Picked Up A Bad Book? Think Of It As A Good One

Have you ever picked up a much-admired or much-hyped book, read all or some, found it terrible, and wondered why you’re bothering to become a better writer? Have you ever found yourself in the pub with fellow writers and authors, collectively high on fury or sunk in gloom about how those books get published?

Here you are, slogging away to develop and improve your own prose, characterisation, plot, character and dialogue, and then this kind of thing gets agented, published and backed to the hilt; it’s admired and hyped; it wins prizes and/or sells in the hundreds of thousands - or all of those things? And yours doesn’t?

Truly, I sympathise, and I empathise too, particularly if I have myself recently run into one of the industry’s dead ends. It’s not simple envy, or even envy’s more toxic sibling, jealousy, it’s an honest frustration: you want to find an audience for your writing, but evidently publishers think that what potential audiences like is stuff you would hate to have to write, and the opposite of the kind of writing you’re working so hard to do really well.

But I want to suggest a new perspective on books that seem bad to you, because it’s genuinely more useful than even a cozy and pleasurable session bemoaning how the entitled lit’ry snobs are running the show, digital natives write such feeble TV-brain prose that proper books will soon be extinct, or how the cultural barbarians are at the gates.

You learn so much about writing and readers if you read at least a few miles in the shoes of someone who likes this kind of book, and those of the publisher hoping to sell it to them. And you certainly learn more than if you look only for evidence that the writer and publisher are stupid, lazy, ignorant or out to defraud us of our hard-earned £8.99.

So when you encounter a published book which you think is ‘bad’ - whether that means badly written, crudely built, stuffed with clichés, utterly formulaic, ludicrously pretentious, incomprehensibly up-its-own-arse, or too long or too short or too silly or too stupid to be borne - instead of being scornful, outraged or depressed, ask yourself, why is it ‘good’ as in ‘good enough to sell enough’? This is, if you like, one way of reading like a writer.

1. What does this particular combination of good-enough-to-sell-enough consist of? There are many different kinds of pleasures a book can promise to give its reader, although no book will deliver all of them. Does this on give the reader:

   1. A story promising and delivering the reliable pleasures of this genre, in terms of ‘story is the journey you make’ and ‘plot is the route you take’?

   2. A story promising and delivering the genre pleasures of literary fiction, which is to say: new and thought-provoking prose and forms of storytelling, ideas, characters and story?

   3. An attention-catching premise?

   4. A zeitgeisty topic?

   5. An appealing main character in an intriguing situation?

   6. The chance to live temporarily in a fascinating, idyllic, closed, vanished or imagined world?

   7. Beautifully observed life?

   8. Rich or evocative prose?

   9. Fascinating ideas?

2. Why did a publisher think it was worth gambling thousands of pounds and hours on publishing this book, in the expectation (or at least the hope) of finding enough readers and selling it to them to make that money back and then some profit?

   1. Is this by a writer those readers already know they enjoy, and trust to deliver on what the book promises?

   2. Is this by a writer very like a writer those readers know they enjoy? (Clue: look at the cover-design)

   3. Is the writer someone readers already know from some other sphere of visibility?

   4. Is this a new voice in the genre (including lit fic as a genre), who promises something new while still delivering the classic pleasures of this kind of book?

   5. Is this a new voice which combines different sets of genre pleasures in a way which looks new and exciting?

   6. Are there things about this book which make it above-average at disrupting potential buyers’ attention to other things, and think about reading it? Does it catch elements of the zeitgeist which will improve the chances of being widely reviewed and talked about?, e.g. demographic changes, cultural shifts, specific films or attention-grabbing genres, historical periods or events that are having a moment, or newly popular hobbies, pastimes or sports? Does it have prize potential?

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Notice how that second list doesn’t include prose, because to the industry the primary job of prose is to deliver what the book promises as well and consistently as possible, and many of those promises are not about the prose: the promise is about the message, not the medium. Only in literary fiction is does the overt promise of the book include that the medium itself, the words, will be a conscious pleasure.

To those of us who sweat blood over better writing - and toss aside books whose prose is unexciting or worse - that might seem weird, not to mention exasperating. But let’s be honest with ourselves: as Mark Lawson puts it à propos thriller writer Michael Chrichton: ‘there are three basic elements that a novel can contain: narrative, ideas and prose’ and a weakness in one can be made up for by strength in the other two. In a writer or genre whose strengths we enjoy, our irritation at their weakness doesn’t put us off.

That’s not to say ‘real readers don’t notice’ the technical issues we have to learn to wrangle: they may not know or think about point-of-view or five-act structure, but such things still make all the difference to how they experience the story. More about this here.

If what’s ‘bad’ about the book are things that writers tend to be blind to, and an editor could and should have tackled - repetitions, unbelievabilities, sketchy bits, flabby bits or sloppy copy-editing - it’s even more irritating, in a way: why didn’t they just sort it out, and do a potentially good story justice?

With a famous name and a long-time editorial partnership, it can be that the editor, too, has become a bit blind to how the writing strikes a non-aficionado: they’re not really an outside eye any more. Other authors have enough success and therefore clout that the publisher doesn’t want to risk a row that might prompt the goose to fly off to lay its golden eggs elsewhere.

By no means all bestselling or admired authors are like that: Georgette Heyer, consummate professional and massive bestseller, was horrified when she discovered that her publisher was passing her typescripts straight to the typesetter. Heyer knew every book needs an editorial eye, but her editor reckoned that a quick proof-read of the typeset version would be enough, because it would sell anyway.

And that’s the core of the brute truth: for each book the publisher has to do a cost-benefit analysis of how much to spend not just on cover designs and production, but also in editorial time (which may include freelance fees) and effort.

You’d think that the bigger the book’s potential earning power, the more work the publisher would put in - and that can be true. But the opposite can also be true: if lots of the other reasons for its saleability are sure-fire, and the editor has other books (they always have other books!) which need more work, or where editorial input will make much more difference, when it comes to an author and book with a reliable market that will buy it anyway, they may decide to just do the basics.

Each of us will vary in what we choose to investigate - but here are some things that you could look for, and think about how you might map that insight across to your own projects?

• Why would a potential reader, picking it up, be drawn in by this particular blurb/copy and cover?

• What keeps readers turning the pages when it sure as hell isn’t the prose?

• What keeps readers turning the pages when it sure as hell isn’t the plot?

• What keeps readers turning the pages when it sure as hell isn’t the ideas?

• What are the genre pleasures the book delivers, and what does that tell you about what readers want from that genre? What is satisfying about that kind of story? What does that tell you about what is satisfying for readers - which is to say, about the kind of story you would write?

• If ‘nothing happens’ - what does the writer think is happening? Why might their readers feel that what does happen matters enough to be satisfying?

• If ‘characters are cardboard’, what nonetheless might appeal about them? Are they clear, their motivations easy to understand? Are the villians a satisfyingly simple Aunt Sally?

• If ‘the ending was really annoying’, was it over-determined and too tidy, or to fuzzy and not resolved enough? Why might the writer have done that on purpose, for a reason that seemed good to them?

• If things about it are ‘boring’ to you, or dislikeable, what might someone predisposed to like this kind of story find interesting in them?

• Is the book catching and evoking zeitgeisty things? Given there were probably lots of other manuscripts doing similar which didn’t get published, what is it this one doing with them?

None of this, truly, is to persuade you to like books you don’t, or to think they’re good in the way you hope your books are good (or will be!). What I’ve tried to unpack is how much there is for any of us to learn from temporarily considering such books’ merits instead of their deficiencies.

Whether you then go back to being incandescently furious that you’re forced to write in a world where such bad books get published, or join me, Goethe, Madame de Staël and Lev Tolstoy in finding that tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner (when you understand everything, you forgive everything) is up to you!