I almost never watch television. When I do, it's a cable news channel and I listen more than watch. I'm also almost always doing something in addition to listening to the program. Sometimes I'm reading or writing a blog post or editing photos for my Etsy shop or sewing or making jewelry. The idea of sitting and watching television and doing nothing else is almost beyond my comprehension.
Movies are the same. I don't "go to the movies." That's a concept even more outrageous to me than watching television. To sit in the dark and do nothing but passively watch other people doing things on the screen, and be surrounded by a bunch of strangers? Nope, it's just not for me.
Reading is different. Reading requires me to participate in creating the action. There are words on the page, but there are no sights, no sounds, no hot or cold or windy or rainy. No smell of freshly baked bread or new-mown hay or exotic perfume. My brain has to supply all those things; I have to complete what the author has begun. Ours is a collaboration, or at least it should be.
Tonight I tried to read one of the many (hundreds?) of free Kindle books I've recently acquired. This was a boxed set of four "cozy mysteries" packaged under the title Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery 4-Book Bundle by Deany Ray. The copyright date is 2016, but there's no other publication information in the books' front matter nor on the Amazon listing. I'm going to assume, safely or not, that Deany Ray publishes her own books.
Whether or not she has an editor of any kind is questionable.
I will at least credit Deany with making the first of the four books look like a real book. Paragraphs are indented without extra spaces between them.
Beyond that, I don't have much good to say about the eight pages I was able to read before giving up. My eye muscles can't take that much rolling.
After reading those eight pages, then reading them again two more times, I couldn't make much sense of the story, but I did get a sense of how someone could write something like that. I've seen this before many times over the years and I've tried to explain to the writers what's wrong with it, but I never understood why they didn't get it. I think now, finally, I do.
They are writers who don't read, or if they do, they watch more television and/or movies than they read -- and they've been doing it longer.
The bottom line is that they don't know how to read. They see the words, they know what the words mean, but they don't know how to convert those words into mental images and sensations, into tastes and smells and textures. Therefore, when they write, they just put down words that don't -- that can't -- create the experience a reader wants.
Let me explain. Or at least try to.
This is the opening paragraph from Barbara Bretton's 1986 contemporary romance The Edge of Forever. I have never read it, though I have the digital edition on my Kindle.
Joe Alessio stood on the top step of St. John's Episcopal, poised for escape. All around him, New England was ablaze with color, the great rush of splendor before the winterkill. It would be easy to pretend he was a tourist, come to northern New Hampshire for a little leaf-peeping R&R, but the heavy wooden doors of the old church weren’t thick enough to keep the minister's words from spilling out and bringing reality with them.
“. . . so I tell you that Anna Kennedy isn’t really gone . . . “
Bretton, Barbara. The Edge of Forever: A Classic Romance - Book 4 . Free Spirit Press. Kindle Edition.
Here's what Ms. Bretton -- whom I met a couple times at RWA conferences more than 20 years ago and that's about it -- has shown the reader already.
Joe Alessio is standing outside a church and he doesn't want to be there. He wants to escape. It's autumn and the trees of New England are changing color. Joe lives here or at least he used to, because he's not a tourist. Whoever Anna Kennedy is, or was, the reality of her death is something Joe would like to be able to deny but can't.
A reader who is accustomed to reading doesn't even think about this; it's taken for granted because that's the way readers read and the way writers write.
The reader is also brought into a situation that's fraught with emotion. There's been a death, and even before we get to the next paragraph, we already have a taste (pun intended) of Joe's feelings. Maybe he's glad that this Anna Kennedy is gone, but I don't think so. He wanted to escape, remember? That's probably a metaphor for wishing to escape the reality mentioned at the end of the paragraph.
As a reader, I'm already intrigued. Who is/was Anna Kennedy? What does Joe feel about her? Why didn't he go into the church, or why has he already left it while the minister is still speaking?
What's crucial here is that each sentence builds directly on what the previous sentences have started. The focus is on Joe Alessio, standing on the church steps but wanting to run, surrounded by New England autumn, hearing the minister's words that he doesn't want to hear.
It's very much like the opening scene of a movie, but the reader has to do the camera work. Tight in on Joe, then pulling back to show the church, then the trees in their fall foliage, finally the minister's voice.
This is showing, not telling.
Two paragraphs, no more.
Now let's look at the opening two paragraphs of Deany Ray's first book of the boxed set, A Sweet Chunk of Madness.
The sun blazed through my beige drapes as I opened my eyes and directed them to the alarm clock on my nightstand. Ten to seven. Ten more minutes of sleep until the alarm went off. Only I was so excited to bake the recipe of sour cream rhubarb coffee cake that I jumped out of bed, almost knocking the lamp on the nightstand.
After a quick shower and a quick look in the mirror, I put on my favorite pair of jeans and the light blue t-shirt I worked in and headed off into town.
Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.
At this point, the reader knows not even a fraction about what's going on that she knows after reading two paragraphs of the Bretton book. No setting, no emotion, no tension. We know the color of the drapes and the character's t-shirt. We don't even know what she sees in the mirror.
Am I being unfair? Why? Barbara Bretton did it; why should Deany Ray be held to a lower standard? Is it because the two books are in a different genre? Does Deany get a pass because her book is free?
Here's the next paragraph of Deany's book.
My name is Becky Chambers and I live in Ouna Bay. After my parents died in a car crash, I took on their pastry store-slash-coffee shop. Well, actually, my aunt and uncle took on the business since I was only five years old when the crash happened. When I was twenty, they moved to Florida and I continued to run the café, which came only natural to me, since I spent almost every free minute there.Besides the fact that this is rather lackluster writing style, the information doesn't show the reader anything. There's nothing in this paragraph to help the reader visualize the scene or any action. Why is it important that the reader know now, right away, on page one, that Becky's parents died in a car crash when she was five? Why is it important for the reader to know, right now, on page one, that Becky's aunt and uncle moved to Florida when she was twenty?
Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.
Where is Ouna Bay?
Why should I care?
I gave Deany Ray, Becky Chambers, and everyone in Ouna Bay eight full pages to hook me into the story. It never happened.
Deany Ray is telling me things, things bout Ouna Bay and about Becky and about her friend Rosalie, but there's no story happening. Not until page eight, when the newspaper vendor Dev informs Becky that some man asked for directions to her café, is there even a hint of anything the tiniest bit mysterious.
“Oh, before I forget. There was a man here earlier asking about your café,” Dev said.
That caught my attention and I looked up.
“A man asked about my café?”
Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 8). Kindle Edition.
If you're a reader who is accustomed to automatically creating the action of the story in your imagination, page eight is way too late. Remember how much drama Barbara Bretton was able to pack into her opening two paragraphs?
When I wrote in an earlier post about Christopher Vogler's book The Writer's Journey, I also mentioned an article published in the February 1982 edition of The Writer magazine. Written by Shelly Lowenkopf, "Creating a Rejection-Resistant Novel" explains what needs to go into a novel's first three pages to grab the reader's -- editor's, agent's -- attention. In today's publishing environment of free digital downloads. that applies to consumers as well.
"Start with important action," Lowenkopf advises. "Involve someone of consequence in an event of consequence or with a threat of significant impact."
Setting aside the measurement of just how much is "three pages," after eight pages of Deany Ray's book, nothing has happened. I know a few things about Becky -- her friend Rosalie is forgetful and Becky buys lots of magazines and someone is jealous of Becky's brownies -- but so what?
Deany Ray hasn't made me care what happens next. Maybe Becky is going to go through her day and nothing worse will befall her than she mismeasures the sugar for her cake.
I want more than that. I want a hint that there's going to be more, and I want it at the beginning, not somewhere after eight pages.
Maybe it's just me. Maybe I'm the same generation as Barbara Bretton, and we grew up reading books rather than watching television all day. Maybe the problem is ours. And that may very well be true, because books like Deany Ray's A Sweet Chunk of Madness seem to get a lot of five-star ratings on Goodreads and Amazon.
Here's the stats block as of 9 April 2021 from Goodreads:
The book has 140 ratings, of which 98 are five- and four-stars. Only four readers rated it one-star, and only one of them left a review.
Are all the other readers lying? I don't think so. What I do think is that they read the words but don't take the time or make the effort to put those words into a viable context.
A few years ago, a friend of mine recommended a book that she considered one of the best she had read in a while. The Kindle edition was free, so I "bought" the book and tried to read it. On something like the first or second page there was a glaring error, the kind of mistake where one character is standing to another's left and then without moving they're to that character's right, or some such. It was so noticeable that I went back and reread it several times, trying to figure out how it could not be the writer's mistake but instead be mine. It wasn't.
So I asked my friend if she had noticed the error. Oh, no, she didn't notice, but she said she never pays attention to things like that. She "just reads."
Maybe that's how everyone reads, and I'm the odd person out. But then there's that single one-star review on Goodreads: "This read like a fanfic, and not the good kind," reader Annemarie wrote. She described the writing as "clunky," and I have to agree.
What does that mean? In the case of A Sweet Chunk of Madness it means the writing doesn't flow. The individual sentences are all right, but as Goodreader Annemarie writes, the text had ". . . sentences awkwardly put together to make longer ones."
In good writing, one sentence leads seamlessly into the next. In the opening paragraph from Barbara Bretton, the first sentence is about Joe Alessio. The next one is about what's around Joe. The next is about what Joe is doing there, and then about what he's hearing. Each sentence carries on what the previous sentence started.
That's almost completely missing from Deany Ray's writing. The sun and the beige drapes don't enhance our understanding of Becky's waking ten minutes before the alarm. She's excited about baking, then she's in the shower, then she's heading into town . . . and then she's telling us about her past.
And then we get details about her café and Ouna Bay. Those details make no sense at all.
The Blue Bay Café was situated in the middle of Ouna Bay, attracting the town natives as much as the summer tourists. Ouna Bay is located near Lake Erie and it borders the mountains on one side and the sea on the other. The view of the beautiful bay and the small but charming harbor in the distance can be savored from the two wooden tables by the window. Those tables are the most coveted in the entire café.
Ray, Deany. Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set (4-Book Bundle) (p. 6). Kindle Edition.
Wait a minute. Is Ouna Bay an actual bay, as in a part of a body of water, or is that just the name of the town? Oh, it's "located near Lake Erie," so I'm going to guess it's a town not actually on the lake shore but inland some short distance. But mountains? What mountains? And sea? What sea? Lake Erie is one of the Great Lakes, a body of fresh water hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. There are no mountains along the lake. And how does the border the mountains on one side and the sea on the other? Wouldn't they border the town?
I'm getting confused. A second reading doesn't help much.
If Ouna Bay is a town located "near" Lake Erie, how can this little café have a view of "the bay" and a "charming harbor" in the distance? Is the harbor in the bay?
Does Deany Ray even know what these words really mean?
If the café isn't right on the waterfront, it's not likely to be able to afford a view of the waterfront. This is optics, or physics, or topography, or something.
A reader who takes in the words on the page and turns them into a mental vision is going to be stumped trying to translate these sentences into a "scene." On the other hand, a reader who just sees words and doesn't want to or need to make them into a coherent whole may be able to enjoy this kind of book just fine. Kinda like Jabberwocky.
One of the criticisms leveled at Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey is that it lays out such a rigid template that film makers -- more than creators of books or other forms of Story -- are unable to experiment with other narratives, and that this is why Hollywood keeps remaking the same tired stories over and over and over. What happens, however, when a writer strays from the tried and true template? Do we get the wow factor in a "new" template? Or do we get incomprehensible drivel that doesn't satisfy anyone?
The new writer has far more freedom to experiment than the new producer playing with someone else's millions of dollars. Just as we have conventions of grammar and spelling to make our writing comprehensible for all readers, so we have conventions of plotting and characterization to make all Stories comprehensible to all readers. If the new writer wants to ignore those conventions, they're allowed to. They can make up their own spelling, their own alphabet, their own syntax. But then they have to deal with the audience that doesn't get it.
When a reader embarks on the adventure of reading a book, she does so with certain expectations, but each individual reader has her own expectations. The author who assumes (!) all readers have the same expectations runs a risk of disappointing some, and perhaps most, of those readers whose expectations are . . . different.
Whether the differences are intentional or just the result of incompetence, Deany Ray's stories in Ouna Bay Cozy Mystery Box Set just didn't meet my expectations. I gave them a chance; I'm not going to read any more.
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