No, you’re not ready yet.
Literary agent Kristin Nelson conducted her “Agent Reads The Slush Pile” workshop at the Missouri Writers Guild Conference in St. Louis this past weekend. In it, she asked a writer to read aloud the first two pages of his manuscript intended for submission to a literary agent. If the first two pages were good, the writer read through. If she found an issue, where she would stop reading if in her own office, she said, “Stop,” and then explained why.
Kristin stated that 99.9% of what she sees in the workshop is not ready for an agent to read and this weekend only one submission made it past the first page. The majority of the others were stopped by the second paragraph.
The top ten problems:
1. Telling instead of showing.
2. Including unnecessary back story.
3. Loose sentence structure that could easily be tightened
4. The use of passive sentence construction.
5. Awkward introduction of character appearance.
6. Awkward descriptions/overly flowery language to depict.
7. Starting the story in the wrong place.
8. Not quite nailing voice in the opening.
9. Dialog that didn’t quite work as hard as it should.
10. A lack of scene tension even if the opening was suppose to be dramatic.
(Source: pubrants.blogspot.com)
