Constructive criticism:heed it or stay on the slush pile

When someone in the publishing industry tells you why they're turning down your work, by all means punch a pillow or kick a door to deal with your hurt pride. You may then shove the rejected typescript into a drawer, not wanting to risk further rejection. Alternatively, you may send it out again to someone else, thinking the first person has poor judgement.

Maybe at this stage it's better to tell yourself,  if a publisher or agent has bothered to say anything outside of the standard rejection, then it's probably a compliment to me (unless it's to tell you you're absolute rubbish and to give up writing for ever).

If a second or third publisher or agent says the same thing, then don't waste postage on sending your typescript out to anyone else until you've given the offending flaws in your writing major consideration.

This is when it's the right time to put your work aside and examine the alternative techniques successfully published writers employ to say what they want to say. Sometimes you'll come across the very flaws in their writing that you're meant to possess. These flaws, apart from making you wonder how they've managed to get published, will probably also irritate you like crazy.  The difference between you and them, is that they have a publishing track record and you're an unknown. This means you can't get away with breaking the rules like them.

One agent, two publishers, and now my son (who is reading for a BA in Creative Writing) have told me that my writing is really good, except for a couple of faults. The first is an occasional slip into telling rather than showing, for example, using adverbs and adjectives where dramatisation would work better. The second is author intrusion, especially when I go all preachy over some moral/ethical issue that I feel strongly about, so it's no longer my fictional character's voice but my voice talking. 

Whoops ... I do hope you don't think this post is preachy!

I'm off to do a strenuous rewrite of my latest novel now, having already found a model of brilliant writing in Philip Pullman's "Dark Matter Trilogy", which I've spent the last couple of months reading.

My next post will show some "before" and "after" examples of my work subjected to the literary pruning sheers.