Making a Better Plot
O n her blog, I’ve seen Rachelle Gardner write that she would rather see a well written manuscript with a poor plot than a poorly written manuscript with a great plot. The assumption here is that an agent can make suggestions concerning the plot and through a collaborative effort the author and agent can produce a good book, whereas poor writing is much more difficult to correct because it requires going through the manuscript sentence by sentence to make changes. I see some truth to that. Assuming the agent has the ability to do either, improving the plot requires less work, but is that a safe assumption. I kind of wonder if literary agents aren’t somewhat like movie directors who believe they can fix all of the mistakes that happened on the set in the editing room. The implication is that plotting is so easy that anyone can do it. Recently, I’ve watched many of the Alfred Hitchcock Presents episodes. You would be hard pressed to find a television series with better written episodes...