Left to Write: How Not to Ask For Help

Not long ago in a writing group I was in, one of the participants went on a expletive filled rant about how no one is willing to read his brilliant book. First off - if you want a favor from someone, it's a good idea not to swear at them. I know, swearing is all the rage now, but there are some people who don't like being sworn at. Further, when a writer requests something from another writer, the other writer puts on their editing hat and says, "judging by this request, what am I getting myself into?" So if you pepper your request with swear words, the editor is going to ask themselves, "is that how you got your word count up?" And, "there's so many swear words here I can't find what you are actually saying," and, "I don't want to have to trudge through all the swearing to find a story." A note on swear words. Most people find them acceptable now. However, you do risk turning some people off with them. And even those who aren't turned off by them, really don't want to have to eliminate every second word from your prose to read what it actually says. In other words - if you're going to use swear words, make them count. Make them matter. Use them for effect. Don't use them to hide your story or up your word count. And for heaven's sakes, if you are going to use them then be aware of your audience. You don't use them for Christian or other religious fiction, clean romance, most cozy mysteries, children's books (teens maybe), and most non-fiction. Further, you need to read books in your genre to see what words are acceptable. So if you're going to use them, know why you are and do it purposefully because they are generally filler words that don't add to the story. Secondly, writers will judge you by your request. If you use text speak as in "'mazing story. Need 4 sum1 2 c it" you might not get any responses because you've just advertised that your story is written in text speak. And no one wants to read that. Sure, you can use text speak in your story when people are texting - but you don't write your whole story with it. Yes, I have seen people make requests in text speak. Honestly, I don't understand why anyone uses text speak because it was more work for me to come up with that text speak and type it out than it would have been to write it out properly. I know. I know. Someone is saying "just because I ask in text speak doesn't mean my story is written in it. It's just me asking people to read it." Here's the thing. If you want to have people look at your work then you are probably thinking about publishing. That is a working relationship. You need to respect your fellow writers as professionals, especially when you are asking them for a favor. Further, it's good practice if you ever write a query letter to a publisher. You don't use text speak or swear words in query letters. So, when you as a writer, are asking a favor from other writers, be kind, be respectful, and show them that you can write a proper sentence and paragraph. Which brings me on to the next thing. This young man at the beginning of my story, who in spite of being told that he was being rude with all his swearing, continued to use swear words (apparently he couldn't write a sentence without them) and proceeded to rant about how people couldn't look past the grammar and punctuation mistakes in his story to see how brilliant of a story it is. Okay, so basically, what he wanted was someone to come along and fix all of his mistakes and make all of his corrections because as far as he was concerned his work was done. Now, every manuscript has mistakes. You can go over it and go over it but eventually you have to let it go, mistakes and all. But this young man didn't see the need to edit his own work. He claimed that was the editors job, that he could hand in a manuscript riddled with bad writing, bad punctuation, bad grammar, and the editor was supposed to fix it all. NO ONE WANTS TO READ THAT. Seriously, anyone looking at a manuscript can forgive the occasional mistake, but if there is too many, the manuscript gets tossed in the trash heap. Editors don't have time for this crap. They have mountains of manuscripts by writers who have slaved over their work and care about it and polished it up to the best of their abilities. It doesn't matter how beautiful your prose is, how exciting your story is, how fascinating your characters are, if you show an editor that you can't even make an attempt at offering a clean manuscript and that you don't understand what grammar and punctuation are, they won't read it. It's just too painful and hard and takes too much time. And they certainly won't want to work with you. And if you're asking another writer to put aside their own work to look at yours, and you haven't even bothered to present them with something readable, then they will give up too. Further, when people politely tell you, that you need to edit your manuscript before they will look at it, you don't then go into tirades of how they don't understand how brilliant you are. I'm not even going to go into the narcissism of that. There is such a thing as being confident and humble. Raving about how brilliant you are while insisting that you don't have to do the work, isn't it. Imagine it this way - you've hired someone to come in and cook you dinner and you tell them you have all the ingredients, and then you present them with a dirty kitchen to work in. Unwashed dishes in the sink and on the counters, moldy food sitting out, crumbs everywhere, and no clear surfaces for working. There's at least two hours of cleaning to get the kitchen to a point of being able to cook in. A chef won't stick around for that. They have other things to do, other jobs to go to, other clients who appreciate his/her work more than you do. When you hand a manuscript over that you haven't carefully edited yourself, you are expecting someone to dig through your mess, find the ingredients, clean up your mess, and cook up something wonderful. Yes, editors fix mistakes. They find all kinds of mistakes. But they need to have something decently clean to work with first. And no editor is going to accept a book that is unreadable. I told him those were the rules about writing. Which caused him to go into another expletive tirade about stupid rules and how rules are meant to be broken and aren't we all tired of following the rules? At which point I told him that writing is a bunch of rules and you have to know and understand them and use them almost all the time in order to break them occasionally. And if he didn't understand that, then he isn't a writer. Because really, if you can't write a complete sentence with proper punctuation and grammar, then you need to go back to the basics and learn how to do it before you can call yourself a writer.

And now for my last point - when you ask for help, and people offer advice, don't go having a tantrum over it and tell people who have been writing for a long time that they don't know what they're talking about. As for the young man, the host of the group deleted all the posts and he hasn't been seen since. And no one has reported him as missing.