Beware the AYFKM, My Son

There are plenty of reasons a person may stop reading your book at the beginning: overwriting, underwriting, rehashed plots or story elements, a disconnection with the protagonist. I can't even list the number of books I've picked up and put back down before the end of chapter 1 (it's a long list). That's the important part. I can't list them. I don't even remember most of them. Those books are discarded from my memory as not worth remembering or filed into the "not right for me" category. The worst that happens when someone starts to read and dislikes your story is that they stop. They might go so far as to comment that they did not enjoy the story when the subject matter comes up. Sure it stings and you want all the readers you can get, but in the grand scheme of things, much worse things can happen.

Like the AYFKM--the Are You Fucking Kidding Me moment. This is so much more dangerous than a person giving up after page two. The AYFKM happens much later in the book. The reader has invested time and money, but more importantly has invested in the story. He or she cares for what's happening, cares for the characters and the outcome. There is something at stake. Then you hammer the square peg into the round hole and that whole investiture comes apart. You shat on their feelings with your plot decision and there are consequences for your action.

AYFKM Level One
The reader immediately stops reading the book. They then seek out others to vent their frustrations, say like a blog post. ;) They're not waiting for conversation. They're starting the conversation. This isn't the same as weighing in with a "yeah, I just didn't like xxx main character, so I never read the series." This is "I was reading xxx and yyy happened. Are you fucking kidding me?!?!"

AYFKM Level Two
The reader immediately stops reading the book and refuses to buy any more books in the series (or possibly no books by you ever again). They actively begin conversations, but rather than voicing their frustration, they tell people that the entire experience is a waste of time. Stay away from this series. The author completely ruins everything that came before it (*cough*HPbook7*cough*). If you're lucky, this person may read the back cover copy for your next series, but as far as this one goes, it's dead in the water, and they're going to try to sink it with everyone they know too.

AYFKM Level Three
This is where all the bells and whistles go off. The torpedo is in the water and the submarine has to dive before everyone on board is killed. You didn't just waste their time, you hurt them on a personal level. For whatever reason, the bond they established with your story/character was an intense emotional investiture, and you just gave them a golden shower. You have made yourself an internet enemy. Nothing you ever write will ever earn you forgiveness. They will hunt you across the internet and make you pay. They will troll your blogs, spoil your Twitter hashtag conversations, and even show up at conventions to tell you how much they hate you. Nothing breads entitlement like an open mic and anonymity (aka, the internet), and you're about to suffer the worst of it. And you deserve it (or so they think).


And the real trick is, beneath all this self-assured rage, the person has a point. There is quite possibly, a fundamental flaw in the event that set them off. Too often an author will bend the plot to accommodate a personal desire/whim at the expense of immersion/realism. I know writers who decide what the beginning and end are going to be, what they want the plot to be, and they'll beat the story as hard as they must to move it from point A to point B.

I had a level one AYFKM moment this evening, that I will put behind the cut because it includes spoilers.

I've arrived at Lowell, reading BLUE FIRE all the way home. I have 20 pages left in the entire book and I'm at the tail end of the climax. Rather than driving home and finishing it there, I head up to my car in the parking lot and continue reading. I am that invested. We're not going anywhere until those last 20 pages are accounted for.

The big bad is defeated (for this book at least), the mysterious machine is going haywire, and the big damn hero has to make a run for it. Using the BDH's unique powers, the MM has killed people, disintegrated objects, and is destroying the BB's palace all around them. Walls and floors and ceilings are crumbling. RUN!

The BDH takes two survivors with her (as BDHs are wont to do). They run through the palace, walls exploding around them and the roof about to collapse on their heads. And just when they reach the door to the outside world, to freedom, to survival, one of the rescuees stops them. You see, using the BDH's unique power, the MM disintegrated her clothes. He stops them--INSIDE--and gives her his tunic lest she go outside naked.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?

A palace. Not a shack. Not a shanty. A motherfucking palace is about to fall on top of you, and you're going to stop and put on a skirt?

Let me guarantee you, if I was naked and fleeing a crumbling palace, the world would see my swinging cod before I stopped to put on a pair of shorts and give that building one last chance to drop a rock on my skull.

And it's a palace. Why didn't they stop outside the building on the grounds? What palace doesn't have grounds? You already described how long the walk was. There have to be grounds.

I loved this book. I devoured it. I got it yesterday and was 20 pages away from finishing it today (and I read slow). As soon as that happened, I turned off my nook and came home.

I have since finished the book and the ending is of a satisfactory nature that I will buy the third. As a result of the AYFKM moment occurring so close to the end of the book, my enthusiasm for the next installment is considerably depreciated. Time will heal this, of course, but where I was champing at the bit for book 2, book 3 can take its time.

How many people did the BDH kill in this book (middle grade my ass)? But she can't go outside naked. This is a pervading fact of American fiction (both in text and in screen) and it is incredibly stupid.

Query Doldrums

I've pretty much known what was wrong with THE TRIAD SOCIETY since I finished the first draft of the manuscript. It's taken all this time to articulate what's wrong with it, but there is a reason I did not launch immediately back into revision. There was something seriously wrong. I knew it. And I needed to be able to say what it was before I started revising.

The setting sucks. You would think this to be a hard thing to have happen given I'm writing TTS in the same setting as WANTED: CHOSEN ONE, NOW HIRING. I've already built the setting, how could it suck? Well, for starters, that book isn't published. It's written but there's nothing to say it'll ever see the light of day. So here I am writing another story assuming that WCONH has already been read? Ridiculous. Not that I did that too much because TTS is set on the opposite side of the Crescent Sea. It's a pre-steampunk society. Very different from Andaria in the east.

But that wasn't all. There were scenes from my original concept of the story that never made it into the finished draft but should have. Perhaps not where I thought they'd go, but they need to be in there. The pacing is too fast and too many things happen in convenient successive order and all these things could happen anywhere because I haven't given any consideration to the setting and how it would affect people's decisions.

In summation? It's pale. It's a pale representation of a story that should be flush with depth and description.

I've started noting specific instances that I made a mistake and how to correct them. I'm getting exciting about the story again because I think I can fix it and make it awesome and people will love it and that would be awesome. WHEEEE! When I get excited, I start thinking of what comes next in the process. I thought it would be fun (and helpful) if I wrote a query for THE TRIAD SOCIETY and through it up here for criticism. Certainly it would be good to get a few drafts under my belt before I start the process in earnest. (And yes, I'm aware of the query forums on Nathan Bransford's boards but have had mixed results with the comments posted in response.)

So I began to craft my query. I've already done one (terrible) query for this manuscript, so perhaps I could build off that failure. ...god I hate querying. All that excitement over getting back to this ms has totally evaporated. I hate writing queries. I am so ridiculously bad at it. The male hero rescues the princess? Really? That's the trite you want to send in buster? Well no, that's not really story. Sure sounds like the story. It's more nuanced than that. Nuanced my ass, you just wrote a rescue the princess damsel in distress story. Get out of here hack.

Sigh. Another reason I want an agent who I will work with for a long time? As soon as I get one, I never want to query again. Ever.

So no, no query for TTS today. It's for the best. I would not want to violate rule number 1 (only work on one ms at a time and don't switch until the first draft is complete). Still, I was excited for a little bit.

Description is Tricky

Hannah Mosk commented recently that her first drafts are very short. They end up being mostly dialogue. She goes in during revision and fleshes the story out to its full potential. I'm getting better at this, but it used to be incredibly hard for me not to do anything but dialogue. That's where the story moves along. That's where the excitement happens, the test of wills between protagonist and antagonist. Oh sure, you can write about Indiana Jones running away from the boulder, but it isn't until he runs into Beloch and the Ubutu that things really heat up.

I receive complements on my description and it always confuses me. I don't think I'm very good at it. In fantasy especially, it is customary to describe everything from the sky to the scent of the air to the dew on the grass. Perhaps I'm tired of over-description and that's why I limit what I describe. Or maybe I'm just not good at it, so I avoid it. I don't go into a lot of detail about what my main character looks like (I think this is a reaction to all the time spent trying to make the "cool hero" when I was a younger writer). I've received complements from people who said they prefer to envision the hero how they want to envision them and the author forcing a description on them lessens the character. I don't agree with that, but...um...thanks? Our appearances say a lot about us, the hardships we've faced, the decisions we've made, the nuances that distinguish us from others. Amorphous beings running around interacting with other amorphous beings isn't appealing to me.

(I will note that unless it improves the situation/description, I intentionally don't describe characters' skin color. If you want the hero to be black or Arab or latino, I have no problem with that. That kind of thing is infrequently relevant to the stories I tell.)

So I try to walk that line of just enough description. I don't talk a lot about the sun or the wind or dawn or whatever. I use similes to put it into a context the reader understands (without breaking the verisimilitude of the setting) and move on. Skewed similes are a great way to show the differences between the story setting and real life. But I don't dwell. Forward action. Is that good? Is that too Michael Bay? Is that a product of a life spent in front of a TV/movie screen as much as in front of a book? *shrug* I don't know. I do know that I was reading ROSEMARY AND RUE by Hugo Award-winning author Seanan McGuire. She crafted an awesome paragraph of description. Awesome in the Eddie Izzard sense of awesome not the hot dogs and socks kind of awesome. It was so awesome that I stopped and admired the craft of the paragraph.

I stopped and admired the paragraph and immediately realized I had left the story. The description was so literary that I left the story as a result of its literariness. It wasn't over-written, that's bad writing. This was good writing, but it was just dropped in the wrong place. The story was on a roll and I came to a screaching stop to admire the majesty of the paragraph's sunset when I should have been worrying about the protagonist and what happened to changelings at sunrise.

It's those moments that make me think that maybe I don't suck at description. Maybe I put as much description in a story as I want to find in stories I read. I still think it's a weak spot of mine. Am I shorting my setting? Or worse, will all my settings seem the same because they don't have enough description to tell them apart? Time and manuscripts will tell. This has been on my mind, though. I'm writing JEHOVAH'S HITLIST (or DOWN BELOW THE UP ABOVE), a walled city beneath a giant platform city in the sky after the oceans have risen and the world has transitioned into the cities above and the ghettos below. Am I describing Down Below enough? It's tricky. None of them have been up on the wall. Almost all of them were born well after the oceans rose and don't know anything except their little city. How do you describe the microchosm of their existence when they themselves don't understand it? There are only so many times I want to know that the city is dirty, full of trash, absent of wood or plastic, etc. At some point, we need to get on with the story.

How about you? Is there a particular feature of storycraft you have difficulty with?