Thankfully I was never at risk of accidentally reading this. The back cover blurb told me everything I needed to know (good job, whoever wrote it). Sounds like it was exactly what I expected. Another entry in the "safe contempt" genre, plus modern cliterature tropes. I'm sure it'll do great.
Did enjoy the detailed breakdown of its failings.
On the technical details, having spent the first part of my childhood a couple hours outside of Boise (actually descendant of that mid 1800 settlement wave you mentioned), can confirm that you know what you're talking about and the author has never so much as done a google street view drive of the place. For one thing a couple hours outside of Boise is a *long* way from Boise. 20 miles from the airport, you're still in Boise (even Idaho has freeways!). Typical global-city people regurgitating each other's imagined versions of places they've never been, only it's rural America so it's okay to be unflattering.
Anyway, don't mean to pile on to your rant. Other specifics check out too. Hard to *live* anywhere you can really see the stars these days. Visit, camp, yes. Live, not so much.
Failures of plot and characterization much more interesting. Because even in books I don't like that received critical praise, the author got that much right. That no longer seems to be the case, which is why I don't care what critics have to say anymore. A big circlejerk for an overproduced and underacheiving faux elite.
For a significantly better take on rural life and timey-wimey shenanigans, I liked The Outer Range. Shame it seems to be canceled.
I’ve been fortunate to live a few places where you can see the stars well. It’s quite addictive—and worth putting up with considerable inconvenience for.
I gotta admit, this book really surprised me with how bad it was. The only book I’ve ever read that was worse was one that I was hired to edit for historical accuracy, and the client was so upset at the mountain of notes I returned that none of them were used—the book failed pretty miserably (not just for that reason—the book had a number of other problems that arise when an author is rife with unearned hubris, massive enthusiasm, and no awareness of how to treat his or her own premise with any more respect than one would give to an adult wearing a child’s Halloween mask).
I just hope that I wrote the takedown of Yesteryear in such a way that writers can learn from Burke’s mistakes :-) The world needs more good writers.
Closest I've ever been to living under the stars is some ways outside of Nashville, where you could just barely see the milky way on a good night during new moon (nashville a dim glow over the horizon), and middle of nowhere in the southwest where the light pollution was bad in town but 20 minutes over a couple hills got you a view worthy of serious amateur astronomy.
Now on a tiny town on the Oregon coast where I can see a lot of stars at night, but still short of their full majesty. Miles better than the dull orange prison ceiling of cities though, and for that I am thankful.
As for literature, I think there's a quiet renaissance brewing. It's just not going to be mentioned in the press. They'd rather go bankrupt than risk putting eyes on it. With "<genre> fatigue" peaking and practically everyone saying "I could do better," and often being right, there can't help but grow an alternative to the failing institutional media. It's good to see you and others offering some hard-earned wisdom to aspiring authors so they don't have to reconstruct everything from scratch.
If it weren't for the OR state government, those tiny towns on the Oregon Coast would be damn close to heaven (with hurricanes). Spent a couple years there, loved it. Hated to leave.
Yeah I hear you. It was a major sticking point. Almost decided to go back to Idaho. But we really wanted to live by the ocean, more than we didn't want to deal with Oregon politics anymore. Really it's not so bad outside the valley cities. Other than the taxes, most of the dumb stuff is kind of out of sight out of mind. They did just pass some lunatic gun law but I'm not really shy about committing victimless crimes so…
Like any good writer, I contemplate whether fiction has a tighter grasp on the truth than do mere facts. Fierce adversaries will often use the same facts to make their case. Even video seems to prove, beyond question, a person's guilt/innocence based on what the viewer has predecided they want to see.
Good writers can 'cook the books,' convincing those who have already made up their minds that they are right. Convincing them that they are wrong, however, is a far more difficult task. Getting them to read the first page of 300 pages of 'you are wrong' is nearly impossible.
But I try. Mark Anthony turned the crowd from supporting Caesar's murderers to condemning them, all in the space of one soliloquy, given in the presence of the murderers, who could do nothing to stop him, once they'd realized what Anthony was doing.
So, yeah, like that. Start off being agreeable. Make that first page really attractive to them. Then slowly, surely...
The art of persuasion is foundational to fictional craft—this is true even if you’re not writing a book with a “point” to it. You have to induce trust that leads to the suspension of disbelief.
I subscribed to read the full review, and, oh my goodness, you did not disappoint. So much expertise on so many domains related to the book. This is a pretty tangential point in what you wrote, but I have never heard anyone articulate it before, and I was so intrigued by your comment about education among fundamentalist families. My parents were both missionary doctors and valued learning a lot. My siblings and I were encouraged to read widely. BUT, the school curriculum we used was very religious and lacking, in my opinion, because my parents just didn't know better as far as what options were out there. I am still a practicing Christian, but I would never use it if I had kids. That said, my siblings and I were absolutely fine when it came to stuff like AP Literature when we moved back to the States, because of the level of sophisticated textual analysis we had to do in Bible study. If you can debate the nuances of the book of Job, the Iliad is a cake walk. And if you are used to looking up words in Vine's Expository Dictionary and Strong's Concordance, then having an assignment where you have to use the Oxford English Dictionary to bolster an interpretation of Shakespeare feels really normal. My sister told me for one of her assignments, "I'm doing an inductive Bible study of King Lear." I have never heard anyone else describe this dynamic, so it was interesting to see you refer to it. And yes, we knew what an ocean is.
My mother was an MK who grew up in the field as well—a lot of what you said sounds very similar to what she told me about her education growing up.
If I had to characterize the de facto Evangelical educational program/philosophy in a single sentence, it would be “sophistication of knowledge, but not of thought.” But, fortunately for all involved, if you wrestle with the material enough to acquire sophisticated knowledge, it’s not a lot more work to hone the nascent thought-skills you’ve developed into something razor sharp and very powerful. As much as I prefer a “thinking-first” paradigm, if one were forced to choose between “content-free technique” and a “technique-free content” approach, I think the latter leaves the student in a better position to grow on their own once they’ve finished the program.
To be fair, the old-school math instruction for elementary school and the old-school phonics for learning to read were excellent. I feel fortunate compared to what kids these days get with Common Core and whole language. I wouldn't say I am great at math, but I got A's in AP Calculus my senior year and did great on the AP exam by working very hard, and the old-fashioned solid foundation deserves a lot of credit for that. But yeah, I still have a copy of a middle school book report on Pride and Prejudice where I talk about how Elizabeth and Darcy exhibited "un-Christlike attitudes," and it cracks me up today.
“Either way, Yesteryear is worth giving a miss. It’s best to wait for someone else to pick up the baton and run this fertile and fascinating concept out of the park.”
The book sounds like a second or third draft. I am guessing that a much better book could have been written with just a few more months of basic research, perhaps giving it to some beta readers, and then doing a fourth and fifth rewrite, which would have made for a better and more profitable book. Considering the effort it takes to write even a bad book, I wonder why she didn’t.
I’m not a big believer in rewrites. Commercial writers learn very quickly that “drafting” is the wrong approach to producing high quality stories—instead, we front load all the research and stoke high the fires of creativity so that when we come to the story we get a first draft out that’s close to final quality (continuity, typos, minor points of style, and problems caused by sudden direction changes usually need to be cleaned up after typing “the end” but developing-through-drafting is usually more suited to screenplays and nonfiction). So if Burke were writing commercial fiction, I’d Rx a “go back, do more research, then redo from start.”
OTOH, Burke is definitely an adherent to that school (that’s what the Bennington program teaches), so in that light your prescription sounds pretty right-on.
OK, the book's rubbish we get that - so were The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades - but all apparently connected with something the audience needed.
"You have to induce trust that leads to the suspension of disbelief" - maybe you can also induce a suspension of disbelief in reality and logic. Rules are made to be broken. Where does artistic licence stop? But you've got to find buttons to press to achieve this. You said you admired the author's business sense. If you want to sell well, maybe you have to swallow your pride and cast pigswill before swine. You're definitely a writer's writer so you're targetting a smaller audience.
I did wonder if it was AI-generated. Losing track of character continuity is classic AI (and also of using a team of hacks). And the lack of attention to detail is what you get if you ask you AI to write chapters rather than paragraphs.
1) Hadn’t thought about the AI angle, but if I had to guess I’d say “no.” The voice and tenor are too consistent, and the implicit POV and the stronger craft points reflects an author with Burke’s training background.
2) Yes, the key to suspension of disbelief is pushing the correct buttons—particularly, to pressing buttons consistently. When your implicit premises change on-the-fly, that’s when you get problems. An audience will ignore reality or realism for the sake of a good time (and they should—next week’s essay is about this), but they don’t take kindly to being rug-pulled all the time. The other two not-very-deep bestsellers you mentioned are good examples of this.
3) The thing that 50 Shades and The Da Vinci Code had over this book in terms of literary merit is that they were exploitation fiction and knew it. Both delivered what they said they would deliver—pretty decent erotic melodrama in the first case, and a schlocky puzzle book in the latter case. An important disctinction between them and Yesteryear is that they worked internally, on their own terms. Everything about The Da Vinci Code is silly, even down to the fact that even if its whole premise were true it wouldn’t actually impact Catholic theology much, but it doesn’t matter, because in the book it’s all played consistently and straight, and the book is an excuse for a series of puzzles that keep the audience working like they’re reading an Encyclopedia Brown novel.
You’re correct, of course, that such a long dissection isn’t necessary for a book like Yesteryear, but, like I said, I was annoyed. This really should have been a great book and it genuinely bummed me out to see such a fertile premise pissed away so badly.
And given my history of talking craft in public, I guarantee some younger writers are reading this and learning how not to make the same mistakes.
So, how did it connect with audience needs?
Judging by its positive reviews, in three ways:
1) It’s great smug fuel.
2) It’s the book to be seen reading. This is kind of a genre on its own—you get social cred from having a given book on your shelf, but nobody really reads them. Shogun was this way at one point in the early 80s, IIRC (though it was also a good read).
3) There are a lot of people who’ve never met an Evangelical and never been out of the city who are happy for anything that promises escape.
—
Me? A writer’s writer? Yikes! I will have to go shoot myself now ;-)
I was quite excited by the concept of this book when I first heard about it - as you point out, it could have been *Good*. However, once the critiques started coming out - not least Holly's - I decided not yo bother, because three of my pet hates seem to be engaged:
1. Lack of internal consistency - whatever you are writing, no matter how fantastic - must take place in a milieu with rules. You cite Thomas Covenant - very weird stuff, but the rules are generally (it's a while since I read the series, so I may have forgotten some bloopers) there, whether enunciated or not.
2. The lack of characters I can have sympathy with. This is so common in mainstream modern fiction that I rarely read or watch anything produced in the last two decades. Even Stephen Donaldson made a bit of a hash of that - Covenant is so awful that the story needs very sympathetic characters to balance him, and that didn't happen for me as much as it should. All I need is just one character to like, and I'm happy, but the current fashion is very much against that.
3. Lack of research, which you and Holly have covered with aplomb. As both of you have described things, my head was immediately saying "But what about [insert obvious bit of reality here]?" - air traffic, road noise, music, light pollution, law, etc, etc. Heinlein, Blish, Asimov and so on created entire universes out of imagination with fewer errors. Jim Butcher takes the here and now and twists it like a pretzel, but the basics are still there. This book fails at every turn, by the sounds of it.
I've made a note to look at your bookstore later this evening, in the hope of finding something new and good. Wish me luck!
I hope you find something you like there, as well!
If you prefer likable characters, Hadrian’s Flight and The Clarke Lantham Mysteries are good places to start. My other leads can be…more difficult.
Suave Rob is an over-the-top-for-comedic-effect egomaniac, Down From Ten’s characters are all very broken (lovable, but not necessarily likable), and The Resurrection Junket’s POV character is deeply disconnected from herself and emotionally cold. I, of course, love and/or admire them all for different reasons (or I’d not have spent time in their heads to write them), but since you mentioned likability as a big thing for you… ;-)
Ooh, you might have some fun with those. A lot of variety of tones and characters. Everything from sentimental and wistful to dark and nasty to mournful to outright insanity. I hope you get a lot of smiles out of them!
Thankfully I was never at risk of accidentally reading this. The back cover blurb told me everything I needed to know (good job, whoever wrote it). Sounds like it was exactly what I expected. Another entry in the "safe contempt" genre, plus modern cliterature tropes. I'm sure it'll do great.
Did enjoy the detailed breakdown of its failings.
On the technical details, having spent the first part of my childhood a couple hours outside of Boise (actually descendant of that mid 1800 settlement wave you mentioned), can confirm that you know what you're talking about and the author has never so much as done a google street view drive of the place. For one thing a couple hours outside of Boise is a *long* way from Boise. 20 miles from the airport, you're still in Boise (even Idaho has freeways!). Typical global-city people regurgitating each other's imagined versions of places they've never been, only it's rural America so it's okay to be unflattering.
Anyway, don't mean to pile on to your rant. Other specifics check out too. Hard to *live* anywhere you can really see the stars these days. Visit, camp, yes. Live, not so much.
Failures of plot and characterization much more interesting. Because even in books I don't like that received critical praise, the author got that much right. That no longer seems to be the case, which is why I don't care what critics have to say anymore. A big circlejerk for an overproduced and underacheiving faux elite.
For a significantly better take on rural life and timey-wimey shenanigans, I liked The Outer Range. Shame it seems to be canceled.
I’ve been fortunate to live a few places where you can see the stars well. It’s quite addictive—and worth putting up with considerable inconvenience for.
I gotta admit, this book really surprised me with how bad it was. The only book I’ve ever read that was worse was one that I was hired to edit for historical accuracy, and the client was so upset at the mountain of notes I returned that none of them were used—the book failed pretty miserably (not just for that reason—the book had a number of other problems that arise when an author is rife with unearned hubris, massive enthusiasm, and no awareness of how to treat his or her own premise with any more respect than one would give to an adult wearing a child’s Halloween mask).
I just hope that I wrote the takedown of Yesteryear in such a way that writers can learn from Burke’s mistakes :-) The world needs more good writers.
Closest I've ever been to living under the stars is some ways outside of Nashville, where you could just barely see the milky way on a good night during new moon (nashville a dim glow over the horizon), and middle of nowhere in the southwest where the light pollution was bad in town but 20 minutes over a couple hills got you a view worthy of serious amateur astronomy.
Now on a tiny town on the Oregon coast where I can see a lot of stars at night, but still short of their full majesty. Miles better than the dull orange prison ceiling of cities though, and for that I am thankful.
As for literature, I think there's a quiet renaissance brewing. It's just not going to be mentioned in the press. They'd rather go bankrupt than risk putting eyes on it. With "<genre> fatigue" peaking and practically everyone saying "I could do better," and often being right, there can't help but grow an alternative to the failing institutional media. It's good to see you and others offering some hard-earned wisdom to aspiring authors so they don't have to reconstruct everything from scratch.
If it weren't for the OR state government, those tiny towns on the Oregon Coast would be damn close to heaven (with hurricanes). Spent a couple years there, loved it. Hated to leave.
Yeah I hear you. It was a major sticking point. Almost decided to go back to Idaho. But we really wanted to live by the ocean, more than we didn't want to deal with Oregon politics anymore. Really it's not so bad outside the valley cities. Other than the taxes, most of the dumb stuff is kind of out of sight out of mind. They did just pass some lunatic gun law but I'm not really shy about committing victimless crimes so…
> "safe contempt" genre
Best description of a lot of NYT bestsellers I've yet seen.
Like any good writer, I contemplate whether fiction has a tighter grasp on the truth than do mere facts. Fierce adversaries will often use the same facts to make their case. Even video seems to prove, beyond question, a person's guilt/innocence based on what the viewer has predecided they want to see.
Good writers can 'cook the books,' convincing those who have already made up their minds that they are right. Convincing them that they are wrong, however, is a far more difficult task. Getting them to read the first page of 300 pages of 'you are wrong' is nearly impossible.
But I try. Mark Anthony turned the crowd from supporting Caesar's murderers to condemning them, all in the space of one soliloquy, given in the presence of the murderers, who could do nothing to stop him, once they'd realized what Anthony was doing.
So, yeah, like that. Start off being agreeable. Make that first page really attractive to them. Then slowly, surely...
The art of persuasion is foundational to fictional craft—this is true even if you’re not writing a book with a “point” to it. You have to induce trust that leads to the suspension of disbelief.
It seems to be a vanishing skill :-/
I subscribed to read the full review, and, oh my goodness, you did not disappoint. So much expertise on so many domains related to the book. This is a pretty tangential point in what you wrote, but I have never heard anyone articulate it before, and I was so intrigued by your comment about education among fundamentalist families. My parents were both missionary doctors and valued learning a lot. My siblings and I were encouraged to read widely. BUT, the school curriculum we used was very religious and lacking, in my opinion, because my parents just didn't know better as far as what options were out there. I am still a practicing Christian, but I would never use it if I had kids. That said, my siblings and I were absolutely fine when it came to stuff like AP Literature when we moved back to the States, because of the level of sophisticated textual analysis we had to do in Bible study. If you can debate the nuances of the book of Job, the Iliad is a cake walk. And if you are used to looking up words in Vine's Expository Dictionary and Strong's Concordance, then having an assignment where you have to use the Oxford English Dictionary to bolster an interpretation of Shakespeare feels really normal. My sister told me for one of her assignments, "I'm doing an inductive Bible study of King Lear." I have never heard anyone else describe this dynamic, so it was interesting to see you refer to it. And yes, we knew what an ocean is.
My mother was an MK who grew up in the field as well—a lot of what you said sounds very similar to what she told me about her education growing up.
If I had to characterize the de facto Evangelical educational program/philosophy in a single sentence, it would be “sophistication of knowledge, but not of thought.” But, fortunately for all involved, if you wrestle with the material enough to acquire sophisticated knowledge, it’s not a lot more work to hone the nascent thought-skills you’ve developed into something razor sharp and very powerful. As much as I prefer a “thinking-first” paradigm, if one were forced to choose between “content-free technique” and a “technique-free content” approach, I think the latter leaves the student in a better position to grow on their own once they’ve finished the program.
To be fair, the old-school math instruction for elementary school and the old-school phonics for learning to read were excellent. I feel fortunate compared to what kids these days get with Common Core and whole language. I wouldn't say I am great at math, but I got A's in AP Calculus my senior year and did great on the AP exam by working very hard, and the old-fashioned solid foundation deserves a lot of credit for that. But yeah, I still have a copy of a middle school book report on Pride and Prejudice where I talk about how Elizabeth and Darcy exhibited "un-Christlike attitudes," and it cracks me up today.
I love it!
“Either way, Yesteryear is worth giving a miss. It’s best to wait for someone else to pick up the baton and run this fertile and fascinating concept out of the park.”
The book sounds like a second or third draft. I am guessing that a much better book could have been written with just a few more months of basic research, perhaps giving it to some beta readers, and then doing a fourth and fifth rewrite, which would have made for a better and more profitable book. Considering the effort it takes to write even a bad book, I wonder why she didn’t.
I’m not a big believer in rewrites. Commercial writers learn very quickly that “drafting” is the wrong approach to producing high quality stories—instead, we front load all the research and stoke high the fires of creativity so that when we come to the story we get a first draft out that’s close to final quality (continuity, typos, minor points of style, and problems caused by sudden direction changes usually need to be cleaned up after typing “the end” but developing-through-drafting is usually more suited to screenplays and nonfiction). So if Burke were writing commercial fiction, I’d Rx a “go back, do more research, then redo from start.”
OTOH, Burke is definitely an adherent to that school (that’s what the Bennington program teaches), so in that light your prescription sounds pretty right-on.
OK, the book's rubbish we get that - so were The Da Vinci Code and Fifty Shades - but all apparently connected with something the audience needed.
"You have to induce trust that leads to the suspension of disbelief" - maybe you can also induce a suspension of disbelief in reality and logic. Rules are made to be broken. Where does artistic licence stop? But you've got to find buttons to press to achieve this. You said you admired the author's business sense. If you want to sell well, maybe you have to swallow your pride and cast pigswill before swine. You're definitely a writer's writer so you're targetting a smaller audience.
I did wonder if it was AI-generated. Losing track of character continuity is classic AI (and also of using a team of hacks). And the lack of attention to detail is what you get if you ask you AI to write chapters rather than paragraphs.
In no particular order:
1) Hadn’t thought about the AI angle, but if I had to guess I’d say “no.” The voice and tenor are too consistent, and the implicit POV and the stronger craft points reflects an author with Burke’s training background.
2) Yes, the key to suspension of disbelief is pushing the correct buttons—particularly, to pressing buttons consistently. When your implicit premises change on-the-fly, that’s when you get problems. An audience will ignore reality or realism for the sake of a good time (and they should—next week’s essay is about this), but they don’t take kindly to being rug-pulled all the time. The other two not-very-deep bestsellers you mentioned are good examples of this.
3) The thing that 50 Shades and The Da Vinci Code had over this book in terms of literary merit is that they were exploitation fiction and knew it. Both delivered what they said they would deliver—pretty decent erotic melodrama in the first case, and a schlocky puzzle book in the latter case. An important disctinction between them and Yesteryear is that they worked internally, on their own terms. Everything about The Da Vinci Code is silly, even down to the fact that even if its whole premise were true it wouldn’t actually impact Catholic theology much, but it doesn’t matter, because in the book it’s all played consistently and straight, and the book is an excuse for a series of puzzles that keep the audience working like they’re reading an Encyclopedia Brown novel.
You’re correct, of course, that such a long dissection isn’t necessary for a book like Yesteryear, but, like I said, I was annoyed. This really should have been a great book and it genuinely bummed me out to see such a fertile premise pissed away so badly.
And given my history of talking craft in public, I guarantee some younger writers are reading this and learning how not to make the same mistakes.
So, how did it connect with audience needs?
Judging by its positive reviews, in three ways:
1) It’s great smug fuel.
2) It’s the book to be seen reading. This is kind of a genre on its own—you get social cred from having a given book on your shelf, but nobody really reads them. Shogun was this way at one point in the early 80s, IIRC (though it was also a good read).
3) There are a lot of people who’ve never met an Evangelical and never been out of the city who are happy for anything that promises escape.
—
Me? A writer’s writer? Yikes! I will have to go shoot myself now ;-)
and older wannabe writers. I've read your book, the The Pitch Perfect Author, and that was a great help too. Thanks.
I am delighted to hear it :-)
I was quite excited by the concept of this book when I first heard about it - as you point out, it could have been *Good*. However, once the critiques started coming out - not least Holly's - I decided not yo bother, because three of my pet hates seem to be engaged:
1. Lack of internal consistency - whatever you are writing, no matter how fantastic - must take place in a milieu with rules. You cite Thomas Covenant - very weird stuff, but the rules are generally (it's a while since I read the series, so I may have forgotten some bloopers) there, whether enunciated or not.
2. The lack of characters I can have sympathy with. This is so common in mainstream modern fiction that I rarely read or watch anything produced in the last two decades. Even Stephen Donaldson made a bit of a hash of that - Covenant is so awful that the story needs very sympathetic characters to balance him, and that didn't happen for me as much as it should. All I need is just one character to like, and I'm happy, but the current fashion is very much against that.
3. Lack of research, which you and Holly have covered with aplomb. As both of you have described things, my head was immediately saying "But what about [insert obvious bit of reality here]?" - air traffic, road noise, music, light pollution, law, etc, etc. Heinlein, Blish, Asimov and so on created entire universes out of imagination with fewer errors. Jim Butcher takes the here and now and twists it like a pretzel, but the basics are still there. This book fails at every turn, by the sounds of it.
I've made a note to look at your bookstore later this evening, in the hope of finding something new and good. Wish me luck!
I hope you find something you like there, as well!
If you prefer likable characters, Hadrian’s Flight and The Clarke Lantham Mysteries are good places to start. My other leads can be…more difficult.
Suave Rob is an over-the-top-for-comedic-effect egomaniac, Down From Ten’s characters are all very broken (lovable, but not necessarily likable), and The Resurrection Junket’s POV character is deeply disconnected from herself and emotionally cold. I, of course, love and/or admire them all for different reasons (or I’d not have spent time in their heads to write them), but since you mentioned likability as a big thing for you… ;-)
Well, I looked at your well-stocked store, and scrolled and stopped at random with my eyes closed. "Tales of a Lombard Alchemist" it is!
Ooh, you might have some fun with those. A lot of variety of tones and characters. Everything from sentimental and wistful to dark and nasty to mournful to outright insanity. I hope you get a lot of smiles out of them!
I'll let you know. I'm certainly intrigued enough by the synopsis that I plan to start reading it as soon as dinner is over.
as an east coast trustafarian with ten grandchildren i have no immediate interest in this particular tome but jeezum crow I do dislike anachronisms
LOL this book is lousy with them. I have about 1500 words towards the end just detailing them.