One of my favorite authors has a writing style that I could politely describe as “Complex.” Or maybe “Exhausting” would be more accurate. “Fascinating” maybe.
He does a lot of flash backs, while breaking the fourth wall as in “wait, that was a bad place to start this story, let me try this . . .” right there on the page. And he has a lot of action. Fighting, running, getting, caught, escaping, running, friend gets caught, rescue, fight, run . . .
Arthur Mayor, FYI. For us SF fans, his Space Station Noir series is excellent.
I rather dubiously tried his Teen Superhero series, as I’ve found others of the genre somewhere between “Meh” and “this is an awful lot like the last time I tried the genre, must they all have these stupid tropes?”
Loved his.
Now he’s extending the series, focusing on a briefly seen minor character from somewhere back toward the start.
And he’s gone from “Complex” to “Chaotic.”
I sometimes wonder if my plots are too simplistic. Mr. Mayor is on the other end of the spectrum.
Where I keep thinking I need to add complications and subplots, I now have an example of going too far the other direction.
Not that I want to dissuade anyone from reading his stuff. He’s high on my Favorite Author List. But approach this extension series with the knowledge that you need to pay attention to the “iteration 3” sort of thing in the chapter heading. So you almost know what’s going on.
See, along with all the running, escaping, fighting, and talking to the reader stuff, he now has a teleporting thirteen-year-old girl who sometimes messes up her teleports and duplicates herself, with one of the duplicates zinging off into some random time in the future.
So the chapters are jumping back and forth between these iterations of herself, in a very non-chronological order. Still with all with the running, fighting, captured, escaping stuff.
Dude! MY HEAD HURTS!
Sorry. But really, I’ll read—and enjoy—the whole series.
But I now have a very good example of carrying a writing style too far.
I now know that an author really can get carried away, and lose his readers. I will take this cautionary example and strive to not go too far (in my own writing, in my own direction) and start losing readers. Which I’m worried a bit about, for Mr. Mayor, as the first Dodger book is picking up fewer ratings and higher percent of two star ratings in a month than even his oldest books have collected in years.
Too much of a good thing, really can be bad.
So, you guys have any examples of writers writing themselves over the edge of a cliff?
And you haven’t read my stuff? Try starting here:
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Going Too Far”
Igor is always a great place to start. 🙂
Aside note – I didn’t miss Novaya Moskva, right? That one’s still a preview in the books so far published?
*Moan* I don’t even remember which one that was. I am however, working on Who Counts. Between other distractions.
*Thumbs up* It has been a heck of a year for those so far, yes. You don’t want to know about plumbing and water quality problems, augh….
(I have today and tomorrow off and I am going to try and get this final pirate fight scene sketched the rest of the way, darn it!)
Novaya Moskva is the one that I think will be Rat’s origin story. Rat (Lord Renatt Zarkov) shows up in Agent of the 300 when Axel’s meeting people on Embassy, in… ah, found it, chapter 7!
The preview I recall has him setting up to move most of a remaining household to some outer property, while the actual Head of the Family is getting off-world. In the process he stops an attempted suicide, and reminding several youngsters to say they’re 16 if anyone asks.
Ah! Lord Rat. Yes. I had a lot of fun with the poor man, stopped dead at what needed to be a nasty bloody scene, before the deus ex machina–he happens to pray the right way when there happens to be a gate open to that World and the Dark Lady saves the whole refugee camps he’s collected by then.
Still the only way I see out of his problem . . .
*Knocks on wood.* May we both finish things despite the world….
I second your take on Mr. Mayor. I love the Space Station Noir series but have not yet tried the superhero series – I am just so sick of superheroes. I knew you were talking about Mr. Mayor before you named him. The space station series is fantastic, but yes the way the plots unwind take some getting used to.
And John Ringo’s jumping on the band wagon, publishing in the fall, he put them on substack, where I read the slightly raw material. Not! Standard! But still a few tropes snuck in, in the background.
“Not That Kind of Good Guy” is so exactly the right title!
Some of the “Aga Saga” writers (British domestic stories) get a little too enthusiastic about following up with all of the extended family members, neighbors, and their neighbors. I realize that’s part of the appeal (Jan Karon’s Mitford series has the flavor but with fewer sidetracks), but eventually I gave up on several authors because it seemed like everything was all digression all the time.
Sigh. I just finished one of Barbara Hambly’s historicals: Patriot Hearts, about the three women married to, or supposedly associated with the founding fathers: Martha Washington, Dolley Madison, Abigail Adams and Sally Hemings. It was a fairly good book (OK, I finished it!) and I was drawn into some of the episodes, but holy moly, Batman, the incessant jumping from woman to woman and digressions/leaps ahead in time, and every one had friends and kin with the same names. It was a terribly disjointed and confusing read, and I don’t know how I would have gone about fixing it, save either doing four different linked books, or a straight linear sequence with an opening and closing frame.
That one stonewalled me; I don’t think I even finished it.
Too many points of view is a danger because I may be interested in only one.
Oh, Lordy, the constantly shifting points of view — I really liked the Abigail Adams chapter, but just as I got drawn in – blammo, off to one of the other ladies! It was exhausting, just keeping up.
I read the first Space Station Noir and thought it was well-done, but felt like the serious stuff (humans enslaved by aliens!) sat uncomfortably alongside the silly stuff (the main aliens are space lizard chickens!) which in turn sat uncomfortably alongside the background manipulations of space lizard chicken Tarkinpalpatine (not his actual name). I haven’t read the sequels.
In mysteries and thrillers, it sometimes seems like authors hit some kind of maximalist threshold with a really baroque story that nonetheless holds together pretty well (Allingham’s Traitor’s Purse, Christie’s Pale Horse, Sayers’s Nine Tailors, Clancy’s Debt of Honor) and even if they continue to do good work after that, the books get either messier or less ambitious, or both.
I’ve also occasionally seen people cite A Storm of Swords (last ASOIAF before the long fallow period) as the last good book in that series, and also seen Wheel of Time fans remark that volumes 4-6 are the apex of the series before it ossifies into wheel-spinning. So possibly there may be some kind of Maximum Complexity Threshold before a series just goes over the edge.
I adored TarkinPalpatine; he was my favorite character, and I appreciate that he was used sparingly. An extremely ruthless character with good intentions.
he was mine too, TBH 🙂