Why I Am Not Turning the Pages of This Novel

Posted on by


Recently I posted about why I found a novel to be a true page-turner. I’m gratified so many authors found it helpful.
So I thought I’d share today the opposite type of experience: reading a mediocre novel I will not finish. (See also Friday’s question and comments). 

I’m not going to name the book, because I don’t believe in running down fellow authors. Nor will I quote anything verbatim. But I do think there are some important lessons to be learned.
1. An Opening Without Disturbance
The first-person narrator of this crime novel is moving through a setting, describing it, and then getting in a car and moving some more, then getting to another location and getting out of the car, and then talking to some people. This is, by definition, action. But it does nothing to hook the reader. Why? Because there’s no trouble, or even a portent of it.
What hooks a reader faster than anything else is when a character’s “ordinary world” is disturbed in some fashion. It doesn’t have to be big, like a gun fight or car chase. It just has to be something that sends ripples through the normal life of the character and makes us, the readers, wonder how the character is going to handle it. And that disturbance should happen on page one. I wrote more on the subject here.
2. A Voice Without Attitude
The key to narrative voice is attitude. This is especially true in the case of first-person POV. We have to feel we’re in the hands of a character who has blood rushing through the veins, who is passionate about something, anything. The voice has to be unique, not plain vanilla. We need to sit up right away and take notice, because the narrator catches our attention:
When I was a little girl I used to dress Barbie up without underpants. On the outside, she’d look like the perfect lady. Tasteful plastic heels, tailored suit. But underneath, she was naked. I’m a bail enforcement agent now—also known as a fugitive apprehension agent, also known as a bounty hunter. I bring ‘em back dead or alive. At least I try. And being a bail enforcement agent is a little like being bare-bottom Barbie. It’s about having a secret. And it’s about wearing a lot of bravado on the outside when you’re really operating without underpants.
That’s Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum in High Five. This is a voice I am interested in hearing from. I will note, too, that the second paragraph on page one is a disturbance. There’s a reason Evanovich is so successful.
3. A Cast Without Distinction
The supporting characters in this novel are what they used to call “stock.” There’s the cop who seems like every other cop. There’s a buddy who seems like every other buddy. And so on.
If your secondary characters are not what I call “spicy,” you have missed one of the prime opportunities to make your novel a page-turner. You can avoid this by simply rejecting the first picture that comes to your mind, and making list of five, six or seven unique alternatives in terms of looks and speech patterns. 

4. A Setting Without Menace
It’s one thing to describe a setting. It’s another to have the setting operate like another character, with potential conflict infused therein. In my book, Conflict & Suspense, I have a section on setting, and include this clip from Gregg Olsen’s Victim Six:
Even in the midst of a spring or summer’s day with a cloudless sky marred only by the contrails of a jet overhead, the woods of Kitsap County were always blindfold dark. It had been more than eighty years since the region was first logged by lumberjacks culling the forest for income; now it was developers who were clearing the land for new tracts of ticky-tacky homes. Quiet. Dark. Secluded.
Notice the words Olsen chooses: marred, blindfold dark. Quiet. Dark. Secluded. It’s right after this that the killer comes on the scene, and then the cops, and then everybody dealing with a setting of menace.
City or country, rural or populated, every setting holds the possibility not just for conflict between characters, but for being part of the conflict itself.
5. A Narrative Without Surprises
I’m stressing this more and more in my workshops. As I consider the fiction that I can’t put down, and that stays with me after I’m finished, it’s this element of the unexpectedthat keeps popping up in my mind. If I keep guessing what’s going to happen next, and it does, that’s called predictability.And predictable equals dull.
The late Elmore Leonard said not to write the parts readers skip. This novel had too many of those parts. So I put it down.


One final note: This was a self-published novel. It wasn’t terrible. The sentences were strung together so I could follow the story. But that’s not enough in this brave, new world. In fact, it never has been. As one veteran editor at Penguin put it, the kind of manuscripts they really have to watch for––in order to reject them––are those that are “skillful, competent, literate, and ultimately forgettable.”
Don’t settle for competent.
***
I’ll be teaching on how to get to unforgettable fiction at two major conferences coming up. This week it’s in Los Angeles at the Writer’s Digest national conference. I’m doing a 3-hour session on Friday called “Writing a Novel They Can’t Put Down.” Also a class on “Dazzling Dialogue” on Saturday.
In November, I’ll once again be with Donald Maass and Christopher Vogler for the big, four-day Story Masters, Nov. 7-10, in Minneapolis. Hope to see some of you there!


30 thoughts on “Why I Am Not Turning the Pages of This Novel”

  2. As always, Jim, your advice is spot on. I see a couple of issues in my own manuscript (the one we discussed at ACFW). I can make my setting a bit more menacing and give my supporting cast more depth. I always love a few quirky cast members in other novels, but am alway timid about my own. I see I need to work on that.

  3. I keep hearing the voice of James Scott Bell in my head while I’ve worked out the plot of my WIP (that’s currently only an OIP – outline in progress).

    I believe I’ve now come up with a good disturbance to place my MC in the setting where I need her. I’ve got a good start on a cast of characters, but whether I’ll properly bring them to life on the page remains to be seen. My only hurdle now is the opponent — I don’t have him fully fleshed out, and my crime isn’t yet plausible.

    But thankfully, Knockout Novel and Scrivener are very flexible, and I took thorough notes at my James Scott Bell Intensive Fiction workshop. 🙂 So I should be good.

    I’m secretly pouting and whining that I’m not able to be at the WD Conference. Maybe New York in the winter, or see you in L.A. next year.

    • Thanks for the good word, Diane. Your instincts are excellent (even if I wasn’t there inside your head, bwahahaha)….and getting a handle on the opponent is one of the big steps. One of the fun ones, too. Have fun with it.

      See you down the road…

  5. I would have responded sooner but I’m trying to figure out how to get to Minnesota in November. Ten hour drive or four hours on a very small plane. Alone. In what could be the kind of weather that sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald. RATS.

    The excerpt from HIGH FIVE is excellent. Which compels me to confess…and this is very embarrassing…I rarely read female authors whose main characters are female detectives. GASP. Horrible to see in print and my only defense is I must have read some bad ones in my youth. I am a female author. My main character is female.

    It dawned on me when I started getting serious about my own writing that I really should read a few. And some were bad, but most were very, very good. I plan on reading as many Evanovich’s as I can find but first…there’s a new Lee Child, and a new Nelson DeMille…which is really dumb of me because those aren’t the kinds of book I want (or can) write. But those are the ones I cannot put down.

    And those are the books that incorporate every one of the points listed above.

    I think the most important point is; don’t settle for competent.

  6. As usual Professor Bell, you reached out and slapped me on the back of the head. My WIP had taken a sudden flat turn. There were still some curves ahead, but suddenly it was just interstate across the prairie.

    In the rather intense debate and bargaining session between my MC and the cops, I had let her win too much and had let one of the stakes be resolved too easily, taking the pressure level down too far. When this came to me the other night, I got up and stuck a post-it to my monitor, “you went too far, fix it.”

    And this post shows me exactly where I did it. Terri

  7. Love this, Jim. Panty-less Barbie is forever in my mind now. Not sure that’s a good thing, but I will try to spin it into a positive. Have a good Sunday.

  8. JSB-

    I’m currently reading James Lee Burke’s “Light of the World”. He reinforces everyone of your points through his mastery: Disturbance(throws his readers headlong over the edge), Voice(s) with attitude (in spades), cast of striking characters (I can feel and see them), setting that establishes tone (I’m there feeling it) and suspense rocketing surprises. Oh how satisfying it must be to write like that!
    I’m going to share your points with some writer friends.

    I’m a Minneapolis guy – looking to bust free for “Book Masters”. Would be fun to meet and learn from you in person (and your compadres are no slouches either)

  9. JSB–Once again, you offer readers of TKZ a truly valuable summary. Aside from the wisdom itself, What your post leads me to conclude is this: writers are in trouble who don’t have the benefit of pre-pub readers who know what you’re talking about. Without such readers, it’s easy to polish and refine, but remain ignorant. After a certain point, it becomes almost impossible for the writer to see what’s wrong.

  10. Thank you for all of that. More great stuff for my notebook and the sign on the wall. However, I’m never gonna get that image of “Barbie w/o whoa-ho-ho” outta my mind.

  11. These are great and useful tools you give Sir James. That’s what I love about TKZ, the tools here are useful. Not just some kind of Dr. Seuss gimmicky flabergasticator with all kinds of zeebleszniks and red ropitational horcolosts that make you looklike you know what your doing but actually would indicate to a pro that you’re mostly clueless. No, TKZ tools are actually tried and true and work. Writers take note!

    This reminds me of a story my wife’s grandfather told of South Korea just after the war in early 50s. The US Army was looking for locals to work as linemen to work the electrical lines as they modernized the country. So many people showed up for the interviews claiming to have been lineman before the war they had to come up with a plan to weed out the real electricians from the posers. To do so, they laid out an assortment of tools. Carpenters hammers & saws, mechanics wrenches, uninsulated metal tools for plumbers, and so on in addition to a handful of real lineman’s tools. They let the men in a few at a time and told them to pick the right tools for the job, climb the pole and fix the broken transformer at the top. Those who knew what they were doing picked the right tools and found the job incredibly easy. The rest failed without ever getting off the ground, because as soon as they picked up a hammer, or an uninsulated screw driver they were immediately sent packing.

    TKZ can be like that. The right tools are being laid before us. Take up thy boot spikes and climbing strap, and bear forth thine insulated screwdrivers and assorted tools and get the power flowing!

    YEAH Baby!

  12. Funny I just read a YA book that suffered from almost all these deficits. It was passably written but I just didn’t want to keep reading.
    Always good to have a reminder (so I don’t fall into the same trap!). Thanks Jim!

    • Yes, we don’t hear much acclaim for “passable.” I do sense we have more passable fiction now, with all the instruction available, critique groups, conferences. But each writer has to learn to add their own voice, spice, vision, heart. That’s the art part of this whole thing.

Comments are closed.