Critical Reading

One of the most important writing skills that you can develop is reading. The reason for this should be obvious. If you can learn to spot the mistakes that other writers make, you can find the problems in your own writing. When I say "mistakes", I don't just mean technical errors, most of which will get picked up by the copy editor, and the same with continuity errors. Sometimes those slip by, but they have nothing to teach you about writing, other than to keep careful notes. I consider it a mistake when a character makes a decision that is inconsistent with past behavior, or when a metaphor falls flat.

I find that most people can tolerate mediocre writing if the story is at all interesting. To write well, you must learn to pick out these problems. One side effect of this is that you will probably come to despise poor writing. When a writer describes a sailing ship moving "like a wolf o'er the waves" you should stop for a moment and think about the senseless and discordant imagery of that simile. If you had been passively reading, just absorbing the story, you might not notice it, but if you are looking for problems, it will jump right at you, probably to the detriment of your continuing enjoyment of the book.

When you read three pages of description detailing how skilled and deadly a certain assassin is, you should expect that the heroine will not survive an encounter with this person unless she possesses either the same type of training, or comes up with some pretty damn ingenious means of negating the assassin's advantage. All too often, you'll see the supposed killing machine get knocked off quite easily by an untrained civilian. This is lazy writing. Few things are more disappointing as a reader than feeling like you have been conned.

When you can learn to pinpoint these problems in the writing of others, you might be unpleasantly surprised by the amount of mistakes like these that creep into your own writing. Unfortunately, in the moment of creation, it is easy to miss them, so it is best to go back and read over what you write after a few days have passed. You might come up with a fantastic piece of descriptive imagery, or throw out a shocking plot twist, only to realize later, when you re-read it, that your imagery is terrible or that your plot twist seems horribly fake. It can be quite discouraging at times. I myself on a few occasions have been so horrified by my own writing that it was an effort to fix the errors and continue, rather than abandon the project in disgust at my own writing.

That brings me to my last bit of advice. Once you have developed the skill to spot bad writing, you have to grow a thick skin and adopt an attitude of perserverence, or you risk losing all confidence in your own ability. Remember the Dunning-Kruger effect? While you can sometimes safely disregard the ill-conceived advice of others, it is impossible to ignore your own criticism. What you should keep in mind is that the ability to spot your own mistakes empowers you to fix them.

Bad Fiction vs. Null Fiction

I tend to be selective about what I read, but every now and then, I'll pick up a book from an author I know nothing about. It is a rare book that is so bad that I cannot finish it, and I can pinpoint with certainty the worst book I have ever read. It was called "Race for Doroon", and my wife borrowed it and read it first. She said that she liked it and gave it to me to read.

I read the first chapter and was unimpressed but not disgusted. Some guy in "the Rangers" stationed on an alien world happens upon one of the local predators caught in a trap, feels sorry for the thing, decides to free it and realizes that what the humans take to be dangerous pests are actually intelligent and telepathic. The plot was bit cheesy, but workable. The prose ran a tad toward clumsy, but not offensively so. Things took a swift and precarious slide from there. I can actually recall very little of the story, but it seems that for the next hundred pages or so, I was driven by morbid curiosity to find out just how bad things could get. I think it was the jumping-into-a-spaceship-heading-off-to-save-a-princess tangent that finally made me stop. Yes, you read that right. Saving...a...princess.

At that point, I went from wondering if this was the worst book I had ever read to knowing it. The publisher, Robert D. Reed, apparently charges authors $15,000 up front for first publication. So now we know how this train wreck made it into printed form. Sure, a few authors probably get lucky with vanity publishers, but the vast majority just end up paying money for the privilege of being able to say that they have published a book.

The funny thing is, I've read books that are nearly as bad published by major houses. Take "Genesis" by Ken Shufeldt, for example, the second worst book I've ever read. This one, I did manage to finish, but not without a grave effort of will. Again, it started out as mildly interesting--a new twist on biblical interpretation and the end of the world, but things quickly spiralled into the ridiculous and ended in the inane. The publisher was Tor Books. Yes, that Tor Books, the ones who published the Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan, as well as dozens of other bestselling and acclaimed authors like Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Poul Anderson, Philip K. Dick...the list of distinguished names is quite prodigious.

Somehow, this complete hack ended up with a green light from Tor for a book with poor pacing, virtually non-existent character development, a ludicrous plot and dramatic tension that stems as much from stupid choices by the characters as it does from the big rock coming to kill everyone. Have I mentioned that I didn't like this book? I actually threw it away to keep anyone else in the house from reading it.

And yet, as deserving as these (and several other) books are of my utter disdain as a reader, as a prospective author, I think we have something to learn from them. "Race for Doroon" is probably unpublishable through traditional means. Simply rewriting the story wouldn't do it. The best thing you could probably do would be to take a two-sentence synopsis of the overall plot and write a completely new book. It's that bad. And yet, the author started and finished a book. "Genesis" went a step further in getting published by Tor.

The lesson here is that, short of losing a chunk of your own money to a vanity publisher, bad fiction is always better than null fiction, at least from the author's standpoint. What is null fiction? That is the story that you never write, whether because you don't have faith in your own ability as a writer, you don't feel that you have the time to commit to writing, or whatever it is that is holding you back.

Now, I'm not saying that everyone can write. Writing, like many activities, actually requires the application of several not necessarily related skills (more on this in a future entry), and poor ability in any one of them can doom your writing. What I am saying is that you might just have both the idea for a great book and the skill to write it, but what you lack is the confidence or commitment. It may even be that your skill set is still a bit unrefined, but if you are an intelligent and adaptable person, that can often be remedied as well, through study and practice.

For me, self-confidence is a continuing issue. Sometimes I read something truly great, and I'll attain some insight that inspires me to try something new in my own writing. Just as often, I'll be utterly dumbfounded by the author's skill, and start to feel like I'll never be good enough to get my fiction in print. It's the second half of the Dunning–Kruger effect in action, making me think that my own skills are commonplace, and therefore, worthless.

That's when it is helpful and instructive to remember the Ken Shufeldts of the world, the hacks who had the motivation and patience to see their books through to the end, and eventually, to see them published. I just think back to that awful writing that is, nevertheless, probably above average and I know that I can do better. Add to this simple insight the fact that the internet offers authors incredible new opportunities for self-promotion, and there really is no reason to let an insignificant obstacle like self-confidence get in the way.