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You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
61–70 of 100 posts
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
He's a popular writer, but hardly good. No one is going to be reading his books in 50 years, let alone 200.
That's an extremely high bar. But to the extent that critics and awards are the metric we have, he is an objectively good writer.
Oh course it's a high bar! Why should anyone care about this work outside of the time of their release? It's modern culture but it ain't gonna be passed down anytime soon.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#63As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it. "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback. If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right!…
This is true for casual users, but if you're getting feedback from enthusiasts or even experts, their solutions are often -- not always, but often -- quite good.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#64As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it. "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback. If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right!…
> "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
smells like LLM
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve heard exactly the same advice re: focus groups. A focus group can give excellent feedback but terrible advice. Probably applies to comment sections in the modern day too. So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note". The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engro…
This reminds me of the infamous Sid Sheinberg memo to Steven Speilberg and Bob Zemeckis on changing the title of “Back to the Future”.
https://imgur.com/gallery/producers-memo-to-speilberg-during...
“Behind the note”, it’s about emphasizing the goofy fun of the film, rather than the genre elements, and in that it’s right on.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's an extremely high bar. But to the extent that critics and awards are the metric we have, he is an objectively good writer.
Oh course it's a high bar! Why should anyone care about this work outside of the time of their release? It's modern culture but it ain't gonna be passed down anytime soon.
If the bar is that people will continue reading their books in 200 years, than which fiction writers of the last few decades would go into your list of "good"?
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
A phrase I heard from a tv writer on a podcast was "note behind the note". The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engro…
This reminds me of the infamous Sid Sheinberg memo to Steven Speilberg and Bob Zemeckis on changing the title of “Back to the Future”. https://imgur.com/gallery/producers-memo-to-speilberg-during... “Behind the note”, it’s about emphasizing the goofy fun of the film, rather than the genre elements, and in that it’s right on.
I would never have gone to see a spaceman from Pluto.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#68Vaguely related, there’s been a trend (thanks to submittable making it easy to add charges to submissions), of some publications offering editor feedback for an additional charge.
Aside from my general policy of never paying submission fees when I submit my writing, this particular service seems especially misplaced to me. I’m submitting my piece because I think it’s good enough to be accepted for publication. Paying that extra fee for editorial feedback is essentially starting from a position of, this isn’t good enough, in which case, there’s no point submitting in the first place.
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
Totally wrong. Game mods constantly create game experiences that should have been there on day 1 and weren’t because dumbass devs refuse to correctly use the very tools they built. Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good. Rome 2 total war (divide et impera) Empire at war (thrawns revenge)…
>Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description. Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI w…
Maybe the developers should've put more porn in. (Hell, a lot of the time they know the game should have more sex, but leave it to the modders because of instructions from above and/or to maintain plausible deniability).
Re: You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
#70As a pratical lens on this advice: people are excellent at giving feedback on their problems. They are terrible at identifying how to fix it. "It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback. If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right!…
This is true for casual users, but if you're getting feedback from enthusiasts or even experts, their solutions are often -- not always, but often -- quite good.
Yes. People who live and breathe your product should absolutely be listened to. Especially when they don't have the super-user tools you do for support (or unconsciously rounding off sharp edges).