In the Malcolm Gladwell sense of the word, of course.
One of Gladwell’s key premises in his popular book is:
When faced with an onslaught of information, only an expert has the prior knowledge that lets her weed out the confusing mess of important-looking but irrelevant chaff so she can focus on the one or two key bits the decision turns on.
His examples range from curators at the Getty museum who when faced with an expertly executed fake statue failed initially to see it as a fake, to overwrought doctors trying to decide the fate of possible cardiac patients in a inner city hospital in Chicago. He walks us through the dilemma faced by police officers with milliseconds to decide if the dark object in a young man’s hand is a gun or a wallet.
It’s interesting stuff. And the parallels to the current crisis in the publishing industry were obvious. According to Gladwell’s experts, the key factor between making the correct split second decision, the right blink, is the amount of good, no excellent, prior information and research you have internalized or a willingness to follow a set of triage instructions and not waver in the face of conflicting information. The cardiac physicians who used the apparently simple triage rules, ignoring the rest of the symptoms, had patients with better results. The art experts with years of experience trusted their first glances of the statue and identified the fake, but only because they backed it with deep knowledge.
Gladwell found when inexperienced people trusted their initial judgments, or blinks, preconceived results based on bias ruled. Decisions often went awry.
The publishing industry is in crisis and not just from the threat of ebook readers. Personal computers, the internet and easy access to just about anyone makes it seem like anyone can write and publish a book. Just do google search! Slush readers who twenty years ago would get a handful of manuscripts a week to slog through for an editor or agent are receiving, in some cases, hundreds each day. Agent backlogs are months long.
How are these querys and first pages getting read? I bet they’re getting blinked. And in most cases the slush readers are likely experts and know what they are looking for. But some are getting blinked in an unknowable, inexpert way, as well. That’s just human nature and the internet firehose.
Since I am getting ready to query my first novel, this means that anything I can do to elevate myself above the slush pile is crtitical. You can work to gain access through contests and, pitch sessions at sites like SavvyAuthors or other writing sites. Producing squeaky clean pages and a tight query seems like a good starting point. Making sure my unique voice shines in my first pages, and the rest of my novel is one of my priorities, and improving my basic grammar and self-editing skills. I figure in a Blink world it’s all about not squandering any opportunity that drifts my way.
I just paid my yearly tithe to Audible.com. Yes, I admit it, I am an audiobook junkie. I do housework, exercise, walk the dog and do the dishes all to the strains of my favorite audiobooks. My family are all Pandora and Shazaam junkies. My iPods don’t have any music on them, pure audiobooks.
So as I’ve been editing A Fault in Time,The Box, my short stories and the Weekly SavvyAuthors.Com Newsletter, I began to think. My best line edits come when the computers read my words back to me. I follow along on my iPad or hardcopy and make notes. I can’t skip or read what I mean to write but actually didn’t. But this ties me to the computer. It’s summer! I want to be digging in the dirt! What if I could convert my entire mss to an AAC file, an audiobook file?
Well I can, and it’s changed my life. At least my editing life.
What I wanted was a tool that would let me create an AAC file, import that into iTunes and play on my iPod so I can immerse myself in my own writing in my favorite way. And most importantly the way that will not let me skip words or read what I intended to write rather than what I actually wrote. I can check for pacing, redundancy and crappy sentence structure. Those pre-fab voices are also real sticklers when it comes to grammar. lol. The voices are flat and pretty montone so it’s really all about your words. Do they work do they flow?
There are a number of applications that will speak words back to you. I’m on a Mac, so Mac OS also does this.
GhostReader by ConvenienceWare is my choice, and at $39.95 for a full license is a pretty nice tool. They also have a 15 day trial that works in a nifty way: 15 days that you actually use the application not 15 days from installation!
On the iPad or iPod SpeakIt is an amazing little tool. I can import an entire manuscript and choose a reasonable voice and let ‘er rip. But I cannot create a file of more than 1000 words. 8(
A Fault in Time is getting very shiny. The real question is…
Am I polishing a fabulous, vintage 1964 Airstream Globetrotter trailer or a turd?
OK, to be fair it’s not an either/or question. It could be something in between. It could have a plot that is close and needs tweaking, or a great plot but be light on characterization. Or it could have great voice and lack detail, or….
“Last boarding call for the spiral staircase of doom to Obessoland.”
Yes, well. Harrumph.
The first set of beta readers get their mitts on it Sunday. Oh shit, that’s tomorrow. I expect that it will have problems since finding great crit partners has been one of the more challenging things I have attempted this year.
I am prepared for problems. I am prepared for rewrites. I am prepared to go to a coarser grit, take off the shiny top coat and rip into the subsurface to make this story right.
I’m willing to do whatever it takes. Bring. It. On.
But a damn sharp one. And today I rounded that most wonderful of goals Draft 4 success.
San Francisco….now called A Fault in Time (catchy, eh?) is complete in fourth draft and approaching query readiness. OMFG.
Nearly ready does not mean ready. Oh my lordy no. I have not angsted over this puppy enough. Want to know how I know? Look at the colors on the image to your left. See all the greens, oranges and dark blues? Those are scenes that are in 4th, 5th and even above! Nicely polished happy scene-lets.
Pink is a lowly second draft and bright blue is third. So! while the overall story is complete in the fourth draft I have some scene-lets that I’ve recently added. Some are very small transitions to fill plot details and some reflect changes that I made when I turned one of my characters a little bit darker.
But I keep track of them so I know what has been really edited well and what words are still pretty fresh and crunchy.
I am still wildly happy about this, because this kind of editing goes pretty quickly for me. We’ll see what the beta readers say.
lol.
So what the hell is a scene-let? I’ts not a true scene, but I break out action in a finer granularity, makes it easier for me to write. Not a true scene in the Robert McKee screenwriting defintion. In fact, I guess mine are actually beats, but I hate to use that because it has other means as well. Sigh, overloaded terms.
“Scene”: A group of beats which result in an action through conflict in continuous time and space that turns the lives of the characters around into another direction.
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