I love Kindle Unlimited, and i've found some stellar authors while scouring through the KU library. I've also found books that are the literal dregs of their genres. if the premise is promising enough i'll read the bad stuff anyways, if for no other reason than to say "oh yeah, i can definitely do better than this." I also do it because i tend to find lessons in writing a lot more easy to spot and understand when i can see errors in practice. for example, right now i'm reading a book that has a terrible habit of using too much exposition. Two characters having a conversation? better include inane commentary about the structural integrity of the house they're in. just finished an action scene? time to make the MC think on it way too much and rehash it for the reader three times over. characters on a journey? here comes a hour-by-hour explanation of every little thing they do, think, and experience, down to the flavor of their jerky. reading from a clinical perspective, it's amazing how obvious it is that unnecessary content can take you right out of the story. i don't know that i would have learned this lesson quite so fully if it were just a lesson in some writer's handbook, though. What about you? What lessons have you learned from reading a bad book (or even a good book with a few problems)?
My lesson is that for every bad thing I notice in someone else's book, there is probably one that I have overlooked in my own writing.
Dispassionate error-spotting betas. I've read three self-published (two Kindle, one in a proper, glossy novel cover, decent art and all format) books that had obviously not been professionally edited, let alone betaed. I'm talking about misspelling "samurai" as "Samaria", or having ships that accelerated so fast that "any living matter in them would have been torn to pieces", followed on the same page with the statement that they were controlled by human brains that had been surgically wired in level errors. One book I read. Had so many sentence fragments. That I wondered. If the writer was a native speaker. Or a robot. You need someone to go through and find the basic mistakes, especially SPAG. I make them, from time to time, and I'm allegedly an English teacher. Your story may be brilliant, your plot may be amazing, but if the actual sentences hurt to read, very few people are going stick around long enough to find out.
What's worse then picking up a book by an unknown writer, and finding it sucks... is using my monthly credit at audible.com and listening to a 31 hour audiobook by a 'name' writer. Last year I listened to Neal Stephenson's, Seveneves. Oh my god, what a fucking abortion of a book! A rough guess, out of that 31 hours-- about 13 or 14 hours is unapologetic, exhausting exposition. Exposition should be something the reader slips in and out of without noticing, not entire chapters that are devoid of dialogue, interaction, action, nuance, the stuff of life! I'm also tired of exposition relating to the main character the story follows without regard to familiarity. If a character is in her bedroom, presumably a place she frequents often, she will take no notice of the color of walls, the number of tassels on a pillow, or the floral pattern on her bedspread! If she's entering a palace for the first time, well then go at it, let loose the dogs of exposition! So yes, these days I read with a more critical eye. I'm currently reading, Mysteries of Winterthurn, by Joyce Carol Oates. Bloody hell, can this lady ever write! I now appreciate well written stories on a whole different level. If I devoted a decade to becoming a better writer, I would still fall well short of Joyce... but I will never write a story as bad as Seveneves!
I read one that I really wanted to like, but I just couldn't do it anymore after dialogue exchanges like this one: " 'Arbor Lake.' Crystal said. 'It's where everyone our age goes for fun. And school starts back Monday so I'm sure nearly the whole school will be there.' Luke's eyes lit up. 'Will, uh, will there be girls there?' Crystal giggled. 'Of course, and I'm sure they'll all be quite interested to talk to the new prince.' 'Who's that?' Luke asked. 'Er...you," Crystal said. 'Oh. Right. Then what are we waiting for?' " It was about these high school aged twins who were uprooted from their entire lives (after their parents were MURDERED, mind you) and they discovered they were really royal elves from a magical underworld realm and their reaction is simply, "Whoa, way cool, let's live here now and check out all the HOT ELVES, WOO!" It had all the cookie cutter characters, too. Very unoriginal. So lesson learned from that is make sure your dialogue is more interesting than what you can overhear in a high school cafeteria. And for crying out loud, make your characters original.
No joke. I feel like reading poorly written books has given me a whole new perspective. Moving back to a quality book makes the difference so much more noticeable, too. The quality story elements and subtleties become a bit shinier and easier to appreciate. I feel like I can step back from my own material more easily now, too.
I have been working on a shorts comp. that is well written, but the characters are bland and forgettable. Suppose the author is truly detached from them and doesn't know or doesn't care. Though the worst books I have read have been Romance and Erotica/BDSM. The former from the unrealistic ideologies and standards, along with a female lead that is basically there to move the plot contrivances forward. And the latter for it thinking that BDSM means that all men are evil sadistic jerks, and women are simply torture slaves for the men and have no real humanity.
When I read I don't analyze why it bores me. I'm more of a passive reader. I can say that mistakes in initial description/ cover art really bother me though. When I read about a story being one way in the description, and that becomes a minor point in the book, I want to slap the reader with a hard-cover complete 14 book set of The Wheel of Time. Also... when the cover art is bad and doesn't match the description in some way, I am not as interested in the book. So I tend to think about the description and cover art I would want on my novel if I self-publish.
One lesson I got recently is 'maintain your hooks'. When I think about it, there are several books that I lost interest in some way in that weren't bad books, perse - they were even very successful or famous. An example - I started reading Game Of Thrones, and the prologue really hooked me with its exotic and vivid scene-setting. I love a strong, tangible fantasy world. But then a few chapters in it moves away from adventure and world building to political intrigue and drama, which is all well and good, but it's not what the prologue promised me. It wasn't my hook. Sure, it's a successful book, but you got to write what you enjoy, right? So I'm taking that lesson right there. Similar was C J Sansom's Sovereign - it reeled me in with visceral historical scene setting and atmosphere building, but failed to maintain that hook. Both high-profile books, but niggles that turned me away.
I've learned that if I want readers to finish and love my book, I had better put some emotion into it. I recently finished a book I had started many months ago, and nearly the entire time I spent reading it I was just looking forward to learning how it ended. I don't know exactly why I had almost no investment in the characters--I liked the MC's personality well enough, but I just couldn't get into it emotionally. I think it was written with the intention of being in close third POV, but it was actually in third limited with some close third and perhaps a bit of omniscient. If I'm right, I wonder how different it would've been had the author accurately written the book in a solid POV. Yes, yes, yes! I hate it when a book description doesn't match what the book's really about. I mean, I bought/read the book based on that description, for pity's sake! I admit that I experience this most often when I'm watching a movie of TV show, but in books it's even worse because I'm spending a lot more time on them (and I'm a slow reader). It also irritates me when the cover art shows a picture of the MC (or other character) that looks different than how they're described in the book. Many books I've read with a picture of a character on the cover had the hair and/or eye color off and sometimes other attributes as well. As silly as it sounds, that drives me crazy. I'm not a very artistic person, so the cover can really help me picture things.
yessss. honestly, i dislike when characters are pictured on covers in general. i like allowing my mind to paint a picture with what's on the page, and more often than not the character(s) on the cover are never what I had in mind.
I've read books with very selfish main characters. I can not stand these kinds of books. Everything revolves around them and they become aggressive quickly. I prefer my main character to reflect on those around them and participate in others lives.
Interesting. I can often enjoy a book with a selfish MC, especially if it's first or close third, because it allows me to temporarily get into that headspace. I've found, however, that things like that adapt very poorly to movies because the screen converts the perverse enjoyment of being an asshole back to the all-too-familiar experience of watching someone be an asshole.
Why is the fictional novel written by the MC, usually more interesting than the story your currently reading? Honestly it can be either meta or just a weird irony in and of itself. Clearly if you can write a better, much more interesting story than the one it is written in. For the love of all that is good, write that other story instead or in addition to the one that it is in. Cause it really speaks to your ability to write better fiction, inside of your bloody fictional novel! I feel cheated, because there is a better story I could be reading, but unfortunately like a damned striptease it never goes beyond that point!
Because we're only reading a summary of the story-within-a-story. You look at any Twitter-length pitch in the Writing Prompts forum, you'll wonder why people are writing other stories instead of those. The reason why "Cancelled Too Soon" series like Star Trek: TOS, Firefly, Freaks and Geeks, and Forever are remembered so fondly is that they never had the chance to go downhill (Dexter, Castle, Lost)
@Simpson17866 Sad thing is the fake story has nothing to do with the real story, in some cases. But I get what you're saying.
