Writing Wrongs

December 23, 2005

Posts over on Writer Beware (an excellent blog, if you�re new to submitting your work, check them out), have sparked a small firestorm in the blogsphere about scam agents and the like. I plucked this comment from the fray:

As for the scam agents...well, anyone who is stupid enough for fall for that crap deserves to be taken for a ride. I can't abide people who don't make an effort to educate themselves when there is so much information just a few key strokes away.

Really? Get what they deserve? Ouch. I will say that I do believe in self-education when it comes to both writing and the publishing industry. Don�t just listen to the first source you come across. Ask why. Search out other opinions. Gather information and sift through it, determine what is reasonable and what is crap. Because along with all that information out there, there�s an equal amount of misinformation.

Maybe it�s my intelligence background, but I�m shocked that people don�t search out information, don�t use a search engine--or even, they don�t know they can use a search engine to find things.

But I never, ever, think people deserve to be taken in by a scammer. It�s the scammers I can�t abide, these people who deliberately prey on other people�s dreams. Is it a matter of desperation on the writer�s part? Willful ignorance? A lack of knowledge? How can you know when you don�t know something?

I had a dear writing friend (yes, past tense, he died a few years back) who was what I would call a natural-born storyteller. Never took a writing class, was mostly self-educated, made a good living (he was a cameraman among other things, but never put together a r�sum�). He discovered the internet and we both discovered a writing site at about the same time, so we were assigned to the same group.

The first time he posted a story, the entire thing was one single paragraph. No paragraph breaks for dialogue, no breaks for a change of scene. I had to paste it into my word processor and give it breaks before I could read it. When I asked him to post this way (with breaks) in the future, it led to a discussion of manuscript format for submitting work.

He�d never heard of that. For years, he�d been submitting work in one, long paragraph. Can you imagine page after page of one, long paragraph? Neither could the editors he submitted to, I�m betting, because it was the constant rejection that had him signing up for the workshop in the first place.

I showed him how to format, and the next thing he submitted, he sold. In fact, he started selling on a regular basis. One day, we were both online when he sent me a story he wrote that morning. By the time I read and returned an email raving about it, he�d sold it. Yeah, he was that good. And a wonderful, giving person.

But he didn�t know what it was he didn�t know.

Charity Tahmaseb wrote at 10:23 a.m.

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