On Writing: Wonder and Beauty

I’ve had to dump a surprising number of Kindle samples in the past year-plus due to pure ugliness. I find this more than a bit bewildering. Yet sample after sample I’ve run across, if they’re not in first person present tense (argh), riddled with typos in the first few pages (why), or have a main character whose only acquaintance with morals would have been the dictionary, if they’d ever read a dictionary….

Weed out all that, and there’s still way too many books out there apparently focusing on ugly. Not the characters’ physical appearances, although that shows up too. But diving into and obsessing over the absolute worst parts of the society, setting, or world the character is dealing with. Monsters exist? Cue the most gore-filled kills of innocents the writer can splash on the page. Character is abandoned as a young child? The writer drags up every nauseating detail on the city dunghill/dump he’s abandoned on and the disgusting things he has to do to survive. (Most of which, BTW, would in real life leading to the kid dying of dysentery or worse within a year, not surviving over a decade.) Politics are ruthless? Every person we meet has either stabbed the main character in the back already, is about to, or was plotting to in the future but only laughs now because someone else beat them to it. Prostitution and slavery are elements of your world’s society? (As they have been in most places and times, historically.) Every female character (and some males) will be raped, threatened with rape, or working with the panderers. And even if the first few pages avoid all of that, odds are the character is bemoaning their horrible situation and using foul language to do it.

Rrrraaaaaauggggghhhh.

This is bad writing.

The point of the first few pages of a story is to hook your readers. To make them sympathetic to the main character, curious about the world, and interested in knowing What Comes Next. Ugliness shuts all of these down, hard.

First, sympathy. Sympathy is feeling with the character. It is not feeling pity for the character. Sympathy is what happens when, say, Sarah Kelling has to deal with a massive debt, the grief of being a widow, and enough legal matters to choke a paper shredder – and decides she’s going to get through this anyway. On determination, bluffing, knowing how to cook on a penny-pinching budget, and fast feet if she has to. She’s not going to sit there and whine about how horrible she has it, she’s going to make a plan and fix what can be fixed.

Reader reaction: “Yes! You go, girl! If I were in that situation, that’s just what I hope I’d be able to do!”

Second, curious about the world. If the writer hits us over and over with either how ugly things are (horrible spaceport sex and drug dives, dunghills and sewers, seriously) and/or attributes everything beautiful like silks and precious metals to arrogant, power-mad, smarmy nobility, then why should we want to learn anything more? We already know there’s nothing wonderful here. Whereas in Sarah Kelling’s Boston we hear of pleasant rooms with high bookshelves, worn red velvet curtains, and a fireplace; of a lady employed as a maid (in part for a paid room to rent) with a uniform in bright orange, topped by a cap of frilly velvet and long orange streamers; of window-boxes that would be full of carefully-tended flowers in summer, now brightened for the holidays with greenery and red ribbons. And that’s just physical beauty. We also hear of universities, mountain-climbers, fortune-tellers in tearooms, and a host of other interesting characters sketched out even in just a sentence or two of humor. That Boston is a city where people live, and sometimes live quite happily. It invites us to explore.

Last, and certainly not least, interested in what happens next. If in the first few pages I’ve seen a character abandoned by his parents in horrible circumstances, committing an act of bravery only because he’d end up framed for murder if he wasn’t, and then after a time-skip betrayed by the same group of people all over again who deliver him into the hands of slavers… yeah, no, I give up. He says he has a wife and kids to get back to? Gee, that would have been so much more effective if you’d ever shown them in the first few pages. Now? Don’t care. Bye.

As opposed to the widowed Sarah Kelling, who starts the story determined to run a boardinghouse and just keeps going, even once her landlady duties expand to trying to figure out which of her boarders might have committed a murder. Every chapter brings a new complication, and an attempt to resolve the last one; some more successful than others. You stay up way too late reading onward, because okay, how’s she going to figure out this one-?

Stories need beauty and wonder. Characters need it, or they’d have no reason to go on. And your readers need it. Get it into the story. All of the story.

Now pardon me, I have a few more samples to dump….