It hasn't been all tea and chocolate here at the house of sniffles this past week. I also read a bunch of books, including two not very good books. Usually I don't bother to finish bad books, but this time I decided to take them as "how not to write" lessons. And one of them I didn't finish after Oz said, "Oh yeah. That guy is all build up. It takes forever to get where he's going and then you wonder why you bothered."
It should tell you something that the book I picked up afterwards as a palate cleanser was a Stephanie Plum novel, which by contrast seemed really well written.
Lesson #1: Show-don't-tell or Tell-don't-show, but for God's sake, don't Show AND Tell the same thing in the same paragraph!
This was the reason why the book I didn't finish took forever to get anywhere. Every paragraph of exposition had a couple bland sentences of Telling and then a few not bad sentences of Showing what was just Told. I wanted to send the author a pack of red pens and a strongly worded note about using them. A good bloodletting would have been murder on the word count, however, leaving the author with a novella which would have been harder to sell. This was a debut novel from someone who'd been writing short stories. Tough transition to the new form? Egregious padding? Bored reader.
Lesson learned: My red pens are my friends.
Lesson #2: Let's cut the "um" crap already!
In the other bad book, the story was told mostly through dialogue. This does not always make for a bad story, but requires that the author clearly differentiate character voices, keep the attributions clear yet not intrusive, and avoid repetition, especially repetitious speech quirks. Like, uh, you know what I mean?
One of the recent trends in the writing of dialogue is to make it more realistic by including non-verbal vocalizations: um, ah, er. The um is the one I hate the most, but the er is a close second. Ah doesn't bother me as much.
These vocalizations are annoying because they are crutches which a writer uses instead of writing words. Consider, there are two basic ums, the um of snottiness, as described in the TWoP forum guidelines, and the um of hesitation. While literature has been peopled for centuries with snotty and hesitant characters, they've only recently started to say "um" all the damn time. For the past few hundred years, the hesitant characters have been pausing, hesitating, clearing their throats, fidgeting around and looking out the window. They have occasionally emitted the odd " . " The snotty characters have been snotty with words.
Lesson learned: I already avoided um. I just hate it more now.
Other lessons:
Throwing in a couple random drag queens does not a screwball comedy make.
A scene written mostly in dialogue, in which ten characters sit around talking and interrupting each other, is incoherent. If you have one long speech, which communicates something important to the reader, don't interrupt it with ten interjections which add nothing (though they do pad out your line count nicely).
Sometimes bad books get great cover art.
536 words | February 12, 2006 05:06 PM | Writer's block