A Consensus Of Opinion

The last of the manuscript samples has been rejected and the agents have weighed in.

Good writing, a story that's worth telling, but.....

When three different agents tell you the same thing about your manuscript, it's worth listening and it's very much worth making the necessary corrections.

My manuscript has a particularly thorny problem, however. Those who read the pages didn't relate to the main character. Alanna Ramirez of Trident Media, J.L. Stermer of Donald Maass's agency, and Courtney Miller-Callihan at Sanford J. Greenburger have reached a consensus.

The female protagonist needs to be more sympathetic, to offer a reason for the reader to find common ground or feel sorry for her. Characters should tug at the heart or generate some kind of positive reaction, and my opening pages don't do that.

It has to be in the opening pages. In this short attention span world, the book buyer won't wait for the eighth or tenth page to fall in love with the fictional person facing a conflict.

So I've re-written the opening again, moved more things to the front and chopped off a bit more that might be considered repetitive.

And I've started up another round of queries.

Maybe I'll have better luck with the other manuscript that's out there. It's easier to do a feisty female lead than one who's dealing with deep seated psychological issues that are more difficult to tease out from the showing. Characters need to grow over the course of the manuscript, but sometimes they need to mature a bit faster than we authors might think.