Is there anything nice to be said about it at all?

Well - they're very nice people.

That's, well, yes.

That's all I got.

(banging head against monitor)

Ouch. On both counts.

Hope you're going with the chapter-by-chapter tutoring and hopefully they'll start to realize what they need to do on their own plan. Cause ultimately, it's their story and not yours so you shouldn't bleed yourself dry over it.

And hey, less-than-perfect manuscripts get published all the time.

Ms H, that's recisely what I'm doing - they've already been told, anything more than this and we're in the ghosting range, and ghosting is $4-$5K, except that I. Don't. Wanna.

This isn't less than perfect; it's not publishable. It reads like a cross between a series of gossip sheet press releases and someone's idea for a movie of the week teleplay treatment.

Oh well. Off to Woodside, to have dinner with a real writer, damnit. Not to mention a real editor; Deb B was Editor In Chief of Orion Press and maybe she can tell me how to cope with this junk.

Maybe you can point them toward an online crit group?

That's all I got. I'm off to dinner too.

Deb, I feel your pain as well. I've done what you're doing, but only for very very short pieces. It hurts, and it's hard as hell.

You're a good friend, and I hope they learn from the experience.

A nice evening with Tad tonight, and Deb's advice was stinging and to the point: tell them what you've got. Show them the difference. Tell them to take notes. Then cut them loose. They haven't done their writerly homework in the basics.

So, I sent the BNNs (Bad Novel Not-Novelists) the following email:

OK - I've put a large chunk of the past three days into this, and we need to get together to discuss this. I have about twelve pages of notes (typewritten), and then I gave up. We need to sit down and go over what's wrong here.

I don't want to be discouraging about this, but I have to tell you, while I think you may be able to fix it, the book has some serious fundamental problems - as in, you've missed on the basics of writing fiction - associated with it. You're going to need to perform some major basic surgery on this - literally, from the ground up - before you give this to an agent or an editor to read. Right now, going by the first 55 pages, this isn't publishable fiction.

We should get together, you should bring notebooks or other devices with which to take notes, and we can go over this.

Did you want to do this tomorrow? If you're committed to fixing it, the sooner the better, I'd say.

And, that's all, folks. I'll meet with them, scream at them, collect my hundred bucks (which is really, really not enough for the headache I've got, thanks to worrying at this bloody excuse for a book), and then it's their problem.

In the immortal words of Popeye - that's all I can stands, I can't stands no more.

You did the right thing, Deb.

I'd be very interested to know if they're able to "get it" after you meet with them. I'm not so elitist that I believe fiction writing can't be taught--i.e. with work and study, IMO a mediocre talent could do good work, a naturally good writer could become outstanding, etc.--but I also think there's a literary equivalent of tone deafness. And if a person doesn't have at least a rough instinctive grasp on how to show instead of tell, just from his/her lifetime of reading, I'm inclined to believe that person is storytelling deaf.

I mean, I look back at what I attempted to write in high school. I cringe at it, because it's all semi-autobiographical MarySues with long curly blue-black or auburn hair and vividly sky blue or cat green eyes. But, I already knew how to structure a scene, and wasn't especially prone to telling rather than showing.

(Which is not to say I never violate the show-don't-tell rule, or scramble tenses mid-paragraph, etc. Just that I've got a certain amount of inborn feel for what works and why. The one common error that I can honestly say I don't make is confusing, head-hopping POV shifts, and not just because I'm currently writing in first-person. Even in third person, keeping it clear whose head I'm in has always come easily to me.)