Why Corporate Publishing is so Much Better Than Self-Publishing

I just finished reading a book that was quite appallingly bad.

There are so many ways in which this book stinks that it’s difficult to know where to begin, so I’ll just jump in.

1. Dated research.
   
   There were so many references to the 1992 US presidential election, and to fashions and fads of the time, that I honestly thought the author was writing in his own past, and was striving (too hard) to establish the timeframe. But, no, the copyright date is 1993, and the book very likely was written during the election season.

2. “As you know, Bob…”

   If there’s anything that drives me nuts, it’s having the characters explain things to each other solely so that the readers can keep up.

3. Excessive character descriptions.

   Every time a new character comes on stage, we get two or three paragraphs of physical description, life story, political attitudes, and so forth.

4. Shallow characters.
   
   In spite of all that backstory. Perhaps he should simply have shut up and let the characters speak for themselves?

5. Plot twists that exist solely to let Deus ex machina reach down into the diorama and mess with things.

   The biker and the Mexican steal some cargo in a very opportunistic manner, but when it becomes handier for it to have been planned, well, then, that’s what it was. Don’t go back and fix it, just declare it planned.

6. Secrets. As in, hide stuff from the reader, as in:
   

   “Could you go to the home of the dead man and search for two thousand pairs of US Navy shoes?” Bobbie asked, and then she had a long conversation with Rojas concerning her investigation.

   After she hung up she dialed Fin’s number, but got his answering machine. She dialed Nell’s number and got another machine. She hung up and experienced the longest afternoon of her life. She called Fin and Nell no less than fifteen times, leaving several messages for each of them. The messages sounded progressively more impatient and more excited.

   Could we maybe be told what Rojas told her? No. Too much to ask.

7. Poorly written dialogue, part A: Bad dialect.
   
   One of the main characters is a Mexican citizen, but he speaks normal, idiomatic American English, with a normal American vocabulary and cadence. Replacing all of his “i” sounds with “ee,” and writing “joo” instead of “you,” doesn’t make him sound Mexican, it just makes him hard to read. I’ve read dialogue written by masters of understatement, where you can hear the music and rhythm of the voice, without any misspelled words. Here, the words are misspelled, but the voice still sounds like American English.

   Another main character is a biker/thug dude. (I did mention shallow characters, right? Yeah, there’s also a 45-year-old male failing actor/failing cop and a 40-year-old female failing cop worried about her age, and a peppy little high-school-cheerleader type with a blond bob and a big Colt .45 and a dapper white-collar-crime-boss and… It’s about as real as the characters in the Village People.) Anyway, the biker/thug dude reads his lines like he never quite found his motivation, and the director just said “Ok, well, throw in a cuss word now and then, and that will be good enough.”

8. But the absolute worst part, bar none, was “Poorly written dialogue, part B: Bad diction.”

   Every single time, throughout the book, that someone should say “should have,” “would have,” “want to,” “going to,” etc, we get “shoulda,” “woulda,” “wanna,” “gonna,” etc!

   Every single time. Yes, people sometimes speak like that, and yes, we sometimes need to write that, but not every time. Even if you were to argue that no one ever really enunciates properly, nonetheless, we should write as though they do in situations where we want the reader to assume the enunciation was normal (define normal as you will). Reserve shoulda coulda woulda spellings for when you want to say the the character is not enunciating. And lest you think I’m simply misreading, let me point out that the young peppy cheerleader chickie is a Navy (oh, by the way, “Navy,” referring to the United States Navy, is seldom capitalized in this book) petty officer, whose “over-formality” is pointed out to us several times, who habitually uses “sir” and “ma’am,” and she can’t say “would have” or “want to”?

   At one point, the petty officer and the aging cop/actor are getting drunk. We’re told repeatedly that they’re stumbling, that their chins are slipping off their palms and their elbows off the table. We’re told that they lose enough inhibitions that the petty officer is sitting in a man’s lap and being bounced “like a child,” yet their speech never changes!

And, what, you ask, does any of this have to do with self-publishing?

I suppose you’re sitting there thinking to yourself “So what? So that one author should have gotten that one book edited. So what does that have to do with me?”

Well, speaking of hiding things from the reader, I was being a little facetious with my title, because in fact, this book is “traditionally” published!

This book, Finnegan’s Week, was written by Joseph Wambaugh, published by William Morrow and Company, and presumably was edited by someone.

So there you go. That’s the famous gatekeeping value of the corporate bulwarks of publishing, keeping the poorly-written stuff off the market in order to protect the value of all that machinery they sit on, that we need access to so badly in order to publish our little attempts that we’re willing to jumps through the irrelevant hoops of the query/conform/requery pablum-grinding process in order to get our chance at fifteen seconds in the sun.

At least it was free, from Michael’s Books.