How do you tell a writer that the manuscript is awful?
It's a private job. And oh, dear God, this woman cannot write. She's an extremely nice woman; I wish that all of my clients were so nice. But she cannot write.
The manuscript is...I don't really know how to describe it. There's no actual plot. I'm 150 pages in and the two mains (a woman who is either a former spy who was tortured or a victim of attempted murder who's in Witness Protection and a sexist werewolf stalker who is offended that her hair and clothes don't suit his taste and who keeps describing everything she does that he likes as "masculine") haven't even met yet. There's a lot of what a friend calls "doorknobbing" instead. Here's an example:
"She was rewarded with a large tear up the seam of about four inches. [The female lead] then snapped off a small branch at eye level and stripped the leaves from it and used the sharp broken edge of the branch to jab the material on her dress at the point where the tear stopped. When she had made over a dozen puncture holes she put the branch in her mouth so it wouldn’t fall and grabbed the material again to rip it horizontally this time. One of the holes grabbed hold and the fabric ripped easily along the thread line. [The female lead] maneuvered her hips and brought her legs up to keep the tear going along the entire bottom half of her dress until she had a four inch wide long bandage in dark purple.
Each sentence is averaging between five to eight corrections, because every sentence is a run-on and half of the sentences are in passive voice. Words are used the wrong way. The author tends to overexplain everything at least three times. Also, all the dialogue looks like this:
"I don't know that dialogue followed by attributive takes a comma." The female lead responsed. The male lead sighed in agreement with her because he thinks her to be right.
"I don't either." The male lead warned. He was never interested in punctuation, he left that kind of thing to his sisters.
FOR FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY PAGES.
Is there a story here? I don't know. I'm eleven chapters in and I don't know what the story's about. (I think it's intended to be a paranormal romance, but I can't honestly tell.) And the manuscript is drowning in verbiage; it's a quarter of a million words long.
How do you tell someone that something they spent this much effort on is a complete turd?
The manuscript is...I don't really know how to describe it. There's no actual plot. I'm 150 pages in and the two mains (a woman who is either a former spy who was tortured or a victim of attempted murder who's in Witness Protection and a sexist werewolf stalker who is offended that her hair and clothes don't suit his taste and who keeps describing everything she does that he likes as "masculine") haven't even met yet. There's a lot of what a friend calls "doorknobbing" instead. Here's an example:
"She was rewarded with a large tear up the seam of about four inches. [The female lead] then snapped off a small branch at eye level and stripped the leaves from it and used the sharp broken edge of the branch to jab the material on her dress at the point where the tear stopped. When she had made over a dozen puncture holes she put the branch in her mouth so it wouldn’t fall and grabbed the material again to rip it horizontally this time. One of the holes grabbed hold and the fabric ripped easily along the thread line. [The female lead] maneuvered her hips and brought her legs up to keep the tear going along the entire bottom half of her dress until she had a four inch wide long bandage in dark purple.
Each sentence is averaging between five to eight corrections, because every sentence is a run-on and half of the sentences are in passive voice. Words are used the wrong way. The author tends to overexplain everything at least three times. Also, all the dialogue looks like this:
"I don't know that dialogue followed by attributive takes a comma." The female lead responsed. The male lead sighed in agreement with her because he thinks her to be right.
"I don't either." The male lead warned. He was never interested in punctuation, he left that kind of thing to his sisters.
FOR FOUR HUNDRED AND SEVENTY PAGES.
Is there a story here? I don't know. I'm eleven chapters in and I don't know what the story's about. (I think it's intended to be a paranormal romance, but I can't honestly tell.) And the manuscript is drowning in verbiage; it's a quarter of a million words long.
How do you tell someone that something they spent this much effort on is a complete turd?