don't think there was grass when dinosaurs existed. I mean it is argued anyhow.

Another Ex. Say one of your characters says "Yeah, I know." -- Well if your book gives off a 1400s to 1500s setting, there was no such thing as the word "yeah" back then (was created in 1902ish), it is the editors job to point that out to you.

I think that the advice she gives you is just her pointing out facts that you may take into consideration. Many times really good fantasy books start with a good believable foundation, and many times they don't! But it is not for the editor to decide, it's for you! They are there to give you the facts.

Take the advice in stride, change the things you want and leave the rest. Hopefully you will get what your looking for.

Now then, have you ever seen the show "Samuarai Champloo"? If you don't like Japanese Samurai cartoons then probly not. The guys who write this have it set way back in time, but with new age slang. An editor's nightmare, but it really works well! (check it out on youtube sometime)

Hope this helps!

Oh yeah,

So my experience. Well I sent part of my manuscript out to a list of professional editors to let them do the 1st chapter, and give their hubbub about it. I recieved many pats on the back for my manuscript. But I picked a woman (I am a guy, so I wanted a woman's hands on the manuscript) who was very professional, very smart, had many published books under her belt, and was critical of my work.

I do not need any more pats on the back, they are nice, but not very helpful when it comes to things I need to work on.

When I recieved the final product, I was very happy!

Just to put in my two cents worth:

What we need to make our writing the best it can be is critical review that's really critical, that points out any and all possible stumbling blocks to our work's success.  We might not agree with all of it, ultimately, but we owe it to ourselves and our work to take it all under consideration, with an open mind.  If we want to be our only reader, of course it doesn't matter what others think. But if we want to make at least a bit of a living at this, and gain a real readership, we have to be willing to heed a fairly wide range of opinion.

I think I've reviewed two or three works from this group, and I've read several reviews from other members.  Mostly I've seen the "great job" kind of thing that we can get from non-writing friends and family.  I try to give reviews that catch problems, from tiny to large, and that suggest alternatives -- what to do with that is up to each reviewee.  We've all been at this long enough to have some idea of what works and what doesn't, and if we really want to help each other improve, and improve ourselves, we have to be willing to be a little hard on each other -- and on ourselves.  Reviewing others' work really critically has helped me look at my own work more critically too, and I don't  need quite so much outside opinion as I once did.  It's a learning curve, but it has to start somewhere.

I don't think you need to pay an editor if you can find a volunteer reader, preferably one who's also a writer, who'll give you the straight dope.  It helps to have one who understands what you're trying to accomplish -- you might have to explain that a little.  Peer review is a dialogue, a relationship.  It takes a little work -- but if you're serious about writing and being published, it's worth it. That's the function I'm hoping this group turns out to serve.

On the subject of fantasy verisimilitude in particular:  if you have a medieval-type setting, it should be accurate to the time period as to food stuffs, work done, technology, etc.  If you want to introduce anachronistic elements they have to have explainable logic. My world has technology that stops at European high middle ages/Renaissance, except for indoor plumbing, rapid advances in ship design, and post-Enlightenment political ideas.  I try to account for it, within the story, without lengthy explanations.  If you're going to defy the typically short lifespans of people who lived without antibiotics, sanitation, or even real hygiene, you'll have to account for that too, by providing them with some of that stuff, or special powers that obtain longevity, or peculiar racial characteristics (like the long lives of Hobbits, or endless lives of elves) or the excuse that it's some kind of heroic age, like the first chapters of Genesis, when people routinely had incredibly long life-spans.  You can't get by with just saying "I can if I want to." If those exceptional circumstances are evident in your story, and a critic or editor still has complaints, you might have to explain your intentions and premises a bit.  That's where having an open (and open-minded) relationship with a reviewer is useful.

Okay, I'll stop now.

I don't know Samuarai Champloo.  I will have to look it up.

I'm not being arogant (Hey I don't even know how to spell the word!) when I say "It's my world so I'll do what I want." I think the beauty of writing Fantasy is that it IS your world and you don't have to be confined to what happened on planet Earth (even when it is set on Earth.) We all know magic doesn't exist but that doesn't stop Harry Potter & co. All you have to do is make it believable.
In the book I am currently writing my main character can fly. Mera doesn't flap her arms (that puts her into a dangerous spin) or seems to use any form of propulsion. It seems unbelievable but we all know Superman can fly. My job is to make sure the reader believes Mera can fly and people who just say "that can't be done" should open their imagination or give up reading fantasy.

Gayna

 

Gayna:

Exactly what I was saying -- you have to make readers believe it.

My characters have very specific psychic abilities, and I try to describe where the powers come from and how the characters use them so that they'll make sense to readers. If I just said "She read his thoughts"  or "they set up a thought-barrier" I wouldn't get very far in that task.

I'm sure you try to do the same thing with powers like flight.

Maybe we should be discussing this in the Wood.

Leah

I agree. You might remember I asked to join Wood but you were waiting to hear back from the others. So let me know when I can join.

Gayna

I made an agreement with a guy on here: he reads mine, and I read his, and we give each other in-depth reviews. Since his genre is not what I normally read, and mine is not what he normally reads, we're both getting what I feel is non-biased feedback. We go through grammar, repeating words, punctuation, misspellings, typos, etc. and offer suggestions. I have others who review and catch all my grammatical  & typographical errors as well.

I think it comes down to finding someone who is willing to take that time with your manuscript and put a "clear" eye to it--there are typos in my ABNA entry; one of my reading partners hadn't been all the way through the MS when I decided to enter the contest and I didn't see them until after I'd submitted (of course).

I'm not saying it's easy to find someone--it took me a while! There's a group of three or four of us who keep each other writing cleanly, but it's a lot of work.

Checking for grammar, punctuation, spelling, typos is one thing, but how about revision for the best possible way to structure, from individual sentences to scenes, chapters, and the whole shooting match?

A text can be grammatically correct and clean, but still not a very good story, or the best story it can be.  That's the hardest thing to see for yourself, sometimes, and the hardest thing to take advice on.

That's what my two writing partners and I try to do for each other -- see more than the details -- though we do those too.

It's serious critiquing, and I think we all need it, sometimes.

Never used a manuscript assessor, and I don't think I ever will.

I have some very clever and very perceptive friends, well versed in media studies and cultural sciences, who are avid readers and concern themselves with language and art without being writers themselves. They are experienced in critiquing diverse kind of works and texts and their thoughts and analyses are invaluable.


Stated bluntly, I don't believe there is anybody out there doing the job any better than they do. And them I definitely trust. Besides, they do the work for free. :)

That would be Jinx--she and I are ruthless with each other's work when we suggest revisions. And if we veer from the plot, or something doesn't make sense or tie in to the plot, we catch it for each other. She's invaluable.

Honest critiques are a must. Nothing else is of any help at all.

I belong to a very small (five members) private site and the comments we give each other are deadly honest. We trust each other and know we're all doing our best for the other members.

I've done a couple of reviews here for members who were rejected by amazon. I've read a few other exerpts but either the writing/story didn't grab me or my only comments would be those that devastate. I would not do that to another writer. If I can't mix positive with negative, you won't hear from me.

In addition to everyone elses comments, I'll tell you what I do.

I'm a memeber of writing.com, which is much like this place. There are groups and you can post your work all that stuff. There is a group there for fantasy novelists. At any given time there are at least ten people actively exchanging reviews. They will help you with grammar, pov, timeline, plot, anything really. If you worry that your reviews wont be good enough for them to compensate, don't. They will quickly teach you how to review.

I've been there for just over a year, and seen a dramatic improvement in my writing. And the strangest thing is that since I do all these reviews, my writing is better the first time around, and there is not nearly as much editting to do.

I'm not trying to convert you or anything... I am new to this site so there very well may be something like it here, not sure. But if you would like to join, hit www.writing.com and look me up... Jezzilin. I'll send you the stuff you need to get in.