The Triumphant Return of Reasons I Quit Reading Your Book

[mrissa]

Now supplied by both the library and WFC! I am alarmed by how many of these apply to more than one book.

1. It turns out there is no one single "way black people talk." So you can't throw in Southern Urban African-American, Louisiana Creole, Caribbean, and I Swear I Heard A Guy Say This On The Bus into one character within four pages without the person deliberately imitating anybody else and have your readership nod sagely and go, "How vividly urban," Whitey McWhiterson. Even if your readership is as white as you, it turns out some of them will have met actual black people! Personally! And heard them speak! Also, going straight to the absentee black dad trope does not make you groundbreaking and edgy. Particularly in combination with the black youths in gangs trope. It makes you...well. Let's say it makes you not a writer I want to read, whatever else it makes you.

2. It turns out that historical personages from non-European countries do not always think that Europe is the be-all and end-all. So having your non-European protag go on, in the first person, about what awesome things are happening in Europe in their time period--things that will be Sir Not Appearing In This Book--is not really very realistic. Or interesting, given that history happened elsewhere also.

3. Stop wibbling! If it might have happened this way and it might have happened that, do something meta with it, but don't just drone on about how you're not really sure. You're the writer. Be sure.

4. Stop wibbling! If your character spends the first five pages whining about how she can't make up her mind and doesn't know what she wants, the reader may decide she doesn't care if the character gets what she wants, or what's coming to her, or a bright blue lollipop with a bow on.

5. When you are already describing demons, layering adjectives and metaphors to tell us how really truly darkly demonic these demons are will not intensify my sense of forboding. I will not think, "Oh no! I had hoped that our heroine might be menaced by a dim demon from the shallow pits of hell! Not a midnight black darkety dark one from the deepest pits of hell dark dark scary ooh!"

6. If your protag is a jerk, they had better be an interesting jerk fast. I don't have to like all the protags. I do have to want to know what happens or care about another character or something enough to overcome the "wow, this person's a jerk" reaction. This can happen. You just have to work for it.

6b. All right, your protag is a lovable loser. You forgot the lovable part. Done now.

7. Suspension of disbelief has its limits. "But that's impossible," can be overcome much more easily than, "But that's stupid."

8. Kids These Days will at some point be the right age of people to read your book. Heaping scorn upon them for not having the totally wise and awesome generational conventions of your generation is not going to make them adore you. In fact, very few things date a book faster than the certainty that the current generation of young people is wrong about everything.

9. I know the temptation of Gratuitous Capitalization. I do. But resist. Seriously.

10. I can do without a plot. What I can't do is do without a plot when you've got a plot. If your plot is, "And there was totally obvious innnnnncesssssst"? You fail.

Wait, I didn't quit reading that one. I'm looking at you, Antonia Susan. Your novella is bad and you should feel bad. Sheesh.

Comments

[athenais.livejournal.com]

Number 7, so much!

[brooksmoses]

Yes, exactly. Though I've rarely seen it said quite so pithily in quite so few words!

[biguglymandoll.livejournal.com]

Yes, I thought that too!!!

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

If that last one is the first half of Angels and Insects, no, that wasn't the plot, I can turn on my Critical Exegesis Of What Is Going On There Really if you would like, I promise it wasn't as dumb as it looked.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The other half of the plot did not strike me as significantly less dumb, though. I kind of suspect I will still hate it when you're done explaining, but go ahead if you like.

this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[rushthatspeaks.livejournal.com]

The incest is obvious because it's meant to be obvious. The thing I liked was at the end, where the two of them left headed for the Amazon, because that's when I realized that the governess is the subsidiary ant queen who's headed out on a mating flight-- the viewpoint character's wife is the principal queen, so of course she's unable to accept a male who isn't from her nest. The viewpoint guy is the new ant who looks enough like one of the colony not to be killed on sight, but who will never truly be accepted. And of course the colony is the institution of the aristocratic family. This also gets explained in the fairy tale insert, which basically has the entire thing recast as yet another set of metaphors, including the incest.

The reason I like the story is that this was subtle enough not to beat me over the head until the final scene, when the two of them left, and then their entire future as a couple spooled out in my head, inexorably coming from the suddenly realized metaphor, and I was impressed by that. Because the governess is the New Woman, the first-wave feminism in action, and we know from the studies of ants that the new queen usually survives to lay eggs, even if the males she takes with her don't. And so the governess will make it, though the guy will almost certainly die of yellow fever or something, but nothing can stop her now, because she's learned that she can make a living from her writing and go where she wants.

She's the protagonist, it's the story of her liberation, but the viewpoint character, blinded by the Way Things Have Always Worked, almost completely misses it. That's why he's a male ant, without real agency: he wants to buy into Things As They Are, just to have it work for him so that he comes out on top. But that order, aristocracy/the semblance of patriarchy, is inherently incapable of letting human beings be any more than insects. The protagonist is, at least, an insect with agency that she makes herself.

I don't necessarily agree with Byatt's view of aristocracy and patriarchy as systems reinforced and maintained entirely by women, but I do like the portrait of the way this stuff hurts everybody, the way the system dupes people. And I like the protagonist's escape, and I really love the fairy tale, which, seriously, it's all in there in a gorgeous set of encoded symbols.

But yeah, by the time the viewpoint character found out about the incest I... was kind of surprised he ever actually found out; I thought he might not be allowed the space for moral outrage, that he would simply wind up tossed out. I thought Byatt had been assuming the reader picked up on it about a third of the way through, but when I read critical reactions to the novella, they all treat the incest as the plot revelation, which no.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[apis-mellifera.livejournal.com]

It's been at least 15 years since I've read that novella and now I totally want to read it again.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Oh yes. Of course she's the protagonist. From the time she appears on stage, it is clear that she is the New Woman and will have her intellectual liberation and prevail, and that for this to happen we will have everything about the Old Woman directly contradicted not just from the hero's assumptions but from the earlier characterization she has received. Even though the careful mounting and assiduous attention to correct flora in Old Woman's previous decorative efforts are likely to have taken too long for her to be feigning them to trap Our Hero, she nevertheless completely gives up all intellectual pursuits upon marriage, to the point where one might easily believe she had never had them, even though they were perfectly decorous and in line with the Old Style for her to have had. We are to forget them as completely as if they had never existed.

And why do we know this from the very start? Because of her body type and that of the New Woman. Secondarily from her position in life and that of the New Woman, but really. The more like my own body the description, the less possible it is for a woman ever to have any intellectual agency or pursuits, and the more likely she is simply rotten to the core. Girls with curves never get to be the New Woman. I don't at this point care whether it's because Byatt has selected a Very Very Special Ant Metaphor in which the curves are the same as the bloated old queen, because she's doing the same damn thing as everyone who hasn't bothered with the metaphor. Any time there is a choice between a curvy woman and one who is more "spare" or "elegant" or just plain less curvy, the curvy one will wind up evil, dead, or both, and a good thing, too, because we can't have her sort running around getting a handle on good men who might blossom with an intellectual equal for a partner. Every girl chooses consciously and with full control at puberty, you know, brains or breasts, and so the ones who have breasts have only themselves to blame when other people realize they need to be evil or dead.

The only things that surprised me in this story were when Byatt didn't bother to explain away Eugenia's previous illustrations with her father's collection and when Eugenia didn't have conflict with her mother and need to go create a new nest, since multiple queens in the same nest can get pretty iffy pretty fast, and nobody seemed to be abandoning or neglecting the old queen once the new one started breeding. I mean, not only was Eugenia curvy, she was eager for sex! Which is always a bad sign in a woman. Means they're not only bad but probably up to something.

Also it was extremely important for Our Hero to rescue the servant girl, who was scrawny and curveless and therefore innocent, but the other little girls who were growing up in the same house as a brother who had shown no signs of taking no for an answer and who had shtupped a sister before? Eh, whatever, they look like their sister, so they probably suck also. Leave 'em to rot. Neither Our Hero nor the New Woman who has spent a great deal of her time caring for these children should have a moment's concern about them.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Any time there is a choice between a curvy woman and one who is more "spare" or "elegant" or just plain less curvy, the curvy one will wind up evil, dead, or both, and a good thing, too, because we can't have her sort running around getting a handle on good men who might blossom with an intellectual equal for a partner.

There might be a strange genre-based correlation going on here, because I can think of a number of books in which the curvy woman is good and smart and gets the guy - and the ones that came to mind are all mysteries.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

For the love of Pete send me titles. I am so tired of this I could scream.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody series (Egyptologists; the series now stretches from Victorian times into WWI). There's also her VIcky Bliss series, whose heroine has a completely *different* sort of curviness than Peabody's. That is, Amelia Peabody is short (um, I have a vague memory that she's tall in the first book and suddenly short in later ones) and large of bust and hip, whereas Vicky Bliss has more of a statuesque pin-up's shape. Peabody is self-educated (later books do mention college's becoming open to women); Vicky is set in more modern times and has a PhD in history, or maybe it's art history.
Nancy Atherton's Aunt Dimity and the Duke, which is the first of the Aunt Dimity series chronologically, but is sort of tangential to the rest of the series. (Cozy mysteries. The first two are decent but after that it's annoyingly repetitive.)
Melissa Bourbon's Pleating for Mercy: A Dressmaker's Mystery (Harlow Cassidy, descendent of Butch Cassidy, opens a dressmaker shop in her TX hometown. )

In the first two, the curvy woman is the protag, so it's no great surprise when she has brains etc. In the third, the protag's figure isn't really mentioned, and the curvy and angular women are secondary characters.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed the first Aunt Dimity book, but then I discovered Steven Brust and forgot to read anything else for a while. At this point I don't remember much about it beyond "pleasant fluff for when you have a cold."

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[dichroic.livejournal.com]

Both the Aunt Dimity books and the Dressmaker mystery would quality as pleasant fluff. (Not nec. a bad thing; there are a ton of mystery series out there these days that are worse than that - it was mysteries that convinced me of exactly *why* telling instead of showing is a bad thing. For some reason the genre seems particularly prone to that failing. These at least don't do that.) Aunt Dimity is a bit unusual in having two "first" books: Aunt Dimity is Dead, which is the true start of the series (and most likely the one you read) and Aunt Dimity and the Duke, which happens earlier to someone who is a secondary character in the rest of the books, and IMO is the best of the series. I'd particularly recommend it to people who like gardening (as well as women with hips.)

The two series by Elizabeth Peters are better than fluff, though I tend to think that at 18 books in, the Amelia Peabody one has gone on a bit too long.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[txanne.livejournal.com]

I read one of the later Peabody books and wasn't grabbed--perhaps I'll try an early one.

I'm very fond of fluff, when I'm in the mood for it, and it's not Aunt Dimity's fault that Vlad and Loiosh distracted me.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

The other exception, of course, is the kind of writer who is like Robert Heinlein, whose answer to "curvy girl or linear girl for your hero?" is "Why not both!"

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

This is a terrible thing for me to have in my head. I haven't even gotten my booklog spreadsheet filled out, and suddenly I have this ambition to catalog female body types. Except I almost never remember them-- I am the least describey person ever. I'll keep an eye out for female characters described as curvy and try to remember to send the good ones on.

Re: this is of course wildly spoilery for those who haven't read it

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It's not just the curvy ones I mean here, although it's nice to have a variety of body types in characters. It's the curvy ones when they are explicitly contrasted with someone thin and linear. That's when I know how it's going to go.

[rosefox]

#7 is the perfect length for tweeting (with attribution to "M. Lingen") and has thus been tweeted. Because it is GENIUS.

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

"a midnight black darkety dark one from the deepest pits of hell dark dark scary ooh!"

...in the gloaming dankety-dank of the brackish marshy moors of the derry-oh

[pipes] [fiddle]

[autopope.livejournal.com]

Something about your #4 rang hollow for me at first.

Then I worked it out: you're describing a frame around an action novel in which $PROTAG is either drawn to do things, or driven by events, but is in any event never directionless.

Whereas if the story is about how $PROTAG finds their direction (or the horrible hopeless realization that there is not and never will be a purpose to their life) then, well, you just put the book down for the wrong reason.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"Protagonist finds direction or lack of same" is a perfectly reasonable book. "Stupid annoying wibbly whiner finds direction or lack of same" is a great deal harder sell for me. But in any case you're right, it was a frame where a great many things will happen, but none of them is anybody finding direction, and we just had to get through the wibbling and whining first.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

In re your 2, one trope that has always irritated me is "we have an immortal or bunch of immortals who have lived all down through history all over the Old World who of course all move to the New World as soon as it is discovered because it's just inherently cooler, even when this requires flaily thrashing around to come up with a half-way plausible motivation for the character at the time", particularly in The Boat of a Million Years (I contend that the specific page in that book at which the Brain Eater got Poul Anderson can be determined) though there are other examples that seem to me to tend that way, such as Wild Seed.

At some point, somewhere, I want to do an immortal Native American who has been there for ten thousand years whose response to being "discovered" by the rest of the world is to go explore it because it is full of interestingly different things, and who ends up settling somewhere else entirely because of finding a culture more to his taste.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

"I am a Lakota who thinks that Korea is just awesome" would be pretty cool, yes. I see why historically it was much easier to go the other direction as a random peasant, and I see how the Native American folks kind of got squashed down to "random peasant equivalent" or worse, again historically speaking. But the sort of story with an immortal in it generally has the immortals having resources, and yet they never seem to use them for that in this type of fiction. Funny thing.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I have just noticed, also, that the Old World immortals who go rushing off to look at the New World never actually care much about the Native American/First Nations societies they discover there. We do not, for example, have the horrified first-person account of an immortal from France discovering that the Iroquois have a lot of interesting ideas and social norms, and then watching in horror as they die of disease and war and like that. I mean, it would be greatly depressing. But I would also think it would be part of the immortal experience: "Oh, here are some interesting and congenial OH SHIT."

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

Especially since immortal women are always understandably annoyed at the hideous sexism of European cultures at the time. Plenty of mortal women ended up running off to join native groups for that reason, and it would make, if anything, more sense for an immortal who was used to cultural shifts.

[redbird]

It's been a while, but I recall Wild Seed as having in-book plausible motivations for the move, that at that time North America is less crowded than Africa (this being after many of the First Nations people were killed by war and disease, though I don't remember whether that's mentioned). The author had other reasons for setting much of the story in what became the U.S., I think, but I also think she made it work. (And I may be feeling in a good enough mood to go reread some Octavia Butler now.)

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I would absolutely read that.