Since this post is late, let me tell you how I spent yesterday so you know why I'm tallying again. After work and a massage to get out the "at the computer 24/7" shoulder knots, and grocery shopping, and cooking dinner, and cleaning up, and then shopping for new winter boots since mine are leaking wet into my socks every time I go out (and this is a massive problem in Northern Wisconsin, since it has yet to be above negative or single digits for 3 weeks and snow only keeps coming), *inhales deeply* I finished reading a book.
It was terrible.
It was so bad, I told my mother, "I don't think I'll ever read another book of her's again, in case she does the same thing."
This is the kiss of death for a writer. I (as a reader) did not enjoy the story. I told someone else it was terrible. She will probably tell another 3 people, so on and so forth, and then this writer will have to live out of a cardboard box behind Wendy's. Bad word of mouth travels.
Why was this story so terrible, you ask? It was terrible because the writer let me down.
Common ways to let your readers down:
- Using 3/4 of the book to hype up a supposedly explosive meeting between protagonist and antagonist, and then when they finally meet on page 368, they have a slightly strained "talk" and work out their feelings sans shanking and bullet wounds.
- Building up a world with rules and boundaries, only to smash it to bits and tiny pieces in the third to last chapter.
- Anything along the lines of, "Turns out they're government experiments".
- Anything along the lines of, "Turns out it was just a dream".
You get where I'm going with this. If you lead the reader to believe one thing (that your world's rules are solid and unbreakable) then feed them something else entirely (whoops, looks like she can bend time afterall thanks to a government mutated gene hidden deep in her genetic code...no, wait, that was a dream, she's really dead), they're going to feel let down and they will hate you - or at least your book. They may never read another word you write.
New ebook? Nope, not taking it if it's free. Score a nonfiction magazine article deal? Flipping past it, in case that's just a dream, too. You sent me a Christmas card? Trashing it, in case it's mutated by the government.
Letting the reader down is the number one mistake you can make. We can all see past a little diffused tension here, a little crappy writing there, and a typo or two, but none of us will ever get past being let down. It's like the time your friends said they'd pick you up from your house on the way to the airport, but then left on the plane to Vegas without you. They're not your friends anymore.
People's time is precious. Don't waste it.
Don't live behind Wendy's in a cardboard box because you could have done some more creative thinking - or better yet - trashed that one story you didn't know how to end properly.
That is all. Write better and more prosperous, my friends. (I'm going to leave myself a note and hopefully, we'll speak again on Tuesday!)
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