SquarePeg Books

• 

May 5 question – Has any of your readers ever responded to your writing in a way that you didn’t expect? If so, did it surprise you?

It surprised me when my husband read the first chapter of my first romance book (first person POV, hero’s perspective) and declared “It sounds like Bruce Campbell talking.”

Now I can’t read that book from the hero’s perspective without hearing Bruce Campbell’s voice narrating it.

It surprised me when I thought the BIG DRAMATIC DEATH SCENE OF A LONGTIME NPC in my fantasy novel would yank on my reader’s heartstrings, but the one scene all of them commented on, male and female, was “The part in the garden, when it was nighttime, and…um….they um…”

“The boy must die?” I offer.

“Yeah. That part.”

None of them EVER commented on the death scene.

It surprised me when my entire critique group (I’m not part of one now, in part because of this) told me I was too descriptive in my writing. “Show, don’t tell. Reduce your descriptive words by half.”

I edited accordingly, and submitted the first chapter of the edited version to a BIG NAME FANTASY EDITOR (for a fee) to be discussed privately with me at a Writer’s Conference. He informed me that I was not descriptive enough. “You need to double your descriptions. At least,” he said. “There just isn’t enough there for me to get a good idea of what your world is like.”

It surprised me when my husband, reading a different romance novel, told me “There’s too much cursing. You need to edit out all of your character’s cursing. It’s tacky.”

This man reads military fiction novels in which the word “fuck” is used like a comma, and giggles every time he comes across some creative profanity, which happens about every other paragraph in the books he likes to read.

Check out the Insecure Writer’s Support Group to see more writers dish about their concerns, their solutions to various problems, or their latest roast platypus recipes.