A Plank in my Eye

Missy here. Let me start off by saying this is not a sermon. But as I was thinking about judging contests, this Bible verse popped into my head:

“Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?” Matthew 7:3

Okay, so maybe you don’t see the connection, and you may be thinking I’m a bit off my rocker. But aren’t we as judges able to see all the problems in an entry, yet still don’t find the exact same problems in our own manuscript?

I’m guilty of having a plank in my eye.

I can quickly pick up plot problems and lack of conflict in someone else’s work, but I have the hardest time finding it in mine. It usually takes someone else pointing the problems out to me before I realize I even have a problem.

I think it’s because we get so close to our babies. You know, kind of like our real babies. We think our children are gorgeous no matter what they look like—because we love them so much we see them through different lenses.

Different lenses…

How can we put on our judge lenses and use them to look at our own work? Here are some ideas I had while pondering this dilemma:

1. Fresh Eyes.

Let it rest. Set the work aside and get away from it for a while. If you’re like me, by the time you type The End and have read through it a half dozen times doing revisions, you’re sick to death of it. So take a break. A year would be good, but, hey, most of us would like to try to sell the thing. So I suggest giving it at least a couple of weeks. Preferably a month or two. Stephen King, in On Writing, talks about doing this. I’ve tried it, and it really helps.

2. New Eyes.

Ask someone else to read it. Someone who hasn’t seen the formation of the story. Maybe a trusted writer friend or someone you don’t normally critique with. You could also use a critique group or partner if they haven’t looked at the story yet.

3. Untrained Eyes.

I’ve heard this person called a Beta Reader. It’s someone you may or may not know well, who is a reader, not a writer. This person will give you the perspective of someone who may be reading the book in published form someday. She can point out problems that would strike someone who has no idea about writing (no idea about goals, conflict, character arcs). This person just reads and knows what she likes to read.

4. Honest, Critical Eyes.

How many times have you read an entry in the Golden Heart and zipped through it, dying for more, praying it’ll sell so you can buy it off the shelf someday and find out what happens? I’ve had that happen two or three times. One of those was a winner in the GH last year. I told a friend, “Watch, they’ll announce so-and-so as the winner and will say it’s sold already. Well, they did announce it as the winner, but it hadn’t sold yet. (And I had so wanted to be able to buy it!) But back to my point. I have to be honest and ask, when I read my own book, does it excite me as much as that entry did? Is the writing as flowing, the pacing as thrilling? No? Then I need to try to figure out what that entry has that my own story doesn’t have. What makes the writing so evocative? What makes it so enjoyable? If your work is putting you to sleep when you read back over it, then it may not be as exciting as it needs to be. So be honest. Study the great writing that keeps you up late at night reading. And then try to apply what you’ve learned to your own writing.

5. Marketer’s Eyes.

Okay, don’t shoot me on this one. Just ignore it if you want. But I think you should consider looking at your manuscript from the editor’s and Marketing Department’s eyes. Do you have a salable hook? Are you writing a story that’ll fit reader expectations? Can it be summarized into a really cool back cover blurb? Is your first sentence an attention-grabber (but not something that’s thrown in there for no other reason than shock value)? If it’s a romance, does it have the happy ending? If not, does it have a satisfying ending? Take off your personal lens and put on the marketing lens to see if the company will want to spend the time and money to buy, edit and sell your story.

6. A Child’s Eyes.

Is your plot/story easy enough for a child to read? I don’t necessarily mean simple. But does it confuse readers? I’ve been talking with a friend who’s judging a contest right now, and she’s having a terrible time with a few of the entries. One in particular is so convoluted that she can’t even follow the story. Sure, you want to write a great story, one that’s new and intriguing with maybe a twist on an old story. But you don’t want to leave a reader’s head spinning. Can you simplify? If you have a cast of thousands, can you pare down, make a character fill more than one role? Can you simplify the plot so you're not having to snatch implausible plot points out of the air? I sometimes get myself into trouble a lot by planning something too difficult to carry out.

So, we need to knock the planks out of our eyes, then look through a different set of lenses at our own manuscripts. Maybe then we’ll write that story that a contest judge or editor races through, wanting to beg for more.

Missy