Jessica Lee: "Dear Carmen Maria Machado: What keeps me in orbit?"

Dear Carmen Maria Machado: What keeps me in orbit?

By: Jessica Lee

I slowly walked down the aisle between the bookshelves, sunlight shining between the gaps of the cosmology and earth science section. I was entranced by the covers, the sly words that headline the top of the cover. I’m sorry Mr./Mrs. Author, but your cover does matter, unless a recommendation from a friend leads me to a book’s Dewey decimal number. Every Sunday morning as a 12 year old, I found myself at the library, looking through the Young Adult section to pick up around 5 books to read for the next couple of days. Needless to say, I devoured romance and fantasy like it was a pack of seaweed: easy to digest and addicting. There’s nothing like the feeling of finding a long series that captivates me every page along the way. Jokes and first impressions inside, compels me the most to continue reading is the power of reflection.

My attention span is short. In modern society, we run on small digests of information like snapchat stories and Facebook posts. To me, my form of “reading” comes in the form of LINE Webtoons. Although they take as long as it would take to read a normal book, what interests me is the intense scenery. This is similar to reading a book, because a good book requires vivid imagery. But, for me to continue a book, I need something that draws my attention in like gravity keeps a spaceship in orbit. This is something core to science fiction: “it uses the future as a narrative convention to present significant distortions of the present.” This represents the “catch” in the seemingly perfect world.  I want to feel the plot twist that makes me question everything I’ve learned so far – a different perspective.

One of my favorite webtoons series is called: 2015 Space Series. This webtoon is organized in standalone stories for each chapter. In chapter 5, these groups of astronauts found a group of cells, regenerating them into a full organism. Once the body was fully developed, they found an organism with a great intellectual capacity that would’ve known how meaningless war was to avoid the collapse of their civilization, described as “a species with infinite potential”. But, the author reveals that the organism was the human race and the astronauts were aliens. After reading the story, I reflected on our obsession with our own opinion, driving a wall between us and others.  A reader will never regret a story that makes them think, because we’ll be stuck in a loop our heads, never reaching answers, even after we finish the book. By building the world with a unique twist, this compels the reader to continue to read.

But, once I start a book, there are things an author should not do: repeat what they have done before and focusing on irrelevant plotlines. There is nothing more frustrating than starting a book, thinking something unique will happen, but then the arc that occurred in the last novel appears again. Also, focusing on arcs that are unimportant to the series is an annoyance that will cause readers to put down the novel and not want to open it. For example, in an anime called “Sword Art Online”, I stopped watching the second season because they started focusing on the relationship between the main character and his cousin, pretending it was a love arc even though the main character already was loyal to his girlfriend.

The other thing an author must not do is make their writing hard to understand. Authors must start writing books for the readers and not the critics. For example, Lord of Light had such an interesting concept, involving spaceship passengers from Earth, settling onto a planet impersonating gods with an conscience-uploading cloud above it. But, I would not have understood any of that if it hadn’t been explained to me by my teacher. When a reader does not follow their book, it is a one-way ticket to no review – because the readers do not even bother finishing it. Your readers are not paying to decipher your metaphorical pile of diction.

So authors, I hope you can walk away from your work saying, “Wow, my readers are going to be in for a ride.” Give us so many twists and turns, with your compelling but not confusing words, to bring us into orbit, around the brink of insanity, waiting to be pulled down to the conclusion. Give us a plot deep enough that we’ll never return the same.