Should everything serve the plot?

A post at Writer Unboxed: I Finally Figured Out My Decade-Long Reading Slump

I’ve been in a “reading slump” for the last decade. … I don’t like it when books feel too much like a bad tour guide. … In this metaphor, the writer is the guide. A good guide will keep the pace of the group moving forward and on track without overexplaining or underexplaining. Every so often, they may stop or slow the pace of the walk to point out points of interest and share their specialized information … [but sometimes] the tour guide marches the group through the underbrush like a drill instructor, pointing out everything but stopping nowhere.

Increasingly, I’ve been noticing a trend in contemporary novels toward the overly aggressive tour guide. I pretty much feel like I’m being dragged along by the hair by a book while it yells, “LOOK AT THE PLOT. THIS IS THE PLOT!”

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This is where I laughed.

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I came to this conclusion while reading an adult fantasy novel published in 2022 by a Big 5 publisher. I actually finished the book, even though it gave me aggressive tour guide vibes, because the prose was so good I could mostly overlook how I felt like I was being breathlessly yanked along a single track, and that single track was the plot … What stuck out most was that that I viewed this book as extremely fast-paced to the detriment of the story. But when I went to record the book in my tracking app, I saw that 68% of people who had rated the book thought it was “medium” or “slow” paced.

I stared at this data for a while, wondering what planet I was living on.

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And this is where I paused to think about various editorial feedback I have received over the past 20 years.

—Readers don’t like journeys. Can you cut the journey?

—Can you cut this incident, since it doesn’t serve the plot?

—Should this character be removed since he’s not contributing to the plot?

And so on. And I do think this sort of feedback is good and useful because it’s fine to consider whether something ought to be trimmed, but I also agree with the author of the linked post, Kelsey Allagood, that honestly, even if you’re heading somewhere, it’s fine to admire the flowers along the way. Allagood says she thinks this tendency is driven by publishers, not authors and not readers.

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I wish publishers trusted us, the readers, more. Trust us to stay on the path if you’re not always holding our hand. There is still absolutely an audience for (what would by some be considered) “slow” books. … But this trend of consume more, consume faster, seems less like a natural evolution of our psyches and more like a trend being pushed from the outside. It takes a while to finish a book like Karamazov, which is less time posting covers on Instagram and pushing others to buy, buy, buy.

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I don’t know, could be both. I know I like stories with setting and a sense of place, and you have to build that. I’m a character reader (and writer, usually), and you have to build characters. All of that is on top of the plot. But I know I like many books that are comparatively very slow paced.

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