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Feb. 6th, 2022 07:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rainwatersparkI previously went on a bit of a rant about how to take critique on your manuscript, based on a prior experience I had with a critique group, but I wanted to go into a bit more detail on that experience and what I might do in a future critique group.
To sum up what happened again: We ended up reading a member's 100k+ word fantasy novel, which I had serious problems with, and the more time I had to spend reading it, the more impatient and blunt I became with my critique, because the novel was seriously flawed on every possible level and I was sick of reading it. Which obviously led to some...Bad Feelings in the group.
I was too polite to voice the fundamental problem I had with the novel, which was:
I didn't know what the author's intention for it was.
And because I didn't know what the purpose/intention for the novel was, it was impossible to explain why it was failing on a structural level (at least, not without sounding really mean).
Here's the thing: In a commercial genre, you always know—very clearly—what the author's intention for the book is. (I mean, unless the author completely failed to write a competent book.) A murder mystery requires a twisty, not-too-predictable, fast-paced murder investigation. A romance requires emotions and feelings and an investment in seeing the two main characters get together, romantically.
The thing with SFF is that those genres describe a setting, but not a plot. A fantasy novel can have any kind of plot—a mystery plot, a political intrigue plot, a military epic, etc.
But the author needs to decide on what kind of plot their SFF book is going to have, and communicate that to the reader.
The author in my critique group, quite honestly, didn't seem to know what their plot was, other than the fact that they wanted not to follow any kind of trope. So the character who was being built up as a the Big Bad got killed off only a few chapters in, and a different character was supposed to be the antagonist.
The thing is, tropes exist for a reason. Reader expectations are an important thing to keep in mind, not just something you can completely subvert because you think it will be a brilliant reversal. When a reader's genre expectations are broken, oftentimes, readers react with unhappiness instead of awe at the author's brilliance. No romance reader wants to read a romance where one of the main characters dies at the end, and no mystery reader wants to read a mystery where the murderer's identity remains unknown at the end.
(One example of successful trope subversion is Knives Out. I can't go into detail because that would entail spoiling the entire murder mystery, but something to take note of is that Knives Out subverts some expectations, but ultimately still fulfills the basic expectations of a murder mystery—i.e. it still reveals the murderer's identity to the audience. And while the subversion purposefully misleads the audience, the audience still always has an idea of where the story is going.)
If a reader doesn't know where a story is going, they're likely to put it down, not keep reading because they want to know what the plot actually is.
I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a page-turner. Books capture readers' attention not because readers have no idea what is going to happen, but because readers have an expectation of what will happen, except only in broad strokes, and they're eager to see how the author fills in those details.
Anyway...I was too polite to voice any of these fundamental concerns I had with this book. If I were more honest, I would have told the author outright, "I don't know what your intention is for this story and what you're trying to accomplish with it. Therefore, it's impossible to suggest how to make the story better when I don't know what you're fundamentally even trying to do. And if you don't know what you're trying to do with this book either, you might want to spend some time deciding why you wrote/are writing this and what your authorial vision for it is."
To sum up what happened again: We ended up reading a member's 100k+ word fantasy novel, which I had serious problems with, and the more time I had to spend reading it, the more impatient and blunt I became with my critique, because the novel was seriously flawed on every possible level and I was sick of reading it. Which obviously led to some...Bad Feelings in the group.
I was too polite to voice the fundamental problem I had with the novel, which was:
I didn't know what the author's intention for it was.
And because I didn't know what the purpose/intention for the novel was, it was impossible to explain why it was failing on a structural level (at least, not without sounding really mean).
Here's the thing: In a commercial genre, you always know—very clearly—what the author's intention for the book is. (I mean, unless the author completely failed to write a competent book.) A murder mystery requires a twisty, not-too-predictable, fast-paced murder investigation. A romance requires emotions and feelings and an investment in seeing the two main characters get together, romantically.
The thing with SFF is that those genres describe a setting, but not a plot. A fantasy novel can have any kind of plot—a mystery plot, a political intrigue plot, a military epic, etc.
But the author needs to decide on what kind of plot their SFF book is going to have, and communicate that to the reader.
The author in my critique group, quite honestly, didn't seem to know what their plot was, other than the fact that they wanted not to follow any kind of trope. So the character who was being built up as a the Big Bad got killed off only a few chapters in, and a different character was supposed to be the antagonist.
The thing is, tropes exist for a reason. Reader expectations are an important thing to keep in mind, not just something you can completely subvert because you think it will be a brilliant reversal. When a reader's genre expectations are broken, oftentimes, readers react with unhappiness instead of awe at the author's brilliance. No romance reader wants to read a romance where one of the main characters dies at the end, and no mystery reader wants to read a mystery where the murderer's identity remains unknown at the end.
(One example of successful trope subversion is Knives Out. I can't go into detail because that would entail spoiling the entire murder mystery, but something to take note of is that Knives Out subverts some expectations, but ultimately still fulfills the basic expectations of a murder mystery—i.e. it still reveals the murderer's identity to the audience. And while the subversion purposefully misleads the audience, the audience still always has an idea of where the story is going.)
If a reader doesn't know where a story is going, they're likely to put it down, not keep reading because they want to know what the plot actually is.
I think this is the fundamental misunderstanding of what makes a page-turner. Books capture readers' attention not because readers have no idea what is going to happen, but because readers have an expectation of what will happen, except only in broad strokes, and they're eager to see how the author fills in those details.
Anyway...I was too polite to voice any of these fundamental concerns I had with this book. If I were more honest, I would have told the author outright, "I don't know what your intention is for this story and what you're trying to accomplish with it. Therefore, it's impossible to suggest how to make the story better when I don't know what you're fundamentally even trying to do. And if you don't know what you're trying to do with this book either, you might want to spend some time deciding why you wrote/are writing this and what your authorial vision for it is."
