The Reject via Tweet

A month or so ago I received my first rejection via twitter.  Anyone else received one of these yet?

I suppose this may require a bit of explanation.  This wasn't a cold query that I sent to an agent, who proceeded to seek me out on twitter just to get my hopes up and then blast me down with an @tmcbroom reject.

I had met this agent at SCBWI LA last summer, and through a series of exchanges I won't go into detail about here, he ended up passing on my partial by sending me a direct message on twitter.  Obviously I was disappointed, but at the same time I felt like I was pioneering a new form of rejection.  So that was cool.

What also came in the direct tweet was the promise of a detailed response (yes!).  That response came in yesterday, and oh man was it enlightening.  He told me I was being overly respectful of both my character and the world I created.  I was describing the world as I had created it rather than how my character saw it, and this was creating distance between my voice as the narrator and the voice of my MC.  Another brilliant little tidbit he bestowed on me was the idea that too many descriptors of a scene don't help connect the reader to the story, but actually do the opposite.  It only takes one quick detail to ground a reader in the scene, and anything beyond that just jumbles the reader's mind and confuses him or her.

I had been debating a rewrite lately, and I'm so grateful to have finally been pointed in a proper direction.  Now it's time to take the guidance to heart, and churn out a drastically improved manuscript!