Reasons I Have Stopped Reading Books This Month

[mrissa]

--Adjectives and adverbs. Sometimes you can cross a room or sink into a tub. You do not have to do it -ly. The danger sentence I mutter is now, "He crossed the room in a manner which would excite no comment." skzbrust is aware of Paarfi of Roundwood doing that sort of thing for effect. If you just think that's the sort of thing a reader needs to hear, not funny at all, away with you; you are not the writer for me.

For years I thought that my problem with romance novels was that they were "soppy" or "goopy," or at least that many of them were. I assumed that it was the characters and/or plots that would get me. But mostly I can't get that far because of the prose style. A lot of the prose choice seems to be centered around envisioning a scene in cinematic detail, and that is not what I read for. This is what I mean when I talk about "reader protocols" in a genre: obviously not all SF readers are allergic to these prose choices, because I know several SF readers who also read romances. But for the most part, I think it's impossible to read the two genres for the same reasons, and the things the romance publisher wants to sell are not things I want to read.

--Author had clearly watched too much TV, or at least watched too much TV without thinking about it very thoroughly. TV is a different storytelling medium than written prose. If you want to write for TV, write for TV, do not try to torture the page to make it do with great difficulty what TV does naturally. I know it's hard to break into TV writing. It's also hard to maintain a career in written, unperformed prose when you really suck at it. Lots of things are hard. That doesn't make them worth your time.

Have you seen a cop show? Yeah? So have your readers. I don't watch all that much TV, so if I read your scene and think, "I've seen this a dozen times on TV," you screwed up. And if I think, "...and it was awful every single one of them," you really screwed up. Some stock cop show scenes have not been fresh within my lifetime. Treating them as though the reader should be surprised by them is a bad, bad idea.

--The plot required people to be idiots. Not only idiots. Not only idiots in their supposed fields of expertise. But idiots in their supposed fields of expertise, in which they had supposedly had great success. I went to college; I'm familiar with people who are idiots in their supposed fields of expertise. But they were not considered rock stars by their peers, or else they relied on a much higher order of idiocy than the work in question portrayed.

Authorial contempt for a field does not mean that it's actually possible for any idiot off the street to attain soaring levels of success in it. You may not personally have much respect for actors, drug dealers, religious leaders, [you pick yours here]. But that doesn't mean that other people have no standards for those professions, or that success in them is pure luck.

--Every character was a contemptuous stereotype except for the main two, who were fawning stereotypes.

--The authorial voice was so damn smug I wanted to hurl the book across the room. Please note: this is not me being unable to deal with a point of view contrary to my own. I agreed with this smug bastard. I just wished I didn't. Some people can make you think, "Okay, fine! Human rights and treating people as worthwhile individuals were misguided after all, so long as I don't have to agree with you!"

--The author had not done basic research into a group to which I belong, and had chosen a plot that hinged on the behavior of members of that group. Oops.

--Pointless flashback structure in the first two chapters. If you're going to bother to use flashbacks, something non-stupid should happen in them. In fact, something non-stupid should happen in every device you choose. It's a good rule of fiction, really: something non-stupid should happen on every page.

--And finally, it was just not doing enough wrong because it was not doing enough at all. Right, wrong, whatever: I read 100 pages of this last book and could not steel myself for the remaining 450, not to mention the sequel, because I was in the mood to read, but every time I sat down to read, I would think of towels that needed folding, or had I wiped down the kitchen table? Maybe I should. Maybe family members had e-mailed with more news. Maybe I should check. Maybe someone had posted to livejournal. Etc. This is not the mindset one wants an eager reader to fall into. I put it down and will not pick it up again.

Clearly, I am a cranky and unpleasant person and should not be allowed near innocent books.

Comments

[kythiaranos.livejournal.com]

Amen, sister! I am continually stunned by how much bad stuff makes it to publication. (On the other hand, it gives me hope. If these people manage to find publishing houses, then it can't be impossible for the rest of us.)

And I don't think you're cranky. I think you have reasonable reactions to having things you dislike being foisted upon you.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"I was not lured. I accept full responsibility for my actions."

I try a bunch of new books. Some of them are not my cuppa. They go back to the library, back to the person who lent them to me, or on the discard pile. Some things are objectively bad enough that they should not be published in their current form, but some of them -- particularly the first example -- are doing perfectly well at things I don't want, and that's fine. It is time for me to exhibit learning behavior and no longer accept Luna books without extremely strong and specific recommendations, though.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It was more than one book. But still, probably very few of them were above the reproaches I gave.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

Adjectives and adverbs. Sometimes you can cross a room or sink into a tub. You do not have to do it -ly.

While I wholeheartedly agree that it's possible to overuse these things, and agree with extra hearts that people's tastes may differ as to what constitutes overuse, I <WARNING: tangent alert, I'm not saying this is what you said> occasionally take issue with the way people go on crusades against these poor parts of speech. They end up getting treated as the second-class citizens of the English language, sometimes. It's true that dropping them out can make you choose stronger nouns or verbs to begin with -- but it's also true that sometimes I wish the author had chosen a nice, inoffensive adverb to go with a familiar verb instead of whatever obtrusive bit of vocabulary they resorted to instead.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The great thing about bad writing is that there are so many ways to do it!

Wait. That's not a great thing at all.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

Hee.

Yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes. Also yes.

I developed my allergy to overuse of adjectives and adverbs in on-line roleplay, which is where I discovered that if you want every sentence to draw eyes, you have to let verbs do a lot of the work and adverbs very little, which somehow no one else I was playing with seemed to learn. Except, in non-interactive, written-down-writing, every sentence should not draw eyes that much anyhow. That veers into what Shirley Jackson called the "The Other Responded" syndrome. The fundamental issue is that, although writing is all about words, and choosing evocative words is sometimes important, basically, if your story isn't interesting/exciting/endearing/horrifying/whatever, then your vocabulary can't make it so.

In other news, I'm clearly not reading the right...er, wrong...bad books, because I have no connection to your television statement at all.

Oh, wait! (No, that's not a writerly pause, followed by sarcasm, that was an actual realization as I was typing.) This is because I don't watch television!

Actually, no, it can't be. For one thing, I /do/ watch some television - some by choice, some because the only alternatives would be either unprofessional or rude - and for another thing, I do know some of the tropes. But it does occur to me that there have probably been things I've read and disliked without being able to articulate a clear reason for my reaction, and that if I'd had more exposure, I would have formulated the reason in this way exactly.

(On the other hand, I was thinking last night that there are things television can teach. Good television, anyhow. But that's a different subject.)

Anyhow, them books were guilty as sin, and you done right to turn 'em in.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yes, definitely, good television can teach, and even not-fabulous television can teach people about storytelling if they're willing to think critically about what it's doing and how. I am not anti-television.

[pameladean]

In isolation, the bit about crossing the room in a way that would excite no comment would make sense in certain contexts, if exciting comment from other characters is specifically not desired by the crosser. But I presume that that was not the case.

I am so with you about books' not being movies. If I feel that I'm behind a camera, something is wrong. Well, all right, something is very, very seriously not to my taste.

P.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh sure, but if it's "Jan drank her juice quickly. She filed her nails wearily. She put her shoes on sexily. She crossed the room in a way that would excite no comment"...er, okay, that one is clearly doing it on purpose, too. But I think you've probably encountered the kind of writing I mean, where everything involves the actions of someone's luxuriant hair. Or their matted hair -- it's not the glamour that bothers me.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Oh, me too, I bog very quickly when everything gets some kind of description or obtrusively colorful noun or verb.

But otoh, for beginners it might be worth noting that usually the cure isn't changing "He trudged/struggled/toiled up the hill" to "He went up the hill" but to "At the top of the hill he [....]". If there's nothing worth telling about how he went up or how someone crossed the room, maybe that sentence isn't needed at all.