Hate the author, hate her books?

Yesterday I blogged about the disgruntled Twilight Saga fangirls who want to punish author Stephenie Meyer and her publisher for not giving them the story they had anticipated in the newly released Breaking Dawn. Today I looked in on Jennifer Crusie's blog and found Jenny considering the question of whether blogging authors risk lose readers when they post strong opinions. For her part, Jenny makes a careful distinction between who an author is and what that author writes:

P.G. Wodehouse did broadcasts for the Nazis, but I’m not giving up Bertie and Jeeves. Georgette Heyer made disparaging comments about her readers but they’ll get my copy of The Grand Sophy when they pry my cold, dead, chocolate-stained fingers from around it. Robert Frost was one of the biggest [expletive deleted] who ever lived, but “Two Tramps at Mudtime” is still the most beautiful evocation of work and love that I’ve ever read. I don’t want to have lunch with these people, I just want their words.

I was delighted to see two of my favorite authors, Georgette Heyer and Plum Wodehouse, mentioned in a single paragraph. Yes, I realize they were both disgustingly racist. But no novelists have ever tickled me quite the way they have. Unlike Jenny, I'd love to meet them for lunch (well, except for that whole problem about their being dead) as long as they behaved themselves.

I'd enjoy having lunch with Jenny, too, even though we're worlds apart on certain political and moral issues. I have cringed at a lot of things in her books, but I keep buying because, darn it, the woman is funny.

That said, there is at least one contemporary author whose books I won't buy because I can't separate who she is from what she writes. I'm not trying to punish her. I simply can't read her inspirational romance novels when I know she doesn't believe what she has written. I just can't stomach that hypocrisy. I'd rather have lunch with a dozen wisecracking, profane Jenny Crusies than with this one "nice" person who pretends to be a conservative Christian only to sell books.

What do you think? Have you ever avoided a book everyone was talking about because you didn't respect the author?

Respecting books

There's a good question in today's Telegraph.:

Do you ever start talking to an incredibly boring person at a party and say to yourself, after five minutes: "Well, he's incredibly boring, but I'll talk to him for another 30 hours. He's bound to get better." Or, when you've finished with a newspaper you've enjoyed, do you ever put it on a shelf on prominent display so that you can admire it from a distance and never read it again?

No? Well, why do so many people do the same with books?

Beats me. As I've said before, one of the reasons I'm not a good book reviewer or contest judge is that I simply can't finish a book I'm not enjoying. But I never dreamed that would be a problem yesterday, when I finally got my hands on The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes, which I believed would be an adorable story because it was co-written by Jennifer Crusie, a favorite of mine.

I didn't make it to Chapter Two before I started skipping and skimming pages. The story just bugged me. It's not like I have anything against magic in romance novels, because I dearly loved Laura Kinsale's Uncertain Magic. But if you've ever watched the TV show "Charmed," you have already seen everything in Jenny's latest book. Seriously. The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes are three twentysomething sisters who live together and must join their magical powers (each has a different power--sound familiar?) to defeat their wicked witch of an aunt while simultaneously discovering their true loves.

Please. I've never read the book's other two authors, Eileen Dreyer and Anne Stuart, but I would hope they're better than this. I know Jenny is.

As to the other part of the question in the Telegraph article, I don't keep books unless I mean to read them again. Bad books, I throw away.

Right now The Unfortunate Miss Fortunes is in my kitchen trash can underneath a pile of used tea leaves. Sorry, Jenny.

Having our say... and eating it, too

Over at Flogging the Quill, writer and editor Ray Rhamey has some things to say about the use of "said" in dialogue:

There are so many "rules" about writing dialogue tags. One you hear most often is to use "said" instead of more colorful verbs. The theory is that the narrative should give the reader an idea of the nature of the speech, of how it's delivered, and that "said" becomes "invisible" and thus lets the dialogue and action do their thing.

In general, I agree with this, although there are times a verb other than said can be better. For me, "said" does tend to disappear. Especially in my own writing, where I hardly ever use dialogue tags.

In my workshop at the Writer's Weekend conference this year, a participant who is also an editor volunteered that she felt that the dialogue tag "said" was, in fact, far from the "invisible" dialogue tag device that many say it is.

I strip "said" from my own dialogue whenever possible. But the "saidless" passage Ray presents as an example of how that tag and all others can be avoided entirely made me itch.

The problem is that I'm a fast reader and highly distractible. I frequently skim and skip, even in the middle of a good book. When the writing approaches excellence--and I'm not talking about story tension, but the actual writing--I'll slow down to savor it. But most of the time, if dialogue tags aren't spread around a little, I'm liable to miss something and become confused about who's speaking. Since I don't believe I'm the only reader who does that, I don't like hearing writers advising other writers to strip tags until it hurts.

But I think most writers probably err in the other direction. One of my favorite authors, Jennifer Cruisie, uses "said" way too often. Here's an example from Bet Me:

"Cal?" David said.

"Cal?" Cynthie said.

"I love this," Tony said.

"What?" Roger said.

Cal sighed.

At this point I was sighing right along with Cal. This ought to have been a cute exchange, but it was just plain annoying.

Surely there's a happy medium. I'm still trying to find that in my own writing.

Each of us has her own tolerance level for "said" and other dialogue tags. We need to figure out where we as individuals draw those lines, because when we do, we'll know we're writing in our own voices and not trying to copy someone else's.