User:CarrieBerg/How To Kill A Perfectly Good Story

How to Kill a Perfectly Good Story (or when finding a story dead, how to revive it.)
I know you have read them. Books with wonderful ideas behind them: marvelous concepts, great characters, impressive worlds. And then it all goes wrong. The author, seemingly so brilliant at first glance, kills their own story. And once being killed there is no way to revive it. So it flops and flounders for pages (or, shudder, two or ten more books) until the idea is so far beyond dead that it might as well be considered a zombie. Zombie books are never good. They are depressing things. Constant reminders to all that could have gone well, but didn't.

It has long been a habit of mine to read such zombie monstrosities. I like to live dangerously - those books could eat my brains! Or at the very least rot them. Over time I have cataloged the many ways books die. I have also set up a list of likely authorial culprits: the types of authors who let their books die. Let's now take a look at this list:

The Pretentious Thesaurus User

How to identify them: Smug look of self-satisfaction. Carries around an antique dictionary. Always wins at scrabble.

Favorite saying: "I have a prodigious vocabulary.  You are incredulous of me?  Allow me to demonstrate my phraseological prowess..."

An example of such writing:

"Above her head the sky rippled, a candent pewter pond. From the glaucous downward-curving hills around it shining villages like jasper berries seemed to hang suspended.  Before her, a serpentine construction of shimmering glass and enchanted iron glimmering bright as silver crouched above a cinereous roadway, which seemed to disappear within it." Page 13, Dream Dancer by Janet Morris.

Yes, the image is quite poetic, but dammit, I can use a thesaurus too! Frankly, the impressive use of four syllable words is wearing on me. When I have to snatch up "the" in a sentence as a drowning man gulps air, I know you have a problem.

Set the book down. Now back away from the thesaurus slowly. It's OK to be plebian.

When I have to look up three or more words in a paragraph in order to understand what the hell is going on, you've lost me. And if you've lost me, how many other readers have given up? As for words, candent is fine. Glaucous means blue-green (why not use some other easier to understand synonym?) Cinereous means ashy-gray (like cinders.)  When every paragraph in the entire book is like this, it becomes really hard to swallow. Especially when the main character, who is supposed to be uneducated at first, is making these comments!

I firmly believe that some long words are good, even needed. But not that much. They are like lemon in a vodka martini - a little hint is good, but when the drink tastes more like lemon and not at all like vodka, it's time to cut back on the lemon.

The Clever Coincidence Creator

How to identify them: Garishly colored tie. Cheesy grin.

Favorite saying: "What a coincidence! I (have that/have been there/grew up there) too!"

Six degrees of separation at it's worst. Every character is revealed to be related to another character. Every action is affected by every other action. Nothing is spontaneous, because in Chapter 10 we found out that, oh, the person they just met has been searching for the main character since she was five and the main character's best friend was her ex-lover and she used to be the High Priestess of the temple, so breaking in there will be easy now that they met her and her favorite drink just happens to be the final ingredient they need to defeat the evil overlord. Come on. Sometimes things just happen. Everything does not have to be part of some master plan. Play God with something else - and leave your writing out of it!

The Lazy Backstory Checker

How to identify them: Slouches. Always forgetful. Take copious note then promptly loses them.

Favorite saying: "Once, when I was camping... No wait, not camping, swimming, I found a ring. Um, no, wrong again... a necklace!  And this necklace ended up being made out of gold... Oops, that's not right... not gold... but silver!  Yes, silver.  And I...

They never get it right. They wrote the book, but they still get the facts wrong. Names change spelling. Years change. Times and dates change. The worst is when the author changes a characters personality drastically from one book to the next. Once, I even read a book where the main character changed sex for a paragraph (she became he.) Was it intentional? Was it a simple error the editor missed? Who knows? Next time, keep some notes and make sure they are sorted, indexed and filed away for later use. Or at least do a "find and replace" before you turn the story in?

The Flat Author

How to identify them: 2-Dimensional. Always wears the same clothing. Doesn't change much.

Favorite saying: "Why change a good thing?"

You've read one book by the author, and it was pretty good. So you read the author's next book, hoping for some more and... it's exactly the same. Sure, the names have changed, the places are different, but the plot has been plagiarized from their own work. How sad is that? Usually this goes on for books and books, an endless rehash of a story that was great on the first telling, and not so great on the fourth (or twenty-fourth). Try something new already! A little growth is good for you!

The Multiple Main-Character Fanatic

How to identify them: Split personality. Often multitasks - and is usually unsuccessful.

Favorite saying: "The more the merrier!"

One is typical, two is fine, three is OK, even four is manageable. Five, six, seven, eight, can start to cause problems, but over ten? Twelve? Now things are getting out of hand. How many main characters do you need? What is the author trying to do? Create they own chess set? How about minor characters? They are just as important, or do you believe that there are no pawns in your world? And then the author breaks them up into groups - five main characters here, six over in that part of the world, three over here. How is one person supposed to keep track of all those people? Just because I can doesn't mean everyone can! Hell, it even gets tiresome for me sometimes. Hmmm, I haven't heard about Main Character #3 in ten chapters, I wonder where he went... oh, wait, I no longer care.

The Great Writer with the Poor Editor

How to identify them: They look completely normal at first, but they have a shadow that moves on its own (and often seems to be engulfing them.) There seems to be something holding them back.

Favorite saying: "_ __ ____", editor jumps in, "This phraze been editted for you're safety..."

Not to be confused with The Lazy Backstory Checker. These are obvious mistakes. Not with facts, but with how it is written. This is often the most painful way a story can die. The book is great: the concept, the characters, everything should be fine. And then, page after page, there are spelling mistakes. Grammatical errors. Entire chunks of unfinished sentences. Once, I read a book where anything in italics had not been edited. It was awful. There was one paragraph where a sentence was cut in half - it started, then four sentences were placed in it, then it ended. I was so confused until I realized the whole sentence was supposed to have been moved, but only half had been (and no one noticed the glaring error!) Sadly, that killed the book for me. It was a great book, but I could no longer read the italicized paragraphs without wincing. At least that happened in the last book of a series and not the beginning, so I could finish the book. But I was deeply disappointed. Remember, when editing read the italics too!