Bad Writing
I have to admit, I do sometimes enjoy reading a well-written, highly negative book review. This one in particular interests me because it’s not a book review; it’s an analysis of the opening prologue.
Lessons From the Bad Writing of When the Moon Hatched
When the Moon Hatched is a traditionally published bestselling fantasy novel, and honestly, right off the bat, I do have this reaction to it:
Because for crying out loud, big publishers are supposed to have a clue and it’s just painful to see a terribly written history-lesson prologue in this book. No wonder so many aspiring self-publishing authors ask questions like, “Do I have to have a prologue in a fantasy novel?” and think that this kind of prologue is either just fine or actually required.
Actually, the reviewer at the linked post thinks some of the prologue is beautifully written. I don’t. I think all of the prologue is badly written and some of it is excruciatingly badly written.
The world began with five.
First was Caelis, God of Aether, invisible to the naked eye. The empty space no one thought about. Where matter formed, he was simply shoved aside.
His baritone song was so full of substance, yet lacked it entirely. A lonely echo that haunted the empty space between near and distant suns—inaudible in its depth, no matter how loud he sang.
Desperate to be noticed, it was he who offered an empty canvas for the others to fill.
***
I’m done already. Actually, I was done, let me see, one and a half lines into this prologue. But if I’d gotten this far, I would now be done. There is literally nothing I like in the above, plus give me a break, the first god’s defining characteristic is desperation to be noticed.
The author really means it, too:
Others fell upon a silver book some say Caelis wrote in his desperation to be heard. Who found a different form of power in those runes nobody could read or pronounce, discovering that the strange markings could be wielded. Could mend bones, charm blood, glamor objects …
His desperation to be heard. Just kill me now.
Here’s the whole prologue, without snarky commentary, so you can judge for yourself, not that I haven’t biased your perceptions, probably, but you can see what you think. Italics are in the original.
***
***
The world began with five.
First was Caelis, God of Aether, invisible to the naked eye. The empty space no one thought about. Where matter formed, he was simply shoved aside.
His baritone song was so full of substance, yet lacked it entirely. A lonely echo that haunted the empty space between near and distant suns—inaudible in its depth, no matter how loud he sang.
Desperate to be noticed, it was he who offered an empty canvas for the others to fill.
Bulder, God of Ground, sculpted the sphere with one belted bellow, building a sturdy globe that did not spin. A world half bathed in sunlight, sprinkled with a rich ripple of rust-colored sand, the other half eternally dunked in shadow so thick it seeped into the stone and cast it black.
With more blunt and droning words, Bulder sculpted the terrain, creating dips, dollops, and cracks in the world. Forging a wall that cut through the Fade — where sunlight and shadow refused to meet — the sky a forever splash of pink, purple, and gold.
The Goddess of Water came next.
Rayne fell upon the ground in a billion yearning teardrops of unrequited love, puddling in Bulder’s dips, filling his gorges with her gushing affections. Upon the shaded side, she descended in a patter of heavy flakes, dusting the sharp mountain ranges in a frosty hug.
Her love was a screaming torrent. The deep, gut-wrenching wail of an avalanche. The near-silent cry of sprinkling rain.
Her mournful song was so unlike that of her sister Clode—Goddess of Air—who hinged on the precipice of immeasurable madness. Her voice was a ribbon of silk, soft to touch, unless it turned to the side and slit you with its edge.
Her whispered words swept past branches laden with leaves, tilling them into a flirty dance. Her violent shrieks ripped around sharp corners at a voracious speed simply because she liked the sound. Unable to stand Rayne’s somber still, Clode’s gusty howls often churned the Loff into a heaving mass that dumped upon the shore like a drum.
Ignos was a glutton for Clode. The God of Fire feasted on her. Consumed her.
Loved her so much he could not breathe without her.
His searing song was one of ferocious hunger and impassioned greed, but Clode could not be tamed by his rabid affections, even as he blazed jungles and gave her smoke to dance within. Even as he melted bits of Bulder’s stone until they were molten rivers of red, desperate to woo Clode with volcanic blasts that shook the sky.
Bound to his mournful solitude, Caelis watched all this, jealous of the other creators for their ability to be seen, touched, or heard, but thankful to be part of something.
Anything.
And he watched in quiet wonder as, upon this lush and fertile canvas he’d gifted his emptiness, life bloomed. A various cacophony of folk who littered the land and snow and sand—some with hearing sharper than the tips of their ears, making them privy to the four other elemental songs. A number of whom learned their languages. Spoke them.
Found power in them.
Others fell upon a silver book some say Caelis wrote in his desperation to be heard. Who found a different form of power in those runes nobody could read or pronounce, discovering that the strange markings could be wielded. Could mend bones, charm blood, glamor objects.
Many beings filled all corners of the world, but none the Creators were more proud of than the great winged beasts that lorded over the sky.
The dragons.
Upon the seemingly uninhabitable crown of The Burn, where the sun’s harsh rays bubbled skin into fleshy welts, the Sabersythes thrived—big, bulky beasts with black and bronze and ruddy scales. With ferocious aptitudes that could not be matched.
They made Gondragh their spawning ground.
Some folk were brave enough to venture close. To raid a nest and snatch an egg.
Brave … or stupid.
Less volatile than their distant kin, the Moltenmaws found their home in The Fade. In Bhoggith—a foggy scrap of marshland that gobbled almost everything in muddy, sulfurous burps.
Their honed beaks were sharp enough to slash, their claws just as severe. Veiled with feathers as colorful as the ever-vibrant sky in their part of the world, no two Moltenmaws bore the same glorious plumage.
To steal a Moltenmaw’s egg, one also needed to be brave or stupid … but perhaps a little less.
Netheryn, however, was almost imossible to raid — the chosen spawning ground of the ethereal and cunning Moonplumes.
Being farthest from the sun, Netheryn was the darkest crown of The Shade, bearing a cold so deep it could turn the blood of most common folk slow and sludgy. But not the Moonplumes, with their luminous, leathery skin so chill to the touch. With their long silky tails and eyes a crush of glitter and ice.
Tucked amongst snow and ice and a hungry quiet that swallowed sounds then spat them out like a warning roar, the Moonplumes flourished, growing in number, strength, and brilliance.
Only those as unhinged as Clode or bearing enough power to protect themselves would attempt to steal a Moonplume egg.
Most failed, consumed by the fearsome, thrashing beasts or the hostile land.
Some succeeded — a celebrated few who used the dragons to wage wars for sprouting kingdoms.
But as castles grew taller than mountains, and as kings and queens decorated their crowns with bigger, sparklier jewels, so too did folk learn how to shed dragon blood.
For many Moonplumes, Moltenmaws, and Sabersythes … their eternal lives were slashed.
The Creators did not expect their beloved beasts to sail skyward upon their end. For many of them to plant themselves just beyond gravity’s grip, curl into balls and calcify, littering the sky with tombstones.
With moons.
They certainly did not expect those moons to fall not long after they found their lofty perch. For them to collide with the world in a clash of splintering doom that threatened to devastate everything that had come to be.
It took seven moonfalls before Clode, Rayne, Ignos, and Bulder realized Caelis was to blame. That his empty space which yearned to be filled was strong enough to displace a dragon from its resting place and rip it from the sky.
It took them yet another moonfall to devise a plan to save the world they loved so much.
Wielding empty promises and faithless vows, they lured Caelis into their trap and captured him.
Subdued him.
They sang their whipping, burning, breaking songs, mincing Caelis’s essence into pieces small enough to trap in a cage of ebony crystal no larger than a pip, henceforth known as the Aether Stone.
Threads of his silver cloak tore free as he thrashed and fought, but the other Creators did not bother to round up the scraps, leaving them to tether to both poles of the world. A luminous aurora that spun around the globe, giving folk something to track their daes and slumbertime.
Caelis himself was set within a sterling diadem embellished with a collection of runes that bore malicious strength. Enough to keep him trapped within the stone for eternity, so long as the runes had something to feed on.
A guardian.
A mighty fae warrior known for his strength and wisdom was bestowed a gift from the Creators themselves: power immense enough that he was able to host the Aether Stone upon his brow and keep Caelis contained. A gift that passed down his familial line like skipping stones.
Many aurora cycles passed, and more moons littered the sky …
Stayed there.
Peace eventually reigned, despite a slew of tragedies and ill-timed deaths that swallowed the Aether Stone’s catastrophic origin, its very meaning for existence becoming a scrambled myth passed around campfires or sung to babes to hush their fussing cries.
Until one aurora rise, for the first time in more than five million phases …
Another moon fell.
***
There you are. That’s the whole prologue. Various reviews at Amazon mention the great writing. The snarky critique I originally linked says:
There are many beautiful passages with evocative phrasing and lovely imagery.
And I really, really wonder where those beautiful passages are, because I’m not seeing them. This is aside from the annoying tendency to make Every. Single. Sentence. Into. Its. Own. Paragraph. Which is barely an exaggeration, and of course looks worse when spacing between paragraphs, which is how WordPress wants to do it, so avoiding that is a pain and a half, but admittedly that does make this tendency to super-short paragraphs look worse and more extreme than in the real world. But my point is, I’m seeing a LOT of clumsy, awkward, inferior writing here. A LOT. And how is it possible the reviewer who critiques it doesn’t see that?
His baritone song was so full of substance, yet lacked it entirely. What?
no matter how loud he sang. You mean “loudly”?
eternally dunked in shadow so thick it seeped into the stone and cast it black. “Dunked”? “Cast it black”?
dips, dollops, and cracks in the world. “Dollops,” really?
Rayne fell upon the ground in a billion yearning teardrops of unrequited love, puddling in Bulder’s dips, filling his gorges with her gushing affections. I can’t bear it.
The deep, gut-wrenching wail of an avalanche. Avalanches wail?
On and on, I see a handful of sentences that don’t strike me as painful, but MOSTLY this is painful to read. 35,000 ratings on Amazon. 4.4 average star rating. I just … the editor at whatever publisher — oh, Avon, which is an imprint of Harper Collins — anyway, to be fair, the editor did her job, which was to recognize a book that had the potential to be catchy and package it up in a way that would sell. Good for her, I guess, but for crying out loud, I wish she had failed to make this sell, because it’s not great to see something as badly written as this jump to the top of the bestseller lists. I realize tastes differ, but honestly.
The linked post also says:
The prologue serves the story by getting world explanations out of the way and setting up the story’s throughline.
And I am here to declare that you should not need to explain the world and you most emphatically should not need to “get the world explanation out of the way,” for crying out loud, stop that. How about you integrate the worldbuilding into the story as you write it, the way every good author actually does it, and this kind of explanation of the world’s mythology is lazy as well as boring, even if it is well written, which this one is not.
The linked post finishes:
This prologue is simply not a replacement for actually starting the story, for meeting the main character and forcing that main character to deal with a threat. Ideally, Parker would sketch out the basics of the world – eternal day and night, the dragons – while that happens. That depends on putting the main character in the right situation to start. You don’t want a first scene where nothing happens just so you can explain the world. But it’s usually possible to choose a good opening problem that also lets you show the world off.
Yeah, what she said.
Although I wouldn’t say I’ve NEVER seen a mythology-of-the-world prologue that worked for me — I might have seen one I loved and forgotten about it — I can say that I don’t REMEMBER ever seeing one that I thought was a good idea, while I’ve seen a fair number, including some by well-known and popular authors, that were terrible plus completely unnecessary. This is another one like that.
Here are the first sentences of chapter one:
I curl my shoulders forward, crumbling my posture into something that appears trodden.
Scared.
Just skip the prologue, stop right here after the first fourteen words of the actual story, and try to tell me this book is well-written. Because if anybody thinks wow, such great writing, I swear, I will just give up.
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