Critiques vs. Outright Rejection or Approval

Remember in school what would happen when you got back a paper. Unless you were Mr. or Ms. Perfect, you’d usually have red marks all over the page. Your paper would be bleeding to death. There would be marks on your grammar, spelling errors, capitalization,  and/or punctuation. And you would correct them so the next time you’d get a more perfect grade.

Your word processor follows the same method. Only that under a spelling error a red squiggly line appears and under a grammatical error a green squiggly line appears. But the effect was the same.  You would correct them in order to produce a more perfect document.

A similar situation occurred when I was doing my capstone project in college. Every Tuesday and Thursday, we would go up to the front of the class with the projects we had worked on that week and present them to the class. Then with his famous laser pointer, Mr. Rodrigo de Toledo would point out what we needed to work on to make each project  perfect.

But in the world of publishing, the red pen does not exist. There are only two grades for a book: A and F. There are only the books that are accepted and those that get a rejection slip.

We as human beings do not learn that way. By accepting or rejecting whatever we do, we cannot learn without the input. That’s why one of the worst places to be on Project Runway is at the very bottom. The second worst place is in the middle without any input from the judges. The best place, of course, is at the top, but those people get input from the judges and (if they’re the winner) they get immunity for the next week. Even being at the bottom is better than being at the middle  due to the input, just as long as it is not the very bottom.

If a kid got a paper back with only the letter F on top he would ask, “What did I do wrong?” That’s what a rejection letter is, a gigantic letter F that deserves the question, “What did I do wrong?” Take J. K. Rowling and her “Philosopher’s Stone.” She got tons of rejection letter’s and she would ask the same question. Finally, when it was published  in America she got the answer. The publishers didn’t like the name and they changed it to “The Sorcerer’s Stone”. If that was the only problem they had with the first book, then they should’ve said something.

At the same time a kid who got absolutely no marks on the paper would ask, “Did I get a good grade or have you not graded it yet?” There are some books that are published by famous book writers that don’t have great stories. Books that aren’t graded by the publisher, but are given the stamp of approval just because of who wrote it. Take Sarah Palin’s book. I’m sorry Sarah fans but this is a BAD BOOK. I heard the reviews and I decided I wouldn’t buy this book even if it was free.  Over a thousand pages and only five chapters, a PhD would have trouble looking at that much text. Eyes need to breathe. And if the publisher read the finished product they would agree.

So what would happen if publisher’s would take off those beer goggles and pulled out their red pens. Then the publisher’s would be forced to read the whole thing. An they would be able to determine what is good (A’s), what need’s work (B’s and C’s), what need’s serious work (D’s), and what needs a miracle to reach at least a C- (F’s). They’d also be able to lay out to the author’s “what did you do wrong?” Then they would write the author’s an email or at least give them a phone call. After all it takes months to write a book. It takes only days to read it. And it takes only twenty pages to get hooked on a good one.