Subj : English skills
To   : Spectre
From : Arelor
Date : Wed Oct 19 2022 04:35:16

  Re: English skills
  By: Spectre to Arelor on Wed Oct 19 2022 02:53 pm

 >  Ar> I come from a tech documentation background, so when I think of bad
 >  Ar> mistakes, I think of functional mistakes. If you assign a wrong
 >  Ar> number to a part or a diagram, you can cause a lot of trouble
 >  Ar> for the user.
 > 
 > That seems reasonable, and I'd expect in some kind of tech documentation the
 > author would know more on what they are writing about to make the work
 > functionally useful.  Diagrammatical errors I'd associate less with an author
 > as most authors wouldn't be the illustrative author.  So there might be a
 > disconnect between the author of the text and the artist.
 > 
 >  Ar> Then there are the instruction sets you cannot replicate for cheap in your
 >  Ar> home. Maybe you are writing some tutorial for a specific piece of
 >  Ar> equipment you are very familiar with, but you don't happen to have
 >  Ar> nearby by the time you are writing, and since deadlines are a bitch
 >  Ar> you end up finishing the piece crouched in the backseat of a bus.
 > 
 > This sounds like a mash between someone not doing it as a primary role, and
 > trying to compete in that market.  I know nothing about deadlines, never had
 > to work to any, at least not since high school.  It strikes me as poor time
 > management if you need the device on hand and you no longer have it, or its
 > at home and you're on a bus for some reason. Shrug, I hear what you're saying
 > but, it seems you're either in the wrong job, or need a better focus on that
 > job. I don't have any fantastic answer for this.
 > 
 >  Ar> extra times. Keep in mind I have not started about examining plot
 >  Ar> consistency yet.
 > 
 > This one  seems cut and dried to me, if the author of some fictional work
 > can't keep the story straight, how is anyone else going to manage it? I'm not
 > sure proofreaders are going to help that much if at all.
 > 
 >  Ar>  My gripe is the current industry of written fiction pretty much expects
 >  Ar> authors to deliver a publishing grade work to the publishing
 >  Ar> house. This means a given author is to deliver a text which is 95%
 >  Ar> ready for publication, in a formatting determined by the publisher,
 >  Ar> in exchange for a 85% probability of the publisher sending
 > 
 > This does appear to be unrealistic.  Times change I s'pose, but I'd have
 > thought the authors job is to tell an entertaining coherent story, that's as
 > good as they can make it.  After that you'd feed it to your "proofreader",
 > get it typeset, re-read and head of to print or publish. It's a waste of time
 > if they haven't even decided they like before even worrying about the
 > subsequent details.
 > 
 >  Ar> Think of it. The author is supposed to accomplish a titanic task in
 >  Ar> exchange for a meager probability of it being read. Basically,
 >  Ar> we are asking writers to do work for value of 250*bucks in
 >  Ar> exchange of scraps. OF COURSE quality is going to suffer
 > 
 > Short stories for the most part and I might be wrong, make me reminisce about
 > pulp fiction. If thats the market you're in, then the strike rate has always
 > been low even in the days of yore. Some ~90 hit the fireplace without going
 > anywhere so this is not a new phenomenon but the extra work required going by
 > the above is pointless if that is the case.  Used to be a thing about getting
 > something, anything published by someone being an accomplishment in its own
 > right. Perhaps you need a level of that to keep you at it, without looking at
 > it as a "job".  I think in order to make any kind of serious money in the
 > writing field you need to either be really lucky and or be truly exceptional
 > at it, the money makers seem to be the exception, not the rule.
 > 
 > Spec
 > 
 > 
 > *** THE READER V4.50 [freeware]
 > --- SuperBBS v1.17-3 (Eval)
 >  * Origin: Good Luck and drive offensively! (21:3/101)

Finishing something important in the backseat of a bus is an exception rather than a
rule, but it happens. Real life is that place where the Editor in Chief needs some
work done the same day you have 10 urgent deliveries to make on $job_01 and fix the
server which stores the accounting data for $job_02.

In theory, publishers will take rough drafts and polish them, but in practice they
only take texts which they can get publication ready as fast as possible. Most of the
time that means anything they need to spend too much time fixing gets piped to
/dev/null. A number of Editors for big pulp magazines outright say that they are
unlikely to read past the first paragraph of each manuscript. The name of the game for
them is Burning Through as Many Manuscripts as Possible. With so many manuscripts on
their desks, anything that does not look fine from the get go is going into the trash
bin.

I think most good authors will generate fiction free from gaping plot holes, but that
does not mean you need not look for those. When one is writing, things are christal
clear in his head, but you have to check your ideas are conveyed to the readers
properly.

After being exposed to publisher's selection processes, I no longer think quality is
what makes a money maker in the pulp market. I have seen quite a lot fine manuscripts
kicked out so the Editor could work on mediocre ones instead. There is a lot of hidden
criteria for selecting what gets worked on and what gets burnt at the stake, but I'd
say if you write an average piece that can be sent to the press ASAP, you have much
better chances of having the story bought than if you write a masterpiece which needs
some extra adjustements to fit this month's magazine pagecount.


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