Redeeming the voice

[larryhammer]

This happens depressingly often. I pick up someone's first novel and while it's flawed, I like it -- there's a fresh voice here, one I'm willing to follow even through a standard fantasy plot. Writers can learn inventiveness. Writers can learn how to de-Sue more complex characterization. So I look for their second book (or more often, the second book of their trilogy, for it turns out to be a previously unannounced trilogy) and go THUD. Because it sounds exactly like two-thirds of the fantasies out there. The one thing that made me buy it is gone: they've learned standard voice along with their other skills. But I read it anyway, because I care about the characters now, and maybe it's just sophomore slump that's homogenized things. And despite slogging through Fields of Meh, I get their third. Which is even more homogenized -- and I finally give up.

The last author this happened with was Katya Reimann -- couldn't get through her third. Now it's Elizabeth Kerner. I picked up Redeeming the Lost with trepidation, after the experience of The Lesser Kindred, and the first 50 pages haven't redeemed my continuing.

Does anyone else have this problem or is it just me?

ObLinkage: Balloon hats of the world.

---L.

Comments

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Reiman was never to my taste (and I did try a few, but bailed earlier each one) and I haven't heard of this other. But I have noticed it--and I've wondered if sometimes that first novel has been polished to a fare-thee-well, and despite first novel flaws the voice does come through. But subsequent novels haven't gotten the polish--or the time to work through the flaws, and thus they are disappointing, hasty-seeming.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

If you sign a multibook contract, you do find that all of a sudden, you've Run Out Of Time. The first book was finished when it's finished. From the second book on, it's finished when the schedule says it is. Things that you would have fixed in the first book are allowed to slide from #2 on because you're trying to get it done and your scale of Important changed.

The alternatives? Single book contracts, which if series are involved, won't fly. Or, wait until the entire series is written before selling the whole thing, which is nice from a marketing perspective, but rough on the writer. All that on spec work won't pay the bills.

How about more time between books? The generally accepted rule is that in mmpb, you need to release a book a year in order to build an audience. In the case of genre, that may be true for tp and hc as well. Is this really the case?

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

Yes! a three book deal can sound like a dream at the time, but in the long run I don't know that those fast deadlines serve the author nearly as well as they do the convenience of the publisher.

[larryhammer]

Though fast is relative -- I note that for both Reiman and Kerner, the books appeared two or more years apart.

---L.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I think there were issues such as new babies and such in the case of one of the writers you mentioned.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

I dont know spcifically about these cases. I second guess some of the choices I made with my series all the time, because I think that some things that made it different also hurt it. I don't have any real proof of this, but you hear what people like about certain books, and what they dislike, and you wonder.

[larryhammer]

It's all too easy to second-guess yourself. Especially on books already out there. I suspect, though, that your books are the sort that want a cult following, if that makes any sense.

---L.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Madame Agent tells me I need to be patient regarding those books. The concept of cult following is not lost on me.

[larryhammer]

I suspect Madame Agent is right.

---L.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

fingers crossed

How big is a cult, anyway? Can't they sometimes kick over into, I don't know, tens of thousands...?

[larryhammer]

I've never been clear on cultic dimensions. Are we talking Branch Dravidian size or Rocky Horror numbers?

---L.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Rocky Horror numbers would be cool.

"Cultic dimensions"sounds positively Lovecraftian.

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

Gah! Just about everybody is getting held up for two or more years between books. For the reader this makes series' really suck unless you discover them as the last book is being published. *Memory like a steel sieve, rusted here*

[larryhammer]

I don't mind (much) when it takes a couple years between books, even in a series -- if the result is good. There's too many enough other books in the world in the mean time.

---L.

[kristine-smith.livejournal.com]

Or is it a reality of the market now that so many books are being published? If you don't pop your head out of your hole at regular intervals, does everyone assume you're out of the picture?

Maybe this is where the change in business model from megawatt publishers to smaller presses serves the writer better? Less pressure? I don't know.

[sfmarty.livejournal.com]

My daughter in law sold a series of mysteries. First one was untouched by the publishers. The next two had changes pretty much forced on her.

She has another series written and a new agent. We shall see.

[movingfinger.livejournal.com]

I very much liked Katya Reimann's first two, but didn't know the third had ever come out.

A lot of it is the publishers' or editors' fault. They won't take a single rather long book; they want more than one, which results in padding and spinning the story out over the author's moment of perfect attention and unity. If by the time Book 3 is halfway done, the writer just wants to get the thing out of the house, because it's boring, because it's complete (in the author's mind), because the advance is long gone and it's time for another, for whatever reason, the quality of both writing and story itself must suffer.

[larryhammer]

Prince of Fire and Ashes, out for a couple years now.

(I must say, I rilly envy her gift with titles. Just wish I liked the story more.)

---L.

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

Hi, Wanna be published author someday here. I surfed over from Kaygo's lj.

I always figured that the Meh middle book of a trilogy was more of a transition or filler piece to make up a trilogy when there was just enough material for a duology. Because trilogies are sexier than duologies?

I didn't quite finish the first Katya Reiman book (I think I got bored at the end or I didn't care for the direction the ending took). I didn't read the other two.

I really enjoyed the first Elizabeth Kerner book the first time I read it and even the second time round (I had to refresh my memory) but I had some problems with the main characters falling in love soul mate style after an hour long acquaintance.
I began the second book but I haven't been able to get involved with it. I'm not sure why I couldn't care. Maybe because I'm still not convinced about the falling in love at first sight thing. That whole can't suspend my disbelief thing.

[larryhammer]

Reimann's second book isn't filler -- I'll give her that. It's a fully formed story of its own. It just wasn't fresh. The third, less so.

Kerner's second, though, does has some of the marks of being filler. Or possibly more accurately, of being the first part of an overlong book split in two and then stretched out to fill the space. Hmm.

The instant lifebond with the king of the dragons was what I was looking at when I crossed out that accusation of MarySueism.

---L.

[aeriedraconia.livejournal.com]

The life bond thing with the king of dragons was fine but I would have liked it to have happened over a more realistic time frame. I know, I know, she was only there a week but still. :-)

The insta-love thing just throws me out of any story. *cynical me*

[janni.livejournal.com]

The insta-love thing just throws me out of any story. *cynical me*

This is one of my problems with romance in much of fiction (not just genre romance)--the time compression that results in falling in love almost instantly.

It's hard, in a book, to drift quietly and slowly into love with anyone or anything, even though in real life, that happens all the time.

[larryhammer]

Which pings interestingly off a comment I read last night on Sidney's sonnet sequence Astrophel and Stella, about how sonnet 2 specifically contradicts the Petratchan and courtly Love convention of falling in love at first sight, by showing Astrophel falling in love by slow degrees, kicking and screaming every step of the way. Just one of the many innovative things Sidney was doing with that sequence.

It's an old, old convention.

---L.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Maybe it also depends on the kind of series it is. I'm not good at coming up with examples off the cuff, but I know I have read in a few episodic series where the writer didn't really hit her/his stride until volume 3 or 4; Tony Hillerman might be a good example. Perhaps there's a matter of whether the material can really sustain multiple volumes.

[larryhammer]

Hmm. A thought. Some datapoints from mystery writers would be good here.

---L.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

I was thinking that the feeling I get with the first has to do with impetus. There's a reason for the story in the first.

The relationship thing is tough. Once you get it (they fall in love admit they are in love etc) where do you go then? If you are Buffy someone loses their soul and.. but a sometimes that seems a sticking point. For some reason I am also thinking of TV series here as much as book series.

There are places were continuation seems to work. Spencer, Fiddler and Fiona etc.. but also the tradition of one relationship after another, or rather "encounter." Leading to:

In some of the longer series seem to stick at book five. I probably don't have enough datapoints. In terms of material, if the main point is self discovery and or growth (some form of hero's journey,) where do you go after that first book? I am a little more acclimated now, but one of the reasons I drifted out of fantasy reading in my thirties was looking for the other stories.

There were a few people I was still reading. I think they were doing certain things I really liked, so I was in a sense reading the book for these secondary things. Frex really good dialogue or a poetic use of language or whatnot, and occasionally stumbling over people doing different kinds of stories (or at least different for me.)

Oddly hitting forty has either made me easier going or something because I am reading more fiction again. (The main drift at thirty wasn't away from redaing but a lot of the fiction I spend my teens and twenties with.)

[larryhammer]

Interesting thought about book five, for the continuing episode series. I think I know what you mean, but I'm not sure I have enough data points. But sometime around books 4-7 it does seem like a new source of continuing tension has to be found, and sometimes isn't.

---L.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Sorry to be so long replying to this really interesting post (I was out of town on family business).

I'm interested in your suggestion that some of the longer series seem to stick at book five. I think there may be some truth there, especially if we're talking about character growth. Or the limits of the authorial ability to say something new about the character.

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks for the reply. I have comments sent, age doesn't matter.

I had a pretty small sample size in mind there. If I get more time at some point, I should review a few more more. I am sure I'll hang myself up on Brust/ frex.

[angeyja.livejournal.com]

..also, I am apparently not signed in.