Do you truly wish to learn as an author? Okay. Here we go. Because giving you my impression of your work – confusing and frustrating – was the best I could do without going into... what I'm about to. Beyond that, your issues weren’t worth special attention and didn’t require more than what was already said. But since you want attention, I’ll give it to you. Here are some lessons I feel you need to grow as a writer. While my kid gloves are off.
Also, for anybody else, these are good lessons, though I’m being blunter than usual about it. This is the guiding philosophy to some of the stuff I look for and I keep in mind as an author, editor, and reader.
LESSON #1: ENTERTAINMENT IS A TRANSACTION
Welcome to the transactional marketplace! Here’s how things work here: the audience pays (with time and/or money) for that which entertains them. No entertainment, no audience. I wouldn’t read your work if I didn’t have an obligation to because of this thread. I considered big time putting you in the “I refuse to review” category because your writing is so terrible – more on that in the next lesson! But first, let’s get to the root of why I only ever read 1 chapter: because real readers will only read one chapter.
I’m going to quote from Noah Lukeman’s The First Five Pages: A Writer’s Guide to Staying Out of the Rejection Pile.
The truth of the matter is that I only need the first couple of pages to understand something because if there are issues on the first page, chances are all the issues are going to remain because the writer didn’t view the issues as an issue. Let’s think of it with another art form: music. You only need to hear a little to be able to form an expectation of their skill level.
“No, it’s different with storytelling because you haven't seen the full thing—”
WRONG! WRONG! WRONG! Any setup you do should do double duty of being interesting and strong in its own right. If you can't handle something in the micro, the likelihood of being able to handle it in the macro is unlikely. This is why I keep telling people to focus on focusing on introducing character early on. It’s something people can attach to quickly and moves them through to everything else. Concept grabs, character keeps. and it provides the window into the world for the reader to get attached to and to care about everything else through. I have a video on this on the first page. about that.
“But I have 100+ chapters--”
IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW MANY CHAPTERS YOU HAVE WRITTEN! I don't care if you have 1 hundred chapters, 1 thousand chapters, 1 million chapters if I can't even read one. Why should I have faith in you for all of those – which demand more out of me – when you couldn’t do that much in that tiny space? I feel like I’m dealing with a con artist then. A con artist pulling an advanced fee fraud. "Aww, just invest in this, I promise it'll work out. Trust me -- I like what I came up with." We'll address the issue with this mentality in lesson 4.
Anyway, I wondered if it was just me, so I went to testing. We’ll revisit one test in a bit, but first, I asked a guest staying at my place. They were confused, feeling it was a disjointed mess that jumped from one scene to another without any connection between things. Maybe that wouldn’t happen if you applied some basic scene/sequel to things. On top of, you know, having a grasp on how sentences are formed. Or how indirect internal dialogue works. Which brings us to lesson two.
LESSON #2: GRAMMAR MATTERS!
“It’s a movie in my head!”
It’s not one in mine because your prose is poor. Let me give you a little science lesson that’s relevant to writing. I’m going to first quote a bit from The Science of Storytelling.
So, why does that matter? We skip up to this:
Easier and immersive, aka the exact opposite of your reading. That’s why I referenced Sanderson. He himself notes he intentionally keeps himself out of things because Orwellian prose is designed to put the focus on the story instead of going “look at my beautiful prose!” And see the first page on my take on that stuff. Also, see the part on self-indulgence since I feel that’s relevant to your writing too. We’ll come back to that in Lesson 4 -- the most important lesson for all this.
Regardless, if your work is a movie, what I experienced was some director who has non-stop shaky cam and random jump cuts. This is why I often tell people about prose issues because I’m not even asking for top-of-the-line prose. I just want basic grammar so I can follow the story. If something is confusing, I’m moving on.
And with your whole “I want the reader to work” mentality, I’m all down for the reader working… IN THE RIGHT WAY! WITH THE RIGHT THINGS! If I need Matpat to come in and make a Literature Theory video to explain the basics of what’s going on in a chapter, I don’t feel like reading. This brings us to what works for slow burns and why trying to constantly explain away stuff will never, ever work.
As said, I tested your prose on others too, just to see if it wasn’t me. I don’t wish to copy every reaction, but I feel this one summarizes things well:
So yeah. How do you expect to get readers when you fail to engage with them? And speaking of that, let’s bounce over to this important thing to keep in mind:
LESSON #3: PEOPLE FEEL FIRST, THINK SECOND
You have to make the reader FEEL something first and foremost before they think about anything! That’s why I insist on starting narrow with a central character and expanding out slowly – which is a tip so many different fantasy writers and so on insist on too. You have to make the setup interesting in its own right AND setup. Explaining to someone why they’re wrong for feeling that way doesn’t convince them shit. It just makes them want nothing to do with you or your work.
I’ll cite a book series I read that has… let me count… 22 books in it! Here’s what the big story is all about:
It does A LOT of setup. There’s an entire 4 book series which was setup for things. And you know what it also did? IT STARTED NARROW! I don’t care about any of that on its own. I just was looking for a caper novel and I read this description for the 1st book in the series:
Daniel Faust knew he was standing with one foot over the brink of hell. He's about to find out just how far he can fall.”
And how does the first chapter start? Like this:
This isn’t some explosive opening or anything. It’s nothing grand either. It just delivers on the genre goods while giving me something to hook onto right away that the synopsis promised me (the emotional experience I was looking for as a reader) and I’ve grown to see the much bigger world and care about others because I gradually got to them. Hell, as my friends can attest to, I’ve geeked out over the possibility of who is The Paladin in The Chosen One myth or everything going on with The Enemy or how Harmony got a sister series, with Harmony being my favorite character from Daniel’s book 2 through 4, while she was his lawful rival. And how hyped I was for their inevitable meeting again and it made Wisdom’s Grave Book 2 all the more anticipated. Or even me caring about little things like Daniel Faust’s missing car. The payoff to where the car was was great, built up across multiple books, but I cared because the author made me laugh in the immediate with Daniel’s constant bitching about it and insistence that Harmony stole his car. This is what proper setup is like.
And if you look at most successful stories, they function like this. That’s the key to big serials. You start narrow, don’t overwhelm or confuse at the start, and drip feed people information as it goes on, as you make them want the info.
Now here’s the lesson you need most of all because I’ve seen how you keep responding to other people.
Also, you know what? I want you to understand this about storytelling and skill with it:
“Good stories are felt, not understood. Just as a musician plays an instrument, a storyteller plays the emotions of their audience. They lead their audience through a series of ups and downs, using the principles of engagement to keep their audience focused and moving along an emotional journey through the story.
To be a good storyteller means to be good at controlling and directing the emotions of your audience, preferably without the audience realizing they’re being manipulated. A good story feels natural, unforced, and as though it were something which is really happening in the hearts and minds of the people experiencing it.”
You are not controlling and directing the emotions. Unless feeling frustrated is what you want of the audience, at which case… well, mission accomplished? I’m not sure how that gets people to read the remaining chapters though.
That brings to the most important thing to say to you. The most important lesson.
LESSON #4: THE FIRST LAW OF WRITING FOR STRANGERS
You keep talking about this and that with your readers, but here’s the thing I’m noticed: you have almost no readers. You barely have any views and, if you keep going the course you are, nothing will ever change. The reason why you lack them is the same reason you react as you have to me and others when you face criticism: you don’t care about the audience’s experience. Or at least that’s how you come off. You only care about your feelings and the attention you want from others. That brings us to the first law of writing for strangers! What you absolutely fail at so far:
I’ve been in your shoes before where I failed at getting stuff across because I had plans for later. I would push people to keep reading, that they’d understand when they got to this part! Their emotions on everything leading there would change! Guess what? They didn’t! And my takeaway wasn’t to blame them. I instead asked myself “What can I do to make what’s going on more clear? To make the experience better for them while still doing what I wish to?”
And guess what happened after I started thinking that way? I failed! Again! But I failed only in small ways while improving in others. So I kept trying and trying and got it to a point where I realized I needed to make every point stuff that my intended audience understood and enjoyed immediately. And that they’d WANT to continue.
I think this is what you lack. You see someone tell you your stuff is confusing (multiple people, in fact) and you don’t think about how you could make it easier for them. You instead become antagonistic towards the reader for not feeling what you want them to. You failed at communication.
Anyway, this is a lengthy response. This is me putting effort into it more. Why didn’t I do this before? One, it’s an overwhelming amount of info. I could go into much, much more if I wished. For instance, when it comes to prose, I could talk about the rhythm of a sentence and how each punctuation mark – or lack thereof – can impact the experience of it. The double dashes there are a perfect example. Or how this sentence is part of a combination which goes long, short, long.
Or I could bring up euphonics and how different sounds and presentation of them can impact emotions differently. I could even go over rhetorical terminology – examples including alliteration, polyptoton, or synaesthesia – and the many ways I could use those. But I decided against any of that.
I decided against it because it depends on what someone is ready for and needs to/wishes to know ,pre about. Your writing comes across as someone who needs to know that it’s frustrating to read, so all you need to know is that you need to simplify it first to make more accessible. Work on your grammar and pick a better starting point to open on. How you do that is up to you.
And there, that’s pretty much all I have left to say. I owe everybody else more attention since I can actually read what they wrote without it feeling like an obligation. If you think I'm wrong, show me by getting tons of readers who will argue for your work instead of telling me about what you're trying to do and why it'll work. AKA "Show, Don't Tell."
...Which everything on that is another lesson onto itself, how "show, don't tell" is advice given to beginners because they tend to tell far too much. Growth as a writer involves understanding how to balance between the two -- when to show, when to tell. I have a whole thing on why I think those words are bad for conveying what the thing means (evoking vs. informing are better IMO) but I'm just... tired of typing. You got your lesson, take it, leave it, be disappointed in it, be angry, whatever. If you're angry, prove me wrong by staying the course and getting the audience you believe will love your work. Then come rub it in my face that I was wrong or whatever. Personally, I wish I was wrong since I'd like to see everybody succeed, but I can recognize when something is just fundamentally flawed from the ground up and my only thoughts are "destroy this entire opening chapter."