I recently went to a bookstore with my partner to read romance/YA book blurbs + first pages to discuss (and often laugh at) them. If someone watched me do this, it wouldn’t be obvious how much respect I have for these authors. (The envy might be more palpable.) With some exceptions, to have completed and posted at all puts them in my mind far above me. To make this caveat every time would have an artificial land-acknowledgement-y fee, so I’ll do some combination of saying it well once in a while, and being judicious about how often I publicly rag on media.
Another note: while the usual emotions behind sneering are present in me when I make fun of these books, this is my genre (‘my’ in a tribal sense) and most books I pick up are doing something I enjoy. They’re rarely executed the way I’d like, but the author and I share an id. In the above paragraph I said why these authors deserve my respect according to my own values; this one is about how they deserve kinship and support. I am bad at offering them this support verbally – I usually don’t have glowing things to say about the books qua stories – but I like to think that when it comes to supporting authors, currency is the more important currency.
“I usually don’t have glowing things to say about the books qua stories…”
I had a baby, so I’m supposed to get my shit together and sleep on time because I have to sleep when I can. (I have somewhat done this.) But yesterday I ran on 3 hours of sleep because I’d stayed up until 6am reading Sailing to Sarantium.
It’s a great book, but I notice I’m capable of writing (without rancor, but at length) about where it fails. It must have done important things well, to make me stay up so late as a Person With Commitments. That I can’t also talk about those good things at length means… it means I don’t have a good model of what makes a story good.
Someone without such a model probably cannot write a good story except by accident. This is true of me.
(I’ve read books on story structure, but it hasn’t penetrated – probably I ‘just’ need more dakka and spend more brain-actually-online hours on applying the principles in analysis and practice.)
I used to think two separate undesirable traits (one of which inflamed the other). “I’m overly critical of media I consume to start with. Also, I don’t finish my own fiction, so my ressentiment makes me extra ornery at people who Did The Thing but badly.”
But they’re more related than that! They both spring from the trait of “being able to have extended verbal narration about story structure where it fails, but not about where it succeeds”.
The part of me that enjoys novels seems to live in an airy, nonverbal room in my head. It produces good feelings, but I can’t “talk to it”. The part of me that gets annoyed at bad execution lives in a verbal room. It produces bad feelings but is a chatty, intelligent, engaging conversationalist. I gravitate towards listening to it, whether it’s about my own work or others’. It is not as interesting as sitting in silence with the enjoying part in the airy nonverbal room.