Losing your readers by trying too hard
On losing your readers by trying too hard, how editors and agents can vet your work in only a few pages, business survival skills for authors, and structural ways to keep your writing interesting.
As an editor, I have a keyboard shortcut for one of the most common comments I leave in manuscripts: "WTF." That text itself never appears in my feedback—the macro merely opens a comment with some ideas and prompts for me to use. But typing those three little letters lets me vent my frustration at being abruptly but utterly lost. It’s not clear who's sp…