brendan halpin

In most cases, when people say a novel is good or bad, they’re wrong. Because novels can offer a variety of pleasures: an involving plot, interesting characters, beautiful prose, keen observations, titanic imagination, dialogue that is better than real life speech but not so much better that it sounds fake, an atmosphere that you enjoy getting lost in, or just a vibe that hits you in the right place at the right time.

We all value certain of these pleasures more than others, and no novel offers all of them. And our preferences for things done well and tolerance for things done badly can change from book to book.

All of which is to say I am against snobbery and don’t think, for example, having beautiful prose automatically makes your novel better than a novel with an engaging plot.

But, for God’s sake, your book has to offer something. I just read a book that fell drastically short on almost every front, and I’m intentionally not naming it because the fact that it’s an extremely shitty book is not the author’s fault.

It’s a mystery/thriller with a really good setup. Two of the main characters are interesting and feel like real people. Those are the good things I can say about it. Unfortunately two of the characters are cardboard cutouts, the prose is jaw-droppingly bad in sections, the author has a tendency to make a point and then beat you over the head with it instead of trusting you to draw an obvious conclusion, and the big “twist” I saw coming at least a hundred pages away.

But literally all of these problems could have been fixed in the editing stage. “Hey, it’s pretty obvious who the killer is because you haven’t included any credible red herrings.” “Hey, you had a character say, “now I know that love truly does conquer all,” and I threw up in my mouth. Maybe write something that sounds like a person outside a Hallmark movie might say?” “Hey, you can trust your readers to get the very obvious point you just made.” “Hey, your villain is boring and flat which makes your big reveal fall flat too.”

Again, literally all of these things are fixable. And I don’t blame the author for not fixing them. I blame the editor for not doing their job. This author is a brand name, and so the editor clearly knows that just putting that name on the cover is going to move copies, so they just didn’t bother to make the author fix the kind of early draft mistakes that many authors make.

I don’t exempt myself here! I have a tendency to apply my points with a sledgehammer in an early draft. When I’m writing to get the story down, I tend to give characterization short shrift. I could go on. But I’ve been lucky enough to work with fellow writers and with editors who have called me on my bullshit and pushed me to make my writing better.

This is literally supposed to be what editors do. But the editor in this case committed professional malpractice and left their author looking stupid because they put an underbaked draft out into the world.

Perhaps this isn’t totally the editor’s fault. Someone in publishing said to me ten years ago, “All editors do now is go to meetings and try not to get fired.” I can’t imagine this has gotten any better. But if you’re going to charge full price for a book and have it appear to be a professional product, you owe it to your readers to give them a book that’s been edited profesionally.

I was of course annoyed that I spent my time reading a novel that could have been good but wasn’t, but then I was thinking this—somewhere an author probably just had their novel submitted to this editor, who passed for whatever reason, and that author is probably sitting by their computer thinking their novel isn’t any good because a “real” editor passed on it, not knowing what a half-assed job this editor does.

Sigh. I guess I would say this—the next time you read a bad book, maybe cut the author some slack and ask why the editor was asleep at the wheel. And if you read a good book, be aware that it’s probably good because an editor pushed theauthor to make it good.