You don't need advice from editors on rejected manuscripts
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"It felt too long" was right. The solution was not to make the story shorter. The solution was to look at the parts that felt long, and believe that feedback.
If you're building something, and your users tell you it's complicated or it's slow or it's not useful, they're right! The fix may or may not be to make it simpler, faster, or more useful. Maybe it needs to be organized better, or to create deliberate moments of action, or to be used at a different time. The problems are real, but the obvious solutions are not always right.
So if they didn’t like your movie the movie probably is bad. But don’t listen to them about what they would change about the movie. They don’t know anything about the creative process.
The gist of the conversation was about TV execs giving all sorts of bonkers notes all the time that are usually terrible. This writer tried to think about what might have triggered the exec to make a note. Maybe the characters are not engrossing enough, or the plot is too complex, or the dialogue isn't snappy enough. If the exec had been engrossed in the story they wouldn't have made a note. This writer rarely implemented any note from an exec, but did make all sorts of changes in and around noted sections.
https://imgur.com/gallery/producers-memo-to-speilberg-during...
“Behind the note”, it’s about emphasizing the goofy fun of the film, rather than the genre elements, and in that it’s right on.
However, the maker has tried many things, and among them will be things which are obviously bad (to anyone) if you actually try it.
Story time: in 2008, I went to the big board game fair in Essen and got to try the then-new game Dominion. I think most people who did, knew that this game was going to be hugely popular and influential, which it was. Donald X. Vaccarino is a really, really good game designer. And sure enough, it spawned the genre of deck building games, games where you build a deck as you play (as opposed to collectible card games, which are an important ancestor). But the first few attempts to adopt improve on the formula were pretty lousy.
What's interesting is that Donald X. posted dev diaries, writing at length about what he had tried and rejected. And although I'm pretty sure he did not follow the Dominion-likes closely (the dev diaries may even have been written before many of them), the things he'd tried and rejected were exactly what the Dominion-likes tried to add as their twist. Multiple currencies, like Thunderstone had, he'd tried rejected because it was too high variance. "Pick one of the cards on offer" like Ascension had, he'd also tried first, and found that the game was deeper and more fun if everyone had access to buy the same cards. (The "Pick one of three" mechanic would turn out to work much better in solo/computer games, however, as Slay the Spire's success is proof of!)
Fan-modded games are often great fun if you're seriously into a game. But they're rarely better if you've never played the game.
I would propose as a heuristic that for the early stage, when your product relies on true-fans, you at least consider the content of a complaint more and don't just treat it as a signal that something somewhere is wrong. Bringing it back to the OP, I'm sure this is what Card did himself.
smells like LLM
Smells like not adding value to the discussion.
The slightly inflated rhetoric whose tells are false contrast and unnecessary parallelism let me know that a human did not spend time writing that comment. Why should humans spend time reading it?
> If you ignore what we tell you its possible we'll fire you. However, if you do everything we tell you to do its almost certain that we'll fire you.
That we have to lock down installation of unsigned extensions in Firefox on Linux because spyware/nagware in the form of add-ons that re-install themselves have been observed in the wild (on Windows) and caused problems.
Yes.
> not the underlying concerns
The stated concern embedded in the first example is "anyone would be able to edit the wiki".
> Motivating concerns here might be things like "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info", "people will unknowingly install spyware".
Right. That's the point. The concern that "anyone would be able to edit the wiki" is not a valid concern. The concern that "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info [if just allow anyone to edit it]" has to be determined through empiricism. Avoiding locking down the wiki and seeing whether it fills up with junk will reveal whether the concern was valid. It's possible that it's an invalid concern and therefore requires no solution.
If their underlying concern is "our wiki will be full of inaccurate info because the wiki is open", and if that's empirically shown that opening the wiki doesn't produce a wiki full of inaccurate info, then it's an invalid concern. Neither it (the "underlying concern") nor the stated concern are valid.
Is that level really too hard, or did you just fail to properly introduce a new ability? Is the story boring, or is the story taking away from the enjoyable gameplay?
Game after game you get some half baked feature kept gimped by poor choices of values from the developers, and a bunch of modders have to go fix it to keep the game good.
Rome 2 total war (divide et impera)
Empire at war (thrawns revenge)
Rimworld
Skyrim
Stalker (project gamma)
Blade and Sorcery
And so many more games are just like this!
Actually gamers and modders DO know how to fix the game and it does NOT break the game. Folks like you would argue that the “lethal” difficulty added to ghosts of Tushima “broke the game”.
Star Wars Jedi knight 2/3 are infinitely better when you turn instakilling with light sabers on. I had to do that in the games built in command line.
Game devs are fucking morons. The cello maker is not the cello player. The map is not the territory.
eehhhhhh if I was going to install a skyrim mod at random, I would probably hate it. Even if I did this 1000 times, I would probably hate 99%+ of them. In fact just in terms of volume these are all likely to be porn mods of some description.
Skyrim modding hours, and output, converted into paid dev time would be a disaster. ROI would be negative a few million percentage points.
You seem to be taking examples where an individual player can tailor an experience to be just what they want, and extrapolating it back to presume the developers, who have to make a game for a wider audience, are stupid somehow.
Its a bad opinion, based on nothing and very much in the mode of the modern gamer.
Bethesda has quite a unique approach to everything. Its almost a joke at this point where most of their negative reviews are demanding more content after 300 hours of gameplay. I knew a guy who bought Oblivion at launch and played it for 2 weeks straight before declaring it trash. I would like Bethesda staff in general to get high and make weirder games like they used to, but at the same time, a lot of people are screaming at them to become like every other modern RPG which is not going to improve them at all.
Its clear they could get away with more sex thanks to games like Witcher, but i think they think it would require making more elements of the world fixed and detailed, where they like to spread their attention further to less depth.
Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind. You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff. The actual taste of the food escapes you. Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement. Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
The wide audience argument is the death of art. Catering to the lowest common denominator produces the exact kind of grey sludge you are currently defending. You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint. You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets. Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
Translation: You have decided to move to cherry picking. Got it.
>Bringing up ROI is the ultimate sign of a hollow mind.
If the developers cant do what you suggest while being profitable, then it isn't a sustainable path for them to take is it?
>You judge the quality of a meal by the cost of the kitchen staff.
No I judged it by the average quality of output of the kitchen staff.
>Modders provide the refinement that these developers are too cowardly or too incompetent to implement.
Modders do a lot of stuff. As a category their output is starkly below average.
>Those millions of hours of output you dismiss are the only reason half these games remain on anyone's hard drive.
No about 100 hours out of those millions are probably worth anything.
>The wide audience argument is the death of art.
No it really isnt. You are presuming "Widest Possible" audience which would be. But I was only talking wider than the audience for any particular mod. Which is roughly a good spot for art and roughly where games have been for decades.
>grey sludge you are currently defending
You just seem so mad now you cant even articulate an argument without using the standard slurs from slop youtube reviews.
>You mistake a lack of vision for professional restraint.
You mistake a couple of nuggets for a mountain of gold lmao. Regardless of the shit they lie in.
>You are the kind of person who looks at a masterwork and complains about the price of the canvas. You have no understanding of how systems actually function. Stick to your spreadsheets.
Some shit you just made up. Yawn.
>Let the people who actually play the games (the way they should have been played, pushed to their limits with mods, hacks, etc) talk about what makes them work.
And now you seek to gatekeep a discussion you aren't even fit to partake in yourself. Boring. Go and goon in peace.
And after so many layers of gatekeeping and due process, what got to the shelves are like, uh, Kiss of the Basilisk. I mean it totally makes sense in from a marketing perspective, but the whole situation is a little bit funny.
[0]: used as a neutral term, not a negative one
And even if you do get selected, you may fail for reasons that have nothing to do with the quality of your writing.
If you've got the social media following, your book can be really bad and it'll still get published (examples... abound). The book hardly matters, guaranteed sales via an audience you bring to the table (so, no work for them) is what they're interested in.
I mean, it was already nearly impossible, but now it's nearly-impossibler (nearlier-impossible?), with the social media following being almost necessary to make it even a very-long-shot instead of a no-you're-definitely-getting-rejected.
For breakout authors, publishers will often get in touch directly.
Agents are basically - well, I don't know any more. There used to be a point to them, but now they're running a kind of cottage industry of pointless gatekeeping for wannabes who will make pennies even if they are picked up.
It's not the same industry it was fifty years. It's not even the same industry it was twenty years ago.
A lot of wannabes haven't worked this out yet. They still think a proper author goes through proper channels, and is properly anointed with a proper agent and a proper contract.
And then most of them are surprised to discover their properly published book sells less than a thousand copies, and it's off the shelves almost immediately - because that's how print works unless you're a Big Name - and they can't give up their day jobs.
I, however, miss twitter's "twitterness". 140 characters and a link.
Maybe in this case the editor's comments were not helpful, and maybe OP is right for that. I do not see how this generalises to a rule "do not take advice from editors that reject your manuscripts".
For one, in scientific publications, when you get rejected based on reviewers' comments, chances are if you send the manuscript to another journal the article will be sent to the same reviewers, and if unchanged will be rejected again. Not taking advice into account, as a general rule, sounds like very bad advice.
You are basically working for exposure until someone puts it on a screen.
Aside from my general policy of never paying submission fees when I submit my writing, this particular service seems especially misplaced to me. I’m submitting my piece because I think it’s good enough to be accepted for publication. Paying that extra fee for editorial feedback is essentially starting from a position of, this isn’t good enough, in which case, there’s no point submitting in the first place.
The other loved the pacing, hated the opening scene! These were the editors at the top selling magazines at the time.
Needless to say, I didnt follow their advice. After some time, when no editor was found, I self pubbed the story in a collection.
Continues to tell us how he did listen to the advice because the editor actually had a point that made the story better, got the book published and won him an award.
Bug reports should describe the problem but often shouldn't try to prescribe a solution.