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msagaraHaving covered probably the most common reader complaint I've heard over the years in the bookstore, I'm now going to move directly to one of the next most common.
I hate LKH for turning Anita Blake into such an oversexed solipsist. Doesn't she realize that she's losing all her fans?
This one, oddly enough, I have more problems with, for a variety of reasons. And this one follows more clearly![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
amber_fool's question, which spawned the previous two posts indirectly.
The first problem would be: LKH regularly hits NYT #1 with her later books. She is clearly not losing all her fans. The argument made here isn't based on what I can see as objective fact, unlike the previous argument downstream; in the previous post the base fact is: Book 5 or book 3 do not exist, which is immutable.
In this case, however, it's clear to me that LKH's writing choices are not losing her all her fans. An author doesn't climb to #1 on the NYT bestseller list consistently without any fans.
When it comes down to brass tacks (and where does that phrase come from?), what's being said here is: I hate what she's done with the series I used to love. Hate it. Hate it.
And I have no problems with that. But that's not how it's worded (let me just add: I get a lot of the flat-out Hate it comments, and those don't push entitlement buttons for me because there's no point for discussion; the reader hates the book. I can't very well say "no you don't!" and not seem insane or inattentive).
Did I read the early books? Yes. And I enjoyed them. Do I like the direction she chose to go in? No. No, I don't. Did I stop reading them? Yes, because I didn't like what she was doing. Do I hate her? Well, no. Do I make dire predictions for her future career based on the fact that I didn't like where she was going? No. I can see that if I didn't care for the direction Anita was taking, a lot of other people did; she's selling. She has a lot of fans; some people clearly did enjoy where she took her characters, and they wanted to go along for that ride.
I got off the bus.
It's her right as an author to write what she feels compelled to write as long as she has a publisher who agrees that it's viable; hell, it's her right to do so even if she doesn't. It's my right as a reader to stop reading when I don't care for what she feels compelled to write.
What I don't understand are the readers who still read those books, while hating on them so ferociously. The hate-on isn't going to change what she chooses to write because if you read her blog, she's clearly dedicated to her vision. I admire the dedication; I don't admire the results.
So, bottom line for me here is: I don't like where this book is going, and I'm not willing to shed money to get it there.
This, however, is the bookseller and reader response. The author response is different. So I'm now going to talk a little about me-in-my-writer-hat response, because in this case, the author response is a little more visceral.
I write a series of novels, which I distinguish from a multi-volume single story in a variety of structural ways. I try to keep the books as self-contained as possible, while allowing the characters the room to grow or change. I haven't been entirely successful at self-contained writing--but I'm continuing to reach for that in the Cast novels. As I write, and continue to write them, the world does change as consequences of previous actions come to the fore; the characters change as they grow. And here's the thing about that: some of the changes will not be the ones that some of the readers are hoping for. Do I know which changes those are? No, actually, I don't. But I do know it will happen, because it seems almost inevitable.
Am I aware that I, like LKH, will lose readers for making choices that seem natural to me--and don't to some readers--within a series? Yes. Yes, I am.
Does this fill me with joy? Why, no, now that you ask, it really doesn't. No one wants to disappoint their readers. And not just for mercenary reasons, although those exist. It's hard, when you put the time and work into a book. to have it fall flat or fail with readers, especially with readers who liked and supported the previous volumes in a series. They feel angry, or even betrayed, because the characters they loved are wandering off in a direction they didn't anticipate when they started reading the series. And as a writer, I feel insecure and worried because I did somehow have their attention, and I failed to maintain it. I failed to write something that could sell the changes and the story I was telling to that segment of readership so that said changes naturally seemed the only possible outcome.
What I hope is that those readers don't then assume that I'm writing a book that disappoints and annoys them with the intent of doing either; I'm not.
But, like LKH, I have stories I want to tell, and on some base level, they're my stories. I want to write them well enough that they're clear to the readers who read them; I want to make them compelling enough that the story I'm trying to tell works for them.
That's the important phrase for me: the story I'm trying to tell. There are hundreds of ways to fail the story I'm trying to tell. When I see reviews which point some of these things out, it's clear to me that I did fail, and it's clear to me how. Not all of the choices that seem clear to me while I'm writing are as clear to readers who don't have my brain.
But when readers don't care for the book because it's not the book they wanted, as opposed to not a well-executed book, it's trickier. When they are angry--as they are with LKH--about the fact that the books are not the books they wanted to read, it does push my buttons on the writer side, in a way that the reader/bookseller side fails entirely to notice.
I think it's ultimately a losing game to attempt to write novels--or TV shows--to a vocal subset of the readers a writer does have. Because while I understand what some readers want to see, I'm not at all convinced that a story that comes solely from a desire to placate readers, and not as a consequence of a writer's deep investment, is going to work for anyone.
I think a writer has a responsibility to their story.
I think a writer has a responsibility to write that story to the best of their ability.
I think a reader has the right to react to that story in whatever way they react: love it, hate it, fall asleep half-way through it. Throw it against the wall. Refuse to buy anything else by that author Ever Again. Tell people how much they hated the book, and why.
But. I don't think a reader has the right to expect or demand that the story be something entirely different; I don't think they have the right to demand that a writer's responsibility to them is much, much larger than it is to their story, because while a given reader may hate the story, not every reader will or does.
I can tell you what I hated about the LKH books. I can tell you exactly where I stopped. I can complain bitterly about what the books had become. But I don't hate LKH for not writing the books that I wanted to read. I don't, in my anger and disappointment, assume that because I didn't like the books, she should understand what she should have written instead, because it is not, in fact, all about me. I know that she feels strongly about the story she needs to tell. And it's clear to me that there are readers who want to read the story she feels she has to tell.
I hate LKH for turning Anita Blake into such an oversexed solipsist. Doesn't she realize that she's losing all her fans?
This one, oddly enough, I have more problems with, for a variety of reasons. And this one follows more clearly
amber_fool's question, which spawned the previous two posts indirectly. The first problem would be: LKH regularly hits NYT #1 with her later books. She is clearly not losing all her fans. The argument made here isn't based on what I can see as objective fact, unlike the previous argument downstream; in the previous post the base fact is: Book 5 or book 3 do not exist, which is immutable.
In this case, however, it's clear to me that LKH's writing choices are not losing her all her fans. An author doesn't climb to #1 on the NYT bestseller list consistently without any fans.
When it comes down to brass tacks (and where does that phrase come from?), what's being said here is: I hate what she's done with the series I used to love. Hate it. Hate it.
And I have no problems with that. But that's not how it's worded (let me just add: I get a lot of the flat-out Hate it comments, and those don't push entitlement buttons for me because there's no point for discussion; the reader hates the book. I can't very well say "no you don't!" and not seem insane or inattentive).
Did I read the early books? Yes. And I enjoyed them. Do I like the direction she chose to go in? No. No, I don't. Did I stop reading them? Yes, because I didn't like what she was doing. Do I hate her? Well, no. Do I make dire predictions for her future career based on the fact that I didn't like where she was going? No. I can see that if I didn't care for the direction Anita was taking, a lot of other people did; she's selling. She has a lot of fans; some people clearly did enjoy where she took her characters, and they wanted to go along for that ride.
I got off the bus.
It's her right as an author to write what she feels compelled to write as long as she has a publisher who agrees that it's viable; hell, it's her right to do so even if she doesn't. It's my right as a reader to stop reading when I don't care for what she feels compelled to write.
What I don't understand are the readers who still read those books, while hating on them so ferociously. The hate-on isn't going to change what she chooses to write because if you read her blog, she's clearly dedicated to her vision. I admire the dedication; I don't admire the results.
So, bottom line for me here is: I don't like where this book is going, and I'm not willing to shed money to get it there.
This, however, is the bookseller and reader response. The author response is different. So I'm now going to talk a little about me-in-my-writer-hat response, because in this case, the author response is a little more visceral.
I write a series of novels, which I distinguish from a multi-volume single story in a variety of structural ways. I try to keep the books as self-contained as possible, while allowing the characters the room to grow or change. I haven't been entirely successful at self-contained writing--but I'm continuing to reach for that in the Cast novels. As I write, and continue to write them, the world does change as consequences of previous actions come to the fore; the characters change as they grow. And here's the thing about that: some of the changes will not be the ones that some of the readers are hoping for. Do I know which changes those are? No, actually, I don't. But I do know it will happen, because it seems almost inevitable.
Am I aware that I, like LKH, will lose readers for making choices that seem natural to me--and don't to some readers--within a series? Yes. Yes, I am.
Does this fill me with joy? Why, no, now that you ask, it really doesn't. No one wants to disappoint their readers. And not just for mercenary reasons, although those exist. It's hard, when you put the time and work into a book. to have it fall flat or fail with readers, especially with readers who liked and supported the previous volumes in a series. They feel angry, or even betrayed, because the characters they loved are wandering off in a direction they didn't anticipate when they started reading the series. And as a writer, I feel insecure and worried because I did somehow have their attention, and I failed to maintain it. I failed to write something that could sell the changes and the story I was telling to that segment of readership so that said changes naturally seemed the only possible outcome.
What I hope is that those readers don't then assume that I'm writing a book that disappoints and annoys them with the intent of doing either; I'm not.
But, like LKH, I have stories I want to tell, and on some base level, they're my stories. I want to write them well enough that they're clear to the readers who read them; I want to make them compelling enough that the story I'm trying to tell works for them.
That's the important phrase for me: the story I'm trying to tell. There are hundreds of ways to fail the story I'm trying to tell. When I see reviews which point some of these things out, it's clear to me that I did fail, and it's clear to me how. Not all of the choices that seem clear to me while I'm writing are as clear to readers who don't have my brain.
But when readers don't care for the book because it's not the book they wanted, as opposed to not a well-executed book, it's trickier. When they are angry--as they are with LKH--about the fact that the books are not the books they wanted to read, it does push my buttons on the writer side, in a way that the reader/bookseller side fails entirely to notice.
I think it's ultimately a losing game to attempt to write novels--or TV shows--to a vocal subset of the readers a writer does have. Because while I understand what some readers want to see, I'm not at all convinced that a story that comes solely from a desire to placate readers, and not as a consequence of a writer's deep investment, is going to work for anyone.
I think a writer has a responsibility to their story.
I think a writer has a responsibility to write that story to the best of their ability.
I think a reader has the right to react to that story in whatever way they react: love it, hate it, fall asleep half-way through it. Throw it against the wall. Refuse to buy anything else by that author Ever Again. Tell people how much they hated the book, and why.
But. I don't think a reader has the right to expect or demand that the story be something entirely different; I don't think they have the right to demand that a writer's responsibility to them is much, much larger than it is to their story, because while a given reader may hate the story, not every reader will or does.
I can tell you what I hated about the LKH books. I can tell you exactly where I stopped. I can complain bitterly about what the books had become. But I don't hate LKH for not writing the books that I wanted to read. I don't, in my anger and disappointment, assume that because I didn't like the books, she should understand what she should have written instead, because it is not, in fact, all about me. I know that she feels strongly about the story she needs to tell. And it's clear to me that there are readers who want to read the story she feels she has to tell.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 07:28 am (UTC)Anyhow. From what I've read of the anti-LKH arguments (and seen in deconstructions of other literary and TV series), the case the anti-LKH faction makes is very, very similar to yours....
....except that where you describe an author's obligation to story, the opposing case argues an obligation to character -- and therefore argues that the paradigm-shift in the Anita Blake books arose because the author forced her heroine down a path that the character, as she'd previously been established, would never have taken.
From a reader's perspective, I think that's a defensible premise. As noted above, I haven't read enough of the right books to judge whether LKH forced Anita into OOC (out-of-character) action when that series switched gears, but I think the idea that inconsistent characterization is a violation of reader expectations is valid, and that it can be usefully discussed in relation to particular works.
An example: when Laurie R. King's second Sherlock Holmes pastiche (A Monstrous Regiment of Women) first appeared, opinions on a key event in the story were very sharply divided, with one camp arguing that King had adopted an extremely out-of-character portrayal of Holmes in order to arrive at the event in question. Myself, I thought the portrayal of Holmes was among the most effective and nuanced I've encountered -- but I could see where the complainers were coming from.
Now the King case is complicated by the fact that she didn't actually create Sherlock Holmes, so there are actually two authors in play: King herself, as immediate storyteller, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as source of the canonical Holmes. If one judges the King series solely by King's own portrayal, then there's little room for objection; the Holmes of the first book and the Holmes of the second are clearly the same character, portrayed consistently from one volume to the next. By contrast, if one seeks to discern whether King's Holmes is consistent with Doyle's, there's more room for discussion. (I think she fully justifies her extrapolation -- unlike most other authors who've tried to pull off that particular plot. But whichever way one comes down, the discussion is clearly a discussion of the texts, not the authors' intentions.)
A further point of contrast: the J.J. Abrams Star Trek film, now referred to by most as a "reboot" of the Trek franchise. Trek fans have several decades of emotional investment in Kirk, Spock, and the "classic" iterations of those characters. Abrams and his writers definitely see them through slightly different eyes -- but via clever writing, they presented the new story in a way that upheld the validity of the prior timeline (and its forty-odd years' worth of associated characterization). In so doing, they afforded viewers/readers a significant degree of respect -- something first-gen Anita Blake fans might argue that LKH failed to do when she paradigm-shifted that series.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 08:11 am (UTC)Along with character, though, there is also theme. Though I see that betrayed more often in longer running series, especially manga. Naruto, for example, spent a great deal of time at the beginning building the theme of "hard work overcomes inborn ability/limitations" only to have that theme completely contradicted by the second half of the series.
While I've never seen the change in LKH's work as a character reversal (actually, I think Anitia makes a fine villain) but the early themes of "moral choice" and "the price of power" were completely scattered to the winds later on. Personally, I never enjoyed them very much to begin with, so I didn't get worked up about it, but I can see why some people do.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 07:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 06:49 pm (UTC)Thanks :)
Michael
no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 09:47 pm (UTC)My story rubric does include character, plot, structure--all the components. The character is a creation of LKH's, and a part of the story, and it's clear to me that she feels that the character has grown and changed in a way that's natural to the character.
And there's nothing wrong with disagreeing with her view. To be honest? I hated the choice she made at the end of Narcissus, but I didn't feel that it was out of the blue or unreasonable; I found it uninteresting.
There's more of an argument to be made in the Holmes case, because that character is in every way in the public domain; it's not a character that King created out of whole cloth.
However:
In so doing, they afforded viewers/readers a significant degree of respect -- something first-gen Anita Blake fans might argue that LKH failed to do when she paradigm-shifted that series.
This is the crux of the entitlement issue for me, stated in a different way. I think an argument can be made--you have :) -- for this, but it is an entitlement issue. Wanting respect for your affection and devotion is natural. Being unwilling to be bound to continue in a direction that you, as the creator, feel is the wrong one, is also natural. I don't feel LKH owes me anything. I enjoyed her early books. I didn't enjoy her later ones. I don't feel her shift in story is a signal of disrespect to me, and since it's entirely her creation, I can't feel it's an act of disrespect to her character.
One can argue that you lose your fans if you offend them enough. If she wasn't selling, that would be a totally practical and pragmatic argument. But she is. So it's clear that she still has a large fan base that doesn't share this view. If we depend on the market for correction, as we increasingly do, the market isn't offering any incentive to correct. Ergo what she personally feels is the correct direction for a character that's entirely of her own creation is clearly the correct direction for many.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 12:54 am (UTC)First, it seems to me that part of your case presumes that the author has the full dimension of an extended series plotted out in advance...and that it's not subject to change. Some authors have made it clear in various public fora that they do, in fact, plan that far ahead (Jim Butcher, for instance). Others...not so much; in many cases, it's not unknown for authors to plot series arcs based on the number of books in the current publishing contract.
[Complicating the equation in LKH's case: I gather from a number of secondhand sources that the changes in the Anita Blake series coincided with a decidedly messy period in the author's personal life...and that a sizeable chunk of LKH's original fanbase attributes the changes in the books to fallout from the life-events. This at least raises the possibility that LKH changed the series template in mid-stream -- for reasons that may not have been connected to the internal evolution of the work(s). Now on one hand, as the author she's entitled to do that...but on the other, I think readers are entitled to frustration at a change not well foreshadowed in prior books.]
Second: as others have noted downstream, there's a genre shift involved here, and that has additional "branding" implications. To switch similes completely, I'd be right to be upset if I bought a box of cereal labeled "Lucky Charms", only to get home and find out that there were Cocoa Krispies or Grape-Nuts in it instead. Isn't it reasonable for readers to be upset if they buy a book in a series that's been marketed as "vampire fantasy" and it turns out to be "paranormal erotica" instead?
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 04:55 am (UTC)I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that LKH's sales popularized and defined erotic paranormal as a mainstream powerhouse. When she began her books, there were entire chapters of foreplay, for want of a better word, so there was always a high sex content; even within the first five volumes, if you read them, this was evident. Her sales numbers climbed, she was moved from Ace to Jove, and shortly after she hit the NYT gunning, there were a lot of LKH-alikes.
So I think in this specific case it's not entirely fair to accuse her of genre-drift; I think, as I said, she was the Terry Brooks of selling that sub-genre of paranormal.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 04:30 pm (UTC)I promise this is the last time I will say this *wry g*. It is entirely reasonable if they're upset by the marketing, yes. HOWEVER, "paranormal erotica" as a publishing subgenre in the mainstream did not, imho, exist before LKH. There was always plenty of foreplay in the first several books; it's not like they were totally absent the sex; LKH's huge success in carrying that forward in her storyline is what made that genre hot and hugely commercially viable.
If you're the first-of, it's carving out a new niche or territory, rather than moving out of a "branding" position, imho.
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 08:57 pm (UTC)That said, I don't think she's even close to being the worst offender; my outrage and anger is typically reserved for authors that end their series poorly, as either "I'm sick of writing this" or "Hah! I bet you didn't see this coming! (because it's not supported by anything prior)"
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 11:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-10-12 11:48 pm (UTC)I do see the sort of shift that you're talking about, but apart from the cases that are just bad writing (shoehorning a character into the plot, for example, or not maintaining consistent characterization), which I think are no more or less objectionable than any other type of bad writing, I think "the character would never have done that" is often an expression of objection to a change in genre. A lot of readers are fairly attached to their genre (or, more generally, pick books based on the match between genre and mood) and don't like to be surprised.
I suspect a genre shift is part of what's going on with LKH. The initial Anita Blake books started as a sort of noir urban fantasy, then turned into vampire romance (this was somewhat signaled), and then turned into paranormal erotica. Noir urban fantasy to paranormal erotica is quite a shift; it's not quite up there with having one's hard SF space exploration turn into portal epic fantasy, but it's a change of direction that's going to throw a few readers off the vehicle. I think a lot of the "Anita wouldn't have done that" reaction is really "Anita wouldn't have been the protagonist of paranormal erotica," which translates into "what is this paranormal erotica doing in the noir urban fantasy series I was enjoying?"
no subject
Date: 2010-10-13 04:57 am (UTC)I think this is a fair point -- but in my response to