The Makings of a Good Book

I'm sure we've all had this experience: We pick up a book, we're reading, and ... it's just not doing it for us.



Sometimes a book just isn't "our kind" of book. I've adored books that friends of mine have hated, and visa versa.



But sometimes, there's something flat-out wrong with a book. Maybe we can't put our finger on what it is exactly, but something isn't working. I had this happen to me recently. The book was just plain bad. I'm not sure how it happens because getting published is crazy hard, but the book flat-out sucked.



Here are five things the bad book lacked, and five things you can check your current manuscript/idea for:



1. A main character I can root for. And this doesn't mean a perfect character, just one that's appealing to me as a reader.


2. A strong opening. If the opening is so-so, what’s my motivation to keep reading?


3. Creative, intelligent dialogue. Every sentence doesn’t need to be a zinger, certainly, but I think dialogue makes or breaks a book. Two of my favorite movies for studying dialogue are As Good As It Gets and A Few Good Men. Even though I'll attempt it in the coming weeks, it's really difficult to say, “This is how you write good dialogue.” But I can certainly tell the difference between great and lousy.


4. A pace that reflects the needs of the story and the personality of the narrator. If it’s a novel about a poet, the pacing’s going to be different than if it’s about a homicide detective. I’m cool with that, so long as it fits the story and there’s no info dumping. By info dumping, I mean those passages where it's clear the writer did some research and is just dying to put every factoid on the page. The particularly sucky book I read had a five page argument about our public school system. I don't need this. Not when I’m reading a novel, anyway.


5. A specific theme or purpose. And these should be subtle. As a reader, little annoys me more than reading a scene or chapter and then being like, “Okay … that had no point.” The only thing that’s worse is feeling that way at the end of a book.



These are all things we'll cover in more depth later on. Feel free to comment and add to this list!