Essay rec: the components of reader response to a book

[julesjones]

Janet at the romance blog Dear Author has posted an excellent essay discussing the three main strands that go into a reader's reactions to a book (correctness, style and taste), noting that only one of these is objective, and considering how that can lead to misunderstandings in online discussions.

The subject is something I've often seen discussed in fanfic circles, which has a whole critical vocabulary to indicate stories/books which have a high score on one aspect but a low score on another. But this is one of the best single-post discussions of the subject that I can remember seeing, and while it's written from a romance reader's perspective, it does not rely on prior knowledge of any particular fiction genre or fandom in-group knowledge. The comment thread has some good discussion as well. If you're interested in meta, you may well find this an interesting read regardless of your preferred genre.

Comments

[shriker-tam.livejournal.com]

Very interesting, though I feel she's missing the element of "believability". If a book is set in another world, or there are elements in it about which there are no objective truths (like magic), it's hard to talk about "correctness", because there are no facts the author is getting wrong. I had issues like that about the DaVinci Code, for instance, where I just didn't find the characters at all believable the way they were put together.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting essay, but I would suggest that it's possible to be more objective than she claims. Beyond what she calls correctness are things like: is the language fluent and are there vivid descriptions of character and setting? Is there some originality in the language, for example in the similes and metaphors used, or is it full of hackneyed, over-used phrases? (Language can be grammatically correct, but full of boring cliches.) Is there a good balance between narrative summary (telling) and dramatised scenes (showing)? I would say that these features are pretty much independent of genre.

I also agree with shriker_tam that believability comes into it a lot, whether it's lit fic, fantasy, romance or whatever.