When Too Much Polishing Ruins a Story -- a Blast from the Past

[starshipcat]

I'm busy with Hall of Heroes Comic Con right now, and what little writing time I have is going to getting everything done for my Kickstarter backers. However, I happened across an old post from another blog I used to run that's still relevant. In fact, it is even more relevant as more and more authors go indie and need to decide whether it's time

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[sartorias]

I think that that advice has done a tremendous amount of damage. There are few writers whose voices, or command of plot and characterization, show best in sending what amounts to rough drafts out. My sense of this was confirmed when I learned of first readers in NY or magazine editors who only had to see certain names to turn around and stuff the story back in the envelope after scanning at most a paragraph or two. A writer can get a rep for flooding markets with half-baked work. If rejections come regularly really really fast, that can be a sign of this pattern.

Though the over-polishing is also a thing, especially beginnings. The best example of this I ever saw was when I was invited to LA to do a five page workshop, a few years ago. This one piece came in. My method for that workshop was to read the piece aloud to the gathering, stipulating that my cold reading approximated the first reader/editor's first reading. If I, with a zillion years of read words behind me, tripped over something in a sentence, there was a fifty fifty chance that an editor would, too.

This story opened with two pages of absolutely dynamic writing and action. It read fast, and I could see the audience on the edges of their seats. Then page three began with the main character sitting in a room, looking at a picture of his granddad and thinking his entire history at the reader. By the fourth paragraph of this dumpage, though I strove to inject some life into it, I saw shiftings and straying eyes. That particular opening--so easy for the writer, so difficult to slog through for readers unless the authorial voice is riveting--signaled to me that this author has workshopped that piece at all the LA "Your First Two Pages Are The Most Important" workshops. By page fine, though, the story had fallen to sludge. Later on I spoke to the writer alone, who said they got a lot of "send more" after queries and two pages, but then silence or rejections. The writer said that yes, they'd attended a ton of workshops on openings.

There are workshops that are not the best fit for writers. The openings ones were certainly not a good fit for that writer.

I don't know of anyone who doesn't benefit from setting aside a piece for a time, and then looking at it with fresh eyes. Some lucky writers are able to do the fresh eye redraft after only a few weeks, but many need more time. Lots more time.

[starshipcat]

That's the problem with one-size-fits-all advice - the person for whom it's absolutely wrong is apt to double down and do it wrong even harder.

Editors are apt to think in terms of people who need to back off on how quick they are to let stuff out in the wild because they see so much from those people, and never see the procrastinators and perfectionists until they've polished right through the finish and ruined the piece, if they ever do at all.

[sartorias]

True, that!