Bad Craft

4 common mistakes in published fiction

I haven’t been reading much contemporary fiction. Usually I feel guilty about this. But then sometimes I read a fresh just-published novel that’s getting a lot of hype and I think: This, this is why I don’t read more contemporary fiction!

Of course, not all books are to my taste, nor do I expect them to be. Some books wouldn’t appeal to me even in their ideal form, because I don’t like their ideal form. I tend to dislike historical fiction, thriller, romance. So even if a writer absolutely knocks it out of the park in one of these genres, I’m unlikely to get excited about it.

What’s getting me down is that a lot of the books I’ve been reading are bad on their own terms—bad on the craft level. Whether or not I’m on board with their intentions is beside the point, because they’re not even achieving those intentions.

It’s like tuning into the country music station and thinking: Wow, not only do I not like country, but that singer is way out of tune.

And then turning the dial to the Top 100 Pop Megahits Station and thinking: Normally I like pop music, but all these songs are terrible.

I find this frustrating—not just because I keep reading bad books, but because I worked in the publishing industry, and I know how many chances these books had to get better. The writer, the agent, the editor, and the copyeditor all took a crack at making this book the best it could be. The end result may not be a masterpiece—but at least there shouldn’t be glaring craft issues in the final draft.

And yet I see a lot of glaring craft issues in published books. I read a debut novel last week from a Big 5 publisher, and I could not believe how many Writing 101 mistakes the author was making page by page. It was like an almanac of bad craft decisions.

I could spend a whole post speculating about whose fault this is (the writer’s? the editor’s? the industry’s?), and I could spend another whole post trying to establish whether this has always been the case or whether it’s gotten worse in the last however many years, and I could spend another whole post wrestling with my own negativity and wondering whether my taste is too narrow and whether I should just forget my standards and try to like more things.

Instead, what I’m going to do is talk through a few of the craft mistakes I keep seeing. This feels worthwhile because:

• maybe you’ll tell me that you’ve been noticing them too

• maybe you’ll tell me that you totally disagree and that these are brilliant craft decisions that I’m too narrow-minded to appreciate

• maybe you’ll tell me that you hadn’t thought in these terms before but now you’ll keep an eye out for these moves and scrutinize them more closely

Either way, we might all learn something.

Here is an incomplete list of common craft mistakes, inspired by a novel that I shall not name (don’t worry, it’s not yours):

Characters who don’t ask the question

Your character urgently needs to know something. Is my wife having an affair? Were there two or three bodies buried in the tomb? Do you remember what really happened that night in Madrid?

In fact, the whole plot hinges on the answer to this question. And now your character has the opportunity to ask it! Except… well… they don’t want to. The timing isn’t right. They have other things on their mind. They’ll ask it later.

What’s happening here is that the writer hasn’t put enough obstacles in front of their character. The character really wants to figure something out, and they’re sitting across from someone who can finally give them some answers. But it’s only page 70—it’s way too soon in the plot for the character to get this crucial piece of information. So, to prevent the book from wrapping up in the next 5 pages, the writer decides that the obstacle standing in the way of the character is: …sudden reticence. Even though the character’s whole personality is built on their drive to figure out this one specific thing, they’re going to hesitate right at the finish line.

This is totally implausible. And the writer knows it’s implausible, so they’ll spend a paragraph or two trying to justify it:

I looked at her across the table, and the question—the question I’d been holding back all this time—rose to my lips. But I couldn’t say it. I knew, somehow, without asking, that she wasn’t ready to tell me the truth yet. And I was afraid to push too hard, to ask too much, to admit what was on my mind, what was in that moment undoubtedly on both of our minds. Instead, I let the moment pass, and when I dared to look into her eyes again, I saw that she was looking out the window. “Look, a squirrel,” she said, pointing, and I knew I had missed my chance.

It’s true that, in life, we sometimes fail to ask the question we really want to ask. Some of us are conflict-averse. (Me!) Some of us avoid hard conversations. And it’s possible to depict this successfully in fiction, so that the reader feels that pang of: “Oh if only they would just talk to each other… but of course they can’t talk to each other… because of specific ingrained personality traits each of them has that happen to be working directly against each other…” (Succession is great for this. So is Shakespeare.)

HOWEVER. That only works if the reader understands and believes in the character’s reasons for not asking the Consequential Question. If the character has been working diligently this whole time to figure out the answer to this question, but then shies away at the last minute, the reader will get frustrated.

“Well, I want to solve this mystery, even if you don’t,” they’ll think the first time it happens. And the fifteenth time it happens, they’ll think: “Oh come on, you’re just going to let him walk away? Again??”

Another spin on The Unasked Question is Failed Eavesdropping. The character needs some information—they overhear a conversation where two people are about to reveal said information—things are getting very spicy!—but then, whoops, the character drinks too much and falls asleep. Or wanders off. Or loses their nerve. Or suddenly finds some scruples they didn’t have before. (“I shouldn’t eavesdrop,” they think, right before the crucial part of the conversation.)

An even more aggravating spin on this is the Terminally Incurious Character. There’s some huge threat hanging over their head, but they’re just like, not looking into it. There’s some tell-all article that came out that’s making everyone in their life act really strangely towards them, but they keep forgetting to google it. They get a mysterious letter from a mysterious figure, and then carry it around for six uneventful months before remembering: oh yeah, I should read that!

All of these flimsy craft moves come from the same problem: the writer doesn’t have enough plot to cover their story, so they’re trying to stretch the existing plot rather than come up with new material.

If you find these moments in your own writing, ask yourself whether this is really a story about inherently passive people who struggle to communicate… or whether you just have a plot problem.

Inability to stay in scene

Sometimes you need to interrupt a scene to give some extra information. Context, description, backstory, flashback, reflection. Maybe it’s the pragmatic move—the reader won’t understand the scene in question without these added details. Maybe it’s more of a thematic move—you want to show how the present conversation triggered some long-buried memory in your character’s mind. Maybe it’s a stylistic move—your character tends to dissociate, so the narration mimics their inability to stay in the present.

All valid reasons to pause a scene. However, some writers pause scenes compulsively, like a kid playing with a remote.

“Hey, how’s it going?” asked Charlie. Charlie and I had met more than a decade ago, back when I worked my first job after college, bussing dishes at a hole-in-the-wall diner. Charlie was a customer, at least at first—later he became something like a friend. He’d wait in the alleyway for the end of my shift, and then we’d wander the streets for an hour or two, just talking, not about anything important. It was hard to remember now how that friendship had ended. One of us had drifted away—I hoped it hadn’t been me.

“Oh, hey, it’s going great!” I said. I noticed that he was wearing a bolo tie and a white suit, neither of which were familiar to me, though of course it had been years since I’d last seen him. We had crossed paths once in another city, or at least I think we did—he was wearing sunglasses, and I could never be sure whether he’d actually caught my eye. At the time, the sight of Charlie had filled me with a kind of hope, like maybe we had both taken some better trajectory in life since those days at the diner. But now, looking back, I wasn’t so sure.

“Cool,” said Charlie. “See you around!” He walked away, and I watched him go, thinking about how I’d hoped my life would turn out back when I was twenty…

This move is a double-edged sword of unbearable. Here’s why. If the scene is good, we’re like: Dude, get out of the way of your own story, just show me how the scene plays out, I was interested! And if the scene is bad, we’re like: Why did you even bother setting this up as a scene, clearly you just wanted to give me a bunch of backstory.

The debut novel I just read was plagued by this tendency. The contours of each scene had barely begun to settle when we were whipped away into exposition or random musings. I came to realize that the scenes were basically excuses for the writer to mouth off about various subjects:

“Hi, honey,” said my mom. “Did you manage to find that peanut butter you like?”

This was a specific brand of peanut butter that I had been absolutely obsessed with for the last five years. It was somehow both creamy and crunchy, perennially spreadable without that scrim of oil that gathers on top of the jar. I put it on everything: bread, apples, celery, spoons. When I had lived abroad for two months back in the fall, I had brought half a suitcase’s worth of peanut butter with me, afraid I wouldn’t be able to find that specific brand in foreign grocery stores.

After I said goodbye to my mom, I went to my yoga class…

I think this problem comes from a misalignment of the writer’s interests and the story they’re trying to tell. If you want to talk about peanut butter, don’t write a story about plagiarism in which you have to muscle in peanut butter references via flashback. If you can’t manage to stay in your scenes for more than five seconds, maybe you’re not very interested in your scenes. If you keep hopping back to the character’s ancient backstory, maybe you should just write a book that centers on that backstory.

Sentences doing too much work

Some writers of literary fiction feel that every single sentence they write needs to be a sentence that no one else in the universe ever could have possibly written before. It’s like they think that you’re going to reach into the bag of their novel and pull out a single sentence and judge them off that one alone¹, so every sentence has to be a mind-bending metaphorical masterpiece.

In practice, that looks like this:

The sun plunged into the maw of the horizon, shooting up blazing tongue-lashes of amber and bloody pink, as the far side of the sky gave way to the slow sucking cool of dusk, heady with chill decay.

There are two reasons this is a bad sentence. One: It’s a bad sentence. Two: It’s attempting to describe a standard-issue sunset. We can all picture a sunset without assistance. Unless there’s some story reason to describe the hell out of this particular sunset, it’s okay to just mention that the sun is setting.

Of course, of course, we literary writers like our flourishes. Those flourishes can be great, as long as they’re surprising and true to life and warranted by the story! (More on that here.) But good literary writing has a sense of rhythm. Not every sentence can bear the weight of Your Entire Imagination.

Every morning, as dawn clawed up from behind the hills, she sat on the pocked and pebbled leather of her antique couch—a gift from her mother, whose bestowals always held implicit some pernicious obligation to care for, to maintain, to never give away. She sat, hunched and hollowed, and drank from a garish mug the oversteeped tea that would later, many years from now, thrust her back into the memory of this moment, merely from the taste of those coiled and bitter leaves.

What this paragraph needs (even more than a red pen) is breathing room. In poetry, breathing room comes in the form of line breaks and white space. In prose, breathing room comes from sentences like: “She crossed the room.” And: “The church was empty.” And: “There were five of them left now.”

Literary fiction lives and dies by those sentences. There’s no shame in them—in fact, if you avoid them, you will sound ridiculous. It’s always obvious when a writer is playing the synonym game, because they didn’t want to use so pedestrian a word as sunset.

What I would ask of such writers is to chill out a little. Save your lyricism for when you really need it to get your point across. If your point could be just as well made in simple terms, then say it simply. Complicated language will not disguise a simple thought (or a lack of thought altogether).

Theme salad

Let’s say you’re writing a story about an outcast who freefalls from apartment to apartment, job to job, never finding anywhere she can stay for long. Throughout your story, you’ve got this recurring motif of the cockroach. At first, the cockroach is a sign that something isn’t right about the first apartment. The outcast gets blamed for leaving food on the counters, even though she’s pretty sure it’s her roommate. The cockroach represents decay and distrust stealing in, ruining a good thing. But the outcast protagonist also starts to identify with the cockroach. Maligned, despised, unwelcome—and yet heroically persevering. Insisting on taking up space. There’s something feminist about the cockroach, actually. Hardy, resolute survival. Later in the book, the outcast manages to kill a huge nasty cockroach, when her boyfriend is standing there being useless. Take that, boyfriend! Feminism! And when she rids her last apartment of cockroaches, it’s a sign of ownership: she’s claiming the space, clearing it of filth, of pests, of interlopers. She strides out into the city. She’s not afraid—she knows she can take anything. She’s protected by a hard shell of pride and long experience. Like a cockroach.

This is first-draft writing. On any given page, you reach for the metaphor closest to you and think: Yep! Nailed it! The work of revision is to go through and see how well your subtext coheres. If you’ve got images and metaphors pointing every which way, you straighten them out. If you’ve got a cockroach motif, you decide what you’re going to do with the cockroach motif, and then you cut or change the parts that don’t fit.

The debut novel that I keep complaining about seemed to lack any holistic conception of its own themes. The first time the protagonist made a certain choice, I was meant to see it as selfish. The second time she made that choice, it was meant to seem virtuous. Then self-sabotaging. Then naïve. Then subversive. Then triumphant. The themes were just vibes, like, “This feels like it’s about politics in some way,” or, “This feels like maybe it’s trying to talk about spirituality?”

The subtext was a jumbled mess, because the writer hadn’t actually decided what their story was about. They figured it was enough to nod vaguely at Feminism or Inequality and say, “You see that over there? That’s what I’m talking about. What am I saying about it? I mean, what am I not saying about it, you know?”

I will always remember a comment that one of my MFA advisors wrote on a short story I’d sent her. She highlighted a line and wrote, “This sounds like it’s supposed to have some subtextual meaning, but I can’t figure out what it is.”

I reread the line and was embarrassed to discover that there was no subtext. I just thought the line sounded cool. It had that resonant sound that certain lines get, where they echo as if they’re layered in meaning. But in this case, there was no meaning, and I deleted the line.

If you’re reading something and you get the feeling that it has important things to say about the world, and yet, the more you try to straighten out what it’s actually saying and how the surface level of the plot lines up with the subtext, the more confused you get—that’s theme salad.

Luckily, you can straighten this out pretty quickly in your own writing by 1) thinking about your themes, and 2) asking readers to tell you what themes they’re seeing in your work. If the themes your readers are calling out differ wildly from the themes you meant to get across, trust your readers.

---

I’m sure I could come up with another sixteen entries to this list, if I read another bad book or two. But this should be enough to get us started.

Have you noticed any recurring craft issues in published books? Do you violently disagree with any of the craft issues I called out? The comments are open, and my skin is thick.

(No, I will not identify the bad novel that prompted this post.)

(Yes, I realize that all of this can later be used against me when my novel comes out, and I hope you will take great pleasure in pointing to certain passages and saying: “Theme salad! Hypocrite!!”)

1. To be fair, some reviewers do this. Sean deLone talks about the “random sentence level critique” in his very good post on book review culture.