I’ve been thinking a lot about authorial promise lately. It’s a term I first heard used in regards to the explicitness of sex scenes in romance novels, and why readers sometimes get angry when an author fades the scene to black. The idea is that the tone and frankness an author chooses to use creates an expectation within the reader of what the sex scene will be like, when it finally comes around. It’s when the frankness of the two don’t match up that problems happen, readers get annoyed, and books hit walls.
And I think this holds true for more than just sex scenes. I’m currently reading Deerskin, by Robin McKinley, and I was absolutely engrossed at the beginning. I loved the way she was able to make the narration sound lke a fairy tale. In the opening chapters, we learn about the main character, the princess Lissar, her beloved sighthound, Ash, and her somewhat-unusual life in the palace. I loved seeing how Lissar came into her own as she grew to adolescence, how she shrugged off what ws expected of her and followed her passion. I was very thoroughly engrossed, and very much enjoying the woman I was reading about, and looking forward to reading more.
And then Lissar suffered a terrible trauma, ran off to the mountains, and forgot pretty much everything. She doesn’t remember who she is, where she came from, or why she left. She doesn’t even remember what farmland is until she happens to see some. A goddess heals her wounds, and in doing so drastically changes her appearance so she will not be recognized. She also gives her magical abilities.
If this were the opening of the book, I think it might be another matter, but as it stands, this is just about at the halfway point. All those promises the book made to me when I started are thrown out the window, and I feel like I’m reading about another woman entirely. I’m a little miffed about it. It is not what I was led to expect.
The part tht breaks my heart is tht it’s an incredibly well-written book. But it’s not the book I thought I was reding, and I’m having a little trouble moving past that and enjoying it for what it is.
I’m not sure what’s to be done about it. I’m not sure what can be done. Should authors stop throwing plot twists and surprises into their books? How boring that would be! Should readers suck it up and deal with it? I’m not sure that’s the right answer, either. There’s something to be said for the fact that I’m sitting here thinking, “This is not the book I signed on for,” and feeling slightly betrayed, and I don’t think that’s a thought any of us want to be going through our readers heads about our books. This isn’t the book that’s had this effect on me, either. I’ve read other books that have caused a similar reaction, that turned away from the course I thought we had set, and left me impatient, irritated, or frustrated.
I don’t know that there’s an easy solution for this, from either a reader’s or a writer’s perspective. But I’ll be keeping it in mind, especially as I look at my own work.
And I’m going to keep going with Deerskin. Because it is a very well-written book, even if it’s not the one I thought I was reading.
It really does depend for me on what the change is. In George R.R. Martin’s Song of Ice and Fire, you get prolly 1200 pages into the story and then all the people you’d been following from the start–the ones you were certain were going to end up on top, the winners, triumphant, yay! at the end of the journey–end up getting slaughtered. In a terrible, sneaky, underhanded, low-down dirty way.
And it worked.
Because in that book, the larger themes all remain intact. Those themes–lust for power and what it makes men do to other men (and women and children, it is not a pleasant story at times), the triumph (or not) of good over evil, the helplessness of ordinary people in turbulent times, the basic nobility of the human spirit–they never change. Even if the bad guys don’t eventually get punished, even if the good guys don’t win, I’m still reading the same story.
The characters I had grown so attached to (and I felt almost like I might puke as I read it) might be dead, but it was still the same book.
I can really see your point, though. If the change in Lissar was going to be so sudden, and brought about by external events rather than an inner evolution, perhaps the author should have spent less time building the character. Especially if she was planning to make Lissar likable at the beginning. Then again, it might work for me, I can’t actually know without reading it myself.
Stick with it and let me know–does she return to her old life, at all? Does she rediscover herself? And whatever does happen, does it redeem, in your mind, the shock of that initial change?
I think a large part of this has to do with the timing. If you ask me, the halfway point is a bit too far. During the first 1/4 to 1/3 of a book, we’re still getting to know the characters and if they undergo an early morph into something else, one can probably adjust.
I think an example where this sort of situation was done well was in Vicki Petterson’s first Sign of the Zodiac – about 1/6 into the book, the character gets a new name, face, body and a set of powers – following a large trauma. It threw me off at first, and I thought I might not like it, but the external change just forced me to identify with the internal character more, and my attitude shifted to ‘wow, that was ballsy!’. =D