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What pushes a novel past the frustration line for you?
gavindel
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
So I've just finished the third book in Robin Hobb's Rain Wilds trilogy, and I'm contemplating the depths of sadism which she has been known to delve. Gotta respect an author who is willing to maim and drown a main character in the first book of a series or bullrush headlong into societal discrimination without a backwards glance...
But that same amount of sheer abuse turns me off her works, despite her strong writing. I barely limped through Shaman's Crossing before thinking "Two more books of this? I wouldn't wish this heroic arc on my worst enemy!" Novels that put the main character through an absolute grinder turn me off worse than your standard Mary Sue fantasy.
Another good example for me is Greg Bear's Vitals since
So what is the line for you guys that makes you put a book down just for plot? (For the sake of sanity, let us ignore books that are poorly written or otherwise subpar.) Character abuse? Sexual self-inserts (ala Quentin Tarantino's foot thing)? Any novel that uses "Fate" as an excuse for an actual plot?
But that same amount of sheer abuse turns me off her works, despite her strong writing. I barely limped through Shaman's Crossing before thinking "Two more books of this? I wouldn't wish this heroic arc on my worst enemy!" Novels that put the main character through an absolute grinder turn me off worse than your standard Mary Sue fantasy.
Another good example for me is Greg Bear's Vitals since
Spoiler:
So what is the line for you guys that makes you put a book down just for plot? (For the sake of sanity, let us ignore books that are poorly written or otherwise subpar.) Character abuse? Sexual self-inserts (ala Quentin Tarantino's foot thing)? Any novel that uses "Fate" as an excuse for an actual plot?
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There are creatures out there who want your soul, creatures that are willing to rip away your husk of a body in order to obtain it. They hunger in darkness and hunt in blood. Will you be lost...saved...or damned? Your choice.
That, and a character loudly espousing the author's political beliefs that seem all out of place with the setting.
It's ok if it's a legitimate feature of the setting. I'm talking about cases where the author doesn't realize that what their character is doing is rape.
I'm wanting to say this is related to Stephen Donaldson.
Because, among other things, justifying rape ruined the otherwise lovely prose of his epic fantasy.
— Robert Heinlein
1) Transgressing norms - aka, shock horror, gore, etc.
2) Breaking immersion - Duke Nukem espousing libertarianism while he violates physics cause he can.
I suppose that makes sense. Things that jar you out of the mental flow of reading, like a sudden dunk into an icy river for your brains.
I never felt like Donaldson justified the rape... It was sort of the thing that ruined everything else, kept coming back to haunt Covenant, and he really had to work to redeem himself as a character
Not like in Heinlein, where he literally has a character gang-raped, but it's okay because she's trained for this stuff, and the last guy was nice about it
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I would say it's less an issue of transgressing norms in itself and more an issue of transgressing norms for no good reason (gore for gore's sake, for example) or seemingly presenting objectively terrible positions without realizing that they're objectively terrible ("rape is awesome, guys!" presented as if this is a normal position to take). I mean, you can have the narrator holding all sorts of random, unconventional beliefs. But some authors are bad at doing this without coming off as if they don't realize that they're unconventional beliefs. An author needs to be very self-aware, and many aren't.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
Still, a "good reason to transgress norms" is hard to pin down. If you're reading an archetypical fantasy novel, and the hero is suddenly skewered in the guy by a kobold and dies in a gorey fleshy manner, does that count as transgressing a norm? It certainly violates the plot shield most protagonists have, and it can be a sudden event with a great deal of nasty detail.
I emotionally invest in my books. I don't want to get 200 pages in for "and then they got into a car crash on I-H-10 and died, leaving everything unfinished", no matter how "realistic" it might be.
Stranger Than Fiction chewed on that one pretty explicitly.
a protagonist who doesn't seem to know what he wants to be -- He's a hardboiled cop! No, he's the leader of a biker gang! No, he owns the watering hole/restaurant that's a local landmark! --
and a plotline that just doesn't hold my sympathies at all: cop shoots perp in line of duty and lies about it, and then is stunned/annoyed when Internal Affairs gets on his case, and of course the head of IA is some guy the main character has a rivalry with that began at the dawn of his career. Sex scenes include phrases like "a bruising knee between her thighs forced them apart" (wait, so is the knee bruised, or causing the bruise, & + also, WHY) and littered with other similar nonliteral literalisms that are distracting and, um.
The decisions these characters make are based on some kind of unseen forces... almost as if they HAVE to fulfill these actions even when they make no sense. Everything is explained away in these vague "you know what it's like to live in a small town where everyone is up in your grill about things" samey phrases, with the usual cavalcade of cardboard cut-out family and friends except instead of being, like, Methodists, they're bikers! it is like so inventive and "edgy" and... it really doesn't work for me at all.
I feel bad, because I know she worked hard on it
but
I mean sometimes there's a reason why you need to self publish I guess
like because then you don't have to think about editing out redundancies, cliches, plot lines that don't work
and then I feel horrible about it because I would be mortified if someone thought these kinds of thoughts about my novel
but since she has a cavalcade of friendsies giving her 5 star reviews on amazon I don't even know if it warrants finishing the novel and giving a review with my honest thoughts about the book because
well, mostly because I'm bad about even reviewing the books that I LIKED on amazon, let alone the ones I don't
but also because I think it would offend her sensibilities to have my 3-star honest opinion when there are so many others blowing smoke
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On topic, after finishing Ulysses and A Tale of Two Cities for my own edification, NOTHING pushes a novel past the frustration line for me anymore. Dear god those were hard reads.
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Tapeslinger, as far as your friend...pick a relatively small criticism. Maybe a specific scene has a confusing part. Bring this up with her. If she explodes in your face, time to back off. If she is reasonable and agreeable, maybe slip a little more. Definitely don't bother telling her "This is bad", though; that'll just activate her laser orbital author self esteem defense grid.
First off, that's a major imposition. A bit like asking someone to help you move. And as with any major imposition, they need to meet you halfway. If it's genuinely a terrible book - and it sounds pretty terrible - then I couldn't personally, in good conscience, publicly encourage other people to buy it. If it's not the sort of thing you can just perpetually "forget" to do, then I would tell her that you didn't care for the book, really. Be wishy-washy if you want - "It just wasn't my style," or whatever. Tell her that if she wants you to really write a review, it's not going to be of the glowing handjob variety, and it will point out what you see as definite flaws. If that's not what she wants, then you can just keep your review private.
If she really cares about writing as a craft, she will probably tell you to keep it private, but to please be brutally honest to her so she knows what to work on in the future.
If she insists that you lie and say it was an awesome book even though it wasn't, then I don't know what to tell you. She wants to maintain her fantasy world in which she is a brilliant writer, and I guess you can assist her in that to the extent you see fit.
I had a friend who started writing a book and gave it to me for criticism. I was honest - it wasn't that good - and as best I know he stopped writing after that. I think he just didn't want to put in the effort to be good. But it didn't affect our friendship at all.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
That's totally acceptable.
Maddie: "I am not!"
Riley: "You're a marsupial!"
Maddie: "I am a placental mammal!"
yeah, a friend of mine through wdc published a novel through amazon
there isn't any "obligation," per se-- I might never send her my thoughts on it at all
the horrible part is that I have specifically told her I was excited to read it, because I am always excited to read my friends' writing, and really, her work is usually pretty OK!
this is, honestly, kind of a departure from what I'm used to reading from her. I guess short story writers are not cut out to be novelists sometimes.
in fairness, my biggest complaints about the book are that the main characters of the story basically are too many things all at once
The Guy from Internal Affairs who has a 20-year-long hate boner for the Main Dude,
and then there's Main Dude and Lady's Oldest Son's Teenage Girlfriend whom Main Lady actually tries to drown in their pool despite the fact that Main Lady is supposed to be the adult in this scenario,
and then there's Main Dude and Lady's "adopted" son (no adoption paper signed or anything, but the guy lives with them "like family" because he's the oldest son's best friend ... basically that ancient trope of "my best friend practically lives here lol" but overly literalized to the point where Main Lady says he is her son) and that kid's mother who is "the town whore" and there's lots of Judgy McGee statements about how she's this horrible terrible slut who gets paid for sex because that's what whores do.... and the only sex in the novel, and there is a lot of it, takes place between Main Dude and Lady, and invariably it's accompanied by witty repartee about how both of them are shamelessly horny people despite being forty because apparently no one else in their world does, except for the people who pay the whore or something?
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