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I think my standards have risen...
I'm entertaining myself (still at work, yes) by cruising around publisher and author websites, reading excerpts from books and looking for new things to add to my growing, teetering piles of books. (One of these days, my reading pile will fall on me and I'll die in a tragic book-related accident.)
And I'm finding most of them practically unreadable. It's the prose, mainly -- the premise of the books sounds good, but the writing is clunky and plain and spells out everything in excrutiating detail. If these published novels were fanfics, I would have abandoned them in the first few paragraphs. The only thing that's enabling me to slog through some of these is mentally editing the prose into a sleeker, trimmer shape. (Also, the first one I ran into misspelled "tchotchke" in the first few paragraphs. I had to do a little Googling to remember how, exactly, it is spelled, but I knew it was wrong.)
This has been more and more of a problem for me over the last few years. I start reading books and have trouble fighting my way through the first few chapters. Once I get into the characters, I'm all right, but probably half the books I've started in the last couple of years have lost me in the beginning (temporarily or permanently) because of the quality of writing.
Hypothesis one: Maybe I'm just getting pickier. I've been doing a lot more writing lately and becoming more adept at ferreting out good from bad writing. And I don't think it's just my imagination that there are a lot of really, really skillful writers in SGA fandom. I've been reading fanfic for a long time, and I know that you always find a few gems even in the most barren fannish wastelands, but I've been completely blown away by the quality of the fic in this fandom. Being immersed in good writing all day long has to have had an effect.
Hypothesis two: I've simply been unlucky enough to run into a string of bad books. Or whole genres of bad books. What I'm poking at tonight is urban fantasy, a genre in which, despite my liking for it, I've always had a great deal of difficulty finding good books. Is this just me, or do other people experience this as well? I don't know if it's because it's mostly new/young writers, or lower editorial standards, or if it's more subjective than that -- something to do with the style that doesn't appeal to me, even though I love the concepts. In fact ...
Hypothesis three: It's not the quality of the writing, it's the style. Over the last couple of years, my fanfic-to-books ratio has been heavily skewed in the fanfic direction. Plus, the mix of fic is different: though it's definitely not the majority of my fanfic input, I've been reading more slash than was ever true of me before, and I don't think it's my imagination that slash has its own distinctive aesthetic. But I wonder if it goes beyond that -- if fanfic in general has a particular style, just like science fiction, on the whole, has a different style from romance. And maybe I've developed a disconnect between what I read, and thus what I expect to see on the page, and what publishing houses actually publish.
Or maybe it's simpler than that. The thing that's been bugging me most about a lot of published books I've read lately is how much they spell out for the reader: a character is introduced and the writer has to tell you about her. She travels to a new place -- cue infodump. I wonder if part of the problem is that I've been spoiled by the fact that in fanfic, the audience and the reader have a built-in frame of reference. It's like picking up the third or fourth book of a series -- the author doesn't have to tell you all about the characters and the world, but can simply immerse you in it without having to tell you about it. Once I get past the infodumps, I'm usually a lot better. Is it just that reading fanfic, where you start out on chapter 200 by default, has made infodumps jump off the page in a way that they never did before? Or, even more subjectively, is it that after reading so much fanfic, I subconsciously expect to start out with the same deep emotional connection to the characters that you have in fanfic, and get frustrated when it's not there, without realizing where the frustration is coming from?
I know it's not just that, because I've read a few books lately that have sucked me in from the very first page. (Octavia Butler's "Kindred" was one of those -- I really wish that "Parable of the Sower" hadn't been the first book of hers that I ever picked up, because it unjustifiably scared me off Butler for years.) But ... it seems like a book has to be much better than ever before, to keep me sticking with it.
Thoughts?
And I'm finding most of them practically unreadable. It's the prose, mainly -- the premise of the books sounds good, but the writing is clunky and plain and spells out everything in excrutiating detail. If these published novels were fanfics, I would have abandoned them in the first few paragraphs. The only thing that's enabling me to slog through some of these is mentally editing the prose into a sleeker, trimmer shape. (Also, the first one I ran into misspelled "tchotchke" in the first few paragraphs. I had to do a little Googling to remember how, exactly, it is spelled, but I knew it was wrong.)
This has been more and more of a problem for me over the last few years. I start reading books and have trouble fighting my way through the first few chapters. Once I get into the characters, I'm all right, but probably half the books I've started in the last couple of years have lost me in the beginning (temporarily or permanently) because of the quality of writing.
Hypothesis one: Maybe I'm just getting pickier. I've been doing a lot more writing lately and becoming more adept at ferreting out good from bad writing. And I don't think it's just my imagination that there are a lot of really, really skillful writers in SGA fandom. I've been reading fanfic for a long time, and I know that you always find a few gems even in the most barren fannish wastelands, but I've been completely blown away by the quality of the fic in this fandom. Being immersed in good writing all day long has to have had an effect.
Hypothesis two: I've simply been unlucky enough to run into a string of bad books. Or whole genres of bad books. What I'm poking at tonight is urban fantasy, a genre in which, despite my liking for it, I've always had a great deal of difficulty finding good books. Is this just me, or do other people experience this as well? I don't know if it's because it's mostly new/young writers, or lower editorial standards, or if it's more subjective than that -- something to do with the style that doesn't appeal to me, even though I love the concepts. In fact ...
Hypothesis three: It's not the quality of the writing, it's the style. Over the last couple of years, my fanfic-to-books ratio has been heavily skewed in the fanfic direction. Plus, the mix of fic is different: though it's definitely not the majority of my fanfic input, I've been reading more slash than was ever true of me before, and I don't think it's my imagination that slash has its own distinctive aesthetic. But I wonder if it goes beyond that -- if fanfic in general has a particular style, just like science fiction, on the whole, has a different style from romance. And maybe I've developed a disconnect between what I read, and thus what I expect to see on the page, and what publishing houses actually publish.
Or maybe it's simpler than that. The thing that's been bugging me most about a lot of published books I've read lately is how much they spell out for the reader: a character is introduced and the writer has to tell you about her. She travels to a new place -- cue infodump. I wonder if part of the problem is that I've been spoiled by the fact that in fanfic, the audience and the reader have a built-in frame of reference. It's like picking up the third or fourth book of a series -- the author doesn't have to tell you all about the characters and the world, but can simply immerse you in it without having to tell you about it. Once I get past the infodumps, I'm usually a lot better. Is it just that reading fanfic, where you start out on chapter 200 by default, has made infodumps jump off the page in a way that they never did before? Or, even more subjectively, is it that after reading so much fanfic, I subconsciously expect to start out with the same deep emotional connection to the characters that you have in fanfic, and get frustrated when it's not there, without realizing where the frustration is coming from?
I know it's not just that, because I've read a few books lately that have sucked me in from the very first page. (Octavia Butler's "Kindred" was one of those -- I really wish that "Parable of the Sower" hadn't been the first book of hers that I ever picked up, because it unjustifiably scared me off Butler for years.) But ... it seems like a book has to be much better than ever before, to keep me sticking with it.
Thoughts?
no subject
I've also noticed a trend that started in children's book sections a couple of years ago-- they are now being divided into the genres on the shelves when they used to be simply alphabetical by author. Seems like it coincided with the rise of the copycats--kid's books have to be in a genre now, and it's the genre that sells it rather than just being a good story. I don't know if that reflects on adult trends, because obviously those have been divided by genre forever, but I wonder if books are being published that are hot topics rather than solidly written. I do know that even a few of my favorite adult authors have had streaks of kinda poor titles lately (Charles DeLint, anyone?), but they sell anyway.
I've been getting into "magical realism" lately. Which is kind of a vague term, I suppose. Books like Carlos Ruis Zafon's "Book of the Wind," some stuff by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "Solar Storms" by Linda Hogan, and "Boy's Life" by Robert McCammon top my list. They're usually in the regular old literature section (though Boy's Life is, incorrectly IMO, placed in horror). They're sort of sci-fi without being sci-fi, youknow? Rather than aliens or fairies there's just a...er...magical realism to them. And I think because the author didn't sit down to write a sci-fi novel, he or she avoided many of the pitfalls and stereotypes that an author feels have to go into a sci-fi novel.
Ok, I'm only this long-winded because I worked in a book store for five years. With sci-fi (and mystery and romance, I suppose), the characters are so archetyped that, on the one hand, sometimes it feels like reading fanfic because I know the characters already by the time I'm done with the first chapter, but on the other hand, this gets frustrating and old pretty fast. When reading fanfic, I'm looking for characters I already know to do something new, or to learn something new about them. With sci-fi, I'm often introduced to an archetyped character I recognize right away, but then that character just goes on to do the usual expected things. Ho-hum.
I've also decided to start semi-randomly choosing titles from the gay, African American, history, spirituality, and other niche book store sections. It's been hit or miss so far, but I realized that the segregation of fiction onto these tucked away shelves meant that I was missing out on at least a third of the available titles.
no subject
And I think because the author didn't sit down to write a sci-fi novel, he or she avoided many of the pitfalls and stereotypes that an author feels have to go into a sci-fi novel.
Absolutely. I think this is one of the reasons why I like genre-bending fiction -- I love the results when authors step out of the box for a minute or two. Heck, even Stephen King -- who is unabashedly one of my favorite authors, and one of the reasons is because I really can't anticipate what he's going to do with each new novel. They might be shelved in horror, but the majority of them really aren't.
I've also decided to start semi-randomly choosing titles from the gay, African American, history, spirituality, and other niche book store sections.
Good plan! I do a fair amount of wandering around in the library -- where things *aren't* grouped by genre; it's just all fiction all the time -- and grabbing books that catch my eye. I've found some really awesome stuff that way (and some that's quite bad, of course). When I was a kid, the Alaska library system used to have a neat thing that you could sign up for, where the library would send a box of random books to your house once a month. (This was for people like my family who lived in rural places where we didn't have libraries.) You filled out a questionaire on what sort of books you liked, and you could request specific books if you wanted, but mostly it was just "grab bag surprise". I loved it! I found so many new authors that way.