The top three things which cause me to throw a book across the room
So the title is somewhat exaggerated. I don’t really throw books across the room, but when faced with any of the below, I most certainly close them with disgust. As nearly every fiction writer, I’m a reader first. And in my reading journey, I’ve come across many lapses of writerly/editorial judgement. Many forgivable. Most forgettable. But then again, there’s the other type…
Of course writing it subjective, and so what repels me, might be the height of entertainment for others. But here are some things I absolutely hate coming across in fiction:
- Pontificating is the top of the list. In the era of social media, being loud about every single thought running through our minds has become endemic. So much so that on occasion writers forget what their job it: to transport the reader into the world of their book. It is expressly not the place to copy and paste your least popular tweet, which you feel really ought to have gained more traction based on its pure incisiveness. Whether it’s politics you wish to discuss, or the state of education in your home country, or the way you think people REALLY OUGHT TO dress for an evening party, your book is not the place to vent those views. If it doesn’t serve the story, it belongs in the editorial bin.
- Gross self-inserts. I was reading a novel some time ago, by a rather well-known author, where the young, feisty female protagonist is mooned over (in the most inappropriate and creepy way, frankly) by her, let’s call him “mentor”. This mentor is much older, in a position of authority over the female protagonist, and has no qualities that could possibly be attractive to the object of his desire. Yet, at a pretty randomly chosen point, the girl notices him. She suddenly sees him in a different light. The bumbling, boring-as-toast older man becomes interesting and masculine in her eyes. Little things she never noticed before light up a fire within… For no reason. Literally nothing’s changed in the older man. He did nothing note-worthy (in front of the female protagonist at least). And as the pages droned on, one couldn’t help but see the somewhat disturbing similarities between the mentor character and the author. And of course, I wouldn’t begrudge anyone the private fantasy of “punching above one’s weight”. But when written down, it is painfully obvious that that’s exactly what it is: the author’s self-indulgent fantasy.
- Ye olde stylle of speech. Certain genres are particularly prone to this grievous sin. Sometimes a writer really really wants to show that the book is in fact set not in anything approaching a contemporary setting, but could very beautifully fit in the standards of the olden days. The temptation to rewrite everything in a style neigh incomprehensible to the modern reader can sometimes be too much to resist. The easiest way to indulge the urge is to pile in archaic vocabulary, mess with syntax, sprinkle in some schoolboy french and voila! A book with prose that resembles nothing in the history of the English language is ready! And while it doesn’t bother everyone equally, I find it distracting, occasionally hilarious (when eyes become “orbs” for example, to emphasise that before 1950s vocabulary was so much more refined), and mostly disappointing. There are many ways to transport a reader to a particular time and place. Misusing archaisms is not one of them.
The Joy and Wonder of Beta Readers
I’m not impatient, not at all.
I’m just sitting here quietly, as my marvelous beta readers are doing their thing. For the uninitiated, beta readers are all of those wonderful people in your life (or on the web, depending on your preference), who are the first people to read through your novel (who are not you, or some version of you).
Those are the people who will ruthlessly point out anything that simply doesn’t work, that jars, that bores them. They are also, hopefully, the people who will tell you exactly why they love your manuscript.
I’m lucky enough to have a few people in my life, who I know will not sugarcoat it, and will tell me exactly where I might have lost the plot a little bit, or where the stakes are unclear. I have the good fortune of having two local writer-friends, each extremely talented in their own right, and each with completely different expectations/interests. In beta-reading context this works brilliantly for me, as each one of them will focus on a different aspect of my novel, and come up with a different way in which I can improve it.
One of my writer-pals is extremely plot-focused, expecting each page to hook her and bind her to my characters, so that she simply can’t put the book down. Because otherwise, she tells me, she certainly will. So no pressure there. Her no-nonsense approach keeps me on my toes.
My other writer friend writes what one would probably categorize as literary fiction, and she looks for the flow of the language, the mood and the tone. She’s the one to let me know where a sentence needs to be more staccato, and where the tone of the sentence lets me down. I listen to her note-full voice messages with fascination, like I’m invited to take a gander inside her head.
If you write, I highly recommend asking as wide a range of beta readers as possible to look through your manuscript, as they will all find different things which interest and confuse them. It’s the first taste of true readership, and you should savour it, for the opportunity it gives you to improve your work in ways which simply wouldn’t be possible on your own.
Editing the New Thing and the Sparkly Ideas
I’m waiting for my agent to finish reading through my big picture edits (see the last post) of my adult fantasy novel, let’s call it novel X.
What does one do in this time, except drive themselves mad with anxiety? Well, if you’re me, you have a very long list of to-do jobs. When I was querying and then waiting for my agent’s edit points, I completed my YA fantasy novel, set in the world of Slavic sea myths. And now is the perfect time to do the edits on that draft. The. Perfect. Time. So what do I do? I come up with a shiny Middle Grade novel idea that keeps me up at night and sends me to the reference texts for research.
I bat it away and plow away at the YA novel, which I am enjoying, I truly am. And it keeps coming back. Just one sentence, just the opening line… it whispers in my ear. And twenty minutes later I find I wrote the opening scene.
“No!” I shout and go back to my edits. To the edits of that really hard scene in the middle, where the dialogue just didn’t feel quite right and I need to change that one word but I don’t know to what…
Still, the new shiny idea beckons, as I grapple with the muddle of a scene.
Just the rough outline. It’s in your head anyway. You might as well write it down before you forget. Because you will forget. Remember that short story you dreamt up? The one you don’t remember, because you didn’t write it down?
“It was a stupid idea. All I could remember was a live sea being carved up by aliens.”
Perhaps. But you remembered how it feeeelt…
And so I obligingly tap-tappity-tap away on my keyboard.
But I’m at my favourite café today, sipping a latte and feeling strong! So no more distractions, no more diversions, no more interruptions!
But you have this dialogue in your head already… Maybe you can just…
SHUT UP!
Big Picture Edits
I have just completed the “Big Picture Edits” on my last manuscript. My agent, has gone over my book with a fine-tooth comb and came up with an INCREDIBLY LONG list of things that don’t work/could work better/need expanding.
You know all those little lazy bit of writing you think will hide in the awesomeness of your plotting? They will be found out. All the slightly awkward bits of dialogue that you thought “oh, it will be fine“. It will jar on your reader as much as it did on you. And then there were all the little things I did not notice, for reasons varying from “I just love this character and will shoe-horn this conversation in, so it can shine its light upon all” to “well, I meant it to come across like this, so surely since it was in my head, you can see it too, in spite of me not having written a word for it to become apparent?”
All in all, the list of edits was about 100 bullet-points, some of which required barely a new paragraph, some which forced me to rewrite three chapters and add two brand-new ones.
And it was painful, I won’t lie. It took me over two months and extra 20k words But the book ended up being so much stronger as a result. I actually feel like it says what I need it to say now, and the characters are more consistent, more solid.
That’s the beauty of the editorial process, a collaborative one. It’s not meant to be easy.
So suck it up and enjoy the ride.