Does Anyone in Publishing Know Anything?

I must say that most of the agents I initially queried replied, and five or six of them were encouraging. However, in one way or the other, they all said the same thing: make the changes I suggest and you might succeed. Thing was, they all had different takes on what I should do. As the replies came in, I took the first ones at face value and set to work. The opening was too slow with too much identification of characters? Fine. Slam the first chapter with an action scene and go slow with outlining characters. The story is too long? Fine. Cut it down from 180,000 words to 90,000 words. And so on. Within a month or two the manuscript was a complete disaster. A torn-apart rag of a story.

Eventually sitting back to take stock, and reviewing many agent replies, it became clear that these folks didn't know anymore about writing then I did. One would say my writing lacked style but showed good character development. Another would say the style was great but the writing lacked grace (?). What emerged was the sense that each agent was responding according to his or her personal preferences in reading and thus expectations of an MS, rather than according to some overall standard of writing. There is no overall standard of writing to grade manuscripts by. There are standards of punctuation (within a rather broad contemporary range), of spelling, of sentence construction, and so on, but not of writing as such. Maybe that conclusion seems apparent, but it wasn't to me and I suspect many other new writers. No, writing at it's best is an amalgam of the hard-learned mechanics of writing and the plot/character inspiration that derives from somewhere within the spirit.

Viewing the smoking ruin of my story, I filed away all the agent letters and set back to work. That took place before I corresponded with David Brin, and about the time I began to write with some verve and confidence. What a relief to understand that agents really didn't know anymore than I did. In their defense, a few of them said so--they said history had shown that agents and publishers were no better at picking a winner than the average Joe on the street. So how is a guy supposed to know? You aren't. You write what you need to write.