Picky Hook'ers & Mistakes to Avoid in Your First Five Pages

As I’ve mentioned before in an earlier blog post, we’re rejecting a lot of submissions. They’re just not hooking us. The first five pages should snare us, wet our appetite, and have us begging for more, but it just isn’t happening as much as we'd like. 

Are we too mean and picky? Maybe.

Should we relax our standards? Never.

Most agents ask for the query, the synopsis, and a “taste” of your work. Did you know that most agents, after reading the query, skip right to the sample pages? For the most part they could care less about the synopsis or plot of your story. They want to see what your writing style is like. They can get a good sense of who you are and what you have to offer—everything they need to know about you as a writer can be found in those first few pages of your novel. Then, and only then, if they like what they see will they take a look at the synopsis to determine if your story idea is intriguing, new, and fresh, something they want to represent. 

Oh, those first few pages! They can make or break you. It doesn’t seem fair, does it? But agents are busy people. Editors even more so. And Hook’ers are no exception either. 

So, just to give you an idea of what things we’re seeing that tend to cause us to say no (things you hopefully can avoid), I’ve compiled the following list: 

1)      1) Stories starting in the wrong place. Get us into the meat of the story right away. If you start your novel with too much backstory and setup, then we will pass. 

2)       2) Clichéd beginnings. Examples: (YA) The female/male main character comes to school and sees a new kid (girl/boy) in the office registering for classes (I can count on both hands the instances of stories starting off that same or similar way—Twilight, I Am Number Four . . .).  For romance, any type of romance, the opening starts off with the female main character jogging. Enough said. For some reason, female characters must be joggers, because, it’s only through jogging that they happen to come across the main male character (vampire, sexy alien, werewolf, super buff dude). 

3)       3) Starting off with a pretty cool hook/opening line, but then dropping it and never coming back to it. There have been a couple submissions in which that opening sentence was like wow, I need to read more. But then the story takes off in a different direction and leaving us feeling confused and mislead. 

4)       4) Too many modifiers.  The over use of adverbs, adjectives, and metaphors. (You know how much I dislike adverbs). 

5)       5) The cadence or sound of the novel reads funny.  Try reading your words out loud. Listen to the beat of the words as you say them. Even though they are written, they do need to have a smooth flow.

6)       6) Too much stage direction. You don’t have to tell the reader EVERYTHING the character is doing. It’s okay to end dialogue with simply “he said”. That’s good. Some narrative is great and appreciated. It breaks up the use of dialogue tags. But TOO many can be jarring. Find a balance. 

7)    7) Not having a clean submission. I’m not talking dirty, gritty words here (Hook’ers can handle it), what I mean is that the manuscript has either punctuation problems, or margin issues, or copy/crossover over issues.  Now, we don’t always reject simply because there is a misspelled word or two, or the margins are slightly off. We reject when there are too many and it tosses us out of the story too often. Anything that tosses the reader out of the story isn’t a good thing. You want to avoid that as much as possible. 

If you can avoid doing the above, then you will be in a much better position to be accepted by Hook’ers and agents alike. Polish and refine, peeps. Polish and refine.  Do some research and continue to improve yourself. Set yourself up for success.

Oh, and if you want to read a great book on how to make the first pages of your manuscript shine, check out The First Five Pages: The Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of theRejection Pile by Noah Lukeman. If you don’t have this book in your writer’s library, I highly suggest you do. It’s a great book to own.

Thankful Rejection

After I finished my first novel, I ran straight to the query stage with a hungry obsession. I wrote a dozen or so different queries and after settling on one, I started pimping my novel. The rejections came quickly as did my disappointment. 

What the hell was happening? Everyone said they loved my book. I didn’t get it.

I tried sometime later with another equally bad query. More rejects. With the weight of rejection riding on my shoulders, I put my novel aside and did what I should’ve done in the first place: I started writing again. I poured everything into my next project and discovered how much I’d grown. I was better, and I couldn’t wait to try the query process again.

So I finished my second novel eager to test my luck, but rather than leaping as I did before, I let it sit, locked away in my computer for another day. While that one simmered, I returned to my first project and couldn’t believe how crappy it was—how amateurish. My face heated with embarrassment as I pictured the query shark and other agents muddling through what I thought a well-crafted, entertaining manuscript. Why didn’t I see how raw it was?

I had heard somewhere that it takes over a hundred thousand words to get to your better work (note how I said better not best). I knew this, yet I still thought mine was different. I was blinded by my own excitement. 

I started thinking about this as I read submissions this week. We’ve received a lot of good work. Some of it, not so good. The disheartening thing is the not so good have already been published. The ease of publishing nowadays is exciting and terrifying. The exciting part I don’t think I have to explain, having options is great for all of us. What scares me is seeing writers take a quick leap into publishing with a lackluster cover and a book that was only critiqued by family and friends. 

So what’s the rush? Why are writers pushing work that is not ready? Are we in such a hurry and blinded by possibilities that we can't see imperfections? 


Thanks for looking, 

The Skeptical Hook'er

Rejections Sting, Just Like a Finger Poke to the Eye.

 Rejections suck. No one wants them and yet, as writers we’re all bound to receive a few (in most cases, dozens and dozens and dozens). It’s all a part of the “road to publication” process, but nonetheless, they still sting just like a finger poke to the eye.

Rejections suck. Whoops. Did I already say that? Sorry. I hate them. But they do. They really, really do.

I have several rejections under my belt—from contest judges, from agents, from publishing house editors. Even the stupid form rejections hurt, though I shouldn’t take them personally but I do. With each rejection, I’m building a thicker and thicker skin and getting closer to finding the person who will say yes. At least that’s what I keep telling myself. 

Up until last week, when the other two Hook’ers and I started this blog, I’d only been on the receiving end of the rejection stick. Now, I’m in the process of actually delving them out to seasoned and aspiring writers alike.

And I don’t like it one bit.  Not one single bit.

Telling someone that his or her work “just didn’t hook me” isn’t fun at all. In fact, I’ve worried about it a great deal, worried how someone will accept our suggestions and opinions. Because really, that’s all it is—an opinion and you know what they say about opinions (if you don’t, just ask and I’ll tell you).

Here’s the problem: a lot of the submissions we’ve received are actually quite good. Of course, there are a few that are not—some are still in need of additional editing and revisions and read like first drafts. But even though most are good, we’re still rejecting them.

“Why are you Hook’ers rejecting good manuscripts? That’s not fair. That sucks!” you say.  

I agree. It does suck.

But we decided before we started this blog, that a good story just wouldn’t cut it. It couldn’t.

 

We wanted GREAT stories.

Let me explain why.

First, if we accepted every good story, we’d never write again ourselves. That’s a given. We’d simply be too busy reading and reading and reading and . . . you get the drift. Our own writing goals would be sacrificed and not one of the three of us is willing to do that. We’re writers first, readers second.

Secondly, we want our tag line “2 out of 3 Hook’ers Love My Book!” to really mean something (you probably just rolled your eyes at that, but I’m serious). I’m going to take a moment and be scary honest here. I may even get in trouble for saying this, but here goes . . . there are lots of published books out there on the market with five star reviews they didn’t deserve. (Gasp. I know. Someone is going to throw rotten eggs at me. I sense it coming). Authors trade reviews with other authors—kind of like an “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” kind of deal. This is a well know practice.  It happens all the time. Is it illegal? Sometimes I wish (I’ve been led astray quite a bit), but no. It’s not. Is it wrong? That’s up to you to decide. Any book with our tagline on it, you will know went through quite a stringent process to receive it and will darn well deserve it.

Even though we’ve set our standard quite high, it doesn’t make sending out rejections any less difficult. We don’t find it fun or pleasurable by any means. All three of us have been on the receiving end of rejections and we know exactly what it is like, and we take this process quite seriously.

Every rejection we send out is done privately. We will NEVER post a bad review on our blog or any other website. Our purpose isn’t to destroy an author. That’s what makes us different from other reviewers—NO PUBLIC HUMILIATION.  And every submission will receive valuable feedback (at least we hope you find it valuable).

If you do receive a rejection from us, please take it with a grain of salt. Remember, we are not professionals and do not profess to be. We’re just three women with very strong opinions. Nothing more.

The greatest piece of advice I can give you is this—Never let anyone tell you that you can’t write. Never let anyone stand in the way of what you love to do. Always keep writing, because out there, somewhere, you have an audience waiting.

(Notice I didn’t say how big that audience was. It could only be one person. It could be millions. If you stop writing, though, you’ll never know).

Angela Scott