What We Talk About When We Talk About Pain

I've heard it said many times it's much easier to make your audience cry than laugh.

I'll add to that that it's easier to make your reader identify with falling in love than say, having your arm ripped off.

When we write we appeal to common experiences to allow our readers to fill in the blanks. The nervous tingling of your spine when you make eye contact with that guy/gal, the lingering burning sensation on your skin after you "accidentally" brush hands. These are all things we can allude to without going into detail. They know the drill.

If, though, we're talking about having your spine ripped out or a literal burning of the epidermis we tend to fall back on stock phrases. How many times have you read about "searing pain" or "explosions of pain?" It's like we can't even write about pain without using the word itself.

Even better is when the tortured character loses consciousness, the end-all writer's escape. C'mon? Really?

I don't have the answers about how to write pain effectively. I can say my approach is to read. A lot. And I pay attention when someone has written something distinctive enough to make me writhe a bit.

Writhe.

There's a good word.

Lost In Translation

Hello, Halloween. I'm glad you're here.

There's nothing better than a holiday that allows you to dress up and play pretend. Everyone else is doing it, so it's the one day of the year that you can be a kook and it's socially acceptable. Try putting on your costume any other time.

No seriously, try it.

Anyway, the chintzy decorations and random table toppers are out full force at my house and this year brought an extra something special to the table. Literally.

What the hell does this even mean? Without starting a conversation about outsourcing, I'll tell you that I got smart and flipped over the plate. It's made in China, and I'm guessing it's supposed to say "Boo!"

I find this kind of thing happens in writing as well, and I don't mean in the linguistic sense.

A lot of the time, we writers know what we're trying to say, but it's not getting across in our text. Sure, we might think our character is a suave ladies-man because we see him that way, but every one of our beta readers is saying, "Ewww, he's a creep."

Your brain might be saying "Boo!" but your book says "Scare!"

Listen to your betas, they are wise. Even if you don't particularly like your betas, or have respect for their writing skills, remember what they primarily are - readers. They are a prototype of the average person you want to put your book in front of.

And if the betas are scratching their heads, your reader will be too.

As a side note, I've been running around yelling "Scare!" at people after jumping out from corners all day. Trust me, not the same effect.

The Nice Rejection vs. The Honest Rejection

Hooray! A rejection!

OK, so that might not be realistic. Every now and then I used to get rejections that had the inevitable initial sting, but after that I would get past my despair and actually read the rejection and it would say something like:

After careful consideration I decided that while your concept is fresh and interesting, I just wasn't as pulled into those first few critical pages as I would've liked to be. Understand that this is a subjective business, and another agent may feel differently.

Ouch - my first few pages aren't that great. Hooray - I've got a fresh and interesting concept! That's a seriously big hurdle cleared! So I get my e-self over to QueryTracker to record my latest failure and see that another user has posted their rejection in full and it reads:

After careful consideration I decided that while your concept is fresh and interesting, I just wasn't as pulled into those first few critical pages as I would've liked to be. Understand that this is a subjective business, and another agent may feel differently.

Oh... so my concept isn't fresh and interesting. And maybe this means my first few pages aren't that bad... So what do I do?

If you're me (and I know you're not, but let's play) you obsess about it for a bit. So, somebody that sent a query about a girl torn between her love for a vampire and her buddy a werewolf would've had the same "fresh concept" form rejection I did. It also means that someone who sent a badly written query for a 500 page biography of a field mouse named TukkaBobba did too.

What do I deduce from this? The very real possibility that I suck, and no one has bothered to tell me yet.

I'm not saying that agents need to tell every single author exactly why they are rejecting them - that's an impossibility. But I do wish agents used a "You really need to do more work on your sentence structure and grammar use before considering being a writer," and a, "Hey nice try, keep working at it - you might have something here," form rejection.

Do you obsess over every word in the query, like I do? Or do you just notch the bedpost and keep going?