Why Manuscripts Get Rejected

Five Tricks to Polish Writing and Avoid Rejection Letters

Dec 10, 2008 Carrie Lewis

Editors say new writers make the same craft mistakes. Understanding those errors can help a writer polish his or her manuscript and better avoid the rejection letter.

For the more professional writer who already understands formatting and industry standards, it is usually one of five common craft issues that land a manuscript in the rejection pile. Here’s what they are:

Pace

Pace is generally understood by how fast the reader flips the pages. Is the tension high enough, action faced-pace enough, characters intriguing enough that the reader quickly consumes page after page, unable to put the book down? That’s pace. The long, languorous passages of description and psychoanalytic introspection tend to be examples of slow pace. Action and sex scenes tend to be examples of faster pace.

Two-dimensional Characters

Characters who are purely one type of person are two-dimensional. The bad guy who is bad just for the sake of being bad, or the hero who is purely heroic with little to no flaws or weaknesses—they are both examples of two-dimensional characters. The pre-Daniel Craig version of James Bond is a good example. 2D characters can be successful if employed in the right genre, but most editors want to see realistic characters.

Unsympathetic Characters

Readers want to relate to the characters in the book. An unsympathetic character is one who has no quality with which the reader feels connected. The scorned woman, or vengeful man are two classic stereotypical characters. What makes them unsympathetic is when he or she is driven by qualities and motives that readers don’t want to see in themselves. Making them sympathetic means exposing vulnerabilities or honorable motivations and intentions so the reader feels good about cheering for the protagonist.

Not Enough Conflict

Conflict is what sells books. What is the protagonist up against? Generally the new writer throws in one or two conflicts and writes around those but this is rarely enough. The conflicts can be as big as saving the world from a nuclear disaster, to as small as a the hero having to choose between two motivations. The new writer tends to go too light on the conflict, or else sticks primarily with external conflict, when it tends to be the internal conflict that really hooks readers.

Backstory and Info Dumps

Backstory is the history of the character, conflict or scene that has happened before the book opened. For example, if the protagonist in a romance novel avoids love because his mother was a bitter trophy wife, that’s backstory. An info dump is when the writer dumps all this information on the reader in a muli-paragraph clump. This slows paces and tends to annoy both editor and reader alike.

It is usually one of these five common craft issues that land a manuscript in the rejection pile. Understanding them can help a writer edit and polish his or her manuscript and catch an editor’s attention.

The copyright of the article Why Manuscripts Get Rejected in Writing Fiction is owned by Carrie Lewis. Permission to republish Why Manuscripts Get Rejected in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.

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