I read a recently published book a while ago which was truly terrible. I mean groan-worthily, laughingly bad. A friend of mine (who hadn't written the book, but had also read it) asked what, in my professional opinion, had made the novel so abysmal. Rather than write a direct review of the book, (which would be too spoileriffic and require far more tact that I possess) I thought it more useful to single out the main problems it had and explore how and why they're ways of Doing It Wrong. Hence - How Not To Write A Novel, which'll be split into X number of posts, where X is a number I haven't thought of yet. 

When you start any piece of fiction, whatever the genre, you inhabit a certain set of rules. Most of them we feel instinctively, and even sound pointlessly obvious if we list them. For example - a mystery story must have something unexplained at the start that is explained by the end. Obvious. That something must be of interest to both the characters and the reader. Less obvious. That something must be inferable (if only in hindsight) from clues given throughout the story and - crucially - explainable within the parameters of the story world. 

'Parameters of the story world' is crucial to maintaining suspension of disbelief in any genre. If your story starts out as a high-tech police mystery thriller, you can't go throwing ghosts and vampires in the end. You can't even slip them into the middle. If you want vampires and ghosts in your high-tech police mystery, you have to make room for them at the start. I don't mean they have to be there, but the story world must have a space for them to fit into when they arrive. The last thing you want is your reader flipping back through the pages saying "Huh? I thought this was a police story, where do the ghosts fit?" looking for where you hinted at the paranormal, or worse - putting your book down in disgust.

Right at the start of the story, be it novel, novella or short, you set your scene, the 'rules' of the world - magic could happen, or science is super-advanced, or ghosts and vampires walk the streets as merchant bankers. It's set in the title, in the cover art (if there is any) the blurb (if any) and your opening paragraphs and chapters. Your reader picks up on this, and it defines their expectations for the rest of the book.

This doesn't mean that if you have magic, you must explain exactly how it works in minute detail at the start of the book. (Hmm. Future post: Info dumps.) It does mean that your world must hint that magic is at least possible. In the Book That Shall Not Be Named, a fantasy novel, we start out in a high-tech futuristic-Earth in the midst of climate catastrophe. We see scientific solutions to crises, scientific versions of "magic" objects like gates-between-worlds, science-this, and science-that. In the very last paragraph of the opening chapter, in the same world, a character thinks about her magic powers and calls home the werewolves she's bred.

Wait, what? There was no hint of magic being possible in the rest of that chapter, even though that world knows about and is even actively hunting magic users. There's certainly no hint of werewolves. They're just thrown in there with such a brief mention I actually had to reread to work out that the author meant werewolves. The world rules hadn't left space for regular-paranormal stuff, so my first impulse was to try to come up with an interpretation that fitted those rules. Was the author being metaphoric, or perhaps I'd mis-read?

When I couldn't find an acceptable solution that fit the parameters, I was forced to cast aside the world rules I'd been given for the regular ones I use - my experience in life - and that's the moment that breaks suspension of disbelief.  The minute your reader throws your world rules out the window, your entire story is called into question. It's re-assessed using the reader's personal world rules, and suddenly your story looks far-fetched and illogical. The reader loses immersion, loses interest, and often doesn't bother reading further.

How to break your own rules

Everything has exceptions, of course, and sometimes completely upsetting the reader's expectations is what a story's about. Your story may involve introducing an element that the characters previously believed was impossible. Most of the time, you can still leave room for it. If your police story is going to have ghosts, then some slightly unsettling events and some forshadowing (oh, there's another post) will leave the space nicely for you. The reader knew that there was something weird going on, and when it turns out to be a ghost - that's okay. It still fit within the rules, because the rules had said there's something we don't understand going on.

When you do need to utterly smash your own rules, though, you need to give it time. You need to give the characters (and by extension, the reader) time to react, comprehend, and adjust their world view. You have to allow them (characters and reader) their disbelief, and then work to reinvest them in the story. In my Nameless novel, the author should have put the magic and werewolves in a chapter by itself, and extended it further. The space of the chapter break, and the time spent with the new information would have given us the time to process and accept the rule-change.

Otherwise, it'll be "Huh? Where the hell did that come from?" followed by the 'plop' of your book against the carpet.

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