Reasons That Passionate Novel Writers Fail to Publish - Part III

EGO TIMES TEN. 

 Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

We realize a certain amount of ego is necessary to propel a writer forward, but too much ego is a disaster waiting to happen.  The overly egoistic writer is puffed, living in a state of I-know-better. She or he is therefore incapable of successfully editing their work. Friends, relatives, or agents printing out boilerplate replies have told them their writing is good, and their story interesting; and to make the situation even more complicated and susceptible to causing delusion, perhaps the writer is a big success in their other career, so why shouldn't they also know-it-all when it comes to writing a novel?  See our video post on this blog: SO YOU WANT TO WRITE A NOVEL.

We once had a successful venture capitalist person hand us their 15 page synopsis and the first few pages of their novel. The synopsis was absurdly long and unable to summarize the story in any interesting way; and the first couple of novel pages needed a good line editing because the prose was inadequate and one tended to speedbump over at least one awkward sentence per paragraph. Of course, these facts were unknown to the venture capitalist (and forever will be--who is going to tell him, IUniverse?). This person presented us the work with a grand TA DAH!, expecting corroboration.  Isn't that what he received from everyone else in the universe?

Well, of course, irritation set in when we tactfully pointed out shortcomings. This person also did not believe us when we explained that the vast majority of agents would not, repeat NOT read that 15 page synopsis regardless (and if they did somehow manage to muck through it, the novel ms was DOA regardless).