The Undiscovered Country

Perfect Timing

I received comments back from a fellow writer on one of my novels last night.

Truth was, the timing couldn't have been better. You'd think after giving it to her about a month ago -- not long at all -- I wouldn't feel a certain amount of despair.

But I did.

I started to think it was taking far too long, which meant she either couldn't finish it because it was so badly written, or she needed that time to bleed all over it, because it was so badly written. Yep, more of those teeth-grinding "what ifs", Nada .

Part of her email said this:

"I finished!! I made notes throughout and then a short summarizing comment of my thoughts on the entire thing."

When she said that, I realized I wanted the summary more than the line-edits. I've said before that bad writing can be fixed (it is a skill after all), a bad story can't.

She sent me her critiqued manuscript back to me yesterday afternoon, but my courage failed me to look at it until about an hour ago. I didn't look at the individual edits; instead I scrolled down to her summary.

Here's what she said (in part):

"Overall, I think your basic story is good—interesting, engrossing, maybe not quite as original as some would like but definitely enough here to work with. But your style needs work! Edit like crazy—watch for repeated words and phrases, places where you can use more vivid terms."

One word stood out to me. Can you spot it?

I'll give you a minute . . .


"Engrossing."

The death-knell to me -- and most other writers, I'll wager -- is when a reader says a story is boring, that he or she couldn't finish it for whatever reason.

That my manuscript engrossed her, that's all I need to know. The rest is detail.