I recently spoke with a new friend who is a reader of Christian fiction. Not just a sometime reader. A real reader. We share some similar favorites but not all. This person has read a lot of historicals but also enjoys Peretti and Heitzmann. If you’re a member of Shelfari, you know you can post all the books you’ve read and put them on your cyber bookshelf for people to view. If you choose to do so, you may also post your “plan to read” books, your favorites, and other choices. Suffice it to say, this is a person who spends time reading Christian fiction.
What I found wonderfully refreshing about “talking” with this person is that she posts reviews based on whether or not she likes the novel strictly from a reader’s perspective, not a writer’s perspective. The story is what matters to her, not the “ly" adverbs or POV or any of those other “writerly” concerns. She felt sheepish in admitting this to me. I was overjoyed to hear it.
Dayle brought up a good point when we addressed the rules of writing. He suggested a reader who enjoys a story might not consciously appreciate the lack of adverbs, passive verbs, and not switching POVs within the same scenes, but that because of how the story reads when these elements are eliminated or used properly, whatever the case might be, the reader is able to engage in the story more fully. And he may be right. Remove what some consider clutter, and you’re bound to have a smoother reading experience.
However, some don’t consider those things “clutter”. They’re much too willing to read a story and not to analyze good or bad technique. They’re reading with the expectation of a story that takes them into characters and off on a journey, be it commonplace and everyday life experiences or far far away to a place they’ve never been to face problems they can’t even imagine until they’re able to immerse themselves in the characters of this story. An author isn’t going to impress them with anything other than a good story. How the author happens to write the words on those pages is secondary to the emotions and drama, or comedy and laughter, or fantasy and imagination accomplished with those words.
And really when you stop and think about it, how else can you explain the likes and dislikes of a reader? For those who favor Hemingway as opposed to Dostoevsky or F. Scott Fitzgerald or D. H. Lawrence or Jane Austen or Daphne du Maurier, how can it be effectively analyzed? From Peretti to Dekker to Alcorn to Liparulo? From Kingsbury to Rivers to Collins to Samson to Tang? Why do we compare writers with any other measuring scale other than to simply say we like how they write? Isn’t that enough to validate their work? No two writers write the same even though we’re all similar to somebody. While any one of us might agree who is truly “gifted” in their use of the English language, we might in fact not agree about which is the best of the stories they’ve written.
I couldn’t help but find this reader’s assertion about evaluating a book by the story it told like a breath of fresh air. Who really cares about the technique of a story? Not most readers. Mostly only writers and editors can fully appreciate those technical aspects of committing the story to the page. And both writers and editors have their favorites in style, content, and format.
What I’m saying here really doesn’t matter at all in the bigger sense of publishing because it doesn’t offer anything different. All it reiterates is how subjective the process is, and that the technical aspects of putting a novel together today might not be quite as important to the reader as it is to the people deciding whose work is selected for publishing.
Father, all I need to do is to write for you. That’s it. To do what you would have me do. And that is all I want to do. Hallelujah. Help me to do just that, in the Name of Jesus, Amen.
*Please continue to pray for Kristy Dykes at this critical time.*