The other day I was following a few twitter leads through some authors who were either self-pubbing or trying to attract agents or editors in New York, browsing on extracts from their books which they had posted. Most of what I read was competent. Some of it wasn’t.
I don’t want to talk about the incompetent stuff today, partly because it’s depressing, but mainly because I think that people who frequent sites like this know what incompetent manuscripts look like. They are structurally incoherent. Characters appear out of nowhere with nothing more than a name to identify them. Others get pages of minute description, then vanish. The prose is florid and overblown. There are typos, grammar errors, a total failure to grasp the rules of punctuation…
I could go on, but then so could you, so let’s move on.
It’s easy to spot the incompetent stuff. But what about the stuff which is competent but still not very good? It doesn’t make any of the obvious mistakes I mentioned above, but you read a few pages and shrug, and move on to the next thing, not bothering to reflect on why it didn’t engage you.
This is scary, because your response is likely to be the response of the desired agents, editors etc. and because the writers didn’t actually do anything wrong. Their work just isn’t that good.
Every writer I know, regardless of their success, worries that that last statement applies to them at least some of the time, and failure—whether that failure is a dip in sales, or an inability to land a publisher at all—tends to throw such feelings into sharp relief. Most writers who work seriously at their craft and get a few years under their belts are competent. They can frame a sentence, a paragraph, even an entire story. They can come up with plot lines that work, characters who seem plausible enough, and conclusions which—“on paper” ought to satisfy. But in many cases the work, though without obvious flaw, just isn’t that great.
So how do you know if yours is?
Well, the chances are, you don’t. As Stuart observed a couple of weeks ago, there’s nothing harder than reading your own work as if it was written by someone else, and the longer you invest in a project the harder that becomes. You can put it aside for a while (the longer the better) and that does help, but it takes a certain ruthlessness as well as a critical skill which some writers never acquire to be able to coldly and constructively assess your own work. This is why we have editors.
There is probably an entire series of posts to be built out of this article and I kind of like the idea of doing it with reader input, but for now let’s focus on one issue that is likely to lead to the “like it, didn’t love it” response authors so often get.
Dullness.
Yes, you read that right. Most of the competent-but-not-great material I read the other day could be branded with that career-killer adjective: dull.
I know that dullness, like beauty, truth, ability to lead the country etc. is very much in the eye of the beholder, but bear with me a second. Most of what I read in my wholly unscientific survey might be called murder mystery or thriller, so several of the posted scenes focused on crime scenes and detectives making their sweep for clues. That of itself is a strike against them. We are saturated with Bones/CSI type crime scene investigations so writing a new one better show more than competence. It had better have characters asking more than the usual formulaic stuff about time of death and the nature of the weapon. It had better show more than descriptions of the clothing and equipment we already know about. It had better grab the reader and demand that he or she keeps reading.
You see how I slipped that last note in there without actually telling you how to do that? I’m tricky like that.
The problem is that some writers assume that establishing their book squarely within a recognizable genre will assure them a readership. Mystery readers love mysteries, right? So make me story clearly a mystery and I’m golden.
It doesn’t work that way. There are too many detective stories (or fantasy novels or whatever) clamoring for attention, so writing “by the numbers” just won’t cut it.
Let me come at it from another angle. Let’s assume the CSI scene is essential to the book. That’s not necessarily a problem. It just has to be well executed. Several obvious means to make the scene more interesting come to mind but today I’ll just tackle one.
Setting.
We’ve seen a million bodies in back alleys. Either put the body somewhere utterly unexpected (shows like Castle love to do this) or find a way to make that location feel completely new by seeing it differently. Fantasy writers love setting because they get to flex their imaginations and dream up all manner of exotic locales, so coming up with an interesting setting sounds easy. It’s not, because the weird and wonderful stuff is bread and butter for the genre, and exotic can feel drab and familiar by definition. Ah, says the reader, I’m reading fantasy, therefore the sky is yellow and the toadstools glow. Gripping.
Because we expect difference in fantasy worlds the bar is set high. Sometimes what you need to clear it is not grand poetic vision but the details which make it feel real and livable. I have little patience with worlds which become so abstracted from reality that I can’t connect with them. We’ve all read (and probably written) scifi/fantasy environments that feel like the distillations of the dreams harvested from the air above the Marriott on the third night of Dragon Con. Different from real is good (depending on your subgenre, of course [see Misty]) but different or cool isn’t enough of itself.
But I need help with this, because of all the regular writers on this site I probably use invented locations/worlds least. There is an exotic world in my up-coming children’s series, part natural paradise part steam-punk fantasy, and there’s a pretty complex logic yoking those two things together, but I’d like readers to explore the question with me. What makes a setting—not a world or its magic system or anything large scale like that—just the location, the place in which characters interact, constructively (as opposed to distractingly) cool? Let’s hear scenes that make you want to read more. In each case see if you can identify what about the place in which the scene happens, or the way it is presented, makes it better than just competent.
Two instances to get the ball rolling, one from me, one from someone else.
1. One of my favorite scenes in my own Act of Will takes place in an abandoned lighthouse. There are plot reasons for this, and the shape of the building affects things like combat, but what I really like about it is that lighthouses, like Fezes, are cool. They are isolated, bound to the sea, their architecture is strange and severe, they feel like monuments to pride and purpose while holding a specific fragility. They are, in short, geat places to stage a nocturnal fight scene.
2. In recent guest Jim Butcher’s Turncoat, there’s an early scene where Harry Dresden goes to a nightclub called Zero. It’s an electrifying scene because while it has purpose in terms of plot and character (as all good scenes do) it’s also just a thrilling place, dripping with sex and style and danger. Harry resists the temptations of the place, but only just, and a reader with a beating heart will feel those temptations on a visceral level. It’s a great example of how setting controls both interest level and mood, so that crucial plot points slip by without feeling clunky and the reader emerges with a real sense-memory of the scene and its key characters. Great stuff.
Other suggestions? In each case, please try to identify what about the setting “works” for you. I should say that I’m out of town (again) so my responses may be erratic and limited. Apologies in advance.
