Intro and What I Read
On my journey as indie writer, Sapphire Lebesque, I chose two genres to write in, Historical Romance and Romantasy (Fantasy Romance). To make sure I hit the beats within those genres, I read a lot of books in them. In other words, as a writer, you must include the moments readers expect to see. Different genres have different beats and Romance in particular has its own beats. Within each genre are sub-genres and writers must respect those beats as well.
Respect your readers.
In this article, I’m going to pick one genre to use as an example: Historical Romance.
I read a ton of books a week and the prose of one new author (to me) was so bad that I almost posted a stinging review of the first book by her, but I decided to write this instead. Why? Because I’ve been meaning to write this post for a long time. Because the howlers in this book were so bad, they completely knocked me out of the story and I ended up throwing the book, the first in a series, in the DNF pile. That cost her earnings.
You may call me ‘grammar police’, in which case, fair enough. Your counter argument is too few readers will notice mistakes and nitpick like you do. But what if they do? What if they notice one too many mistakes and reject your painstaking work? What if they post a negative review? (We all get those no matter how hard we work to make sure our prose is perfect.) But again… respect your reader, or he’ll toss it the Did Not Finish pile.
What is Genre?
My favourite analogy is the restaurant one. You wouldn’t go to an Italian restaurant and expect to have Indian cuisine. Let’s say your genre as an author is ‘Italian’. That’s what your readership likes to read and it’s what you’re known for. The genre beats your reader expects to find are the equivalent to ‘pasta’, ‘pizza’, ‘Italian ice-cream’ and so on. He wouldn’t go to an Italian restaurant if he wanted an Indian meal.
Likewise, your reader wouldn’t pick up your Historical Romance if he wanted to immerse himself in a contemporary spy thriller. Genre tells the bookseller which shelf to put your book on, first Fiction or Non-Fiction? You get the idea. That’s why the film industry answers, ‘The same but different’, to the screenwriter’s question, ‘What do you want?’
Style Choices v. Must Haves
Style Choices
Americanisms, such as ‘cookies’ instead of ‘biscuits’.
We Brits didn’t ‘stomp’ nor did ‘we figure things out’. Instead, we stamp or work things out, especially in Regency times. Nor did we say, ‘Oh, my.’ It sounds so… American. To have an English Regency female say that knocks me right out of the story. The nearest equivalent in British English that comes to mind could be, ‘Oh, my goodness!’ Of course, there are others.
The worst sins are mostly committed in dialogue. People simply didn’t speak like that in those times.
But I would call this a style choice of the writer. We must consider the marketplace. What grates on a reader in the UK would be invisible to the American reader, and since the UK book market is a fraction of the US one, it makes sense for the writer to ‘write American’, and we Brits just have to ‘suck it up’, as they say over there.
So, I soldier on with the story and ignore the Americanisms as best I can.
Must Haves
In any genre, more unforgiveable are the ‘must haves’. For one thing, copy editing for consistency, story logic, and sentences that make sense, and after that, proof reading. There’s no substitute for a human for these stages, not at the time of writing, anyway. AI will be up to standard in the future but it’s not yet, in my opinion.
Then there’s plain bad grammar such as ‘off of’. Ugh.
Repetition is a bugbear of mine, repeated words or even sentences, but I accept that could be a style choice, and it’s nice occasionally when it’s used for emphasis.
A total red flag for me is the wrong homophone (words that sound the same but with different meanings and spellings). An example is ‘taught’ instead of ‘taut’. One means ‘imparted knowledge’ and the second means ‘stretched tight’. A writer made this same mistake several times in a book, which led me to believe that she used an app to proofread the final text.
Also, use of the wrong word like ‘rouse’ instead of ‘ruse’.
Was This Book Written by a Machine?
A word about AI written books. I read so many books that I’m beginning to spot whether AI or a human has written the book. There are signs the book is written by AI, for instance:
- Repetition (repeated sentences) and overused cliched phrases and metaphors. You may think ‘overused’ and ‘cliched’ together are unnecessary, but I’m talking about cliches sprinkled liberally through the text. They are tiring to wade through.
- Cliched characters, plot points and scenes, but those are outside the scope of this article.
- Wrong homophones, repeatedly, as mentioned above, and wrong word. I don’t mean the grammatical differences between US and UK English. Some howlers are universal.
- Wrong tense. This is just plain confusing for the reader and contributes to the text not making sense. I’m not sure whether it’s the fault of AI fiction-writing apps or AI copy editors and proofreading apps, but the bottom line is that there’s no substitute for human readers in the final stages of the text, in my opinion. You may disagree.
Beware Strangers Offering Candy (Sweets if you Prefer)
There are other red flags but, in my experience, these are the main ones. As a writer, I’ve ceased using AI tools for the time being until the whole copyright issue is resolved. Furthermore, there’s the issue that a writer may unknowingly sign their copyright away by using an app if they don’t go through the fine print meticulously before using it.
There’s also the issue of spying. There are rumours of the big players putting cookies on writers’ devices unknown to the user and releasing their personal and sensitive information to the wild.
As important as the points mentioned are, there’s the issue of the amount of power AI needs to keep it functioning, up several orders of magnitude from human usage. It’s insane. Global warming is already a problem; now we’re adding to it.
I don’t mean to criticize the functionality. There are ethical and environmental issues that come with AI writing apps and I’m steering well clear for the time being.
Summing Up
In conclusion, if a writer has used AI or human input to write the book, the reader doesn’t care or even notice. All he wants is a good read, but making sure that the writer goes through the final proofing process is the low-hanging fruit.
I’ve produced some fiction under my own name and you can find one of my favourites here.
My first ever completed book I published on Amazon here. It’s also one of my favourites.
My latest Romantasy can be found here, and my newest Historical Romance here, under the pen name, Sapphire Lebesque.
Credits
Pizza banner by the mighty Picjumbo.com
Cover art by Cover Kreations, UK.
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