Manuscript Critique: a Comprehensive Guide

ADVICE: The Dangers of Awards

ANHorton1227 and I conducted an award together. We gathered 40 books of varying lengths and must whittle that number down to 5. As such, we hired judges.

Running an award has helped me to appreciate my own works without question. That's all thanks to the culling process.

Imagine you're washing rice in a bowl. You need to get that water off and you dip it sideways and use your fingers as a sieve.

What happens?

You're going to drop some grains of rice. And for all you know, those grains were the most delicious of the ENTIRE set. You'll never taste them now.

Now, that is not to say that the 'water' or the 'excess' is bad. It's just not meeting a criteria and that's an important thing to understand about awards. Something specific is sought out and that is what the original culling is about. And not all judges FOLLOW that criteria as put forth.

What do I mean?

In ROUND 1, the hosts (both ANHorton1227 and myself) acted as a smaller net to catch those grains of rice. We went through the drop pile, each and every book, and read the first chapter. That's why when some were dropped in ROUND 2, and for surprising reasons, I stepped in and (while advancing the judge's original one) read the dropped books for myself and compared them to the feedback. After discussing it with ANHorton, we agreed to add extra books to our original planned amount. From 40 books, we wanted to select 9. We ended up with 13. And I hadn't the time to go back through and read 5 chapters of every dropped book. So now I'm wondering if any of the other dropped ones would have advanced under a different judge.

Truth of the matter is, there are many reasons why a book even gets to the 'judging' phase.

This experience has inspired me to work on my watty's summary and description because now I'm not even sure if my book was ever even read last year due to a vigorous culling process that might have cut it down before it even reached human hands.

At this moment, I truly appreciate my work because I know even if I did/do get culled for a technical reason, that does not mean my writing (my story) has no merit. It could simply have fallen through the cracks.