—usually within the first page:
1. The story is unintelligible. Very often I’ll get submissions that just
don’t make sense. Often, these seem to be non-English speakers who are
way off in both the meaning of words, their context, or in their syntax,
but more often it’s just clumsiness.
2. The story is unbelievable. “Johnny Verve was the smartest kid on
earth, and he was only six. He was strongest one, and the most handsome,
too. But the coolest part was when he found out he had magical powers!”
At that point, I’m gone, and not just because there were four uses of
“was” in three sentences.
3. The author leaves no noun or verb unmodified. Sometimes when an
author is struggling to start a story, he try to infuse too much information
into a sentence: “John rubbed his chapped, dry, sand-covered hands
together grimly, and gazed thirstily over the harsh, red, crusty deserts of
a deserted Mars.” I may put up with one sentence like that in an otherwise
well-written story. You put two of those sentences together on the first
page, and it really bogs a story down.
 |
| By Oscar Villan |
