Transcript: Episode 18

Hey friend, and thank you for being here for today’s episode. I’m Mary, and I hope you’re doing well whenever and wherever you’re listening.

If you’re a regular listener to the pod, I’m going to take a moment right here at the top of the episode to do a podcaster thing and ask you to consider leaving a rating and a review in whatever app you’re listening in right now. It’s an easy way to support the pod and help it grow, and I genuinely appreciate everyone who has already taken some time to rate and review. You are awesome; thank you.

As a rule of thumb on this podcast, I try to keep things generally positive and… I guess I won’t say “upbeat,” because I don’t know that’s a phrase anybody would ever use to describe my overall vibe, as it implies a level of bubbliness that I just do not have. But, I try to keep this space focused on finding new ways to see the positive potential in the creative life.

This month, I’m inviting you to take a little trip with me to the realm of negative evaluation and judgment and yes, even snark – but not for ourselves. Today I’m going to be talking about the potential benefits of letting yourself just really, really hate something you’ve read that somebody else wrote.

I want to note right up top that the framework for thinking about craft that I’m talking about in this episode is best applied to published writing you encounter already out in the metaphorical marketplace, written by somebody you do not know in real life. I would definitely not recommend applying it to, say, drafts of someone’s work you encounter in a peer group or a workshop.

There’s going to be a healthy dose of sort of reveling in dislike happening with this approach, and that’s obviously best deployed in ways that won’t cause critique group trauma or interfere in somebody else’s creative growth or just make you look and feel like an asshole.

So, since I just admitted that there are potential hazards to thinking about other people’s work this way… why am I recommending sometimes doing it?

Partly it’s just a fundamental truth that sometimes we just really hate something we read, and I don’t think we need to pretend that we don’t, as long as we know when to keep it to ourselves. But there’s also a major creative utility to paying attention when we find ourselves having that kind of reaction to a story. Studying the mechanics of writing you dislike is extremely useful for identifying craft you do like.

I’ll definitely touch on this angle of using the shit we hate to learn better writing technique. But I’m also focusing on how our ideas of what makes “bad writing” weave into our experience of our own writing – and how developing a bit more self-awareness about those feelings can reveal some powerful (and empowering) areas for creative growth.

So, let’s get into it. To go about this in a somewhat organized manner, I’ve identified three different categories or types of “no” response that we might be having when we read something and think “nope, no, I hate this.”

The first type of “no” is triggered by bad craft mechanics – something about the prose, plot, characters, or structure that repeatedly kicks you out of the story, some error or style quirk that you just cannot countenance enough to stay in the flow of reading. This type of “no” is going to be the most obviously fruitful for learning more about your personal craft style as a writer and for identifying what skills you most want to focus on getting right in your own work.

The second type of “no” is when something is more of a guilty pleasure – there’s definitely something you really dislike about the story (or at least, something you feel contractually obligated to dislike), but also you don’t want to stop reading (or watching, or listening). So you stick it under the category of a guilty pleasure in order to sort of resolve the cognitive dissonance and move on with love-hating the story.

The third and final type of “no” is something I’m perhaps overdramatically calling “existential loathing” – when a story just utterly and completely grinds your gears on like a deep soul level, even if it’s actually written pretty well. The kind of “no” when just the knowledge that this story exists and is published makes you feel like setting your computer on fire before lying down on a fainting couch for the rest of the afternoon.

(And woe betide you if you encounter this kind of story in a context in which you are forced to finish it against your will and then talk politely and/or coherently about it, like say a literature class or a book club with some very nice people you don’t know very well and don’t want to completely alienate by displaying your hideous true form.)

There are obviously some types of “no” response that fall in between these sort of arbitrary categories, but these are the three I’ll be using as examples for how to excavate some storytelling gold out of even the deepest mine shaft of mediocrity and wasted reading time.

Okay, so to start with the first and most straightforward type of “no,” the one about craft mechanics. The key insight we can take advantage of for this type of “no” is that it can sometimes be easier to tease out craft lessons from work we don’t like than from work we do like.

When we really love the way a story is being told, often we don’t really know why it’s working so well – we’re too busy being wrapped up in experiencing the story. And once we reach the end, it takes a bit of a mental shift to begin analyzing what it is about the mechanics of the writing that actually created such an immersive experience.

Sometimes a particularly good bit of craft might be more obvious, like if a book has really good dialogue or an especially well-executed plot twist. But even then, we have to put on a different mental hat to really pick apart exactly how the storyteller did what they did, on a technique level. Because really good story craft is often invisible in the moment. That’s part of what makes it good – you’re living within the world of the story, not standing back and thinking about it.

For example, let’s say you loved the dialogue in a book because it felt incredibly believable and realistic, like the characters were people you could go outside your door and meet in real life. That alone isn’t actually a craft insight – because what reads convincingly on the page is almost never a word-by-word transcript of the way people speak in real life.

So to get to a concrete and applicable craft tip, you have step back a bit from your appreciation and your emotional response and start to break down what’s actually happening with the words on the page. And let’s be real: it takes time and commitment to buckle down and go back through the book and do that. And even if we’ve got the time… sometimes we’d rather just love the story and leave it at that, at least for a while.

But let’s flip this example around and say you pick up a book with dialogue that you utterly hate. It’s typically a lot easier to quickly point to the concrete things on the page that are making you hate it: All of the characters are saying “cheers” instead of “thanks,” like every single time regardless of their supposed individual personalities, as if the word “thanks” does not even exist, and this book is not even set in the UK.

Or, each line of dialogue in this conversation is tagged with a unique and increasingly esoteric synonym for the word “said,” including tags that don’t actually describe human speech, like “beamed” and “realized.”

Or, this entire page is filled with a sequence of short, single lines of dialogue, as if the characters are engaged in history’s most monotonous game of analog Pong.

When something like this is actively annoying you while you read, it’s a pretty easy mental jump to extrapolate a specific craft tip that you want to keep in mind for your own writing: Check for overused idiosyncratic phrases when revising dialogue, and then use the Find function to trim them out of the manuscript. Use the actual words each character is speaking to convey their tone, instead of conveying tone after the fact with a weird dialogue tag. Vary the length of sentences in long chunks dialogue, and break up long chunks whenever possible.

It may take a little more work to suss out why a bad plot is bothering you, or why the structure of something feels not “cool and interesting” but rather “straight-up wrong.” But even with bigger-picture craft mechanics, I still find it often becomes pretty clear what I’d do differently as soon as I give it even a little thought: Don’t rely on a big reveal to carry the climax scene unless it is truly surprising, because if it’s not, your smartest readers are going to be literally grinding their teeth by the time they even get to Act 3 (if they even get there at all).

Or, don’t use a repetitive, nonlinear chronological structure unless readers are actually getting a new story angle when you repeat scenes, and not just the same events told in different words (no matter how pretty you find your own words to be).

You might be noticing that a side benefit of doing this kind of analysis is that you get to let your snark flag fly in the name of your own artistic growth… and as long as you don’t then go write some deeply nasty Amazon review, nobody even gets hurt! (Except everybody else who is also deeply annoyed by physically improbable dialogue tags.)

If you want to take this kind of craft analysis seriously, as well as having some misanthropic fun with it, here’s how I’d suggest doing so.

As soon as you realize the story is falling into this category of “dear god wut,” shift from reader mode to writer mode and start jotting down what you hate in a systematic way. This doesn’t have to be complex, but I think it does help to make some categorized notes on the general prose style, characters and dialogue, setting, structure, and plot (and also worldbuilding, if that’s relevant to the story’s genre).

When you encounter a story that triggers your “no,” I don’t necessarily think you have to finish the whole book if you’re not inclined to (especially if this is like an e-book sample kind of situation, where you’ve dodged the bullet of actually buying said book). Just read enough of it to make some notes and then hit the eject button.

Feel free to go as wild as you want getting those notes down, but do then take the step of flipping each of your craft complaints into a positive craft tip you’d like to remember.

And for bonus points, if you do this either digitally or on notecards, you can then create a master reference of these craft tips organized by category, so you can easily look back at them in the future. Having this kind of living document can really come in handy when you’re revising projects, especially if something in your own work feels off and you’re just too brain drained to figure out what it is.

(Because sometimes the craft mistakes we hate the most in published stories are the ones that tend to creep into our own first drafts. Or at least, I’ve noticed that to be true for my first drafts.)

In addition to creating these kinds of practical tips to carry forward with you, doing this sort of analysis on shit you truly hate can also help you develop your personal style and voice as a storyteller. Identifying and defining the mechanics that bother you most when they’re done poorly is a direct signpost to which aspects of storytelling matter most to you on the page – which in turn is a signpost toward what skills you may want to really develop and deepen as part of your own voice.

The next type of “no” response in my list of three is the guilty pleasure story. And this type of story has something in common with the first type – usually, if something feels like a guilty pleasure, you know what it is about the way the story is written that makes you feel quote-unquote “guilty” about reading it. So for those aspects of the story, you can apply the same kind of craft analysis I was just talking about.

But with guilty pleasures, there’s a bit more going on, especially under the surface. We’re often starting to get into more psychological and emotional territory. After all, we do like these stories – we just don’t want to, or we don’t want to admit that we do.

So for these stories, I think it can be really interesting to ask yourself why they make you feel guilty. What specific aspect of the story makes you feel embarrassed to associate yourself with it?

Maybe the answer to this doesn’t turn out to be all that deep. Maybe it’s just that the plot and themes are cliché, and as a writer you feel like you’re supposed to be bored with anything cliché.

Even this sort of straightforward answer is worth unpacking a bit. How do you personally define what makes something cliché? Would there be ways to write about the clichés in that guilty pleasure story that wouldn’t feel so trite and embarrassing – that would feel less like an overused meme and more like a universal theme? And for the real kicker question: Would those themes still be as engaging or compelling if they weren’t written as clichés?

I’m going to move on from this example because I really don’t want to keep hearing myself say the word “cliché,” and I think you get the point I’m making. Stories we feel embarrassed about liking can tell us a lot about how we’ve been taught to value certain kinds of writing and certain kinds of stories. Our tastes are sometimes genuinely personal and intuitive, but they’re also culturally conditioned. Picking apart why something is embarrassing is a really good route to becoming more aware of the ways our ideas about storytelling have been taught or socially constructed.

Sometimes, delving into the source of the embarrassment ultimately leads to discovering that you really do take issue with that kind of story – though maybe not for the reasons you’d initially have thought.

There’s a trope that comes up a lot in romance plots, particularly in genre fiction, that I’ve always considered a guilty pleasure: the “enemies to lovers” trope. This trope has gotten a lot of air time recently, but it’s by no means modern: Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Much Ado About Nothing are commonly cited examples of enemies-to-lovers “literature.”

A lot of the side-eye for this trope is just part of the general disdain thrown at cultural memes that have been embraced by girls and women. This is the source of an awful lot of the sneering that goes on over any type of romance or YA fiction. And I admit that my own assessment of these enemies-to-lovers stories as “guilty pleasures” started out having a pretty strong whiff of internalized misogyny.

But after giving my motives some deeper examination, I realized two things:

1.      Disdaining romance as an entire category of storytelling is indeed some misogynistic bullshit, and

2.      I actually do take issue with certain kinds of stories that get essentially sanitized and normalized under the heading of “enemies-to-lovers.”

I don’t want to get too far into the weeds here dissecting my feelings about this trope, but suffice to say: I think there’s a meaningful difference between the Elizabeth-and-Darcy, mistaken motivations style of enemies-to-lovers, and stories asking us to believe that emotional or physical abuse is romantic as long as you get together with your abuser in the end.

Even after drawing this line for myself, I don’t always walk it perfectly – and I think that’s fine. I mean, I will always love Gideon the Ninth, but I do so knowing that it’s probably a good thing I read that book when I was in my thirties and not when I was, say, thirteen.

But there have been other guilty pleasures I’ve examined that have made me realize I was drawn to them because there was something there for me to reclaim – something I decided I didn’t want to feel guilty about at all.

A big part of my journey, so to speak, as both a writer and a reader was reclaiming my love of genre fiction after having it sort of ironed out of me in college and early adulthood. I grew up loving fantasy and sci-fi stories, but like a lot of writers, I went through a period of having drunk the lit fic Kool-aid and thinking that true genre fiction couldn’t ever also be truly good fiction.

Part of what brought me back around to appreciating, loving, and fiercely defending well-written genre stories was asking myself why I felt embarrassed of liking anything I picked up off the sci fit or fantasy shelf while feeling perfectly normal about books with actual vampires and robots and time travel as long as they came out of the literary section.

I assume it’s a similar type of embarrassment that lead Margaret Atwood to insist for years that she doesn’t write science fiction when… she clearly does. Although I do think she accepts the label now, at least in certain context.

Anyway, part of rehabilitating my love of writing over the years has been letting go of genre fiction as a “guilty pleasure” and allowing it to return to the center of my personal storyverse – because it’s just what I like, and no category of story is inherently or universally worse than another.

So to sum up this section on guilty pleasures, here are some questions you might ask yourself to help uncover any insights that might be hidden behind or within that reaction of guilty embarrassment.

·        What makes your enjoyment of this story feel different from stories you aren’t embarrassed to enjoy?

·        What does that reveal about your own writing – is this embarrassing thing something you truly want to distance yourself from, or is there actually something to reclaim here?

·        If there is something in this guilty pleasure story that you want to reclaim or own – what’s the real discomfort that makes you categorize this as “guilty,” and how can you start to let go of that judgement?

·        On the other hand, if you truly dislike it, what is the specific line you want to hold around this in your own work? Is this theme or this kind of storytelling just something you have no interest in touching? Or is it something you want to explore, but only in certain ways?

(If you’re on the podcast newsletter list, those questions – plus some other exclusive prompts for the episode – are in your email inbox, so you can come back to them easily after the episode. And if you’re not on the email list, please do consider joining to get access to monthly prompts and resources!)

That final set of questions about guilty pleasures leads me into the third type of “no” response I mentioned earlier: the “existential loathing” response.

These are the books you want to throw across the room, figuratively or literally. It’s the story you wish you hadn’t encountered because it’s in your brain now and how did an entire editorial department sign off on this thing?? It’s the story that makes you feel so angry you circle right back around to bone weary, because it’s going to be in other people’s brains, too, and not everybody is going to throw it across the room.

I think this kind of complete, unequivocal, full-throated “no” arises out of our instinctive understanding of how powerful stories can be – our awareness that stories are relational forces that do relational work in the world.

Sometimes we can clearly formulate an existential “no” in ways that are equally easy for us to translate into a stance about the kind of creative projects we don’t want to be part of.

To give one concrete example from my work as an editor, I made the decision a couple years ago not to work on any manuscript that uses violence or the threat of violence purely for shock value (so, without actually engaging meaningfully with the effects and implications of violence).

I don’t want to be in any kind of creative relationship with that kind of story – and it would be a breach of my professional ethics to edit a story that I feel this way about. Editing requires you to align your knowledge and your expertise with the writer’s vision, to ensure that the advice you’re giving isn’t just imposing your own vision onto their writing. And if I can’t do that, it’s unethical for me to take on that project.

As a writer, I find that these lines are often harder to identify and embody, because they aren’t as obvious. I mean, I’ve never been drawn to stories with gratuitous violence, so I don’t exactly have to remind myself that I don’t want to write a story with gratuitous violence. And yes, I’m aware that ethical judgements like this in art are highly subjective… but I’m not getting into that right now because it’s not the point of this episode.

But judgments about violence aside… there are other kinds of stories I don’t want to be in relationship with that are much less blatant, or that I might not even be aware I’m creating when I’m writing the first few messy drafts. I talked a bit in a previous episode about my experience of unknowingly starting a bunch of different versions of a story concept that were all ultimately based on a theme I actually didn’t want to be writing about – a theme that was essentially glorifying my characters’ traumas.

I didn’t realize I was doing this until I found myself having a strong but confusing “no” response to something I was reading – a book I’d started out really enjoying was slowly but surely making me itch to throw it across the room, despite all the things I still genuinely liked about it. And when I asked myself why, I realized that the aspect of the book that was triggering this “no” was the way trauma was being held up as the most central, important, and meaningful human experience – the only thing worth telling stories about.

(I also mentioned this reading experience I had in episode 10 on story structure, so if you haven’t taken a listen to that one yet, I go deeper into the details there.)

This book was by no means the first time I’d encountered that ideal of trauma as the core of all good storytelling. But that existential “no” I felt was the first time I’d been able to put my finger on it coherently and consciously. And once I had, I quickly started to notice the ways this ideal had filtered into my own creative work.

Once I realized I was repeatedly attempting to write a kind of story I fundamentally didn’t want to be writing, suddenly my repeated struggles with drafting that project made a lot more sense. That deep “no” response had been leading me to something powerful and precious: a way to unravel a creative knot I’d begun to think was simply the evidence of my own limited imagination.

Once I knew I didn’t want to create a story that glorified emotional pain, I was able to imagine possible forms for this story that included emotional pain but weren’t about pain. And suddenly that creative knot loosened up.

Letting our deepest “no” lead us to an equally deep “yes” is part of claiming our ethical and spiritual responsibility as storytellers – our call to embrace our stories as a kind of prayer or incantation for the world we want to live in, and the way we want to live in it.

Looking at creative work through this ethics-based lens isn’t about reducing art to a soapbox declaration or a propaganda piece. It’s just about writing as if you really believe in the power of stories, and therefore the power of your own story. It’s about writing in a way that acknowledges the creative relationship your story will have to others.

Because, as I often say on this pod, stories shape our imaginations and our spirits in ways that exert tangible change. When we tell stories, they are also telling us. When we write worlds, we make worlds. And it’s the responsibility of the storyteller to be aware of what kind of world we’re making.

This can all feel both weighty and slippery at the same time – I admit that some days, thinking about writing this way is at least as intimidating as it is inspiring. So just like with learning the mechanics of writing, sometimes it’s easier to get a grasp on the kind of story world we want to write by first letting ourselves get really clear on what kinds of story worlds we think are toxic bullshit.

Maybe this approach feels like a natural no-brainer to you… or maybe it stirs up a feeling of discomfort. I think for some of us who have been burned by encounters with dogmatic ways of thinking, there’s a fear that seeking a defined ethical vision for our creative work will inevitably lead to rigidity – basically, we fear that we’ll become closed-minded if we think this way (and that our art will become confined and flat and un-inspired).

But that doesn’t have to be the case. The more consciously aware we are of the lines we’re drawing in the way we relate to the world, the more we’re aware that those lines are their own kind of living, creative document – we can revise them. This knowledge too is part of the power of the storyteller.

And if indulging in a little bit of intentional, creative dislike can help us learn how to draw those lines for ourselves… then I think maybe sometimes, snark can be positive after all.

 

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Thanks for being here with me today, and as always, keep well, keep writing, and I’ll see you in the next episode.