The Black Hole
I received an e-mail notification the other day from the AAA screenwriting competition. Alas, I did not make it. Submitting anything for review, in either a contest or to a publisher, always makes me wonder just what makes the cutoff. Because, to the writer, the other side is a black hole, and their hard work is trapped somewhere behind the Event Horizon. But Hawking proved that information can escape from a black hole, and I think that I can scrye a bit from the other side too. For I have, just once, been inside of that black hole.
Years ago, I had to judge a writing competition. And more than giving a yea or nay, I had to give constructive criticism to the writer. I was given ten short stories. Off the bat, five of those were just…not good. Maybe a character wasn’t believable, or the story jumped so wildly that I couldn’t follow it. Perhaps the ending wasn’t believable. One was an attempt to push a political agenda using SF as the genre. I knew this writer had never read SF, because it was so cliched and heavy handed. Those are the types that think SF is nothing more than B Movie Cliches.
Those were the easy ones to judge.
The other stories were much more difficult to critique. I remember one where everything was constructed perfectly. It had a strong beginning, followed by good conflict with a crisis, and a good ending where the character had to make a moral decision. Everything flowed from point to point. The story was crafted well. But it just didn’t connect in any way. It was boring. And who’s fault was that? Was it the writer’s? Maybe another judge would not have been bored. Maybe it was me. There were two judges for each story, so perhaps the other reader might have liked it.
So there. Maybe it’s just personal preference. Back to my script, I think it is well constructed. I will go back anyway and try to make it better. But maybe it didn’t make it because of someone’s tastes.
Every writer wonders that.
And there is a solution.
Keep submitting. Because if the rejection is only because of personal taste, and it really is good, someone will buy it.
