For no particular reason I went and left reviews for multiple books out of a series that I've been reading, also for no particular reason.
Well, the reason for the latter is I'm still battling a bug and my brain can't handle serious history books this week. This series is your basic space opera, brain candy. It moves well enough and doesn't require much of the reader.
And it is also really poorly written. The reviews are almost perfectly split between very low and very high ratings but most of them have the same thing to say; that the story is fun, the characters engaging, there's a lot of imagination...and that there are numerous typographical and related errors. They aren't wrong...but that isn't the full story.
Between reviewing all the books I've read of this series so far (I don't know that even the brain candy will keep me at it), the edits I'm still at, and maybe the binge-watching of Crispy's Tavern (stories of table-top role playing game sessions gone bad), I am having some thoughts about this.
Let's take the negative reviews first. Most don't go beyond the spelling and punctuation. And, yeah, I have this idea that there is a particular kind of pedantic mind, one that carries this illusion that grammar is a simple set of universal rules and only the callous, careless, lazy or stupid go around breaking those rules. When I see someone hammering on just this one thing, I have to wonder if they even recognize that writing takes other skills as well, or if they believe that grammar is the one big hurdle and the rest is easy.
But leave that aside. A small number of reviewers -- and almost entirely in the negative column -- are addressing the other skills of story-telling. With detail and passion and this feels like the writing of, well, other writers. And I'm going to come back to that in a bit.
I also feel they are assigning low marks not as punishment, but as encouragement. Several of them addressed the author directly, asking them to please learn more about the craft.
A final note on the spelling et al; in the wording of the grammar-pedants, particularly, it is described as "several" errors. Perhaps their eyes are not as sharp as they think. When I put on my proof reading hat, I found some strange error in almost every single paragraph of one sample all the way out to page three. Some wrong words, not too many actual spelling errors, rather, various sorts of rather odd punctuation and capitalization:
"Sir, must I talk to,...those people."
Followed by,
"I know they can be rather frightening but You have done nothing wrong."
These are rather odd mistakes, to say the least. They seem less like errors in typing and more like the errors left during revisions or editing. But also the sort of thing that a grammar checker should catch. The thing they are not is misunderstandings of standards in grammar, spelling, or punctuation.
I think these are at best diagnostic of something...very possibly a broken process that leaves insufficient space for feedback, revision, and above all improvement. Given the number of different series the same author is putting out very nearly simultaneously, I'd say lack of time is quite likely.
But onwards. That small number of fellow writers who left reviews chose to dedicate their remarks to top-level problems in story-telling; pacing, world-building, the like.
These are certainly there. But let's start with some lower-level craft; craft like POV and tense. There are places where this author forgets he is writing in First Person. As in, during a first-person narrative, some of the narrator's actions are described in third person. Very odd.
There is a similar magnitude of error in tense, with present and past tenses sharing space in some paragraphs.
The problems with POV go well beyond pronoun trouble. When I am active on Quora, a very typical question is "Can I have third person bits in a first person story?" These are writers, it feels like, who have stumbled into the first challenge of First Person; the desire/need to show something that the first-person narrator can't have seen or shouldn't know.
The author of the series we are talking about...just does it anyhow. Without even a scene break to make it clear (sometimes not even a change of paragraph). This is head-hopping at its worst. (And what is particularly annoying is that this first-person protagonist is in mind-to-mind contact with a "magic volleyball" AI -- who could seamlessly flick our POV to a convenient camera and thus never lose the focus on our first-person protagonist.)
This is such a basic tool it is sort of appalling. POV is one of the tools to draw the reader in, to help them empathize. And a tool to shape their experience, to control the information they get. By the fifth book this is so out of control entire chapters are suddenly about some other group of characters completely, with our purported protagonist only showing up briefly at the end of it.
And, yes, tense is part of that. Control of tenses is also part of forging that connection between reader and character, erasing the distinction when desired or bringing the voice of the narrator forward when that is the choice of the moment.
The shaping of pacing and scene organization is missing. Missing so thoroughly I can only think the author does not realize it should be there. Location, mood, cast change without warning, sometimes in the middle of a paragraph. A tense moment will end with an off-page rescue. No cycle of tension and recovery. He speaks all his part at once, cues and all, as Peter Quince would say.
It makes the times when these things are present stand out by their unusualness. In book five there's a bit with a mercenary finding himself taking on the backwoods dialect of the pair of annoying recruits he got stuck with. It develops over multiple scenes and comes to a small but amusing resolution. There's even a bit where the narrative voice slips into it the cornpone dialect.
Which almost stopped me dead. This is the author who apparently couldn't stay consistently in the same person with one character alone in a room...but now he understands Free Indirect Speech?
But even that is not the purpose of this essay.
***
The positive reviews. I will give them this; they aren't rubber-stamp. They aren't the kind of reviews popular fan fiction gets (generally an incoherent gush). These are often thoughtful and specific. They liked these aspects of the character, the situation, the story-telling.
And I guess I do, too. Which is after all why I come to fanfic. People misunderstand fanfic; they think because the writers are playing in another creator's universe, the imagination is lacking, the characters trite, the situation nothing that hasn't been seen before. It is almost the opposite; the major flaw of fan fiction is poor writing skills, but the character, situation, conceptions, and world-building shine with imagination and originality.
And that's what this is. What is working in these stories is in spite of the writing.
Or is it? Any writer knows that what the reader gets is different from what is actually on the page. A description in a book isn't a police blotter (usually!) It is a sketch, an Impressionist dash of paint into which the reader projects a cloud, a sailboat, a flower, a face. This is the power of writing; that this lively and detailed world is being visualized by the reader, drawing from their own experiences.
From these positive reviews, the readers are finding character and world-building and story, character development and emotional arc, tension and success...but all in the spaces between, as it were. Read into a text that doesn't, at least according to the usual analysis, contain them. Somehow they are finding a tiger in the pattern of the leaves, and that tiger is glorious to them.
So are we writers wrong? Does the reader bring so much to the experience we are fooling ourselves with all our work to put those character beats in and plan our scenes and otherwise shape the experience? It is more powerful the face they think they see in the shadows than the intentional and skilled brush strokes of a Monet or a Renoir? (Or at least the crude, forceful lines of a Kirby?)
To me, while I am enjoying this story, I am not enjoying it as fully as most of the other books I chose to read. I do like this character and these situations but I wish I could grasp them more clearly. For me, this is a world glimpsed through a shower curtain. It could be glorious, but I'm not really seeing anything but blur.
Are we writers fooling ourselves? The magic is working; we're all seeing that engaging character and that fun story. Or, perhaps, we are seeing the potential. These are the longest reviews I saw, and here I am, writing even more. Because we care about story and we believe in the craft and we want to help this author do better because we want to read it, dammit!
Then there is the theory that some people don't realize there is better. Thing is, many of these positive reviewers show signs of being experienced readers. They've read other books, and some of them even name-drop books by people who know what they are doing, books that have all these things our author in question either hasn't learned how to do yet, or doesn't even realize he should be doing.
So I don't think my theory about the two worlds can still fly. That was the idea that some readers are following, as you do, from one book to another, from one series to another, by word of mouth, by the name of the author, by Amazon recommendations; all things that will tend to lead you towards books that are similar, and not just in subject. Books that share, bluntly, the same amateurism. Possibly in both senses of the word; books that may be less an act of craft, but there is certainly love.
I won't reject that insular circles are still possible. And that different readers have different needs and that Umberto Eco isn't for everyone (he's barely for me, half the time).
Or the idea that writers can start to write for writers. Another echo chamber. This happens with musicians; what they find challenging and interesting moves further and further from what the average listener is capable of following.
Writers and musicians are both conscious of this, of course. Musicians play the music they love with the friends who can appreciate it...and spend the rest of their time playing the music that pays the rent.
So I'm not prepared to completely give up the idea of parallel worlds. And not the idea of just one ghetto, where cliches seem fresh because there isn't enough experience in the readership to recognize them, and technical skills are downplayed because neither reader nor writer knows what they are leaving out.
But the idea of craft as a similar echo chamber. That all this attention on increasingly subtle and esoteric bits of narrative person and tense and the finicky details of where the punctuation goes when a shout is reported in a bland voice within a parenthesis aren't as important to story as we make them. One could construct the idea that the "Three R" emphasis, reduced to math-and-english taught only in ways that could be put to a fill-in-the-circle standardized test, has infected a generation. Editors making themselves useful, disgruntled readers making their voices heard, and now software manufacturers seeing a new market opening up are elevating "did you put the comma in the right place?" as a huge money-making engine and a cheap and easy social currency for people on all sides of the writing table to show off.
That this in short has become a goal in itself. And out there in the self-publishing arena, the electronic books that can be delivered straight-to-reader like burgers being delivered to Wimpy, some of this is being recognized as fat that can be trimmed to increase the profit margins. I see typographical errors in published books and magazines, now more than ever (and despite computer-aided editing). I also see poor stitches and poor welds in consumer products. Like it or not, fiction is a consumer product.
Well. In this particular case, for these books and these authors, this is riding a wave that may go away. There is a juncture of various things -- such as Amazon's advertising system, which is truly biased towards the fifteen minutes of fame -- that make shoddy books written fast a viable strategy. The question is, as always, one of trade-offs. And it seems that, perhaps, with overall readership going down and much of the reading done by younger readers not in the form of literature but in chats and posts and game dialogue and news feeds and texts, that there is a smaller and small audience who recognizes the craft that should be there.
Because my bottom line becomes, oddly, the same as those grammarians. I don't think it is easy. I think craft -- and grammar! -- is hard. But I still think it is worth it. It makes for a better story. Some grammar is pedantic but even that can be a stumbling-block in the smooth flow of comprehension. And the rest of craft is a way of delivering a deeper, more immersive, richer, more emotional experience.
