The Three Archetypes of Flawed Books

Book “Shapes” and Moby-Dick at the 100 Page Mark

Editor Break Down: A Book’s Flaws as Shapes

In this reoccurring segment we embrace the double meaning

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Six weeks into Dear Head of Mine and something I’m already saying incessantly is how hard it is to write a book. It’s an important qualifier to a lot of critiques and criticisms as an editor and as a reader. Critiquing most books is like critiquing college-level or high-school-level athletes, just because they’re not the best in the world, doesn’t mean they aren’t better than 90% of people or that you could get out there and do better. So it is with that respect and understanding that I’ll be examining the three major issues—or shapes if you will—that I see again and again reading many books as an editor.

The Spool

This is the most common shape of a flawed book by far. It is a novel or piece of nonfiction that starts with tons of enthusiasm and then fizzles. I call it the spool because it’s like a ball of yarn, which starts tight and together, but only becomes looser and looser as it rolls along. That this happens so often—perhaps more often than any other issue save books that are just incomplete or first drafts—makes a lot of sense intuitively to me: a great rush of passion when someone has an idea, an argument, a scene, a situation that excites them, only to realize that once they’ve exhausted that creative vein that the conventional form of a novel or book requires them to write a couple hundred more pages. If a book started out as a long form magazine piece or essay it might be hard to pull out a whole book. The best remedy to this issue happens long before the editor arrives—stop until you find something that gets you extremely, uncontainably passionate again, or keep writing to get there but learn to discard what is done out of routine or a sense of word or page counting.

The Sagging Middle

A cousin to The Spool, The Sagging Middle novel is exactly what it sounds like. Start with a bang, end impressively, but basically meander for the majority of the space between A and B. In a way this is the most easily forgiven kind of flaw as a reader, psychologically people tend to remember the start and end of things better. And, in my experience, a phenomenal start of a novel will propel you through a lot you don’t like in search of that greatness again, and a good ending will put you under an illusion that you didn’t waste a lot of time getting there. Of course, in truly great novels everything matters to the overall effect and there is no better feeling than finishing a book and feeling a sense of completeness. There’s something very sad about a book that’s shaped like this—oh what could’ve been.

The Slow Burn

This is by far the rarest of any category of the three major flaws. It is the opposite of The Spool; a novel that starts tepid and becomes more powerful as you get to the end. I can count on one hand the number of books that have won me over in this way, which is why I recommend largely stopping a book if you’re not enjoying it. After getting burned so many times thinking to myself “I’ll just read a little more and see if it gets better,” you learn to pick up a different book.

Bonus: Watch me Work it Out

This is not a shape of a book, but more of an incredibly frustrating feeling you can get when reading sometimes. It’s a sense that creeps over you that the writer hasn’t taken the time to think through every element and is trying to write their way into a plot or a character or even figuring out their style before your very eyes. In the process they waste your time with a lot of meaningless or boring information. It can take on the form of a character stuck in a room thinking too long, lots of cut-and-paste research, or hollow questions asked and not answered.

Unsurprisingly this is a symptom of first-time writers and debuts. Arguably this is the main reason why editors can be so valuable, especially as someone is still improving and growing as a writer. It’s often said that good writing is rewriting. Although seasoned writers will just internalize these lessons and rid themselves of filler automatically, which is nice as an editor too, or just different, because you can focus on the more complex issues.

Bonus #2: I’ve said what my problems are so they’re solved, right?

My favorite subcategory of flaw, is when a novel directly addresses the criticism explicitly in the text that they know the book will likely receive. A novel will say something out of the blue like “He knew that the archangel Gabriel coming down from the clouds to pay off his overdue credit card debt was improbable and made no sense. But there he was entering his routing number for the next days payment.” Or worse, “Colin knew what he was writing was pretentious garbage, but wasn’t that better than writing commercial romance novels that didn’t strive for beauty.” The point that I cannot stress enough for writers is this one: just because you know what you did wrong and say it out loud does not mean you still didn’t do that thing wrong. Your plot point might just strain credulity, your experimental meta novel just might be a failed one, your character might have said something incredibly cheesy or obvious but without real value. It’s good to know, it’s better to fix.

A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic

Progress: Days 21, Pages 115

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Impressions after 100 pages

After nearly a month of reading and a little over one hundred pages, my first thought is: wow these chapters are short. My second, slightly more sophisticated thought, is that Moby-Dick is not quite as dark or dreary as I expected from everything I had heard about the novel. There’s been a lot of slapstick and absurdity: a man shaving with a harpoon, a priest giving a sermon in a maritime-themed church, and most recently Ishmael’s partner in crime sitting on a sleeping man below deck for some reason. So far Moby-Dick is far more Don Quixote than Dostoevsky. That may well change very soon, as it took 110 pages and they just got out to sea this morning. We still haven’t fully seen captain Ahab either. Between the sea and the captain we are sure to be headed into darker waters as we continue our read.

Plot Points

I’ve largely had positive first impressions of Moby-Dick so far—the writing isn’t as arcane as expected and there’s many intricate, beautiful sentences and phasing that is interesting and unique even today. Melville is a peculiar guy and it’s a very bizarre and surprisingly fun read for such an out-and-out classic. But something that is under examined, especially with classics, is if there are pieces or parts in old novels that are hastily constructed or just don’t work. Sometimes we immortalize classics in ways that set them in stone, as if every paragraph and sentence we are meant to divine meaning from. We’ve already talked about how Ismael’s sidekick Queequeg can be a caricature to the book’s detriment. But another example in the last few chapters is the chapter, entitled quite bluntly “The Prophet,” in which a mentally ill person comes up to Ismael named, even more bluntly, Elijah, and gives him a warning wrapped in a backstory. Just like good storytelling transcends time, there’s no point in excusing lazy plotting on the basis that it was the 1800s. If I took my editorial time machine back, I’d tell Melville he could do this in a more artful way (I don’t hate the idea that we need to hear a little more about Ahab before we see him—now that’s a timeless technique that always works). In the end, this move was pretty clunky at best, but it is a heartening reminder to writers out there that even great books misfire.

Thursday Writing Advice: Get Rid of Shadow Words and Phrases

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In emails I find that I write “I think” a lot. Obviously if I’m taking time to write to someone it’s my thoughts: “I think” is totally unnecessary and often I go back and scrub them out before pressing send. This is a Shadow Phrase: a set of words that could be taken out without losing any meaning in the sentence. Writing for consumption and entertainment demands that we move past these verbal ticks and boil sentences down to what is urgent, important. Another example of a shadow word is “it”, when 98 out of 100 times it’s better to name what “it” actually represents in the sentence. Shadow words are the cousin to cliché, they are built from a lifetime of filling in the gaps with placeholders when we are unsure or still need to figure something out (here, “something” is a shadow word, what do I need to figure out? What’s more precise than “something”? Instead of “something” perhaps I should write: “figure out exactly what we’re trying to say”). It—shadow words and sentences—can drive you mad if you start looking for them, but swapping these filler words and phrases out is an easy way to make your writing clearer and better.