Listen Carefully, Your Manuscript Stinks

Your manuscript doesn’t speak English. (Or American. Or Australian. Or Esperanto. Or whatever you call your native tongue.) It speaks Manuscript.

This is why all the threats you sling at it in your native tongue go unheeded. (Well, that, and the fact that it doesn’t like being threatened. It can read your tone even if it doesn’t understand your words.) And while yelling at your manuscript may help release existential angst (Cue “Shout” by Tears for Fears), increased volume still doesn’t result in increased comprehension.

When you’re having a novel crisis, it could be simply because your novel is truly awful. (Give it hemlock.) Or it could be that you’re overwhelmed by life and those things causing your overwhelmed-ness (work stress, heartache, parenting challenges, more heartache, lack of wine, still more heartache) are making the writing process harder than it needs to be. (Give yourself hemlock. Wait, don’t do that. Hemlock is a poor substitute for wine. Just take a break from writing until your real life stuff settles down a bit.) Then again, it could be a million other things, but for the sake of this blog post I’m going to pretend there are only three possible reasons for your crisis and that the third one is a simple case of misunderstanding.

You need to learn Manuscript. (You can call it Story if you like. Or Novelish. Or Splargenslap. Whatever. It’s not a real thing, so I don’t care what you call it.)

Manuscript isn’t easy to learn. There is no Rosetta Stone program for it. Editors waste spend their entire lives learning it. But you don’t have that kind of time. So I’m offering you a handy translation guide. Did I mention that Manuscript is a language of metaphorical scent? No? Well, it is. And it’s terribly fickle.

When your manuscript starts to smell (metaphorically) like rotting fish, it’s saying one of the following things:

• You’re falling back on those pet words and phrases again. How many times can our heroine nod her head before physics demands that it fall off? And who “swipes at their eyes” anyway? Stop it or I’ll delete myself from your computer.
• You’re using similes to distraction. I’m as tired as a tired thing is tired of things that make it tired. Please vary the way you describe stuff. Thank you.
• Hey, it’s not me. I’m fine. You just forgot to put the fish in the fridge.

When your manuscript starts to smell like a moldy orange, it’s saying one of these two things:

• Nothing is happening. Nothing. Is. Happening. Kill somebody already. But first, delete the last 30 pages.
• Hey, put some words on the page. Yes, I might just tell you to delete them tomorrow. Trust me on this, just put something here so I don’t go mad from all the white space.

When your manuscript starts to smell like burning rubber, it’s saying:

• This is probably a good time to release the clutch on some of those plot points. I mean, they’re all great and everything, but there comes a time when it’s no longer suspenseful to “wait for it” – it’s agony. Not the good kind.

When your manuscript starts to smell like paint, it’s saying:

• Step away for a while and let the words settle. I think they’re good, but if you keep messing with them you might screw things up. Work on something else for a few hours – like a blog post or a bag of M&Ms.

When your manuscript starts to smell like some kind of flowers but you aren’t sure what kind of flowers because it’s just some generic floral smell, it’s saying:

• Get specific, friend. If our protagonist’s pet weasel smells like flowers, just tell me what kind of flowers. I don’t know what “floral” means. And about that “beautiful” sky? Really? That’s all you can come up with? Beautiful is a stupid word. It’s practically meaningless. If you can’t find the right words to describe a thing, write a shape around it instead.

When your manuscript starts to smell like chocolate, it’s saying:

• Send me to your agent/editor already. We’re good. I like myself just as I am. I’m not just saying that. Stop revising or you’re going to give me a complex. Would you send your agent/editor a chocolate bar with bite marks?

When your manuscript starts to smell like coffee, it’s saying:

• You just knocked over your venti white chocolate mocha. I hope you remembered to back me up to the cloud.

There you go. Sniff away, writer-friends.

[Insert scent of bacon here.] This is Manuscript for “We’re done here. Go eat some bacon.”