For my pre-writing warmup today, I wrote a short teaser for the novel I'm working on. I'm not looking for a critique of the writing, I'm looking for a yea or nay. "Celebrity skeptic Clifton Walker doesn’t believe in anything or anyone. But when a near-death experience leaves him with a powerful connection to the Other Side, he soon learns our world isn’t what he, or anyone else, thinks it is. When he begins to manifest paranormal abilities, he draws the attention of powerful people who try to exploit him to enhance their own power. Worse, a sinister group of even more powerful people known as The Sentinels want to silence him because of the dangerous secret he carries. Walker must fight for his life, in a world he no longer recognizes, and the only people who can help him, are the very psychics and mediums whose careers he tried to ruin..." If you saw that on the dust jacket of a book, would you be interested? Thanks!
Yes definately. Very good warm-up. I'm assuming you're not submitting any in the review room, by any chance?
Sadly no. I will be putting my short stories and warmup pieces in the Workshop when my first 14 days are up. But no one reads a word of my novel till at least after it's second revision, which will be many months away, since I'm still on the first draft.
The idea of this or any other story is neither here nor there. It's all about how well it's written. I used to be a kid who turned his nose up at anything that wasn't science fiction until I read some stories by Rudyard Kipling and Joseph Conrad. If I'd just read the blurbs on their books, I'd never have picked them up, but they spun my head around when I actually read them. Same with Hemingway, Steinbeck, and others. A summary of an idea can look great or crappy. But it might not turn out that way - if the writer does a good job, it's a good story. If the writer does a lousy job, it's a lousy story. You shouldn't bother asking about how good your ideas are. It's all in the writing, all in the execution. You could say that James Joyce's Ulysses is just about a normal guy wandering around Dublin for a day. Sounds boring and pointless, but it's regarded as a classic and is still in print over seventy years after Joyce's death. Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and Alistair MacLean's Force 10 From Navarone are both about some people in a war trying to destroy bridges behind enemy lines, but Hemingway's book is a classic and still in print, and MacLean's is pretty much trash and out of print. It's not the idea. It's the writing. Tell your story well.
