I read an excerpt from someone's novel the other day. They'd posted it on their blog. Of all the bits and pieces they could have picked, they chose a quiet, intimate moment between their characters.
It didn't work, at least, not for me.
I'm not going to pick apart someone else's writing. Readers' tastes vary wildly. There are many, many popular books that I find unreadable, and many books I adore that others can't get through. A young lady I know couldn't plow through the Harry Potter books. I think The Book of the Courtier by Castiglione is amazing. I suspect I'm a member of a small minority on that score, though you'll hear rave reviews from lots of people including his contemporaries up to the present. The point is, I don't see much point in publicly (I almost wrote pubicly … appropriate in this case) shredding anyone's writing unless I'm writing a review and I really hated it. Even then I try to keep in mind that someone else might like it, or even love it. But when it comes to critiquing craft in general, I'm all over that.
I read romances and erotica, including Victorian erotica, which at times can be hilarious. Women were believed to have ejaculatory orgasms at the time. I suppose an argument can be made that when a woman gets really, really wet just before or during orgasm, that's pretty much the same thing as ejaculation. Maybe. But in these books they make it sound like it's exactly the same. I saw a show once where a woman could and did ejaculate fluid. Lots of it. It was a documentary, not porn, believe it or not! But she's rather a rare beast, I think. Anyway, sex is fun, and fun to read about, and fun to write about.
But.
In this excerpt I got dumped into the middle of a book where I had very little sense of setting, with two people I don't know chatting about things I have no idea about and then the next thing I know someone's nuzzling a nipple. Foreplay is something I don't make much fuss about, but even I need more of a lead-in than this. And then the sex is aborted in favor of more conversation. I ended up skimming when I otherwise might not have. I didn't find the scene sexy enough to justify what seemed like a gratuitous action in the middle of what whatever the author was trying to convey.
I'm sure I would have had a completely different experience if I'd read this bit in-line with the rest of the book. It's a little character/dialogue heavy, and too light on setting and sensory stuff for my taste, but whatever. I think even people for which this is the perfect prose, it's a bit much to have nipple action on the third sentence when you didn't even realize there were nipples available in this conversation about ghosts. It felt as if a stranger had grabbed my nipple while I was having lunch with Roz. No, I would have slugged that person. It was more like a ninja nipple attack, or rather a ninja attack nipple, poking me in the eye and then vanishing into the shadows without a trace.
I've seen issues with this in readings, too. Though many writers steer away from sex scenes, the same underlying problem of insufficient context exists when you're dumped into an action scene with bloody body parts flying everywhere or in the middle of a political rant or a long string of deductive reasoning in the middle of a mystery. Authors sense it when they do it, and they do it anyway. The big hint is that they have a disproportionate amount of explaining about who is who and what's going on compared to the size of the excerpt. In this case, even the long lead-in didn't help me.
I remember watching a talk show, back when I had television (long story) where the host opened the author's book at a (presumably) random page and started reading aloud. Sex. Right in the middle of it. She stopped reading fast, and the author turned pink. She explained that the book only had a handful of love scenes and the host just happened upon one. I don't think that the host stopped reading just because of the intimate nature of the scene, though I'm sure that was a factor. Out of context, out of the blue, its just too much, too fast, too deep, and it didn't give me any sense of what the book was about or even whether I'd like it.
One of these days I'll post an excerpt and I'm sure I'll make mistakes. I hope I don't make the sudden nipple assault error, or the no-setting, no-context error, or put something up that requires a long introduction, but I am human and it wouldn't surprise me if down the road I made all these mistakes at once, and more. It happens for a reason. Writers know their worlds and their own prose too well to be objective about this sort of thing. I will try my best. Later. Much, much later when it's less likely that you'll remember this post and point out I'd just made all the mistakes I'd ranted about. Hopefully it'll be one of those complete-within-itself scenes, like great flash fiction, where you know there's fun stuff beyond the edges of where you can see, and what you do see has a perfect blue-sky clarity.