I completely agree with Megan McArdle from the Atlantic about most of her post. (She's referencing also Elif Batuman of the Guardian who writes about "drunk dialing" book purchases.) The importance of the impulse buy has been proven to me, because I do it, and they ought to find ways to encourage it with material you won't regret in the morning. But here's what struck me (emphasis mine):
Most of the publishing people I've spoken to agree that the Kindle and the iPad will change books--that they will be shorter, that opening chapters will have to be tighter and more compelling in order to survive the free sampling, that transitions will have to be livelier in order to preserve the reader's interest.
ACK! I will not be able to stand more freaking out about opening chapters- they're bad enough already! This may be occurring to me because I read so much genre fiction, but the leaping into immediate, convoluted peril to be compelling and the corpse in the first paragraph have become positively endemic, therefore, forgettable! Authors routinely put their characters in danger before I give a rat's rump about them, and I glaze over.
With the high production values in weekly television, commercials, and video games, a simple whizzing bullet isn't innately exciting to an entertainment consumer. Many mysteries have become more like comedic/ensemble pieces or noir splatterfests where the corpse is scarcely human. The decedent is treated more like the coin toss that starts the football game, not terribly engaging on its own. Sorry. When your characters are cardboard, I don't give a donkey-load how high the body count is. I'm not wincing or sympathizing or worrying. For all I care, you could be smashing marshmallow peeps. And if I'm not feeling something, the fiction has failed.
Given that there are cell phone novels (I wrote about them here) which are already very short melodramas with few wasted words for their format's sake, we already have brief, circuit-thin stories with something WOW on the first page, and so what? Yawn. A seasoned reader looks past all that, like they look past the word "said," and they're the ones you're reaching with the e-readers and the impulse buys. Note what Batuman says about her Agatha Christie kink, which embarrasses her enough to have to defend at some length (not so with me!):
...The Poirot mysteries, which initially seemed to me to rush by too fast and leave nothing behind, are, I find, perfect for a drunk reader with a decreased attention span. The undazzling writing style now seems to me to correspond, profoundly and even ingeniously, to the plot: despite an unassuming, even banal or ridiculous appearance, the detectives work in unfathomably deep ways...
What she labels an "undazzling style" is yet a real and appealing one which keeps hooking her. We could dissect it into types of sentences and vocabulary and constructions, as well as Christie's plotting and touch for her characters, which I find it's become too fashionable to malign. But in short, I'd say Christie's simple ability to evoke the deep currents under everyday life is exactly what readers, with their complicated if non-exotic lives, appreciate.
What gets me, grabs me, and makes me compulsively buy the book after reading the sample are all style and character questions. Sure, it matters whether something suits my mood, but that's already controlling what section of the shelf I'm searching in the first place. What's more critical is whether the author has bothered, within the tropes, to treat characters like fresh, dimensional people.
Editors and agents, facing desperate writers hungry for constructive tips, promoted the concepts of "in media res" and "moving up the corpse" as both a defensive measure and good faith advice to gin up more excitement. But the corpse placement isn't what makes me read, and now I'm getting so fracking bored with these unloved, unmourned meat puppets-- slaughtered without remorse or without ever seeming to have lived-- on every dang-blasted page 1, I'm developing an itch.
If it's a cozy mystery or a romantic suspense especially, I'm reading it for the style and the characters. If they don't grab me, no pyrotechnics will. I wish people would stop saying "tighter" and "more compelling" when what they really mean isn't briefer but better: better crafted, more creative, and more thoughtful. Harder, of course, but that's the writer's job and last I checked, it was voluntary.
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