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What Barb From ‘Stranger Things’ Can Teach You About Writing
Why empty promises piss off your readers
Sometimes, when you’re working on a novel, you lose your way and don’t quite know why.
(By “sometimes,” I mean consistently.)
This is true whether you’re trying to make sense of a messy first draft or trying to figure out the soggy middle of a book you’ve revised 20 times. If you’ve ever been through this, you know that the obviously wrong parts of a book are actually gifts: There’s no question that a too-long scene needs to be cut or a totally extraneous character must go. These you can fix with a song in your heart because they’re so easy to spot and so satisfying to cross off your revision to-do list.
But then there are what I call doldrums: long, seemingly decent passages that satisfy all the basic requirements of competent fiction but lack a pulse.
Doldrums are difficult to fix, because most readers are too nice to tell you about them. In fact, readers (of the sort who care about you and are invested in your happiness) will often gladly tell you how wonderful the language is, beautiful writing, etc. etc., skimming over the fact that they were bored to the point of drooling.
