This is a perennial question, isn’t it? Of course it is! Generally it’s pronounced in a tone that is envious, angry, or both, but let us try to restrain that sort of unhelpful emotional reaction and rephrase the question in a way that is both more helpful and more positive:
What do bad books do well, so that they appeal to readers even though they are not well-written?
I do think that’s a much more helpful way to ask the question.
Badly written: The Last Druid by Terry Brooks, where Brooks shoves the reader away by using a ton of “She was reminded of how precarious her situation was” and “She forced herself to concentrate, to stop the rambling flow of her thoughts,” types of phrases, plus a lot of unnecessary place and character names, plus a lot of thoughts about the backstory.
Here is Amazon’s currently top review for this book:
The Last Druid was a fitting … end to the Shannara Series as a whole. … It was fast paced and picked up right where The Skaar Invasion ended. Everything about the book was great, and really the only thing I can say is that this was yet another great ending to a Shannara Series.
It was fast paced. And the top review is (sorry!) boringly written, vague, and repetitive , which implies that this reader may not tend to be bothered by those qualities in fiction. I realize that is an inference that could be wrong, but it sort of struck me. You can click through and read the whole review; that’s why I linked it.
Badly written: The Da Vinci Code, where the writing inspired this parody for, one presumes, a reason. I haven’t read the book, only the parody and various reviews, such as this one, which is especially helpful here. This is most of the review, but click through to read the rest of it.
Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: the writing…is terrible. Astonishingly terrible. Make ESL students stitch 120,000 words together on their first day of class kind of terrible. I recommend wielding a pen while reading this novel, because you’ll constantly stop and underline sentences that are loaded with badness. My personal favorite: “The fond memory caused Sophie a pang of sadness as the harsh reality of the murder gripped her again.” Cliché sandwich with a side of corny triteness anyone? But, as you may have noticed, this is a four star review. Why? Well, because it’s ridiculously entertaining. … Twist after twist, revelation after revelation, the plot becomes a tangled net of intrigue as the characters race toward a showdown where truths and identities are shockingly uncovered. The book’s strongest quality is its ability to introduce esoteric history and facts without ever slowing down the pacing.
I will just note that “The fond memory caused Sophie a pang of sadness as the harsh reality of the murder gripped her again” is bad both because it’s using the same distancing report about Sophie that we saw in the book by Terry Brooks and because it’s just a silly sentence.
Badly Written: When the Moon Hatched, and here the badness is in the silly, overwrought pseudo-poetic sentences, such as Rayne fell upon the ground in a billion yearning teardrops of unrequited love, puddling in Bulder’s dips, filling his gorges with her gushing affections, although it’s hard to pick out one sentence because they’re all like that.
Here is the unbearably overwraught title, in full, as listed on Amazon: When the Moon Hatched: A Fast-Paced Romantasy with Undeniable Chemistry in a Stunning Immersive World
AND PLEASE STOP. This tendency to stuff the entire tagline, opinions and all, into the TITLE, should thankfully be on its way out. This is done in an attempt to screw with Amazon’s algorithms. According to posts like this one, stuffing allllll the keywords you can think of into the title should now be penalized by the algorithms, and I wish to heaven that change had been made before When the Moon Hatched was published (May 2024), because now they’re stuck with that title, and so are the rest of us. We will have to look at that title for the rest of time. THAT TITLE ALONE SHOULD DRIVE READERS AWAY, but last year, stuffing keywords into the title was rewarded by the algorithms, apparently.
So that may be part of why this book became popular — I mean, pure algorithm manipulation. However, I have seen references to a few influencers on social media platforms pushing this book upward. I don’t know for sure that this happened, but it seems likely. Or at least plausible.
Interestingly, looking at the 10% of the reviews of When the Moon Hatched that mention pacing, just about exactly half say the pacing is great and the other half say the pacing drags, especially in the first part (this is a summary from the AI overview at the top of the reviews). I guess we can’t declare that pacing was the single characteristic that bounced this book up to the top. Some reviews indicate it’s fairly steamy, but it doesn’t seem to be full-on smut like Fifty Shades, so that’s not it.
Though, as far as that goes, Fifty Shades demonstrates that pure smut can also make a book popular. (Very, very popular.) That’s not even unusual, as for example Laurel K Hamilton’s books shifted from novels to hard-core-plus-torture-with-a-thin-coating-of-story years and years ago (I’m not kidding) (or exaggerating). And they’re still going strong, thousands of ratings for each of the recent ones in this series. But setting that sort of exaggerated steaminess aside, how about OTHER books?
And I think the single quality that links those other books is pacing. That’s what I think does it, more than any other feature.
Or, okay, pacing and luck. Those two qualities. Luck, if the right social media influencer picks up a book and raves about it, and because social media influencers, like the rest of us, probably run this gamut —
And therefore plenty are on the left side of that curve and there you go, When the Moon Hatched, boom, popular. But without that kind of luck, then maybe it’s mostly down to pacing.
What do you think? Do you all have lots of counter examples springing to mind?
***
What contributes to the perception that the pace is fast? Some of the elements that contribute are stylistic and some are in the storytelling. Let me see how many I can hit in a rapid list:
1) Short paragraphs.
2) Short chapters.
3) Easy-to-read language.
4) Chapters that end with a mild (or serious) cliffhanger.
5) Chapters that begin with strong foreshadowing of approaching danger.
6) A good balance of interwoven exposition, description, internal thought and reactions, and external action, with the external action tending to come toward the end or beginning of each chapter. This is sort of a restatement of the two points above, I guess.
7) And, the part that I think is what people may think of first, every time the reader’s attention starts to drift away, something exciting happens. This isn’t the same thing as “lots of action,” but sure —
8) Lots of action, with the caveat that action can be direly boring and often is. Meaningful action involving characters we care about, plus the writing is good enough that we don’t just get lost, but can keep track of what’s going on.
I’m getting close to ten, so let’s see if I can’t make this a Ten Things That Make a Book Feel Fast list. How about:
9) Shallow rather than deep worldbuilding and sense of place. I mean, how much do you linger along the way? Does the author give you a chance to stroll at a leisurely pace and sniff the flowers? Or does the world barely exist as you zip through the story?
10) Rhythm. Does the story bounce along at a perky clip, or does it unfold more gradually? Does the tension rise and fall steeply, or gently?
Creating this list made me think of a book I read a long time ago — listened to, actually — and hated. This was a time when I had books on CDs, not on my phone (I don’t think I had a smartphone yet), so I couldn’t just stop and listen to a different audiobook, plus I was mildly curious to see how certain things would resolve. Anyway, what came to mind right now was that one of this book’s many weaknesses was horrible action scenes that dragged on and on. The action scene I’m thinking of in particular was a fight that took place on a bus.
The scene wasn’t hard to follow, that wasn’t the problem. It was slooooooow. The author described this fight in such a way that I kept thinking, “How can this fight STILL be going on? ???” I don’t mean this thought occurred to me once near the end. I mean for a very large percentage of the fight scene, I couldn’t believe it wasn’t over yet. How long does it TAKE for the bad guy to stalk the length of a bus? They aren’t that big! This may count as the worst-written fight scene I have ever read, only to be matched by many other problems with the writing, all of which were exacerbated by the audio format. Should I mention this book by name? I’m sure you’re curious. Fine, okay, it was Hero by Perry Moore.
A much better-written example for a lot of this fast-pace stuff is Wild Night by Patrick Lee. The link goes to my post where I took the novella apart as thoroughly as I could. I know I mentioned a lot of the features in this list.
Another book that comes to mind for me here, that I doubt very much you’ve read, is Truth Lies Bleeding by Chris Dolley, which I beta read … last year, I guess. Looks like it just came out a couple weeks ago. Anyway, my point here is, there are various things about this story that would not ordinarily have worked for me, BUT, every single time my attention started to drift, BOOM!
The Hunger Games is a good choice for #6. Also, I did not pay attention to this when I read the Scholomance trilogy, but since that trilogy had it all, and I read it fast, it probably had basically all the above lined up.
Other examples where a fast pace seems to me to lead to popularity: James Patterson for sure. Stephen King, even, maybe. Perhaps horror usually entails a lot of cliffhangery moments. I’ve never specifically noticed whether those tend to come at the ending of chapters, but perhaps they do.
What do you all think about the hypothesis that fast pace –> popularity? Or, I guess, it’s really that
[fast pace + luck + smut] –> popularity of not-great books
because that’s actually where I started. I bet there are counterexamples, though. Anybody got one?
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I like your theory – it makes sense to me!
I also think sometimes people just don’t care about prose. They care about story (plot, pacing), and characters, and so on. Being someone for whom prose is the most important thing (make or break), I find this strange, but everyone’s different.
I do understand a little in terms of having a very compelling story but weak prose, having read a few series from an author who has what I consider pretty juvenile prose (it’s pretty much at the borderline for what I can tolerate), but the prose isn’t quite bad enough to put me off completely, and everything else is great – fun characters and dialogue, imaginative ideas and world… I’ve always thought it a pity that the rose isn’t better. But the author is very popular, from what I can tell, so they don’t really have any need to change?
I take it those who are fans of the author don’t mind the prose at all, and just enjoy the story. I enjoy the story but find the prose just a little cringey. (I do think the author has improved in terms of the prose, but somehow the story has kind of gone downhill… the early ones were more interesting!)
Anyway, that’s the one subpar prose author I do read from time to time because I like the world and characters they have created.
There’s a couple of other authors who have pretty solid prose but I just don’t quite ‘gel’ with their style? I was somewhat surprised. Because there’s nothing wrong with the writing, exactly, I just don’t like it for some reason, and I’m not sure why.
oh, I’m glad to hear they are going to do away with the incentives for those horrible long keyword-baiting titles! Being a Kindle reader, I hate them – automatic no for any book I see with one of those.
Counter example – The Name of the Rose. Which I couldn’t finish, but anyway, I don’t think it has any of those elements, at least not in the translation we got. And whether it would be a bestseller now, is something I doubt.
I didn’t think Scholomance was fast paced, or all that interesting. I don’t think I finished book one. The …. it was all one tension, I think, and that doesn’t work for me. Didn’t escalate, didn’t relax.
I may poke at Tarzan which is a level of badly written I can read and see what elements it has – fast pace and clifhangery chapter endings I’m pretty sure about, but the rest I’ll look for.
For ERB some of it is the energy he puts in his storytelling, I think. And what gives it energy? That’s part of what may be worth analyzing.
Pace is super duper important, and it’s interesting ’cause it’s so *modern*. Older (classic) books aren’t like this. Like, Frankenstein isn’t, even though it’s an adventure. And frequently action scenes did get interrupted for reflection and tangents. I hate that, btw. Did they even have editors in the olden days?
It’s interesting. Luck is definitely important, otherwise known as word of mouth, current level of subject matter popularity, marketing related things. Once you get people there, they’ll only read in droves if it’s easy to read. Basically. And pacing and simple, clear language are two things that make it easy to read.
Of course, there’s examples like Tolkien and even the moon hatching person. I honestly think a lot of that is down to marketing and word of mouth. I found Tolkien too dense/overwritten as a teenager and kept putting it off. I also never quite got into Shannara for the density/overwriting reasons common in fantasy, though the Magic Kingdom series was smoother. And I enjoyed many classic adventure novels by then. I personally also hate stupid adjectives/adverbs and super awkward phrasing (and particularly the word ’caused’) not because I read slowly but because they kind of slow me down and force me to notice them.
It’s hard for me to ignore, and it’s not because I’m slow. Though I am also a slow reader in the sense that I reread passages and think about them, get distracted and have to refocus. But the actual reading when focused is very fast unless it’s dense as well as bad, haha. Patrick Rothfuss and GRR Martin write dense fantasy in a way where the pacing works for me or compensates or… something. Even though Rothfuss is a fan of digressions, if I remember correctly.
Re: Scholomance. It did have the issue of pacing not relaxing. Which is why I got overwhelmed and paused the last book, which I will get back to, but to me that’s a sign that the pacing/plotting went too far into nail biter territory for me to relax enough to read. I start skimming. With enough tension breaks, skimming can be minimized if not prevented.
In a way, this is a benefit of the ‘good’ (cute and interesting) rambling style with action. I almost certainly won’t get overwhelmed haha. Rare as hen’s teeth but tends to be a great writer, though.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that Shannara became a best-seller because LOTR fans were desperately seeking more high fantasy. I don’t remember The Sword of Shannara being particularly good at pacing — I admit, it’s been quite a few years now, but still. It’s not like fast pacing is a feature of LOTR.
Of course, Brooks has since stayed popular for quite a long career; if I’d read any of his stuff more recently I might be able to say more about what virtues he has. I do vaguely recall the first Magic Kingdom book as being better paced, but that too was a long time back.
There’s some variation. I’ve tried works where I can only conclude that the slow pace and anodyne prose were the draw.
Mary, a cozy, especially the umpteenth book in a series with beloved characters, seem to favor that kind of writing.
Most of the ‘bad’ books I read (or try to) seem to feature
1 – Strong attraction to a “bad boy” who’s trying to kill you (why is that a draw? I’d be attracted to someone who was trying to stop people from killing me, call me funny, go ahead.)
2 – Dragons.
Eye of Argon found fame because of its bad writing.
Bad writing transcends genre. I tried, briefly, to read The Shack. I can’t recall the exact sentence that stopped me word for word, but it was something like this:
She pranced across the room, her white teeth complementing her beige pantsuit.
A) Ponies prance. Women do not.
B) Who on earth coordinates their outfit with the color of their teeth?
Evelyn, you made me laugh, and … I’m trying to imagine that sentence, or anything like it, actually appearing in a real book … but … it’s a strain. A hilarious strain.
SO TRUE about the attraction to the bad boys. It’s tolerable unless they’re trying to kill you, in which case it’s just nutty.
It’s all about what the reader is looking for.
David Weber’s Honor Harrington militarySF series is prone to a number of things I dislike: huge info-dumps about weapons, dull staff meetings, POV from flat side characters. Yet I have still read the whole dang series because the main character is both likeable and a true hero, the battle scenes are awesome (so much better than “shields have dropped to 40%” Star Trek fare), and he’s very good about setting up high public stakes in the first chapter. The promise of exciting conflict to come drags me through some of the duller scenes, knowing the weaponry enhances the battle scenes, and the books end on the high note of the exciting battle, so I end up buying the next one.
Not just cozies. I was trying some Christian romances — from the library.
They also wimped out on temptation, which needs to be tempting.
Ouch.
That triggered a flashback.
The first book I published was a Christian romance. A reader took the time to write me a letter complaining that it was too fast paced and had too much action :(
Evelyn, that’s really funny! Although yes, also ouch.
Actually, the Honor Harrington series is a great example, because I agree that first, it’s not that well written; and second, I liked it and continue to like it now, though I sort of read it in the good-parts-version, skimming through a fair bit of it. The battle scenes are very awesome, and so is the way Weber ratchets them up over time.
I do think some of the related series are less readable, though. The series about Stephanie Harrington and her special magic treecat friend was so close to hagiography as to make no difference, plus boring. I guess I need battle scenes to kick up the excitement level in a Weber book. Also, to be fair, I listened to A Beautiful Friendship as an audiobook, which for me always slows the story and exacerbates any problems with the writing.
I’m not sure that they don’t care about prose, because the lower limit seems to be “adequate, workman-like” and better than some of stuff that got published in pulp days.
But “adequate” is high enough