A follow-up on expectations and predictability

First of all: thanks for the many recommendations for new books to surprise and delight my jaded palate. Interestingly enough, many of the recommendations were either books I’d already read and loved (Pat Barker’s WWI trilogy, for example) or already on my TBR (like the Pam Rosenthal and Sherry Thomas novels). I’m currently reading a shockingly, awesomely trashy novel involving lots and lots of BUTTSECKS. I’ve so far managed to predict every goddamn so-called twist and turn in the story, and the prose is atrocious, but my god, it’s weirdly compelling. Review to come (hur hur hur) whenever I’m done with it.

But one comment in particular caught my eye. Darlynne wrote:

Many readers say they want to be surprised and then run up the red flag of outrage when a writer does just that. I do not count you in that very broad generalization at all, Candy, but lately I’ve seen series authors pilloried when characters and plots don’t behave exactly as fans have come to expect. One person’s vision of surprise is another’s version of jumping the shark, or worse, that the author has abandoned her principles or her marbles, and those lines don’t blur so much as shimmy.

First of all, I certainly agree that many readers don’t especially like being surprised. No, scratch that—it often goes beyond surprise. Most readers don’t like being made uncomfortable, or to have their fictional world threatened, but they really, really enjoy being excited. There’s a reason why bestsellers often are a paradoxical amalgam of bland writing and highly titillating storylines.

I’d also like to say that this simultaneous desire to be stimulated in a safe setting and under familiar circumstances (quote this out of context for fun and profit!) is not a good thing or a bad thing. It’s just how a lot of people seem to be wired, and I certainly don’t exclude myself from the ranks of those sorts of readers, depending on my mood.

I also think the desirable sorts of surprises and subversions of expectations can drastically vary from person to person. For example, I’d probably be delighted no end if the pervy homogay character in a romance novel turns out to be the hero or the heroine instead of the villain. I can imagine this wouldn’t delight other people quite as much.

But there’s also a difference between crafting a clever plot twist and pulling a tank out of your ass labelled “GOD: INSIDE HERE” to blow away the bad guys and solve all the problems; there’s also a difference between taking the time and trouble to subvert a character archetype and introducing jarring character arcs at the last minute in an effort to maintain momentum and interest. I wouldn’t be able to tell you precisely why the authors did what they did, but I do know that the stories that lose control and sort of start Making Shit Up (which I differentiate from carefully crafting a fictional world) come across as sloppy, as if the writers ran out of time or ideas (or both) and threw shit on a page just to get the words out there. The unexpected plot twist should make me go “Holy shit, I should’ve seen that coming, but I didn’t!” instead of “What the fuck is going on here? Why are the wolves and vultures suddenly talking to the hero for no goddamn reason?” The character subversions should make me clap a hand over my mouth with scandalized delight, not wonder why in the hell a previously beloved character is suddenly acting like a crazy bitchbag.

I think ultimately, we need consistency in world-building and character-building. A good fictional world operates by rules, and the rules for a truly excellent fictional world have to consist of more than “Because I own the magic wand, and I damn well say so” (which is partly why the Harry Potter magic system—at least, what I saw in the first and second book, which were all I bothered to read—kind of bug me, but that’s neither here nor there). A fictional world can break every known natural law we have, whether they concern energy and mass (werewolf novels) or aerodynamics (any book in which dragons as big as houses can fly and/or hover) or basic biology (most stories about the undead). The key is that the rules established in the world are adhered to consistently, and when they’re broken, they’re broken for a damn good reason, and are accompanied by an utterly convincing explanation.

The same holds for character-building. Consistency is important, but even more important is motivation. Motivation is what allows a consistent character to behave with what, to the casual observer, would be inconsistency. Whether it’s the Magic Hoo-Hoo or a life-threatening illness or fear or a desire for control, you need to create credible motivation when you make a character change tacks. Otherwise, it’s just Making Shit Up.

Sorry for sounding like a hackneyed Intro to Fiction Writing seminar, but sweet baby Jesus in a sidecar, it’s astonishing how many books out there don’t obey these very simple rules.

So to go back to Darlynne’s comment: she mentioned that she’s seen authors being pilloried for not taking the stories and characters in the directions the readers want or expect. I have three things to say to that:

1. Once a series becomes popular enough, that’s only to be expected. As the readership expands, the sample is going to get more diverse, and it’s going to become exponentially harder to please everybody all of the time—or even most of them some of the time.

2. Some of the reaction could certainly be readers disliking change, and feeling discomfited or threatened by the fresh new directions taken by the authors.

3. On the other hand, the authors could just be undergoing series exhaustion and are Making Shit Up to keep the dollars rolling in.

So what do you think, dear Bitchery? Have at it in the comments.

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Random Musings

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  1. sevendeadlyfun says:

    Trashy buttsecks? Name of book, please!

  2. Lindz says:

    See, this is exactly why I stopped reading Laurell K. Hamilton.  She moved into “making shit up” land and built herself a mansion.

    It makes me sad, since I really did like the series at one time.

  3. Teddypig says:

    Trashy butt secks HMMMMMM

    Two words!

    LORA LEIGH

  4. bungluna says:

    LKH’s always the first to be mentioned.  I still enjoy both her series and can’t wait to see where she’ll go next.  Go figure…

  5. You know, I suspect even authors get bored with themselves. Maybe some of the problem is that they tire of writing the same old characters / series and want to “mix things up”. Or could be they’re just feeling lazy or complacent. Not always easy to come up with safe-zone-genre-appropriate-yet-surprising-plot twists when it’s all been written before.

    Spam word:perform32
    It is all a performance

  6. KCfla says:

    Wow- interesting topic!
    I read a lot of “series” books, so my opinions on this topic are going to be geared towards those specifically. I might comment later on individual books, but right now here goes this much.

    For me as a reader, I don’t usually get upset if an author takes a few “liberties” with her world/story/charactors. After all, it is the author’s world! My feelings on this are two-fold:

    1- When said author created this world, did they really think it would become as big as it has? ( ie- did they think- when starting off said series- it would go… say… 3 books? 5?10? 100+????) With more books comes a “bigger” world, and sometime that leads to adjustments. I don’t have a problem with adjustments. 180 degree turns- aka “Making Shit Up”-…well, not so much!

    2- *Worlds* ( both real and imaginary) evolve. Nothing stays the same- ever! And I really don’t expect charactors in the series that I read to do any different. If they don’t they become boring quite frankly. And no one I know likes to read “boring”. (JMHO here)

    For the most part, I give the author the benefit of the doubt. Oftimes I chalk it up to a “twist” that is made for a reason that will be revealed somewhere down the line. Of course if it isn’t, that’s when it’s time to say goodbye. But ONE book of that type in a series will usually not be cause for me to totally abandon said series. But if it continues ( and I’m sorry to say this- LKH is the prime example that comes to *my* mind here- no offense meant to her fans that remain ) then that is when I just say enough.

    (general21- was I general enough on this one?)

  7. Lorelie says:

    Black Dagger Brotherhood anyone?  Vampires are vampires and humans are humans and never the twain shall meet.  Except when we want Butchie dearest to have his HEA with a girl.

    Change is fine.  Change is good.  If the writing is good I want to believe in an author. But there’s a difference between directional changes or even playing with expectations and screwing with the world building rules they’ve established. 

    On the other hand, even that I can deal with if they give me some sort of half assed explanation.  “Oh yeah, this has always been possible but we never mentioned it before ‘cause it’s about as rare as six legged cat.  You know, it happens but not easily.”  Gimme something to work with.

  8. Great essay, but I wish you hadn’t posted the link to the Cassie Edwards review.  I read it while I was waiting to use the loo.  Now I don’t have to use the loo anymore.  I do, however, have to go change pants.

    Getting back to the essay, even Arthur Conan Doyle had to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead because his fans demanded it.  The author walks a line between pleasing herself and pleasing her reading audience, and knowing where that line is separates the good and great from the mediocre and bad.

  9. --E says:

    This is where other characters become useful in a series. If the readers want more, but the author has said all she intended to say about a particular character or situation, she can pull the secondary characters into the limelight and continue the series without having to corrupt treasured images.

    And, of course, changing a character works fine if the author sets it up well. The two major sins I see are:

    a) the change happens too fast. The author needs to show the readers the character’s internal struggle. We all know that people can change, but we also know that it’s never easy.

    b) the author consistently says the character is A, while showing us the character is B. Nothing annoys me more than authors who intrude in the narration about how smart and clever their characters are, but then show the characters behaving like morons.

    This is why I love love love the Miles Vorkosigan books so much. Bujold takes several whole novels to bring Miles from hyperactive, charming, entitled, people-managing control freak to calmer, still charming, responsible and respectful statesman. Every step in his internal evolution is a struggle for him, and the reader is simultaneously sympathetic and amused.

  10. Shaunee says:

    Christopher Moore, who I love and would marry sight unseen wrote Bloodsucking Fiends some years ago.  Loved this book.  Snorted gallons of coffee through my nose in public whilst reading.  Recently he wrote You Suck, the long-awaited sequel that I was totally not waiting for.  Actually I wasn’t aware I should be waiting for it because I thought the book was finished right where it ended.  Nevertheless, I trot off to the bookstore, buy, sit and partake.  You Suck is not as strong as the first (naturally I could be alone in feeling this way).  In fact after I read about 50 pages, I imagined CM titled this book as much for how he felt about it as he did a pithy interpretation of what vampires do.  There just seemed to be a lack of interest in his writing that I haven’t seen in his other books.  Then I read the acknowledgements and saw that he thanked his readers who clamored for this sequel (I’m paraphrasing) and everything made sense.

    I do not know Christopher Moore, so understand that I’m totally pretending that I have some kind of insight into his motives and reactions.  But it seems to me that he followed all the rules Candy mentioned and then got stuck breaking them whether he wanted to or not.  I guess this falls under the heading of readers not liking change (including the very logical ending of a novel/series).

  11. Shaunee says:

    “Getting back to the essay, even Arthur Conan Doyle had to bring Sherlock Holmes back from the dead because his fans demanded it.  The author walks a line between pleasing herself and pleasing her reading audience, and knowing where that line is separates the good and great from the mediocre and bad.”

    Naturally someone said whatever I tried to say way better than I could.  Sorry Darlene.

  12. Cat Marsters says:

    I think a lot of the problem is that readers start to think they own the characters.  Which can be taken as a compliment, if someone loves something you’ve created, but it does get pretty stupid sometimes when readers forget that they’re not actually the ones in control of the fictional world.  Look at how outraged people became about the way Harry Potter headed.  JKR had already plotted out the whole thing, but plenty of people made up their own minds about how it should go and cried foul when she didn’t see it the same way.

    As for characters/styles/contents changing throughout a series, I think it can be put down to writer fatigue.  Bernard Cornwell said he was getting pretty tired of writing the Sharpe books (plus, he ran out of war), but the demand was so huge that he did it anyway.

  13. Chris S. says:

    My own $02…

    Would I ever dare to presume to tell an author, “Why oh why didn’t you just follow the rules that you, yourself, created?!  Is that so much to ask?  Sheeeesh!!!”  Probably not.  But has it ever happened that I found myself disappointed in one of my favorite writers?  Absolutely, hell yeah.  But the fact remains – the characters and the world created is their own.  Who am I to tell an author where a story “should’ve” gone…

    Is the story credible?  Has the author maintained the level of quality that I’ve come to “expect?”  And if it’s not topnotch, is my favorite author succumbing to selling out?  These, I would think, are the things a discerning reader are most interested.  But that just brings us back to the ugly 50 yard line…  where one person’s “WTF?!?!” is another person’s “OMFG, THAT ROCKS!!!!” 

    And re: sell-outs… Do we consider the Beatles a sell-out for allowing “All You Need Is Love” to be used in a Luvs Diaper commercial?  *shrugs*  Just sayin…

  14. Tracy Grant says:

    Great post!  I love the concept of character building.  Being able to have characters and their relationships with other characters evolve over time is one of the things I love about series, both as a reader and a writer (I also love it in good television series).  It can be a challenge to have the characters develop in ways that are fresh and interesting and yet still believable and true to the character one began with.  Just as I try to set up plot elements I may explore later in the series, I also try to set up character elements that may come into play later (such as one character’s needs for adventure versus a spouse’s desire for a more settled life; it may only be a subtle undercurrent in one book, but it’s been established for future stories).  I also love having secondary characters come to the fore in different books in a series.  It’s very to set up a character arc and think how it will play out over multiple books.

  15. Shaunee says:

    “And re: sell-outs… Do we consider the Beatles a sell-out for allowing “All You Need Is Love” to be used in a Luvs Diaper commercial?  *shrugs* Just sayin…”

    Good god.  Would you believe I didn’t even realize that’s what I was listening to when I saw that commercial?

    Chris S you are precisely correct of course.  And correct again for inferring my disappointment.  But the truth is, I’m less disappointed in Christopher Moore than I am in all those readers he acknowledged. Cat Marsters mentioned Bernard Cornwell and the multitudes that all but forced him to continue his series and I believe I am so bold as to include LKH’s rabid throng when I say the following:  There comes a time when the series or novel is just finished.  The author sees this.  He/she saw this when he wrote that first book.  “I could probably get another 4 or 5 books out of this,” he thought.  12 books later he’s tearing his hair out begging his audience to just let it go.  Because if they let it go, then the publisher might stop offering him the kind of incentive that a saint couldn’t resist and he wouldn’t have regret ruining a world he once cherished.

    So to the readers who beyond all reason love their entertainment, who would write a letter to whomever and describe in detail the veracity of their love I say listen to that song or read that book or watch that movie over and over and over again.  Because once the world is ruined, there’s no loving it again.

  16. Crystal says:

    This is the first time I’ve commented on something, so please be gentle!! I read a lot of series books, and one which came recommended to me was the “Bubbles” series which was supposed to be similar to the “Plum” books which I’m crazy about. So I plowed my way through the series until I got to “Bubbles all the way” in which the ending was SO off the wall and completely out of character for the entire series, that I don’t think I could ever read another bubbles book again. It’s fine to keep your readers guessing and throw them off a little, as long as it maintains the integrity of the characters.

  17. darlynne says:

    Boy, you just never know when a comment is going to put you front and center. I am torn between being all excited and bat-shit nervous. How cool is that? I feel like Miss Piggy: moi?

    I was delighted by your quest, Candy, for books with real surprises because it so clearly is the opposite of what I hear when readers become outraged at the direction an established author’s work takes. It’s as if there’s this invisible but fatal electrified line past which heavily invested fans do not want an author to go. Their thinking seems to follow that the world as the author created it originally is what they bought into, it’s the only way that world can be, and anything too different is a violation of that unspoken contract of expectations between author and reader. The more fans there are, the more that electrified line becomes something an author will eventually cross and with regularity. I agree totally with Cat’s comment that a lot of the problem is that readers start to think they own the characters, and this is what I struggle with most: fans don’t really want to be surprised, not if the surprise bends or distorts their vision of this world they’ve come to love. This was the genesis of my original post, which always come back to: whose book is it anyway?

    How does an author stay true to the world she has built? Who gets to say whether she has done that or produced something preposterous? How can we possibly know the far horizon or boundaries of a world we didn’t create? I get it that readers may dislike change, and feeling discomfited or threatened by the fresh new directions taken. I get that and it is still one of the things I find so perplexing. If a series starts out with fairies and then introduces shape-shifters, has the writer gone too far? If you’re OK with fairies and shape-shifters, does adding werewolves make your head explode? What, then, is too much change and who gets to decide?

    If I started reading a series about fairies because I just love me some fairies and after book three, say, there aren’t any more fairies or the fairies have been sold into bondage to cigarette-smoking lizards, this is clearly not the series I started reading. My choice is to stop reading the series or maybe I’ve discovered I like little green things that can French inhale. I can be disappointed, I can dislike this new direction, but that doesn’t mean the author has failed IMO. Obviously an author wants to sell books, but if someone has created a world, is that world supposed to be what the fans expect or is it supposed to be what the author sees? Is it OK—and, man, I wish I were making this up—for readers to ask the author of an established urban crime series to include hockey players or southern cowboys in her next book because that would just be so hawt?

    As for making shit up, I think there’s a difference between “WHAT?” and “WTF?” I like WHAT, I like that I didn’t see something coming, whereas WTF means I had no hope of seeing it coming and that is where the whole relationship falls apart. But even then, has the author’s vision failed, has mine dried up, did either of us fail? Could I make this post any longer? I’m working on it.

    I’m solidly in the camp—and it may be a lonely one—that the world and its characters belong to the writer. I don’t have to like what an author does—and, please, could LKH kill off that asshat Richard right now—but my eternal and fervent hope is authors will always be true to their vision, that they will surprise me.

  18. sara c. says:

    I’d just like to second the praise for Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan series. My favorite part is also seeing the progression and maturation of Miles. This is probably why “Memory” is one of my favorite books.
    Also, as a complete side point, how can you not fall in love with “A Civil Campaign,” a space opera romance which is dedicated “For Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy – long may they rule.”

  19. darlynne says:

    But there’s also a difference between crafting a clever plot twist and pulling a tank out of your ass labelled “GOD: INSIDE HERE” to blow away the bad guys and solve all the problems …

    I don’t remember the series, but on the last page of the book, when the mortal hero has married his beloved immortal heroine, one of the wedding guests gives the hero something to drink or eat from a small cup. The guest informs the hero that he’s just consumed ambrosia and—lo!—he too is now immortal. That is the laziest piece of writing I have ever read, a silly denouement to an issue that—the need for an HEA notwithstanding—deserved more effort and thought.

    This is different, in my mind, than an author changing gears or direction, or following a path readers find objectionable, which was my original lament about readers not really wanting to be surprised. This is poor craftsmanship so, yes, I will pillory—to use my own term—an author who can’t be bothered to work harder to resolve a complicated situation. The author’s vision or world, though? I am still not the driver behind that wheel.

  20. Lorelie says:

    Darlynne, that is Sherrilyn Kenyon’s Dance with the Devil, which is often touted as the pinnacle of that series.  🙂

  21. I’m interested in what do you consider a clever plot twist in a romance, Candy.  As in a stand-alone straight romance and not romantic suspense.

      I’m not much good for plotting and mostly I don’t think I read romances for the plot—I think of plot in romances as a museum’s walls.  It has to be there, obviously, but people don’t pay money to see the walls.

    Would a clever twist be how Jervaulx was not miraculously cured in FLOWERS FROM THE STORM?  Or how Dougless went back to her own time in A KNIGHT IN SHINING ARMOR?

    I’d always thought the ending of KNIGHT to be perfectly scrupulous to the rules Deveraux had set up in her story, and wonderfully poignant.  But a lot of readers hate the ending.

    Would you expound on this a bit, during breaks of Constitutional law?

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