Deal Killers
As I'm working on multiple writing projects, I'm thinking about what things absolutely ruin a work of fiction for a significant part of the reader population. Not "badly written," so much as an element that provokes a strong negative reaction, to the point the book gets (literally or figuratively) thrown at the wall.
There's the obvious, like icky or upsetting stuff. Some of it is pretty much universal, while others are more contextual. For instance, some people will be OK with a bully on the page as long as bullying is portrayed as bad and the bully gets a strong comeuppance, while others find bullying too much even in a villain that gets killed off. And some readers don't even want the penumbra around these topics -- one short-fiction editor explicitly states that not only harm to children or animals is off limits, but so is any serious jeopardy.
But I'm interested less in turn-offs as blunders, less NOPE than uh, no. You've got your factual errors, and paradoxically, the Things Everybody Knows That Aren't True. In some ways, getting your facts right can often be more important in speculative fiction than in mimetic fiction -- if the author gets things right that the fictional world shares with the Primary World, the reader is more likely to accept the speculative elements, but a single realistic detail gotten wrong can lead to the entire fictional edifice's collapse into a heap of disbelief.
Most interesting of all are the points at which a reader who's previously suspended disbelief in non-realistic elements suddenly hits an element that just proves too much. This is sometimes called the Flying Snowman problem, from a children's story in which a snowman comes to life and plays with the young protagonist. All fine and dandy, until the snowman takes him flying -- and for some readers, suspension of disbelief crashes and burns. But not for all readers -- and some can become quite annoyed at those who do experience that failure, telling them in effect, "once you've accepted all these things in the story, you can't opt out on this one."
It seems to be a matter of what any given reader understands as the boundaries of the worldbuilding behind the story. What can the wonder (whether scientific or fantastic) do and not do?
In the case of the Trope Namer, it appears that the readers who have trouble with the snowman flying are understanding "comes to life" as being able to do the same things as a little boy can, and doing them alongside the human protagonist. Little boys can run and play and eat hot soup -- but can't spread their arms and fly through the air, so the snowman flying and taking his human companion with him is Going Too Far.
There's an oft-cited rule in speculative fiction that you can have one "gimme," one thing that readers are expected to suspend their disbelief on Just Because, and all other extraordinary things in the story should flow logically from it. (This rule comes from the days when speculative fiction was pretty much entirely short stories in magazines -- one could argue that there's more flexibility in a novel, or a series of novels, or a 'verse of interconnected novels that aren't directly in series). So the Flying Snowman effect can be seen as the result of violating that rule and (perhaps through not thinking through one's story logic clearly enough) adding in a fantastic element that seems to come from nowhere.
Contrastingly, someone who objects to finding item F wildly implausible when you've had no trouble suspending disbelief on items A-E may well be seeing the fantastic elements not as a system of logically thought-out consequences of one "gimme" (that a snowman could come to life), but as a sort of "anything goes" in which wilder and wilder things happen, until normalcy is restored and the protagonist returns to mundanity, where snowmen stay piles of frozen water -- that suspension of disbelief is an "all or nothing" proposition, and you can't back out mid-way because you find some item "too much." Some of these people may simply be applying dream logic to the storylne, expecting all works of fantasy to be more like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan, where the wonders happen because the story is a story of wonders, which don't need explanation or logical development. But others, particularly those who regard only mimetic fiction as worthy of consideration as literature, may well regard anyone who enjoys fantasy as excessively gullible or stupid, so their response is condescending.
However, at other times it really feels much more like the person making the statement feels a deep need to put you the speaker down, rather than just categorize you as "one of those people (eye roll)". That the speaker feels you're engaging in a game of one-upmanship, trying to set yourself up as the smartest guy in the room, and thus feels the need to cut you back down to size and show you're not nearly as smart as you think you are.
On the whole, it's a very interesting issue to examine, since it's one that's so idiosyncratic. The very thing that causes one reader's suspension of disbelief to crash and burn may not even bother another reader. And the comment that can result in a lively discussion in one audience may result in a sharp snub or put-down from another.
There's the obvious, like icky or upsetting stuff. Some of it is pretty much universal, while others are more contextual. For instance, some people will be OK with a bully on the page as long as bullying is portrayed as bad and the bully gets a strong comeuppance, while others find bullying too much even in a villain that gets killed off. And some readers don't even want the penumbra around these topics -- one short-fiction editor explicitly states that not only harm to children or animals is off limits, but so is any serious jeopardy.
But I'm interested less in turn-offs as blunders, less NOPE than uh, no. You've got your factual errors, and paradoxically, the Things Everybody Knows That Aren't True. In some ways, getting your facts right can often be more important in speculative fiction than in mimetic fiction -- if the author gets things right that the fictional world shares with the Primary World, the reader is more likely to accept the speculative elements, but a single realistic detail gotten wrong can lead to the entire fictional edifice's collapse into a heap of disbelief.
Most interesting of all are the points at which a reader who's previously suspended disbelief in non-realistic elements suddenly hits an element that just proves too much. This is sometimes called the Flying Snowman problem, from a children's story in which a snowman comes to life and plays with the young protagonist. All fine and dandy, until the snowman takes him flying -- and for some readers, suspension of disbelief crashes and burns. But not for all readers -- and some can become quite annoyed at those who do experience that failure, telling them in effect, "once you've accepted all these things in the story, you can't opt out on this one."
It seems to be a matter of what any given reader understands as the boundaries of the worldbuilding behind the story. What can the wonder (whether scientific or fantastic) do and not do?
In the case of the Trope Namer, it appears that the readers who have trouble with the snowman flying are understanding "comes to life" as being able to do the same things as a little boy can, and doing them alongside the human protagonist. Little boys can run and play and eat hot soup -- but can't spread their arms and fly through the air, so the snowman flying and taking his human companion with him is Going Too Far.
There's an oft-cited rule in speculative fiction that you can have one "gimme," one thing that readers are expected to suspend their disbelief on Just Because, and all other extraordinary things in the story should flow logically from it. (This rule comes from the days when speculative fiction was pretty much entirely short stories in magazines -- one could argue that there's more flexibility in a novel, or a series of novels, or a 'verse of interconnected novels that aren't directly in series). So the Flying Snowman effect can be seen as the result of violating that rule and (perhaps through not thinking through one's story logic clearly enough) adding in a fantastic element that seems to come from nowhere.
Contrastingly, someone who objects to finding item F wildly implausible when you've had no trouble suspending disbelief on items A-E may well be seeing the fantastic elements not as a system of logically thought-out consequences of one "gimme" (that a snowman could come to life), but as a sort of "anything goes" in which wilder and wilder things happen, until normalcy is restored and the protagonist returns to mundanity, where snowmen stay piles of frozen water -- that suspension of disbelief is an "all or nothing" proposition, and you can't back out mid-way because you find some item "too much." Some of these people may simply be applying dream logic to the storylne, expecting all works of fantasy to be more like Alice in Wonderland or Peter Pan, where the wonders happen because the story is a story of wonders, which don't need explanation or logical development. But others, particularly those who regard only mimetic fiction as worthy of consideration as literature, may well regard anyone who enjoys fantasy as excessively gullible or stupid, so their response is condescending.
However, at other times it really feels much more like the person making the statement feels a deep need to put you the speaker down, rather than just categorize you as "one of those people (eye roll)". That the speaker feels you're engaging in a game of one-upmanship, trying to set yourself up as the smartest guy in the room, and thus feels the need to cut you back down to size and show you're not nearly as smart as you think you are.
On the whole, it's a very interesting issue to examine, since it's one that's so idiosyncratic. The very thing that causes one reader's suspension of disbelief to crash and burn may not even bother another reader. And the comment that can result in a lively discussion in one audience may result in a sharp snub or put-down from another.