50 Shades of Bad Advice
We’ve been enjoying Jenny Trout’s 50 Shades recaps: all of the shadenfreude and none of the actual slogging through those books. (Thanks, Jenny!) And in the course of those recaps, something that’s always seemed frustratingly opaque has now started to make a lot more sense. While bad advice certainly begets bad writing, bad writing in turn begets bad advice.
The 50 Shades books are written in first person, present tense. And, they’re poor examples of craft. Correlation is not causation, but it’s painfully clear that in this case an inexperienced author got in over her head with the constraints of that mode. We look upon this and see that if someone had just told her not to do it like that, some of the problems could have been avoided.
Some of them, probably. But wouldn’t the world be a better place if, instead of blanket prohibitions, our newbie writers had guidance about how much additional work they give themselves when they choose a first-person viewpoint? (And how to tell if their particular first-person narrator is sufficiently compelling to carry an entire book.) How the use of present tense impacts plot development?
With writers so vastly outnumbering editors, we really need to up our game. We need to see the cause-and-effect of bad advice accurately and break the cycle. Telling novices, “Yeah, don’t do that,” isn’t helping them.
“As I lay here with you, I think of him. Not just his physical aspect, warmth and solidness, but his humor and his regrets. So I wonder about your regrets. We began as colleagues, and bonded over the riddle of the dark thorn stuck in the skin of a quarantined banana. It was fascinating. We ruled out every known kind of plant that produces thorns, so in the end we failed to determine whether this one might be dangerous, or deduce anything useful about where those bananas had been. But researching it side-by-side for a year and a half was how you and I fused into a single entity. He knew it was happening. He collapsed on the sofa the first night, sobbing, and there he lay for eighteen months. One day he was gone. I hear that now he only eats bananas.”
As I lay here with you, I am reminded of a weird, feminist retelling of Sleeping Beauty, where it was the prince who pricked his finger and fell asleep. Instead of a misadventure with a spinning wheel, the prince encountered an enchanted rose bush belonging to a witch. He made a ham-fisted attempt at plucking a bloom for his girlfriend and got jabbed. The dark thorn stuck in the skin of his index finger and he fell over, unconscious, on the garden path, and there he lay for eighteen months until he was awakened by a kiss from the valiant female gardener. It was fascinating.”