Never said there was anything wrong with studying them. But to an untrained writer who doesn’t understand the basics of craft, it is unlikely that she would be able to detect the essence that was different that captivated the readers. Instead, the untrained writer is more likely to end up with a bad knock-off. Just ask all the agents who have received hundreds of “Twilight” wanna-bes. Studying anomalies works best when we grasp the basics, yet most brand new writers are still struggling to understand the antagonist and narrative structure. This series is all about basics. Think of it like learning guitar. We need to learn to read music and the fingering on the strings before we worry about breaking musical rules. Once people understand the fundamental rules of the craft, THAT is the time to start trying to incorporate techniques used by outliers.

The Girl books took a HUNDRED pages to get people interested. Most readers are not going to give a book ten, let alone a HUNDRED. So what happens is that new writers believe that they have the leeway of a 100 pages before the story really starts. No, that is a total anomaly and a BAD gamble, especially these days when people download samples of the first pages before they buy. These days it is even MORE important to understand how to hook the reader.

I think we should study those anomalies. It tells us something about the reader. Come on, Kristen, where is your research spirit? 🙂 You know that they are many books , quite bad from the technical point of view, managed to captivate the reader. Maybe we should ask the readers why did they like or dislike Stieg Larrson’s novel. I can see why it worked for me. Maybe there are general things form a good mix that appeals to the reader in them , it’s like an oasis in the desert of bad fiction. Brother Karamasov’s is another example of masterpiece being technically a rather badly written novel.

I can’t explain that. I know there are outliers. I, personally, hated them. Twilight is another we could cite, but it is a bad idea to try to write that way. Every once in a while, something like that will take off, but most of the time it dies in the slush pile. It’s poor planning to pattern our writing after anomalies.