Back again for its first 2009 engagement! Books I quit reading.

[mrissa]

1. If you want to write a memoir, write a memoir. If you want to write a book about something else with memoir bits in it, you have to make sure that the memoir bits are roughly on a par with as interesting as your topic, or else really really short. Or else I will run away and read some other book on your topic whose author is not convinced that their own life is the most fascinating thing ever.

2. I remember being a teenager. It was not a built-in excuse for being an asshole. So whining that your parents are mean because they're poor? No. Sometimes it's not enough that the narrative be aware that the character is an asshole--you're still sticking me with a big chunk of text all about this asshole, and if they're not an entertaining asshole, I'm going to read something else.

3. Hockey is not everything. I mean this in a philosophical sense, but also in a very literal sense: hockey is not the building of Hadrian's Wall. Hockey is not the Silk Road. Trying to argue that various historical events were the True Beginning Of Hockey is likely to make me roll my hockey-loving eyes and move on.

4. Unrelieved doom. Next.

5. I know and care about several people who stammer. They do not go, "Th-this s-sentence is s-stupid." That is not how it works. It's not cute, it's not funny, quit doing it.

6. If your entire plot/premise is predicated around someone learning not to worry their pretty little head about big hard questions, go directly to hell and take your book with you.

7. If you have convincingly portrayed a protagonist everybody hates, you may consider that there's a good reason for this.

8. If you're going to compare your parents to Hitler--as an adult writing nonfiction--you need to be aware of the scale differences. No, seriously. Unconscious hyperbole is not our friend.

9. You had no respect for yourself, your reader, or your characters. Next.

10. Women do not constantly think of ourselves as though we were describing ourselves for phone sex purposes. I promise. Even lesbians and bisexual women, who may quite rightly be assumed to be fonder of women's bodies than the average straight gal, do not get their Rice Krispies while thinking of the pertness of their own breasts. In fact, I am a bit skeptical that any woman ever has gone around thinking of her own breasts as pert. Or lush. Mostly I think of mine as...mine. Like my ear or my elbow. Because...follow me carefully here...when you've had breasts for decades, you sort of get used to them, almost like they're a body part a person might have.

11. If you're going to hit a dozen genre conventions on the first two pages, you need to do it in a way that tells me that the story will not simply be a string of conventions. Three pages later, you still hadn't left the stencil. Fail.

Comments

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

I told my students that describing female characters via their cup size was a pretty good way to put a giant neon sign on the story saying "O HAI THIS WRITER IS A GUY."

[elisem.livejournal.com]

I like you. A lot. This just intensifies that.

Also? So funny! I almost laughed, even!

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

in re: #8, I feel I must note that my father did, for a period of time, sport a truly unfortunate moustache.

[redbird]

I particularly like the phrasing on book 3.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Fond of you as well, actually.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's a very high degree of unfortunate.

[mkille.livejournal.com]

Well, *my* breasts are distractingly pert, I tell you what. I can hardly ever get anything done. But I stopped worrying my pretty little head over that.

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

I think about my breast as pert sometimes. Or something like that, anyway. But it's generally when I'm contemplating what to wear for exercise or otherwise putting on a bra and feeling thankful that my mom trained me early to give them proper support.

I figure this characteristic will go away once I have kids, so I might as well enjoy it now, right? Because it's also a feature that seems due to the fact that they aren't exactly, um... big. (I figured if I said lush I might get beaten to death with an olive loaf.)

Breasts are weird. But yes, mine are mostly just... mine. And I often get annoyed when people treat them as something sexual when they were busy just being part of my chest.

Still, I might remember fondly from time to time that Steve categorized them as "pirate breasts" and said that was his favorite kind...

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Re #10: even comparisons between women from narrator voice strike me as ... I dunno, just not how a person thinks about it. There's a bit in one of de Lint's stories where he talks about how Jilly Coppercorn and her friend Sophie look alike except Sophie has bigger breasts which always throws me out of the story, like coming out from underwater spluttering. I think it's even odder because he's not usually quite that clumsy; I vaguely remember something about Sophie thinking she doesn't like a particular sort of neckline that seemed much more natural (this is why it's only a vague memory - it's not a giant weirdness stuck in the story).

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Mostly, the adjective I personally apply to my own personal breasts--when forced to notice them--is in the way. Either that or ow.

And there was one very memorable occasion which was both.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Only one? Gosh.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not that I've never thought of something in comparative terms, either; fairly recently I was trying to remember which person a friend was talking about, in terms of the photos he'd posted of friends recently, and when I got more data, I wound up thinking, "Oh, sure, the one who's generally about my size but less ath...um."

(Because thinking of myself as "more athletic" than other people is weird and new, though often accurate.)

But it's the tone that throws me out when people try comparisons as a method of character description. When they get it right, it's golden. But it's so very easy to get wrong.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That must be a relief.

[carbonel]

This is as good a place as any to mention that I zipped through Enclave, and enjoyed the experience. But it's a cotton-candy book -- the entire rationale for the enclave turns out to have been bogus, and you never find out all that much about the world outside, except that it was bad enough for parents to think they were doing a Good Thing by committing their children to the place.

And in the end? Nothing really changed.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I only think of mine when they're doing something interesting ("You are very big right now. What is going on? Should I worry?") or considering a corset ("No.").

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

One that rates "very memorable." (It involved those long-handled pruning shears? Not, thank goodness, the sharp end.)

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, I guess you're right - it's not the fact that he's comparing that bothers me, but either something about the exact language or specifically that he's comparing breasts, in a scene where only the two women are present with no observer. I don't think it would have bothered me if he had said, "Sophie and Jilly looked very much alike except that Sophie was slightly thinner and a little taller, so that they looked like reflections of each other in a distorted mirror," or something like that.

[ckd]

Steve categorized them as "pirate breasts"

"What's your cup size?" "ARRRRRRRRR."

[howl-at-the-sun.livejournal.com]

You are very funny, especially when you are blunt.

[stillnotbored.livejournal.com]

Oh..ow ow ow.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

She does blunt so very, very well.

[batwrangler.livejournal.com]

Yes, exactly. Practically the only time I notice my breasts -- or any of my other body parts -- is when they are doing something annoying.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

1) I do hope I haven't done that in my fairy book.

10) There's a very nice book by James Alan Gardner called Committment Hour in which kids change gender every year, and then they have to decide which to stick with as a grownup. And there's a scene in that book where these horny fourteen-year-old boys are talking, about a month before they change into girls for a year, and they say things like "I'm going to spend the first week just stroking my breasts, oh man I can't wait..." There are other nifty things about the book, but this was one of the things I especially liked. Because if you switched over, you'd notice.

Personally I think about my breasts about as often as my elbows. They're there, they stick out, big deal.

[buymeaclue.livejournal.com]

If you have convincingly portrayed a protagonist everybody hates, you may consider that there's a good reason for this.

SNERK.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Yikes.