Priya Sharma: "Dear Carmen Maria Machado: Cliches are Overrated"

Dear Carmen Maria Machado: Clichés are Overrated

By Priya Sharma

Maybe this has happened to you. You pick up a book – maybe it is a favorite author, maybe it is someone new – and you dive right in expecting to like it, but you are just not hooked. It happens. Still, for whatever reason, you decide to stick with it and give it another 20 pages, then another 50, then another 100, until you find yourself stuck in the last third of the book trying to convince yourself that you have to finish it. But is it worth it? To me, everything from picking up a book to putting it down, is really up to the author. It is about how the author teaches us readers through the intricately created story line.

Authors must rely on audience reactions and critical reviews. So although the saying "don't judge a book by its cover" is cliché, many authors care to make their books look exciting. Moreover as an audience member, it is tempting to pursue a book based on how fascinating its cover looks. In fact, 85% of the (BuzzFeed) population is guilty of doing that too. But if you fall into the other 15%, you are choosing a book based on its quality. You realize that sometimes, the cover cannot provide you with enough information about how the actual story is. I fall into that 15%. Sometimes it is hard to stay unbiased, but reading the first twenty to thirty pages gives much more sight into what I am getting myself into than the cover. 

By reading the first chunk of the book, the reader can learn two things: one, what the story line is, and two, how efficiently the story line has been set up. The worst thing an author can do is still have no point after the first twenty to thirty pages of the book. Recently, we have been learning about the Hero's journey and what each part of that journey means. Personally, if after thirty pages the characters and setting are still being introduced, I lose motivation to continue reading the book.  Rather than learning about each character and the setting page after page, it is more efficient to learn more about the character as the character grows with the story. Not only is that more interesting to read, it helps the reader relate to the characters. So in my opinion, after the first chunk, the main character or characters should be past their call to action stage. 

Relating to the characters is also what makes the book more compelling. If the characters are too perfect, or trying too hard, it is almost annoying to read about. In the book Howl’s Moving Castle, the characters were not portrayed as the typical stepmother and evil two step sisters. This not only helped make the characters more relatable, they were interesting to learn more about because it was not the typical fairytale story told once too many times. Instead, each character in the book had a distinct archetype. SFF is such a broad genre that it is easy to cover a multitude of topics.For example, we read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Lord of Light back to back. However, DADES focused on the life of androids and that area of science fiction whereas LoL focused heavily on character developments in a religious and historical setting. The books all had different plots, and I did not want to put any of them down because of how intriguing they were. 

Looking back, I realize that authors are doing more than just writing a book for entertainment. They are putting a piece of themselves out into the world. Authors subtly create main characters about someone in their life or include details in settings that were a part of their own life. When an author does that efficiently, and you become as passionate about reading as they were about writing, the author did a great job. The author was able to relay the message they wanted to, to their audience. If that is visible by half the book, that is what inspires me to finish that last half of the book.