A post at Writer Unboxed: I Finally Figured Out My Decade-Long Reading Slump
I’ve been in a “reading slump” for the last decade. … I don’t like it when books feel too much like a bad tour guide. … In this metaphor, the writer is the guide. A good guide will keep the pace of the group moving forward and on track without overexplaining or underexplaining. Every so often, they may stop or slow the pace of the walk to point out points of interest and share their specialized information … [but sometimes] the tour guide marches the group through the underbrush like a drill instructor, pointing out everything but stopping nowhere.
Increasingly, I’ve been noticing a trend in contemporary novels toward the overly aggressive tour guide. I pretty much feel like I’m being dragged along by the hair by a book while it yells, “LOOK AT THE PLOT. THIS IS THE PLOT!”
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This is where I laughed.
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I came to this conclusion while reading an adult fantasy novel published in 2022 by a Big 5 publisher. I actually finished the book, even though it gave me aggressive tour guide vibes, because the prose was so good I could mostly overlook how I felt like I was being breathlessly yanked along a single track, and that single track was the plot … What stuck out most was that that I viewed this book as extremely fast-paced to the detriment of the story. But when I went to record the book in my tracking app, I saw that 68% of people who had rated the book thought it was “medium” or “slow” paced.
I stared at this data for a while, wondering what planet I was living on.
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And this is where I paused to think about various editorial feedback I have received over the past 20 years.
—Readers don’t like journeys. Can you cut the journey?
—Can you cut this incident, since it doesn’t serve the plot?
—Should this character be removed since he’s not contributing to the plot?
And so on. And I do think this sort of feedback is good and useful because it’s fine to consider whether something ought to be trimmed, but I also agree with the author of the linked post, Kelsey Allagood, that honestly, even if you’re heading somewhere, it’s fine to admire the flowers along the way. Allagood says she thinks this tendency is driven by publishers, not authors and not readers.
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I wish publishers trusted us, the readers, more. Trust us to stay on the path if you’re not always holding our hand. There is still absolutely an audience for (what would by some be considered) “slow” books. … But this trend of consume more, consume faster, seems less like a natural evolution of our psyches and more like a trend being pushed from the outside. It takes a while to finish a book like Karamazov, which is less time posting covers on Instagram and pushing others to buy, buy, buy.
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I don’t know, could be both. I know I like stories with setting and a sense of place, and you have to build that. I’m a character reader (and writer, usually), and you have to build characters. All of that is on top of the plot. But I know I like many books that are comparatively very slow paced.
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An interesting topic. In The Hands of the Emperor, which I love, it’s all about the characters- there are essentially three iterations of the same reveal, but since it’s such a lovely reveal, and bc we love the characters, we love the book. Tuyo is a perfect synthesis of plot and character. I love Tasmakat for the ending, but I’m so invested in the main characters I tend to skim the final episodes towards the end. Similarly, I’m invested in the main characters in Rihasi, but not so interested in, say, the actors, so that part drags a little for me. I might guess that for the author, the main characters become so developed that they get a little boring?? but the reader, of course, can’t get enough of them. Sometimes Sherwood Smith’s books irritate me, bc she uses so many different characters and so many POV’s it’s hard to figure out where to invest your, say, reader devotion ?
The thing is that some plots are naturally more easy going than others. Bildungsroman vs. thriller trying to catch an assassin. If you try to make the story move at an unnatural pace, that’s not going to be good.
A nature walk should not drag you along. A toboggan run should
Personally, I tend to like books that are slower-paced than has become average. I like meanders off to random spots we’ll never see again, if they’re interesting to the characters, and I enjoy lovely prose and good descriptions, especially if they help build a sense of place, time, or character. I’m not averse to pauses, like that scene in Howl’s Moving Castle (movie version) where Sophie has finished doing laundry and just . . . sits for a moment to enjoy the stillness and beauty of a mountain lake.
I’m not the person to ask about pacing, though, because I’ll also happily read a headlong hurtle through a plot if the characters grab my interest. But if I’ve read too many books like that in a row, I do tend to find myself a good slice-of-life sort of story to read next, because a breakneck pace in EVERY book can get quite tiring.
More and more often now, I will get about halfway or two thirds of the way through a novel, and I’ll just stop caring. The plot has tension, there are questions unanswered, I don’t know how they’re going to get out of this fix—but it’s a plot, it will get resolved one way or another, plots always do.
What makes me devour books and re-read them multiple times (like Hands of the Emperor, or Tuyo) is the chance to hang out with characters I love in a cool setting, and the trust I have in the author that it’s all going to mean something. The plot must enable those things; beyond that, it seems I could care less about what happens or how quickly or intensely it happens.
Human brains like to see patterns… even when they’re not there. So if you write a scene that isn’t connected to the plot, you run the risk of the reader coming up with a theory that would connect the scene and then being disappointed and annoyed when it turns out not to be.
“Every scene” and “every detail” aren’t synonymous at all, though — and you can and should be building the characters and the world in scenes that are connected to the plot only because they are building characters and relationships. And yes, the relationships are part of the plot, but not the action plot, or not necessarily. I think it’s the action plot that is the focus of the “can you cut this journey” advice — and cutting everything extraneous to the action plot is (often) (not always) a bad idea.