Today marks the publication of the 50th review in my ImmerseOrDie indie book review series. For those who don’t regularly follow it, the premise is simple: every morning I step onto my treadmill, open a new indie ebook, and begin my daily walk, reading the book for as long as I can maintain my immersion. When that immersion has broken three times, I stop, and write up a short report of what caused my attention to wander. This article today is a reflection on the first 50 such reviews, and a synthesis of A) whether or not I’ve been consistent in my evaluations, and B) trends I’m seeing in the causes of those immersion breaks.
Distribution
To begin the analysis, I started with a simple graph. How many of the first 50 reports lasted less than 5 minutes, how many ran between 5 and 10 minutes, how many from 10 to 15, and so on. For most measurements of human behavior, this kind of analysis will produce a bell-shaped curve, with a “hump” near the most common value. But to my surprise, when I produced the graph, it showed a distinct secondary hump at the right-hand end.
At first, I wondered if this might be evidence that books were falling into two primary categories: the so called “weak ” ones, and the “strong” ones. But in thinking about it further, I don’t think that’s what’s happening. If I had not imposed a 40-minute limit on how long I am willing to read, and had instead simply timed how long it took for me to reach 3 WTFs, however long that took, I think we would be looking at at fairly classic skewed bell curve, with the tallest bars clustered around 8 minutes, and then the rest tapering off toward the right-hand tail.
But my policy of stopping at 40-minutes effectively pushes all those right-hand bars together into one big clump at 40 minutes. The slight rise in frequency counts in the 30- and 35-minute buckets give the impression that the right-hand end of this graph might actually be a second high-frequency cluster, but I’m not yet convinced, since there are only five books that fall into that region. For now, I’m going to proceed on the assumption that this is an “artificial” secondary cluster, and that this is actually a classic skewed bell, however, I will probably repeat this analysis at the 100-review point, and at that point, we’ll have a better idea which way things are trending.
One thing worth noting in this graph is that, of the books I found to be problematic, most of them seem to make their flaws evident fairly quickly, with about 2/3 of them having been identified in 12 minutes or less. Writers should pay close attention to this. We all know that the beginning of a book is crucial in grabbing the reader’s attention, but how do we define “beginning?” Well, in the case of myself as reader, the definition appears to be “12 minutes,” or appx. 4000 words. You have that long to prove to me that I am in good hands, and that the story is going to take me somewhere I want to go. Use that time wisely.
And if you ask me, that is an entirely sobering number.
Consistency
One thing that has been a concern for me from the outset is whether my tastes or my process would shift over time. Would I gradually become more jaded? Would I go on long “failure” jags, getting increasingly more desperate to see a survivor? Would I get frustrated and increasingly irritable? To examine this, I’ve created another graph, showing the survival scores over time, with the first report on the left, and today’s report on the right.
To my surprise, however, there has only been one change in the distribution of scores – and even that does not appear to have had any substantive impact on the results. Of the 9 books that have survived for the full 40 minutes so far, half of them occurred in the first month and half in the second. Similarly, the 6 contenders (the books that came close to surviving) were also split evenly, with 3 in the first month and 3 in the second. So in that sense, there has been no appreciable change in my standards.
That trend of consistent classification holds true for the more problematic books as well, but with one small change. We still see the same number of books being classified into this group, but it appears that I’ve been spending less time making that determination. Their survival times have gone down, with the average score in the first month being 13.1 minutes, compared to only 9.8 minutes in the more recent month.
At first glance, this suggests that my patience has ebbed for the books with the most serious immersion issues, and that, on average, it’s taking me about 3 minutes less to pull the trigger. If true, this would be something of a concern for me, and I’ll definitely be watching this stat in the future. But while there may be some truth to that, I think there might be a slightly different (and less worrisome) explanation.
When I began, I would often feel guilty about pulling the cord too quickly, and would continue reading beyond my third immersion break, hoping that maybe I’d overreacted and that things would smooth out. But I think that what’s really happening is that, over time, I’ve simply become more willing to trust my instincts. If that’s true, then what we’re seeing here is not so much that I’m now putting less effort into the problem patients than I used to, but just that I’m spending less time in denial after the patient has flatlined. As I said, I’m not certain of this analysis, but that’s my gut conclusion, and I will be monitoring this trend over the coming weeks.
But enough about the time stats. According to my recent straw poll, most of the readers of the ImmerseOrDie Report are authors looking for tips on how to keep readers engaged, so let’s turn our attention now to what you can learn from the actual WTFs themselves.
The Taxonomy of WTFs
Over the 51 reports written to date, I have cited 131 immersion breaks, which I’ve now classified into 27 different kinds of errors, which I call “WTF moments.” (This classification process is an ongoing thing, so the categories may change slightly in the future, as more WTFs occur and more obvious clusters emerge.) The following table shows the current list, along with a brief explanation of what the error means, sorted from most common to least common.
| Count | Problem | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 17 | weak mechanics | Simple editorial issues such as spelling, missing words, grammar, etc. |
| 15 | implausible character choice | When a character does something contrary to his/her established traits or in violation of basic human nature. |
| 14 | echoing | When words or sentence structures repeat frequently, in a way that calls attention to the pattern. |
| 10 | illogical world features | Aspects of the world building that do not bear scrutiny. |
| 9 | conspicuous exposition | Presentation of backstory in inappropriate places, or in dense passages, or for insufficient story reasons. |
| 6 | weak language style | Poor execution of linguistic styles, such as bad accents, incorrect historical language, etc. |
| 6 | tell mode | Overlong passages of telling instead of showing. |
| 5 | weak dialogue | Words put into characters' mouths that are boring, or inconsistent with established character, or unrealistic human speech. |
| 5 | conspicuous coincidence | Important plot points resolved through unlikely or convenient concidences. |
| 4 | word misuse | Employing a word that does not mean what the author thinks it means. |
| 4 | past perfect | Missing or incorrectly applied use of the past perfect tense when needed. |
| 3 | weak pacing | Stories that go too quickly, or too slowly, or with a fixed pace that does not change, to the point that it attracts the reader's attention. |
| 3 | insufficient exposition | Not enough information given to the reader for him/her to follow the story. (More extreme than simply creating mystery or intrigue.) |
| 3 | inconsistent time flow | Events related (unintentionally) out of time order, or with confused tenses, or with effects happening before causes. |
| 3 | inconsistent tenses | Switching between past, present, and future tenses without apparent reason. |
| 2 | conspicuous borrowing | Any story element that seems too recognizable as the intellectual property of another author that is not being used in a satirical or referential way. |
| 2 | weak proprioception | Insufficient description of the scene and characters' relative positions within it. Often results in 'talking floating heads' syndrome. |
| 2 | weak logic | Explanations that do not bear scrutiny. |
| 2 | ungrounded pronouns | Use of pronouns for which the referrent is unclear. |
| 2 | pointless scene | A scene (or especially a prologue) that adds nothing of substance to the story. |
| 2 | morning ritual | A cliched story beginning in which the protagonist walks through the usual events of their morning. Waking up, brushing teeth, etc. |
| 2 | weak noun coinage | Author has created names for people, places, or things that do not seem appropriate to the story or the world. |
| 2 | show vs tell mismatch | When the author tells us something is happening, but then shows it in a way that does not agree. |
| 2 | inconsistent characters | Characters who act or speak in contradiction to either their established personalities, or the situation at hand. |
| 1 | whiny narrator | Self explanatory. |
| 1 | present tense | I simply can't immerse into present-tense stories. It feels silly to me. |
| 1 | missing explanation | Something important that happens in the story that is either not explained, or is insufficiently explained. |
To me, it comes as no surprise that the most common citation was for weak mechanics. This is the #1 issue for which the indie publishing movement gets criticized, and unfortunately, the ImmerseOrDie reports confirm that these criticisms are warranted. Authors, please ensure that you are putting sufficient energy into removing this single most damning form of errors from your work. It’s not just about protecting our collective reputations, but (if my evidence here is at all reliable) it actually means that more people will be able to enjoy your stories and actually finish them.
What is a little more surprising, however, is that, of the 28 problem-types I’ve cataloged, just 5 of them account for fully half of the WTFs logged to date. Those top five gaffes are:
- weak mechanics (spelling, grammar, etc.)
- implausible character behaviors
- echoing words, sentence styles, and images
- illogical world building
- conspicuous exposition (info dumping).
If you are an author who is looking for the highest-impact place to sharpen your immersion blades, examining your work for the above five problems would be an excellent place to start. And if you can’t see it for yourself, ask your trusted beta readers specifically whether they see any of these problems in your writing. (The response you get from readers will be much more pointed and critical if you ask them to look for specific issues.)
The Shocking Discovery
But, in looking at those five high-impact issues, I noticed something odd: There is no obvious pattern. No master classification that seems consistent across all five. Some are problems of a simple editorial nature, while others are fundamental to the conception of the story itself.
This got me thinking about the fact that these issues can be organized at an even more fundamental level. I often think of the process of fiction writing as being arranged into 3 fundamentally distinct skill sets: story building, story telling, and text editing. And it takes mastery of all three of these areas to produce an engaging story that fans will love. So with this in mind, I’ve classified those 28 error codes even further, into those three fundamental categories:
- Story Building Problems: These are weaknesses in the story design itself. Examples include tired old cliche plots, illogical economic systems, illogical or impossible physics, inconsistent or unbelievable characters, etc.
- Story Telling Problems: Here we find the problems related to how the conceived story is translated and organized into text. This accounts for things like bad pacing, clichéd scenes, bad dialogue, show vs. tell, and so on.
- Editorial Problems: These are the problems that could have been avoided with better copy editing. Spelling, verb tenses, missing words, words used incorrectly, etc.
Now here’s where my expectations got entirely kicked in the face. When we draw a graph of the WTF frequencies, grouped by those fundamental categories, I was absolutely shocked to see the following results. Yes, mechanical editing is the single most common WTF type that I’ve charged. But as a group, editing flaws are the least frequent, accounting for only 25% of all the WTFs I’ve assigned. Instead, problems with the way the story is being told are far and away the largest culprit, accounting for almost half (44%) of all the WTFs. And problems with the planning or design of the story account for an additional third (31%). So, combined, 75% of the problems I encountered were for issues that have nothing to do with copy editing.
Yes, it’s true that a good copy editor will actually help you with some of these other issues as well, but technically speaking, that isn’t their job, so it’s not a good idea to rely on them for that. To deal with issues of characterization, plot logic, world logic, etc., you need to bring an entirely different team to bear. A developmental editor can help you with some of it – pacing, event sequencing, character consistency, etc. – but who are you going to get to help you fix a broken world-design? There’s no easy answer to this, I’m afraid. At least, not one that I can think of. Some editors have a good feel for those kinds of things, but many do not. A better strategy, I think, for authors who work in speculative fiction worlds, is to assemble a kick-ass squad of alpha readers specifically aimed at big-picture analysis – folks who can take a very early draft of your work and who can look past all the mechanical issues that may still be there, and help you work out the world-level problems before you’ve invested in writing drafts 2 through 7.
But there is one other person who can (and should) be called upon to help polish these kinds of problems out of your work. And that person is sitting right there, right now, inside your very own pants, reading this article.
In my opinion, the authors who make these kinds of mistakes are not doing so because they are incompetent at these aspects of writing – they are doing so because they are completely oblivious to the fact that these issues are even a thing. They’re just inexperienced, and they have not yet become sensitive to this dimension of their own work.
So if you weren’t previously aware that readers pay attention to story logic, details of your invented worlds, realistic character behaviors, and so on, don’t allow yourself to continue being that kind of author. Become aware. Have a look at the above list of WTFs, or read through my previous reviews. How many of those WTFs being charged are ones that you weren’t even aware of as a potential problem? And if you do understand them all, do you know whether your work suffers from any of them? You simply cannot fix a problem that you do not realize is a problem, nor can you fix a problem before you know that your work suffers from it. So your number-one tool for improving audience engagement with your work is a healthy sense of self awareness and a willingness to do something about the problems you find. Ask some friends what they think. Conduct a poll with your alpha readers. Or hey, submit your work to ImmerseOrDie, and I’ll tell you what I think. (The rules and submission form are here.)
Well, that brings us to the end of my first substantive analysis. I hope you’ve found this useful, and that these ImmerseOrDie Reports are helping authors learn what sorts of things to watch out for in their work. And hopefully, when you finish your next book and send it in, yours will go straight to the hallowed halls of 40.
If you’ve found this article useful, or the series itself, please consider sharing a link with your reading and writing community. It really does help keep me motivated to continue the series.
Take the Pepsi Challenge: Curious about whether my own work would survive the treadmill? Why not download one of my free short stories and decide for yourself?
This is a good list to consider. I think my worst trait is the echoing problem. I think… OK, I won’t say it twice! But yeah, I get stuck in patterns and re-use the same constructs over and over again. My comfort zone.
Thanks.
I liked this, it’s helpful to keep in mind!
Thanks for posting.
Nice read. I really like that you’re self analyzing there your reporting too.
I wonder about “illogical character choice” and “illogical world features” since that can be considered subjective. I’ve read (or tried to read) best-selling-now-a-major-motion-picture stories that I would claim suffer from both of those, and yet they pull people in by the thousands. Can you give an example of each of these things to make it more clear what you consider to be a “violation of basic human nature?”
As a writer, I hope I am motivating all of those things in the right way so my vision and understanding of a character is conveyed in a way which the reader will believe. At least I’m trying. There has been times where one out of twenty people take issue with a character choice, and most readers never mention it. This type of thing is subjective.
I like the point you make here. If you are ignorant of (or unwilling to acknowledge, as many fledgling authors are) this type of mistake, you aren’t writing the best story you can.
Good post!
Thanks, J.S. (Now there’s some fine initials I can really get behind. :-) As an example, consider a character who is browsing alone through an old library. He finds a rare book, opens it, and then declares aloud, “Wow. A mint condition copy of Beggars of Night, by Cormandy Jing! I understand it’s worth a fortune!” This would be an example of a character acting in a way that violates basic human nature. Nobody talks that way. Or what about three young women who are staying the night in a strange old house, who are awakened in the middle of the night by a shrieking spectre in the middle of the room, and then after it goes away, they all roll over and go back to sleep. Suitable circumstances could be constructed that would make sense of such behaviors, but without the support of surrounding story elements, from a normal person, they are just not credible.
And as for illogical world features, an author can create or explain just about anything they want. Gravity that goes up instead of down. Fire that only burns in a vacuum. So long as these features are properly presented and motivated, anything can go. But without some indication of specific authorial intention, anything that violates logic or physics as we know them would be jarring. I had a discussion with one author who needed his spaceship to be isolated, so he made a comment about his radio only being able to broadcast about 100 miles, which would leave the ship out of contact until they made planetfall. But that really tweaked me. An interstellar ship that can’t punch a comms signal 100 miles? Some knapsack-sized satellite phones today can push a signal out 22,000 miles, and they’re working on portable batteries. So I found his 100-mile limit logically implausible for his story world.
Nice research, and something that could be very useful to fellow writers.
I was intrigued, however, by your statement that present tense feels “silly” to you. Can you explain why?
I’ve been asked that in a number of different threads over the last 24 hours, and I’ll be answering it in a post on that very subject sometime in the next 24 hours. Stay tuned. (And I’ll try to remember to come back here and link to the post, once it goes up.)
I’m not terribly surprised by this result, actually; I don’t think most people who are incapable of putting together grammatically correct sentences or otherwise going over their own work and editing it for major issues are likely to actually stick with it long enough to put together a novel.
Story-telling issues are mid-level issues, while story crafting issues are high level issues. Someone who screws up on the story-telling aspect has mastered writing to the point where they are technically proficient, but hasn’t mastered the art of prose.
High level issues – story crafting issues – are something that even “real” writers run into. It is the highest level issue, and it causes issues even with people who have been published in the real world, outside of independent publication. I mean, just look at all the movies which fail on this front – it isn’t a terribly uncommon occurrence.
Incidentally, in case you’re wondering, I was lead here by someone from FIMFiction.net, which is a My Little Pony fanfiction writing fansite (really, THE pony fanfiction writing website).
Because, you know, it is always amusing to know who found you.
I wasn’t aware of FIMFiction, but I’m tickled to find out that you found a referral there. That means people are actually talking about immersion in their writing communities! (And that means my mission is starting to pay off.) Thanks for telling me about it.
Not true. I recently read a best-selling novel that was full of grammatical and spelling errors. That is not to mention the use of words wrongly. She also had poor character development and strange decisions by the main protagonist. This was not an indie author either! She claimed to be an English student at Oxford University too!
Want to enlighten us? At first, I thought you were referring to Dan Brown, lol!
So, who’s the oxford student/ writer?
A detailed report. I appreciate the work involved in putting this report together. I especially love that you’ve given us a few ideas on how to correct the basic issues. I will certainly share this post.
This was a very thorough study of your responses to books that made you want to put them down. Can I assume that books you enjoyed to the end exhibit an opposite array of data? The same things you mentioned are the things that cause me to quit reading too, but I imagine I’m less sensitive to it in my own writing. You’ve given me some things to go back and examine with a more critical eye.
Glad you found it useful, Madison. To answer your question, the books that survive the full 40 minutes don’t have opposite data, so much as they have very little data. I’m only tracking the issues that cause my immersion to break, so the 40-min books simply don’t have any of those. Or rather, they have fewer than 3.
Thank you so much for graphing and researching like this! This is invaluable for those who are looking to improve their writing.
Loved this–thanks. I especially appreciated the concise explanations of each of the problems. I find myself repeating myself over and over with the various editing jobs I’ve had, so I will most certainly share this with my authors.
What I have found interesting over the years I’ve been editing indie authors is that, just because they make a boat-load of the mistakes you’ve listed doesn’t mean their story isn’t compelling. And, the more they write, the better they tend to get at catching the more obvious issues. Your post will go a long way toward helping them improve further; thanks!
Loved your article – I have 6 novels on Amazon’s Kindle under my pen name, Edith J Pace, and I think have sold only one in a dozen years. Can’t figure it. Work as freelance editor and bend double to be fair and explain errors thoroughly – hard to see freckles in mirror? Live alone and live to write 24/7 for others esp. – Can’t breathe without writing. Thank you for your persistence and professionalism.
Do you have knowledgeable critique partners, Jerine? It’s nearly impossible to do on your own, at least at first. Crit partners will catch your blind spots.
This is great. I’d love to have this in poster/classroom size
That’s a great idea. I just might do that. And I could totally see myself wearing a T-shirt with my favorite “immersion buster” on it, too.
Fantastic article. I have definitely seen my own writing improve over the years as I worked out some of those specific issues. I recently had the experience of reading through fiction I wrote more than two decades ago (I was typing up my old handwritten manuscripts) and cringed at what I saw.
But, then I remembered that old adage that you have to write out about a million words of crap. And I wonder if that’s some of what we’re seeing here–that the indie writers haven’t written the crap out yet, they’re publishing too soon because it’s accessible now in a way it wasn’t.
Either way, I’ll be referring to this post as I look at some of my own current writing projects. Thanks for doing this!
My number one is fancy attribution. The otherwise good advice about repetition is not appropriately applied to “said” and “asked” which should account for about 90% of attribution. Alert adverb hunting will eliminate the frank Tom Swifties, but the needless murmuring, hissing, shrieking, and so forth remains. The first time someone rasps out a speech that should have been said, I’m gone.
Good point, Lars. Speech tags are a special case, but still a potential problem. Even the word “said,” repeated too frequently, can create unpleasant echoes, but the solution is different. With normal echo problems, a common solution is to replace some of the instances with synonyms. But with attribution verbs, synonyms are a trap. Instead, look to writing stronger dialogue that needs fewer tags. In the best dialogue, tags are not needed at all, because it is clear from context, vocabulary, and style which character is uttering which lines.
I love this! It’s good to know that there are people out there who read books the same way I do. I’m not planning to indie pub, but I almost wish I were so that I could submit my current project when it’s finished.
I once took a writing class where the instructor allowed you to submit the first page of your WIP (anonymously). He made up little booklets of about 40 first pages and everyone who attended the class got one at the start of the class. The entire class went in three minute chunks. Everyone read the same first page and then the instructor took a poll of how many people would read the second page and how many would not. After a brief discussion of why, we went onto the next first page. I learned so much in that class.
This article reminds me a lot of that class. It’s brilliant. Thank you.
Thanks, Tiffany. I’m glad you enjoyed it. And yes, that in-class exercise is rather similar. In practice, though, I’m finding that there’s a difference between asking people, “Would you read the next page?” vs. “Did you find anything here that irritated you?” Many readers are quite adamant about finishing every book they start, no matter how error-laden.
Well thought out and detailed post. Thanks for the effort and for enduring so many bad books.
Your article has me thinking big time. I’ll bookmark it and read every time i finish a first draft. Thanks for the indepth information, Jefferson.
You’re welcome. I’m glad you find it useful.
I too think this was a brilliant artcle. Thanks very much.
What an interesting post! I’m a freelance editor (developmental editor and copy-editor) and it’s my job to help writers hold readers attention, so I find a study of this kind fascinating.
Two observations I want to make: firstly, ‘weak mechanics’ may be the #1 reason that readers give up on a book simply because out of all the things you list above, language mechanics are the easiest to identify. Spelling, grammar & punctuation have hard-and-fast rules that we learned at school, whereas the other things you list are not so easy for inexperienced readers to name and identify – they might know something is wrong but not be able to pinpoint what it is.
Secondly, I see that ‘head-hopping’ (POV shifts) isn’t mentioned as a issue that breaks reader immersion, yet it would be one of the biggest problems I come across when editing manuscripts and is one of the main issues that creative writing tutors and experts advise writers to guard against.
I am fairly sensitive to head-hopping, too, Averil, and I see it all the time in stories written by some of my students. But I have not yet encountered it in an ImmerseOrDie submission – at least, not in a way that was intrusive enough to break immersion. And the list I’m reporting here is the list of things that I’ve actually tripped over in these reviews.
I’m always amazed (judging on glowing reviews of books where I couldn’t get past the first paragraph) how many readers will look past *all* of these issues. That said there’s no doubt that it’s best to make sure there aren’t any barriers to entry.
I hear that, Lindsay. I think, in part, it’s because those first half-dozen reviews tend to come from friends and family, who are doing their best to be supportive. And beyond those few, there are clearly a great many readers out there who are simply impervious to such errors, I suspect because they themselves are neither good spellers nor grammarians. Consciously or otherwise, those authors who don’t tend to their editing are simply limiting themselves to that smaller market. But the real question that both fascinates and troubles me is, “Can that market actually fuel a successful career?” And what hope is there for the future of self-publishing if the answer to that question turns out to be, “Yes?”
So how do you explain the popularity of a writer like Dan Brown? I forced myself to finish The Da Vinci Code, mentally red-lining every other sentence. It was exhausting.
Are his story premises that wildly popular? They aren’t exactly original. I’m sure his position on the best-seller lists hasn’t been the result of only family & grammatically insensitive readers.
I would argue that his position on the best-seller list actually is based on grammatically insensitive readers, Donna. I myself couldn’t get through the first chapter, and I know a lot of other people who felt the same way. But once enough grammar-soft readers rave about something, many, many more people will give it a shot, grammar be damned. And then it becomes a bit of a band-wagon to jump on that even many grammar Nazis will join rather than be left behind. The psychology of market dynamics is pretty convoluted, but IMO, it starts with a core of people who don’t care about that kind of stuff.
Anyway, I’ve never said that a book can’t be successful when it is rife with mechanical editing problems, but it is clearly much harder, since the market is smaller. And for a book to survive the ImmerseOrDie challenge, the mistakes have to be relatively infrequent.
I am usually something of a grammar nazi. Now I have to go back and look at Dan Brown’s books because even though I do recall being disturbed by a couple egregious editing errors, I found the overall narrative a compelling page turner. Engagement might actually be dominated by the clever use of memetic hooks. Few authors master the art of motivating continued reading. In fact many books that I have considered to be among the best I’ve read have had the unfortunate attribute of being hard to get into. Only the enthusiastic recommendations of others has gotten me far enough into the book to begin to appreciate the story being told. The work in psychology on attention has demonstrated over and over that there is an optimal level of novelty, surprise, uniqueness, and complexity. Too much or too little and attention wanes while the reader surfaces to their own life. An editor provides a good sieve for the mechanical errors, but is only memetically hooked by the things that are of interest to them. A hooked reader will simply ignore all other problems with the text.
Here is my take on Dan Brown. I have read most of what he has published, including The DaVinci Code (Sorry, Donna, but it’s tough to call an author out on writing miscues when you can’t bother to spell his book title correctly). I will not argue that his first chapters, across the board, are garbage. They are filled with junk science, poor character representation, and unbelievable scenarios.
However, once past that point, Dan Brown has a certain gift at story telling. I like to call it the Clive Cussler syndrome. Or, more accurately, being a good story teller, but not a very good writer. In all my years editing science fiction, fantasy and horror, and now YA fiction, as well as being a published author, I can tell you that, in my personal experience, it pays to be a better story teller than it does to be a proficient writer. Because bad writing can be fixed, bad story telling can’t.
Moving on, thank you for the article. It’s been twenty years since I started editing, and I have to say, I’ve never seen all of my pet peeves gathered together so eloquently before. I will be recommending this article to all my authors.
Thanks for the kind words and the referrals, Jonathan. I’m glad you find the series useful. And I agree with you completely about the relative importance of story vs prose. I might pop out of the immersion bubble once on every page, for mechanical reasons, but if the story behind the words is richly imagined and told with style, I am likely to keep reading, even beyond the 3 WTF limit. But if the story building is weak, I’m going to bail, no matter how flawless the typing might be.
I came across this article from Lindsay’s tweet. Nice to have a bulk analysis like this.
I’ve taken a sardonic individualized approach with my new series of posts: Irritated Reviews. http://hollowlands.com/category/irritated-reviews/ It relieves my blood pressure after I’ve restrained myself from hurling my ereader at the wall.
A great analysis. I’ve had some readers stop 200 pages into my works and others praise them for their immersion. WTF! I’ve got a good group of reader/advisors, I think. But things aren’t going as well as I like. My latest novel is (hopefully) coming you way. I won’t send the earlier ones. They’re written in the present tense.
I look forward to seeing it, Nick.
Good article. I’m printing it out. It’s useful both for looking at my own work and as validation for how I critique. I’m often the only one in a critique group who points out storybuilding problems. I often feel like a putz for doing so. I also get told that readers of (insert genre) don’t care.
I would like to put in a plea for enjoying present tense. I don’t write this style myself but it can be used for: a story which occurs in the mind of the narrator, an event which was so compelling that the narrator continues to experience the event in present tense, or a story intended to be experienced present tense as if it were a movie.
Thank you for sharing your work on this – interesting, well-explained and helpful. I’m looking forward to seeing how/if the order changes with more data and wonder if there are different trends in different genres. The head-hopping to which Averill referred, for example, is something I come across a lot in romantic fiction – but I haven’t collected the statistics to find out if there really is more of it or it is just more noticeable.
A very useful article and one that’s making me think about my own writing. I don’t have a problem so much with grammar and spelling (I’m a University professor… it’s my job to teach those things so I better know how to get it right) and I think I’m pretty good with consistency in world and character building, but your number three worries me a bit. I do tend to repeat sentence structure or words sometimes, though I consider it a literary device. Maybe I’m not quite understanding what you mean by “echoing.” Could you explain?
Good question, R.A. Meenan. “Echoing” isn’t a single problem, but a category of them. In the simplest case, it shows up as the recurrence of non-core words. That recurrence creates an echo in your head, recurring, along with variant words, and drawing attention to the recurrent nature of the recurring material. (Much like my use of ‘recur’ words here.) Core words can be used liberally. Common words like ‘the,’ ‘and,’ ‘but,’ ‘a,’ ‘he,’ ‘she,’ etc. But the less common a word is, the more easily it will echo. Unfortunately, finding them is an entirely subjective process, because everybody’s vocabulary and usage frequencies are slightly different.
Another form echoing takes is in the recurrence of headwords, or to a lesser degree, tailwords. [Note: Did you notice the mental call-back to the previous pgph when you read the word ‘recurrence’ in this sentence? THAT is the echo I’m talking about.] For an example of headword echoing, consider this passage: He went to the store. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to buy. He stood there and thought about it. He finally decided to get the milk. These can feel “echo-y” when they occur at the head of successive sentences, or paragraphs, or even scenes and chapters. Sometimes, this technique can be used for poetic/stylistic/dramatic purposes, but you can usually tell, in context, if that’s what is being attempted. And to be honest, that kind of nuanced writing is not crossing my treadmill very often among indie authors. I only cite it when there is no apparent dramatic or stylistic purpose being served, but I still end up citing it a lot.
To me, though, the most insidious form of echo is the repeating sentence structure, because it’s the hardest form for an author to spot. Dave went to the store. He stood in line. He bought some milk. The clerk gave him his change. The car wouldn’t start. He walked home. The dog barked. This is a particular form of echo that I call “declarative sentences on parade.” In short bursts, such sentence structure echoes are almost unavoidable, but short bursts are fine. It’s not until you’ve read three or four paragraphs comprised almost entirely of a single sentence style that it begins to trudge. The effect is sometimes masked by introducing a sentence or two with a different structure, or by adding a dependent clause or two, but eventually, if you keep returning to any one sentence pattern as a default, that pattern will inevitably begin to echo.
Anyway, that’s a brief unpacking of the echo problem. I hope that gives you enough to work with.
That does! Thank you very much for clarifying. I understand what you mean much better now. I’ll have to keep an eye out in my own writing and make sure I don’t make those kinds of mistakes!
I think the Poisson distribution might have been more suitable for analysis as it is a time based distribution of an event happening. Also a control graph of your concentration while doing another task is also needed so as to compare your ability to concentrate.
That said amazing work and otherwise a well written interesting article.
You might be right about the Poisson, and I’ll consider including that in my next evaluation (at 100 reviews). As for the control graph, I can’t graph data I didn’t collect, but given that the level of effort I put into the treadmill is relatively light, and consistent from day to day, I’m confident that, in general, the different books are being evaluated on a level playing field.
Hi Jefferson
What do you do when you’re presented with a book in a genre you don’t like? Are those culled out before you begin? Isn’t there a low tolerance element for stories outside your own genre?
I ask because one of the taglines on your books says it ‘will melt your face,’ a statement not often referenced for, say, romance novels.
I will submit one of my books to your test. I write historical fantasy, and found your statistics and examples very helpful, but I fall into several pits mentioned.
Thank you for posting this. I just signed up for your newsletter which is a compliment to your article. cheers
Good question, Veronica. I currently accept just about any sub-genre within science fiction or fantasy, and historical fantasy is something I’ve seen a few times already, so that’s completely on side. When I get a submission from an outside genre, I usually just send a note to the author saying that I don’t currently take submissions in that category. I do not read them and trash them. That wouldn’t be fair.
Having said that though, the kinds of things I tend to trip over are issues that would be problematic in almost any fiction genre. I have had books go all the way that explored story lines I didn’t particularly like. But they were well enough written that I got through the entire 40 minutes without interruption. So even if an outside genre book found itself on the treadmill, I think it would still get a fair reading, and the results would still be of some value to the author.
As for “melt your face,” that’s a line that is entirely in keeping with the spirit of that book, and of my readers in general. But I write in a much wider range of genres than that one book, and I read extensively in a still wider range than that.
I just read more on your site which answers my questions. It makes sense you read the genre(s) of your choice. Maybe I will send my WIP sci-fi when it’s finished.
But one more question/comment. All science-fiction is not violent, masculine-based thrillers, so would you read a science-fiction novel written for and from a woman’s point of view?
If it falls into the category of science fiction, or fantasy, or any of their sub-genres, I will read it.
I absolutely hate stories that are all over the place as a reader I usually lose interest if you have a story stick to it and don’t try to confuse us
Okay, can I TELL YOU how awesome it is to find a statistical analysis of this? You are my kind of geek. *cough* Seriously, though, I love having this outlined as to where it is most critical to focus attention. I’ve got an editor who has helped me with several of these that were formerly problems, but it is good to have a more complete list, prioritized a bit.
Follow-up: Where would ‘appropriate tension’ fall? Pacing?
Glad you enjoyed the article, HartJohnson. As for “appropriate tension,” yes, I’d lump that in with pacing. But remember, this list not a list of all the things that can trip me up. It’s a list of all the things that have tripped me up, in the books I’ve treadmilled so far. It’s by no means exhaustive.
I like everything on the list, but I agree with other critics in that the inclusion of present tense seems less objective and entirely subjective. The other items help writers get better at their craft, while saying, “I just don’t like present tense,” doesn’t really help anybody. I also understand that it can be a deal-breaker for some people, so because it is your list, you get to pick the variables. I think something like this experiment, when viewed by a new person, might discourage them from writing in a tense that suits them better.
There is method to my madness, though, Janden. First, remember that this is not a check list of universal writing problems. There is no such thing. For every item on this list, there are some readers who do not care about that issue.
Instead, this is a list of the things that have caused ME to lose immersion in specific books. Your list would be different, and in fact, every reader has their own, different list. Consequently, authors need to remember that there is no such thing as a perfect book, and that every choice or mistake they make may well alienate some portion of their potential audience. I keep the present tense issue in my list because, for me, it is usually an immersion breaker, and removing it would be dishonest.
Furthermore, number of comments I have had for and against that issue are about even. Clearly, I am not alone.
What I hope writers will take away from this is not that they should stop doing everything on this list, but rather, that doing the things on this list will probably cost them SOME readers. It’s up to them to decide which ones matter to them, and to their intended audience.
As I finish printing my first novel’s first draft, I now proceed with a new perspective to read/edit/study and improve what I know is a collective jumble of words waiting to find life. A great list and analysis of problematic issues. Soon it will be time for me to take the 40-minute challenge.
A member of my critique group posted a link this article, and I’ve been reading your site all weekend. Excellent job with your analysis. I appreciate the hard data you’ve collected, the time and thought you put into your analysis, and the additional depth consolidating the WTFs into categories. I also enjoyed reading all the original IOD reports. You tread a fine line between cruel honesty and healthy encouragement, and you do it very well.
I’ve also read through about two dozen of your other posts. Very interesting stuff. I was very excited when I saw you had a solution for measuring progress using Cron launched Python scripts. Unfortunately I was unable to download the Production-Monitor or the Production-Charts scripts. Are they still available? Can you direct me to them? I think this is a brilliant solution and want to use it in my writing process!
Finally, a few suggestions. Can you add an alternate archive list with all posts, one line per post, listed out with minimal paging? Maybe one hundred posts per page? Second, can you add a previous/next post control? I’ve read posts where it commented that the next post would be a continuation, or it was a continuation of a prior post. I’d like a standardized way of getting to those (rather than an in-line link). Third, I find it very difficult to identify links in the text. Are the other display options from WordPress?
Thank you so much for your excellent site!
Thanks, Jim. I’m glad you’ve been exploring the site and finding other useful things beyond the IOD series.
It’s been quite a while since I posted those cron scripts you mentioned, and my own use of them has changed a fair bit since then. I’ll have a look and see whether it might be worth updating the entire article with the latest, so stay tuned. As for your suggestions and questions about the site navigation and style issues, I’ll be looking at those next. I’ve just finished wrestling the load times into submission, in the wake of a recent upsurge in traffic. So now that the style sheets are stable, I can address those other issues.
Great aggregate info. Sharing on my blog.
Yes, 75% of the list is subjective, but so would ANY analysis of this sort of data. And while you, J Smith, might find present tense annoying and I mightn’t, so do I find “She threw up her hands” and “He rolled his eyes” annoying and you may find them perfectly fine. Take it up to the larger aggregate (as you’ve done) and we see a breakdown of where we can fix things easily and where we cannot.
And in the “cannot” column, educating ourselves as readers and (more specifically) as reading _writers_ can only improve our writing skills. Writing is NOT, in any phase of its development, an innate skill. It must be learned to do it well.
Thanks!
k
This is an intriguing experiment you are performing on immersion. I really like the part where you said, “I would often feel guilty about pulling the cord too quickly, and would continue reading beyond my third immersion break, hoping that maybe I’d overreacted and that things would smooth out. But I think that what’s really happening is that, over time, I’ve simply become more willing to trust my instincts.”
I used to “have to” finish books even if they’d lost my interest, now I also am willing to let a book go if it doesn’t catch me. I find, as a reader, I have always had a tendency to become bored with a book about 3/4th of the way through and tend to get impatient for the ending. Is this something that you have found as well?
Great article. Thanks. With Love, Z:)
Yes, there are some books that I find myself getting impatient with, Z. Often it’s one of several competing story lines that I just don’t much care for, so whenever it takes the stage, I find myself yearning to skim. But being a writer myself, I find those books particularly instructive. Why am I bored with that storyline? What could the author have done to keep me more thoroughly engaged? By switching to critical, investigative reading for the sections that bother me, I find that I remain fascinated by the book, although, perhaps for non-ideal reasons. :-) But if I can’t find anything to learn, and if there aren’t other story lines that do hold my interest, I’ll drop the book and move on.
Despite this article being around nine months old, I thought I would reply to point out a typo. It seems apparent that it’s a simple typo because it’s your most commonly-encountered WTF (listed on this page, at least), because it would not be caught by a basic spelling checker, and because it’s exactly the type of error you, as someone who knows how to write grammatically-correct sentences, don’t intentionally make.
Quote: “In my opinion, the authors who make these kinds of mistake are not doing so because they are incompetent[…]”
You might receive an influx of new readers to this particular article as a result of people finding their way here the way I did: the Immerse or Die Storybundle you curated, which contains a link to this page. You probably want the text of your article to reflect your standards for first-time readers of this page, but… hmm.
I can’t help but wonder if the “typo” I quoted was intentionally placed to ensnare people like me to whom simple mistake like those stand out as if they were somehow rendered impossible to ignore. (Yes, that was intentional.)
I’m eagerly looking forward to reading the other content provided on creativityhacker.ca!
For anyone who is unaware, the referenced bundle will still be available to purchase for nearly 13 days after I post this comment! Buy it here: storybundle.com/indie
Thanks for the note, Jesse. I’ve corrected the typo that you pointed out, and I’m glad your enjoying the site. (Yes, that one WAS intentional. :-)
I got sucked in by the scatterplot (I love any sort of visual representation of data) and your analysis of the data collected tells an important truth: many self-published books are published before the author thoroughly learned his craft. Sometimes writers are so focused on publishing that they don’t realize it takes years to learn this craft. Even finding beta readers can only help so much in an early work. How good are the beta readers? How expert are they? How critical are they? Even great beta readers don’t guarantee a good book unless the writer knows how to take that information on and how to apply it. And editors are not going to be entirely responsible for the editing of the book either if it wasn’t submitted as the most finished draft possible. I’ve worked with many a writer who writes their first draft and then sends it off to publishers and contests, getting all sorts of rejections and becoming dejected because it’s “the best thing I’ve ever written”… but the character wasn’t developed and the world was still not clear… They were so convinced what they wrote was so great, it didn’t need those things revised. I get to just wait for them to come back around and figure out how to dig back in…
I found this a highly informative and educational article, including the comments and replies section.
I’m a beta and ARC reader for several authors, not necessarily acting as both for the same work. I admit to being a grammar nazi and am not ashamed of it, however, because the authors I try to be of use to come from various countries, I’ve come to notice differences in style and presentation that seem to be somewhat specific grammar wise to the varied forms of English.
I would appreciate your opinion and advice on one aspect where I may be being too sensitive.
Commas, particularly the liberal overuse of them.
As a British educated speaker of English I was taught that a comma should only be used when it’s absolutely grammatically essential and that fully ninety nine percent are unnecessary and redundant.
Many writers, seem to feel the need, or even, the compulsion, to use as many, as they can, interspersing every sentence, with a plethora, of these, seemingly, ubiquitous punctuation marks.
See what I did there? My English instructor would have advised that not one single comma was absolutely grammatically necessary.
You will correctly surmise that I can be particularly ruthless in exterminating them.
Do you have any specific words or phrases which instinctually prejudice you against a piece of work?
A word that I feel is mis-used quite often in either the back cover blurb or in the brief synopsis is “decimated”. The dictionary definition is “…to cut down or eliminate by one tenth…” yet so many writers use this when they mean…..”annihilated” “exterminated” “destroyed” “devastated” or another of that ilk. I find myself thinking “If they can’t even be bothered to use the correct word in an overview then I can’t be bothered to read it.”
Secondly and in a similar vein is the misuse of a % (percentage) figure. By definition a percentage is a portion of a whole unit expressed as parts per hundred with 100% being the whole. How then can you have a % figure larger than 100% e.g. “The ship’s engines were now operating at 300% power.”? What those ship’s engines were running at was three times their capacity ( “original specifications/design parameters/normal maximum output even usual capabilities”…..pick one you like or construct your own ).
Seriously though Jefferson do you think I’m being overly critical or OCD and I just need to go lie down in a cool dark room (probably one with padded walls) and keep taking the meds?
Thanks for letting me rant/vent, I mean express my opinion.
Regards Mark
Good question, Mark. Different authors have different styles. IMO, a good editor (or beta reader) should strive to help the author polish the work within the author’s own style. For some, that will be punctuation heavy, for others it will be lighter. The job of the critical reader, I think, is not to enforce any particular style, but to ensure that the intended style is consistently applied and its meaning clear.
And what goes for style also applies to word usage. If the intended meaning of a word is clear, and is appropriate to the voice, then it’s fine. If not, then the problem is one of style or clarity, not definition. So my advice would be to pump the brakes on pointing out “definition violations,” and focus more on places where the word choice interferes with your ability to understand the story that’s being told.
Like you, I used to lament what I thought of as “sloppy” usage, but I’ve come to realize that the arbiter of word meaning is not the dictionary. Words mean precisely (and only) what we use them to mean in everyday life. So dictionaries don’t dictate the meaning, they seek to reflect it, by telling us how the words are being used in the wild. Consequently, they’re always playing catch-up to shifting popular usage. The only time I get exercised about misused words now is when the meaning I unpack from a word differs so greatly from the context that I am lost about what the author intended. And even in these cases, I find most can be explained by regional differences, rather than the author actually being “wrong.”
In the end, I’ve realized that there can be no one, singular style or voice that will embrace all writing. Variations in style, voice, and even vocabulary, are the colors of the fiction writer’s palette, and they make the reading experience so much richer. In a way, I’m deeply relieved by this. Because if you went solely on the basis of dictionary definitions, my own books would be unreadable. I invent new words all the time, because it turns out that English is incomplete. It’s a work in progress. And authors are the craftsmen who push those frontiers forward. Without them, thou wouldst utter discourse most strange and unseemly to thine brutish ear.