Learning from the mistakes of others

Had a rotten cold this week, so I’ve been up a lot in the middle of the night, draining, and used the opportunity to make a dent in my bookshelf. Read Kelly McCullough’s Cybermancy in one sitting. Really good stuff. Also read two other novels that I won’t mention by name because I’m going to tank on them a little.

There wasn’t anything wrong with these two other books. They were engaging; they were fun reads; I finished both books. But I won’t remember them for their extremely cool ideas, twisty plots or memorable characters (the way I will Cybermancy). I’ll remember them because there were relatively small but important things about each of them that bugged the hell out of me and prevented me from losing myself completely in the stories.

The first one suffered from info-dumps. Huge clots of exposition by the narrator which are designed to give the reader information that couldn’t be conveyed during the action of the story. They killed the pace of the story for me and made the first half of the novel a total slog. Beyond being pace-killing, they came off as slightly patronizing. A lot of them concerned events in previous novels in the series (which I’ve read and didn’t really need to be told again in exhausting detail). Some of them just seemed to suggest the reader is an idiot who can’t look something up for herself. An example that stands out in my mind is the paragraph-long explanation of the male protagonist’s pet-name for the narrator, dulceata, which basically boils down to “dear one.” Yannow, I could have figured that out for myself from the context, really. And if I couldn’t, there’s always Google. And each time the word was repeated throughout the book (which was a lot), I found myself wincing at the memory of that condescending explanation. Not a good way to read a book.

The other didn’t condescend to me quite as much, but it suffered from a more grievous sin, cheesy character names. I think there’s a lot of power in names. Names usually sum up a character for me. Indiana Jones, Holden Caulfield, Harry Dresden. Great names for great characters. Cheesy names for non-cheesy characters cheapen the character for me, and cheesy names for main characters — characters whose names are repeated often through the book — are like nails on a blackboard. Naming a half-mad vampire “Wroth” is cheesy. Bleh. Made me twitch every time I read it. For the record, twitching is not a good way to read a book, either.

Things to keep in mind as I learn more about this crazy craft called writing.