Great expectations ... is this you?
Is this you? You've started a novel. The first page makes you want to read more. The first chapter has you settling into a comfortable chair, ready to go along for the full ride.
Except that "going along" is not the best description of what you want. You find yourself wanting the story to go in a certain direction. You develop strong opinions, and strong emotions, about the characters.
What you have is great expectations. You expect great things from a novel that has begun with great promise. You expect the author to keep his part of the bargain. After all, you are investing hours of your life, and you keep reading to collect returns on your investment.
If you are lucky, if you've chosen well, your reading will have a happy ending. The lives of the characters may not be blissful in the end, but your reading life will be enriched and your time rewarded.
But (and this is a huge but) some novels will disappoint you. "I could have written a better ending," you protest. "I would have changed this in the middle of the novel, and that." If you're like me, you find yourself yelling at the author, wishing he were there to hear your objections. "Five hundred pages? Really? You could have told the story in 250 pages and had a much better novel! Thanks a lot for wasting my time."
Except that now I waste less and less time on the long ones. If I can speed read large chunks (sometimes at warp drive), and slow down for the more interesting parts, I'll do it every time. This doesn't eliminate my resentment at the author's judgment, but it does save time for other books.
Please note that each reader's judgment of a novel is highly subjective. We each bring different lives, different expectations, to a novel.
If you write fiction yourself, maybe this is you. Now that I've been writing fiction for the past fifteen years, creating my own stories, controlling who my characters are and where they go and how they end up, I have stronger feelings when I read stories created by other writers. The ones I love I love deeply. The ones that disappoint me, that slow down and get lost in the middle, or make me stop caring about the characters long before the end, I have less patience for these than I would have had fifteen years ago.
I often think of the reader as a person in a train station. There you are, in a crowd, with many trains to choose from. Once you buy your ticket and climb aboard, you have absolutely no power over where the train goes. Your destination, the speed of your trip (could be an express bullet train, could be an old slow train that makes too many stops), the other passengers, the passing scenery, the adventures awaiting you—all of these are controlled by someone else.
Some train rides are just boring, disappointing, sometimes deeply disturbing. Your great expectations lie flattened on the rails. You can risk jumping off the train, or you can wait for the next stop and catch another train.
Other train rides, of course, are thrilling. You see pleasant, or sometimes spectacular, scenery. You have fascinating traveling companions. You have great adventures. At your destination you step down from the train a new person, grateful for the experience, eager to tell others. You may look forward to taking the same train again some day, secure in the knowledge that your great expectations will not be dashed.
November 8th, 2010 at 5:01 pm
I try to find something rewarding in everything I read, even if I'm disappointed. Kind of like how Lisa Linn Kanae says you should read all kinds of things even if they're poorly written because athen you'll have experienced what NOT to do.
But I agree, sometimes I do feel jilted, especially since there's so much to read out there and time is so very precious.
November 9th, 2010 at 8:56 am
Well said, MLS. Some books do act as negative models for writers. I remember reading at a young age at home, and sitting on the floor in the library stacks. My reading habits were shaped for years by reading assignments in school, and later college; books were assigned, and I always felt compelled to finish a book. Later, when I taught English, I experienced the freedom of assigning books that I admired.
November 10th, 2010 at 3:49 pm
I find that as I get older and with less free time on hand, I tend to skip over entire subplots throughout a book. It's a bad habit, but depending on what I'm reading, it doesn't seem like I have missed much.