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How can it be so good to be so bad?
I wasn’t sure where to post this – it’s a bit of a howl of anguish, but here goes.
Do you ever find yourself reading commercially published novels and thinking: that’s it, I’m going to give up – not because they are so brilliant that you are immediately overcome with incurable imposter syndrome, but because they break so many of the rules and guidelines we are told we must follow in order to attract even an acknowledgment from an agent, let alone be taken up by a publisher?
That’s how I felt after the Christmas just passed.
(A bit of context – every year my mother asks my wife what I’d like for Christmas and my wife replies: books, of course. My mother then gives my wife some money to go book shopping for me, since she is the person most likely to know what I like and what I’ve already read. My wife passes the money to me, I spend a happy morning in a bookshop buying books, which I then give to my wife, who passes them on to my mother to wrap. Come Christmas Day, I deploy my finest acting skills to express my surprise at my mother’s brilliant choices and spend the rest of the day wondering when it would be OK for me to sneak off to another room and start reading.)
I’m not going to tell you what books I chose were this year, but all were by well-established authors from large publishing houses. As an aspiring published author (ha!), I was keen to see what I could learn from these writers’ craft and the way in which they applied to essentials of good writing.
Reader, I was disappointed. Let me consider some of those rules.
Rule 1 – “Show, don’t tell”:
One novel was speculative/science fiction. The author, naturally, needed to explain the science so that the reader could understand it. He chose to do this by having one scientist remind another, with whom he had worked for years, at great length, of all the experiments they had tried together and, in each case, the scientific principals behind them and their outcomes.
That was the most painful example but the whole book was littered with people telling each other things that both should already have known. The premise of the novel was interesting but, in the end, the plot simply petered out, as though the author had reached his 80,000 word tally and moved on to the next project.
Rule 2 – “Always be clear whose point of view we are reading”
OK, this was from a VERY successful author. Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but I find it annoying enough when the POV switches from one paragraph to another. It’s beyond annoying when it switches mid-paragraph, so I have to go back and read the paragraph again to work out whose thoughts I am experiencing.
And while we’re at it…
Rule 3 – “Punctuation, punctuation, punctuation”:
Speech marks are very, very useful. They are even more useful when your paragraphs contain both direct and reported speech or three people talking at once. Perhaps this author thought he was being innovative, playing games with form and structure. I’ll never know, because after sixty or so pages I threw the book away.
Rule 4 – “Don’t fill the first chapters with backstory or introduce too many characters”.
Reader, she did both. To excess. This one was a mystery/thriller so I persevered to see how well the suspense was built up. It wasn’t. Much of the backstory dumped into the first chapter was irrelevant to subsequent plot; the shocking (a word I use with a pinch of sarcasm in this case) inciting incident didn’t arrive until chapter five and was then barely referenced for another third of the book as the protagonist… did not very much apart from go to the office, the shops and an occasional restaurant; and the denouement was as exciting as a plain yoghurt (the character who seemed to be the most likely to be a murderer from the moment he was introduced not only turned out to be the murderer but happily confessed as soon as this was suggested to him).
Now, I know it’s easy to be critical. If I was better at it, I’d have my own InstaTok channel and be raking in the cash sharing my opinions, but my serious point is this: these were not self-published, print on demand or exclusively available as e-books. In other words, they had not gone straight from first draft to publication without any filtration or quality control along the way.
They had been through an agent, found favour with a publisher, presumably had at least one round of professional editing – and yet were manifestly inferior to the writing that you, my fellow Jerichos, post on here every day.
So what should we take from this – that the ‘rules’ don’t matter, that we should forget about form and structure, throw away all those ‘Save the Cat’ type manuals and ignore the advice offered in the courses and workshops?
Or do we shrug, accept that there are some bloody awful books and bloody awful writers getting away with producing them, and keep banging our heads against the walls of industry indifference.
That’s it. Howl over 🙂.
What do you think?
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10 Replies
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You aren’t the only one who has found that sort of books. Some really bad ones have managed to make it to the bookshops and be sold in insane amounts. They must have some sort of appeal to the public (or really good marketing). Some are even worse. I remember once I got from the library a book whose premise looked interesting. I managed to finish it (fortunately it wasn’t very long)… but it was painful. The story was terrible. The plot was a big black hole. The writing was… ugh. No punctuation, she must have thought she was a second cc Cummings. I wondered for a while how such thing had managed to be accepted for trad publication. Then I saw she was a/the boss at her publishing company. I don’t need to tell you what I surmised from that.
Still, all that doesn’t put me off. Yes, I think at times “If they publish, I should be able to!” But that’s exactly the reason why I get more motivated to keep writing. I know I’m better, I enjoy doing it and others enjoy reading it. Does not getting money for it yet irk me when I see these other cases? Hummm… It isn’t that clear cut.
Even if I get to publish, it isn’t proof that I’ll earn a lot of money with it, not even enough for living wages. I don’t assume every Grignr becomes a star in the literary panorama. Bad lit gets published and paid for every day, but it all comes down to having readers. It’s the capitalism of books. There are plenty more that don’t reach the readers. One thing I do know: the ones that get published, their authors mostly put in an effort to get their books there. That’s all we can do, and if we do what we can we’re good. I won’t waste much time crying over that, I need that time to write.
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Hi Rob,
That must have been extremely cathartic to write! I’d love to know which books they were. The lack of speech marks always gets me, it’s really become a thing in modern literary fiction and I find it an active hindrance to my understanding of the dialogue. Even worse was a book I won’t name where a whole section from a female character’s POV was written without full stops. To paraphrase the author, the character’s personality and mental state demanded this approach, even though the prose more than adequately conveyed this already.
I wonder how many of the books you mention are first novels? Feels to me like a debut these days has to be near-perfect from the pitch upwards, whereas if you’re an established author with a readership and a contract you can maybe get away with lazy ideas and half-baked material more easily…
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Hi Rob, I quite agree! Having had critiques on my novel that have pointed out many a fault, which I have then strived to put right to make it publishable, it annoys me to read a novel that does all the things that I have been told will make my novel unpublishable. As you say, particularly changing POVs, telling not showing, and even poorly constructed sentences sometimes. They often claim to be bestsellers too!
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What do I think?
1. Firstly, I took great offence to your depreciative reference to plain yogurt (and do you really need an ‘h’ in the middle of that word?). And so does Mel Brooks! It’s not boring at all. You just have to add fruit. If you really want to use a put-down dessert then try using white blancmange as a suitable non-offensive substitute. No one could argue with white blancmange.
2. Now, you can’t rant about backstory with any justification when your first five paragraphs are pure backstory. I mean, bringing in your great grandmother . . . was that really necessary?
3. “Banging our heads against a pinch of sarcasm.” That is so-ooooooo cliche.
4. Well, I hope that sets things straight about what I think about it. I’m off to the Gulf of America before the hurricane season sets in. Gonna be a tough one.
😻
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ps. one of the hardest books I’ve read was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, ‘The General In His Labyrinth.’ I think I recall one sentence that had four different points of view in it, with no punctuation. Mind you, the sentence was three pages long 😻
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pps. I actually thought your commentary was brilliant. Concur completely.
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Rob. I feel your pain. I read a lot of debut novels – that’s what I’m writing after all, my debut novel. It’s good to get a feel for what’s out there, by authors who are, in real terms, only slightly further along their writing journey than I am, right? In some instances, I can only assume shovel-loads of luck is a crucial factor that gets them into print, because it sure isn’t the writing (a university degree and/or Irish blood also seem to be valuable). But, before I start to sound too much like a cynical Cyril, there have been some superb and really deserving debut novelists just lately – I have notes on all their agents!! 🙂
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Offering a different perspective here. Publishing is a wide market which caters to a lot of different audiences and what will resonate and appeal to one demographic won’t appeal to others. A book one readership might find riveting might be boring or laborious for another, that doesn’t make that book bad, just that you might not be the person that book was published for (talking in general terms here).
Another thing to remember is that established and especially very successful authors get a lot more leeway. If you have proven that you can sell a lot of books or win a lot of prizes then your editor and publisher are a lot more flexible about what they will allow and the liberties an author can take. Sometimes that leeway is not for the best but again those authors have earned their stripes showing they can sell.
Regarding punctuation or the lack of — again it all goes back to audience. A lot of time the lack of punctuation is a choice in literary fiction and use for specific reasons. Some people hate Sally Rooney’s books because of her lack of quotation marks for dialogue. I personally never had an issue with it and love her books. The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride is written in uninterrupted stream of consciousness with little punctuation which can be very off putting for some readers, but again other people love that book and what it is trying to achieve.
When it comes to the rules — every rule in fiction can be broken if it’s done well or it serves the stories or you can get away with it, but to break the rules well I personally strongly believe that you have to understand and master the rules first. With writing you can do anything, it’s always come down to execution that the writer’s choices are validated. For example, based purely on rules the opening of Demon Copperhead is heavy on telling and backstory but it works because first the voice is very strong from the opening sentence. It pulls you in; the voice and prose really paint a vivid and immersive picture.
Of course there are books published every year that are bad, but there is a big difference between truly awful books and books that people didn’t enjoy or didn’t finish just because it wasn’t for their cup of tea.
To a certain level, books are like any other art in the sense that there is a certain level of subjectiveness. It can be frustrating because there are so little spots available and a hundred times the number of writers competing for those spots. It is hard but at the end of the day all you can do is concentrate about your writing, your stories and your own path to publication however that path looks like and shut out the outside.
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This needs to be said Rob and I’m in complete agreement with you. Personally, I think the answer is a little bit more nuanced than we might realize. In my own genre of crime, I would say 50% of what I read I don’t enjoy – and I probably read two books a month. I always finish the book hoping to be surprised but I’m often not. And then of the remaining 50% which I enjoy only half of those I would say are real page -turners . Like you, I see the rules constantly being broken and you give a neat summary of what a lot of these writers do. Of course if someone is a good writer then rules can be broken but that’s not what you’re saying here. I’ll draw on my own genre here but Terry Hayes in I am Pilgrim begins the book with a load of backstory. He’s such an innate and superb storyteller that it doesn’t matter.
If we’re all noticing this pattern, then I don’t think it is purely subjective. It becomes objective. I think some publishers will just go with what they think works and predominantly with writers of a certain sex, ethnicity, background, age etc. I also notice that journalists seem to get book deals but that doesn’t mean they can write a half-decent story.
So what’s the solution? I think it’s two-fold . First of all there’s networking. I’ve heard published authors say that the more conferences you go to and the more agents you meet in the flesh the more likely you are to get representation. And I totally agree with Natália that you have to know that you’re better than the competition.
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Hi, Rob, this might come across as sour grapes to some but I completely get where you are coming from. I am a journalist by profession, so I write for a living. I have also had two novels published, albeit by a very small independent press now defunct but I just feel the system is loaded against us. By us, I mean the majority of jobbing writers out there. Unless you hit the very narrow parameters that agents seem to operate in, I feel you have zero chance of making it.
Let’s face it, it is not about whether you have a sparkling opening line or a brilliant first page, you have to channel the zeitgeist, which at the moment seems to be romantasy (whatever that is) and locked room thrillers. There is the odd Shuggie Bain, which rightly won the Booker prize as it is brilliantly written and unique, though author Douglas Stuart received zillions of rejections. He very much feels like the exception rather than the rule.
It says it all when publishers now flock to celebrity fiction, when anyone from Simon Mayo to Graham Norton get a go. I bet they weren’t agonising over their first lines and having sleepless nights about whether the dialogue sings, only to get a terse email saying, “Not for us.”
