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I started every book

gavelAfter a cou­ple of my books were nom­i­nat­ed for the Mys­tery Writ­ers of America’s juve­nile award, I was asked to be a judge. I accept­ed and what hap­pened was, I thought, fas­ci­nat­ing. And bewildering.

The judg­ing went this way:  Five judges were cho­sen. I didn’t know them, and nev­er met them. Anoth­er writer was func­tion­ing as a facil­i­ta­tor. I did not know him, either.

We were told we would have to read about two-hun­dred books, the def­i­n­i­tion of a mys­tery being quite broad: “Enter­tain­ment in crime,” or some­thing like that. (Ham­let might have been included.)

Each judge was asked to read the books and then grade them on a scale of one to ten, ten being the high­est. Then I would send on the books to anoth­er judge. I also sent my “grades” to the facilitator.

The facil­i­ta­tor would sim­ply add up the scores from all the judges. The top five scores would be announced as the short list. The top scor­er would be the win­ner. That sim­ple.  But—as a judge, I did not know who the win­ner was (much less the scores) until it was announced at a ban­quet gala in NYC.

I had vowed—out of respect for my fel­low writers—to read every­thing. I tried to. What amazed me, how­ev­er, was how quick­ly a poor­ly writ­ten book announced itself (ten, fif­teen pages) and how in the same fash­ion a well writ­ten book pro­claimed itself. I start­ed every book. I con­fess I did not fin­ish them all.

When I final­ly learned which book was the win­ner, I also learned how my fel­low judges eval­u­at­ed all the books. I was amazed. Vir­tu­al­ly ALL the judges agreed (inde­pen­dent­ly) which were the top tier books. Here and there one book was judged high (or low) by an indi­vid­ual judge. But by and large there was close agree­ment as to quality.

I was left with a vital ques­tion: If I (and oth­ers) could judge the qual­i­ty of someone’s writ­ing so clear­ly and so quick­ly, why could I not eval­u­ate my own work that way?

Think­ing about this I asked a very suc­cess­ful lit­er­ary agent how quick­ly she could tell if a sub­mit­ting writer could write well. Her answer: “Half way through the sub­mis­sion letter.”

If that answer (and my judg­ing expe­ri­ence) does not hum­ble any writer, I don’t know what will.

5 thoughts on “I started every book”

  1. This post rein­forced what I have been learn­ing on my own writ­ing jour­ney- the impor­tance of beta read­er feed­back. Right now I have a class­room of 6th graders beta read­ing my WIP and it has been enlightening.

    One of my “clues” to my mys­tery was a man named Bob­by who is pass­ing him­self off as a mys­te­ri­ous Mr. Roberts. Not a sin­gle kid knew that Bob was short for Robert. I guess nobody names their kid Robert any­more, so how would they know?

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  2. I agree with the lit­er­ary agent. When I was an acqui­si­tions edi­tor, I did­n’t read the queries first. I read the first page of the man­u­script. By halfway down that page (and many times even soon­er), I could tell.

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  3. I’d like a fol­low up. After your judg­ing expe­ri­ence, can you ana­lyze — bet­ter than you could before- which ele­ments indi­cate qual­i­ty on the page (that you often don’t see in your own writing?)

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