You Really Can't Judge A Book By Its Cover

We've all seen movies where someone falls into a river, climbs out, and while on the boat that has rescued them is suddenly completely dry. Or movies with a fight scene where someone falls on their back on solid ice, then jumps right back up and resumes fighting without so much as an "Ouch!" Yeah, right.

A few days ago I finished reading a book. The story held much promise, but the execution was lacking, loaded with far-fetched situations and, at least in the beginning, writing more suggestive of a rough draft than a finished product.

The topic of Not Ready for Prime Time books getting into print without adequate editing is a hot one right now. Romantic Times magazine has published reader letters in which they complain about rampant typos and other aspects of poor editing, and Blogging in Black has featured discussions about the same.

The book I read didn't have any typos, but there's more to being not ready for prime time than misspellings. This particular novel did mix up timelines (Obviously I can't give the precise example; I'm not out to trash someone's work here. But as a similar situation I offer the scene in the movie Titanic where Rose, on the run with Jack from her fiance's manservant, gives the man the finger . . . something I found jolting because the setting was the year 1912, decades before this obscene gesture came into being). It also contained several implausible situations, one glaring incident in particular that I simply couldn't buy. I'm amazed that these got past both the author and their editor.

An editor's job isn't just to merely check the spelling and punctuation. They're supposed to point out how improbable a situation is, or that the author might be referring to an incident that hadn't happened yet, which can be very easy to do when writing a novel set in years past with present-day mindset, even if it's just a few years. (The 1987 film Wall Street announced at the very beginning that the story began action took place in 1985, then in an early scene a character describing the notorious Wall Street Wizard Gordon Gekko says that he was on the phone selling within seconds of learning that the the Challenger rocket blew up - an event that didn't happen until 1986.)

Minor incidents, like the one I cited from Wall Street and the one in a novel I read which was set in the first half of the 20th Century, where a character who'd been killed in World War II sent regrets to a wedding held in 1953, are really not a big deal, because they have little effect on the plot (although I do maintain that if hundreds of readers noticed the latter, it should have been picked up in the editing phase.) But huge mistakes, like in the book I read where 20 years was misplaced in the lives of prominent elderly characters, to the point where one woman died at an age that was roughly equal to the year she was married, reduced what had been a compelling story to just plain unbelievable fluff, for these old folks would at best be over 100 at this pivotal part of the story and, more likely, deceased. You can't just make characters 20 years younger all of a sudden because it fits the plotline.

One of my books, The People Next Door, contained an unfortunate error in a character name early on, one that my personal editor remembers correcting but somehow got through. I was expecting readers to point that error out to me. They didn't. It was rather jarring - I referred to a character by the name of another character who wasn't even in the scene. But if anyone noticed, they didn't tell me.

Back to the Titanic. This was a highly successful movie, breaking box-office records, but I have to wonder . . . did anyone other than me notice how implausible it was? The story of the sinking was narrated by one character, yet contained numerous scenes where she was not present (the scene on the bridge where the iceberg is first spotted, the chaos on the decks as people fought to get to lifeboats, the scheming of her fiance and his manservant, etc.) and would have no way of knowing what transpired.

The publishing world has to be deaf and blind not to recognize consumer discontent with poorly edited books. Whether they will cut back on trying to flood the market with books in an effort to pump up their profits remains to be seen, but if they do, I hope they will pay equal attention to complaints about stories with farfetched or downright nonsensical plot devices as they do to the spelling and punctuation. There's more to a book than an eye-catching cover. The content has to mean something.

The dilemma of this is that books with implausible aspects to their plots are often popular with readers, getting wonderful ratings, which tells me they are either are not comprehending or they just don't care. If a publisher is making money, why should they slow down for quality?