What is working?

The trick I tell everyone about

I’m going to tell you a trick that has really, really helped me throughout my career.

I always try to figure out what works in a book.

Let me take you back. . . .

Back to when I was a new writer, just learning how to write less embarrassing stories.

I’d joined an online workshop that was super helpful for finding a community (I’m still friends with folks I met through that nearly 20 years ago!) and learning the basic building blocks of crafting a novel.

A lot of the advice I got early on will be familiar: show don’t tell; start with action; don’t use adverbs.

So what happened next, as I was applying all these pieces of advice to my own work?

I started noticing all these glaring mistakes in books I was reading. Not just writers using adverbs, but breaches of all sorts of other rules I’d either absorbed from other new writers or rules I’d constructed for myself.

And at some point, the bitterness set in. The feeling of I’m not making these mistakes, so why can’t I get published? And the This author is barely holding a story together so why the heck would anyone publish this book? I could barely read a book. I enjoyed nearly nothing.

I had entered my hyper-critical phase.

And oh I was bitter. Jealous. I was working so hard to improve my craft and these authors were out there blatantly ignoring basic writing advice. Had publishers given up on having any kind of taste???

A turning point. . . .

Then someone told me to read TWILIGHT.

I knew a little about the book. Sparkly vampires. High school. Soundly mocked in online writer spaces. But the person who told me to read it was an authority figure to me. So I bought a copy and read it.

I couldn’t stop reading it.

Through the book, I identified things I’d have pointed out to the author in a critique. I recognized cringy choices. And I had a lot of questions about the romance.

But I couldn’t stop reading it. It was just so emotionally compelling. Engaging. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough. It was so easy to see why thousands — tens of thousands — of readers were obsessed with the book.

And somewhere in there, I realized it wasn’t about what an author was doing wrong. It was about what an author is doing right.

Moving out of the hyper-critical phase

That was a significant lesson for me. It wasn’t the only lesson. Moving past the hyper-critical phase was a longer process than the time it took to read one book. But it was a significant lesson because of the extremely polarized views on that book, my own personal opinions about it, and its eventual effect on the entire industry.

The hyper-critical phase is really common for writers just starting to hone their craft. It’s hard to see others succeeding when they’re breaking all these perceived rules. (Even after you’ve moved beyond thinking that adverbs must be eradicated from the English language.) I hear a lot of new writers talk about not being able to enjoy books anymore, wondering why something got published, wishing they still liked stories they used to love.

But the phase doesn’t have to last. You can learn to read for enjoyment again.

And honestly, the question of “why did this book even get published?” is a good start. If you go in genuinely looking for the answer to that question, you’re likely to find it.

It was a humbling experience, reading TWILIGHT. Because no matter what I thought the author had done wrong, the fact was, she’d done something really, really right. And that outweighed everything else.

Life after hating everything

Writing hadn’t actually ruined reading for me, it turns out. At some point during those years, I’d started enjoying books again. And at some point, I convinced the overly critical part of my brain to shut up and let me like things. And at some point, probably after the TWILIGHT experience, I started to read things with a new goal: figure out what’s working.

This is really easy when I like a book. It can be harder when I’m meh about a book. Or when I actively dislike it. But that’s where I really need to set aside my personal preferences. Not every book has an obvious (to me) answer. Sometimes I have to dig a little, or discuss with friends. And sometimes the aspects I dislike about a book are the aspects other people love. That’s okay.

Again, my personal preferences cannot be part of this equation.

Not every book is right for me. That’s the whole point of this exercise: what makes it right for someone else?

Publishing is an emotionally draining business at pretty much every level. It’s so easy to feel jealous, to wonder why another author is having all of this success when you’re over here working hard a book your publisher is just going to hit the “print” button on and never talk about. (And it sucks. It would be nice if all authors were treated like valuable people, rather than random book generators. But that’s a different post.)

But understanding why some books take off — beyond the publisher’s initial push — is really valuable. It can teach you something. It can help with the feelings of jealousy. And even if it doesn’t do either of those things for you, it’s a reminder that not all books are for all people. If there’s an audience for a book you hate, there’s an audience for a book you like (and maybe wrote??) too.

For more discussion on this, check out Erin Bowman’s great article: Enjoyability over all else.