Creativity Hacker

The ImmerseOrDie Report began in June of 2014, and since then, I’ve put 204 books to my simple test. Every morning, I get on my treadmill, open a new indie book, and start walking. If the book can hold my attention for the duration of my 40 minute stroll, it survives and I write a report about why it worked for me. But if I find things that break my immersion—things like spelling errors, bad grammar, inconsistencies, etc.—then I close the book, stop my timer, and write a report about how long it lasted and what went wrong for me.

Now, I’m not a monster. I don’t close the book on the very first misplaced comma. It has to be something that actually distracts me from the illusion that I’m inside the story world, watching the events unfold. And I don’t just stop at one, either. I tally up three such immersion breaks before I pull the plug. Then I do my best to explain why it broke my concentration.

After posting the 50th report last year, I wrote an analysis, sharing a variety of statistics that I thought were interesting about what I was seeing. But far and away the most popular topic I touched on was the breakdown of the different kinds of errors I was seeing. So this time around, armed with four times as much data as I had back then, I’ve decided to focus more closely on this list of issues. What are the actual writing “sins” that disrupt the reader’s experience?

Same graph after 50 contenders

As many readers have been quick to point out, it’s important to remember that these are only the issues that I myself have reacted to, and I am well aware that in this IOD series, I am a harsher critic than most readers are likely to be. But I have another class of correspondents who tell me that they trip over exactly the same issues I do, and many writers will want to take note here, because these correspondents tend to be submission editors, slush pile readers, and professional critics—the very gate-keepers of the publishing industry who writers are trying to impress. So if you want to run a quick “polish test” before you submit your own work somewhere, I hope you’ll find this list a helpful guide.

Problem Categories

Each of the 204 reports I’ve published can sustain up to 3 WTF flags apiece, for a potential total of 612 flags thrown. But not all reports earn three strikes, so my dataset contains only 571 specific problem flags. However, after going through that data carefully, I find that most of these are repeated occurrences of just 51 distinct issues that happen over and over again. So to organize this index, I’ve broken the flags down into seven basic skill domains. I hope that this will help different writers zero in quickly on the types of issues that relate to different phases or abstractions of the writing process, and that this will help them learn to see such issues if they ever crop up in their own stories. After all, knowing that something causes a problem for readers is the first step in polishing it out of your work. And at the very least, this will serve as a list of the most common things to watch out for if you ever decide to submit your work to my treadmill.

Clarity

The first domain in which I throw a lot of WTF flags is the one of clarity. No matter what kind of story you’re telling, it stands to reason that if readers cannot understand what you are telling them, they are unlikely to engage very deeply with the tale. Because when you get right into it, if they had only put them out there with translucency, they would almost certainly have been seen around it, am I right?

Relax, that last sentence was an example of this kind of problem in action. I was obviously saying something, and it was grammatically correct, but even so, my meaning was entirely unclear. This is not to say that it’s a problem whenever readers don’t understand what’s happening in your story. With some books, figuring out what’s going on is the whole point. But there’s a difference between not understanding the causes and implications of a situation vs. not understanding the meaning of the sentences. One is the beginning of a delicious mystery, the other is a quick trigger for readers to abandon your book in frustration.

Style

Once we’ve stepped past the issue of clarity, the next class of issues relate to style. This isn’t about what your sentences mean, but the manner in which they convey their meaning. Is your prose clunky or elegant? Repetitive? Absorbing? Does your use of language offer a transparent window into a intoxicating world of imagination? Or is it a cartoonish freak show that draws attention away from your characters? These are all questions of style.

Internal Continuity

The previous categories focused on issues at a single point in time—a strange word choice, a confusing sentence, a pompous tone. This next category widens the lens, looking at how story elements behave over time. Basically, a continuity problem is any situation in which the facts of the story seem to be in conflict with what the reader already knows. With internal continuity problems, the facts at one point in the story do not match the facts that were given earlier.

As a simple example, consider a character who walks into a pitch-dark room and then “sees” something on the table. Wait a minute! How can he see it if the room is dark? Or the problem might take more abstract form, such as a dim-witted character who suddenly uses a big word, or an impoverished character who later yanks a silver dagger from his belt. The possibilities and permutations are endless.

Readers absorb facts like happy little sponges while they’re reading, so any time you tell them something that differs from what they’ve absorbed, it will stand out. Sometimes, contradictions like this are exactly what the story needs, but the reader must be able to trust that it was done intentionally, and was not simply a gaffe caused by sloppy writing/editing. When the text appears to contradict itself, the author is made to seem unreliable. It’s all well and good for a protagonist to be unreliable, but when the author can’t be trusted, immersion is pretty much impossible. So we really do have to be on guard for these.

External Continuity

A reader’s knowledge is not limited to just the things you’ve already told them in the story. Each one comes into a book with a lifetime of personal experience about all kinds of things from the real world: history, science, basic human nature, economics, etc. The writer is free to change any of these truths to suit the needs of their story, but unless the reader is shown that the rules are different in your story world, all this other knowledge will be taken as a given. Human beings must sleep, gravity pulls things down, mute people don’t talk much, fire requires oxygen to burn, etc.  So when your hero drops her weapon and it falls up, or her supposedly depressed friend starts cracking jokes, these things can conflict with the reader’s understanding of how things usually work, and that will pop them out of the story.

This is particularly a problem for the “invented world” stories common in fantasy and science fiction. The stranger your world is, the more careful you have to be about managing the readers’ expectations of what is considered “normal.”

Story Manifest

There is a layer behind the actual words of the story. I call it the “story manifest,” by which I mean the list of characters and settings, and the events that take place between and among them. If you think of fiction as the portrayal of an imagined history, then the manifest is the collection of faux-historical facts from which the story is constructed. And sometimes, problems can appear in this dimension of a book.

To be satisfying, stories need to be about events and experiences that seem worth telling stories about. So if the building blocks of your story don’t carry a sense of importance, then it’s likely the story won’t either.

Story Assembly

Turning the story manifest into an actual manuscript is not just a matter of writing prose. There’s an intermediate process that I call story assembly, in which the author chooses which scenes to show and a narrative structure within which to present them. Whose POV will the reader follow? Will there be a prologue? Will we open on a scene of the funeral and then jump back to explain how we got there? Or will the story proceed from the first event and march forward through the chronology of each beat, as they unfolded?

Mistakes at this level tend to produce stories that meander, where engagement suffers, and readers are much more likely to bail.

Publishing Proficiency

Previous categories related to failures in the writing, but this last group is comprised of failures in the publishing phase. More specifically, these are problems that arise when the manuscript is transformed into a marketable book.

Fortunately, these are the easiest to deal with. Most of them can be addressed by giving sufficient weight of attention to professional editing, encoding, and proofreading before launching the book.

Conclusion

So that’s the list. 51 things that frequently break my immersion, and by extension, the immersion of many other readers. But I’d be surprised if there aren’t a few issues that I’ve missed—issues that I’m not sensitive to. Is there something else that pops you out of a book? Something that I haven’t mentioned here? If so, tell me about it in comments and I’ll add it to the list. The more complete this index is, the more useful it will be for everyone.

And if you want to start following the regularly posted reports, you can see the latest posted here, or follow the RSS feed, or even subscribe to a weekly digest by email. Or, if you find this really useful, why not pick up a copy of one of my books and tell me which of these rules the younger me was fond of breaking? :-)