Shit on Debra's desk

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Are you implying that you think Colleen Hoover “write[s] amazingly well”? I would actually say her success is due to her melodramatic, over-the-top stories, not due to her prose.

Or are you saying the opposite: that her stories are good but her writing is shit? If you mean that, do you then mean that Gideon The Ninth did not sell well (because of it’s convoluted story, even though it’s written well)? It looks like Gideon the Ninth sold well!

Your title also kinda confuses me. Writing is not “more about” any one thing. Different parts of the same book will do different things for different people. Unless you mean success-in-writing is more about story.

Sorry, just not exactly sure what you’re getting at but i’d really appreciate if you would explain. If you mean to say that general audiences appreciate story over prose then i would agree. Most people tend to care more about story.

His writing is more important than the story.

Like a boss

You are a master story teller CombatWombat.

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There is an extremely fine line between being a good storyteller and an author. I can spin yarn and tell stories from my past and make them interesting for the listener or the reader. But trying to string that out over the obligatory 300 pages is tough to do. I hear what your saying..the first nine book of Lee Child were fantastic page turners. But the last three have been “Meah” because he has thrown off some to his brother of because the details that are superlative to the work just get in the way. Tolkien did the same thing I really don’t need five pages describing clouds

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I do the same thing all the time no worries!

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Haha it has been a complaint of mine for years. Get a fantastic opening cruddy middle where you slog through just to get to a better than average end. But obviously, it’s a formula. Otherwise we wouldn’t have it in every friggin novel.

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Precisely! For a while there I thought it was just me. But then I realized 12 authors 15 books couldn’t just be me.

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Shit on Debra's desk was a mystery that had been plaguing the office for weeks. Every morning, Debra would come in to find a small mound of feces on her desk. No one knew who was behind the disgusting act, and tensions in the office were running high. Surely, it couldn’t have been a person leaving these piles to dehydrate in the still office atmosphere. The pungent odor alone was enough to make Debra’s head spin, however, she refused to let it get the best of her. She cleaned up the mess every morning with a stoic determination. She would find out who was responsible.

During a slow day toward the end of the year, Debra decided she had had enough. She called a meeting with all of her coworkers and announced that she was going to solve the mystery once and for all. She brought in a list of suspects and announced that she was going to question each and every one of them until she found the culprit.

As she went down the list of suspects, Debra noticed that everyone seemed genuinely shocked and offended by the suggestion that they could be responsible for the feces on her desk. Some even seemed offended that they had been included on the list at all. However, based on Debra’s notes about the suspects diets and lifestyle, she had come to the conclusion logically — at least she thought so.

Her coworkers began to vacate the break room. Debra began to worry that she might never find the culprit. Then, just as she was about to give up hope, a new thought occurred to her. She remembered that the office had a security camera set up in the hallway outside of her office. She raced to the security office and asked to see the footage from the past few weeks. She arrives every morning at 6:30am and leaves last. Whoever it was dropped in after hours.

As she watched the footage, Debra couldn't believe her eyes. There, on the screen, was a small, mischievous-looking creature sneaking into her office every morning and leaving a pile of shit on her desk before disappearing back into the hallway. This wasn’t the usual dump of incomplete TPS reports, it was a personal attack; or so she previously thought.

With the culprit caught red handed, Debra couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdity of the situation. She thanked the security guard and returned to her office, relieved to finally have the mystery solved. From then on, Debra made sure to keep her office door closed at all times to prevent any more surprise visits from her furry perpetrator — the neighborhood trash panda.

I think this is one of those things that's more about individual preferences. I'm kind of the opposite from you and care more about the writing quality/style than plot. IMO, a really great writer can make any story worth reading for the beauty of their prose or the depth of their message. In contrast, if the plot is great but the prose is awful, I wont read it because it makes me too irritated! To each their own.

Haha. I’ve always thought, that the crap you have to slog through was added by the publisher just to make the page count. And the author..who has spent his check already..just has to let it go and endure…hahah.

Look at some of the old piers Anthony novels. Solid front to back. Not until like book 5-6 does the “center slog” start. That’s just one example off the top of my head

What the are you talking about lmao

The opposite is true

Do you need friends or just high?

Why not both?

I still don’t know, but I went with it

writing is not always about story telling. Think about other aspects of writing like poems. what then?

100%

I'm the same. Not that I enjoy subpar storytelling, but even fantastic storytelling can feel unreadable to me if the writing rubs me the wrong way. I've been skewered for saying I can't finish more than a chapter or two before abandoning King novels because his writing irritates me that badly. And yet I enjoy almost every tv/movie adaptation of his work because his storytelling is strong enough that even a butchered version of it is still captivating more often than not. I have no doubt they're lacking compared to the books, but I can't stand the books enough to find out, so the tv/movie versions are good enough for me lol.

i disagree. personally i need both to enjoy the book.

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I'm one of these types as well. I tend to enjoy books, both fiction and nonfiction, that wouldn't do very well as movies. (One of my favorite pleasure reads is Under The Tuscan Sun, whose movie was unrecognizable when you compare it to the book because there was so little actual plot in that memoir worthy of making into a film 😂 They had to invent a whole dramatic romance plot to sell it to people. I could read that book over and over, though, and enjoy every line.) There's no greater damp squid for me than a book with a fascinating plot but super dry, to-the-point prose. The plot is never enough to get me to stay with those kinds of books.

That is a silly thing to say. No art for is primarily about the story. Not film, theatre, painting or literature. Each art form is about itself first. Then the story. Never the other way around.

And the art of storytelling - it's about how you tell them.

>I was thinking about this. Just because you can write amazingly well doesn’t mean you’re a good story teller.

IMO you can not be a good story teller or a good author if you can't write well enough.

>Doesn’t mean your books will sell, that people will enjoy your writing.

Commercial success doesn't equal book quality. There are so many horrible books out there that sell well.

Also, you don't have to enjoy reading a book for it to be great. It's less "enjoyable" reading The Republic by Plato than The Way of the Kings by Brandon Sanderson. But The Republic is one of those important books to exist in our world, and still is Brandon Sanderson the one who sells disgusting amounts of books.

This isn't universally true at all. Not every piece of writing is focused primarily on storytelling.

Ok I totally saw a point in that, and it made me laugh and keep reading. Prose was meh, but it had a hook.