When it comes to literature, my taste is quite versatile: I read books of different genres and can thoroughly enjoy both a classic masterpiece and a contemporary mediocre work, if it makes me get attached to the story and feel all kinds of emotions. Or, might as well admit, even fan-fiction. Still, there are a few things that I don’t understand or accept in literature. And today I want to talk about those.

Contract publishing

How does the publishing process work? The author signs a contract with a house, gets his book published, and if it’s successful, extends the deal. However, there are certain houses that force their clients to finish multiple novels a year. And that’s when writing becomes a soulless mandatory business. The authors, not wanting to lose their contract, start paying more attention to quantity rather than quality. Their works get worse and worse, but they simply don’t care. They write not because they have a new exciting idea, but simply for money’s sake.

I understand, that’s how these people make a living, but somehow I feel like it’s morally wrong. Literature wasn’t supposed to be only about money. For centuries it’s been a form of self-expression and creative freedom. You can’t make writers or any other artists create when they don’t have anything to tell, when they’re uninspired and in the middle of an existential crisis. If you study biographies of classic writers, you’ll notice a big gap between their works. Writing a whole book is psychologically and emotionally draining, cause you put everything you have in your heart and mind out there on the paper. After which you need a while to “regenerate”. And perhaps these old works are still considered a masterpiece, because of the depth of the work that was done. It took a long time to write a good, well thought out story that touch our soul. While what we have now is just a one-time crappy read that doesn’t even leave an impact or whatsoever on us.

Instapoetry

If you’re unfamiliar with this term, let me explain: Instapoetry is a relatively recent form of poetry, mostly popularized in Instagram. It has simple language and minimalistic approach. According to these modern rules, even a simple sentence or a phrase is considered poetry. And while I know that literature shouldn’t have any rules or limits, I simply can’t make myself consider this as a true form of writing.

For me, poetry is about the ability to express yourself or describe something in a meaningful and inspiring way within a certain structure. It’s the rhymes that make the verses sound so delicate, yet powerful. It’s the game of words that makes this genre so fascinating and unique. It’s the harmony, that you can feel between the lines. But somehow all of this is considered old-fashioned now.

The Instapoets, who spring up like mushrooms after rain, think that if they write a banal thought, add some random metaphors that don’t even make sense, and separate the sentence into several lines, it will instantly become a poem. Well, it doesn’t, at least not for me. I consider it more like a prose, than a poem. I can appreciate a beautifully expressed thought, say that it sounds nice and poetic, but that’s literally it: just a good quote, but definitely not a poetry. And I think true classic poets (sorry for overusing this word), are definitely turning in their graves from all these modern fake “sonneteers”.

Mandatory Romance

Today romance is taking over literature. Not only does it have its own genre (which I absolutely don’t mind, btw), but now it’s dominating others as well. Most of the fantasy or mysteries writers include a romantic, and often smutty, storyline because it’s the best or perhaps the only way to promote their poorly written stories. There are now more romantasies or dark romances than ordinary magical stories that have no forced love plot. The authors dedicate more time to describing every detail of the relationship rather than the fantasy world and the lore they’ve created, so it ends up having lots of plot holes, while the general story feels blank and not exciting at all.

Fans, on the other hand, openly claim that they enjoy only the “spicy” parts of the book and couldn’t care less about everything else. They simply want to see how the wizard and the simple mortal girl will end up together. But they still have the audacity to call themselves “true fantasy fans”. For me, these are simply romance lovers who only want to read about romantic tropes in unusual and exotic circumstances but the story itself doesn’t actually matter to them. Speaking of tropes…

Merely following tropes

Most of the contemporary romance novels now follow certain tropes. You know, the enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, arranged marriage, fake marriage… And while I don’t have anything against these plot-lines as it is, I hate how authors now only try to put their stories within these tropes, instead of coming up with something new, something of their own.

Initially tropes were merely used to classify already existing stories into categories. Like creating listicles, so if a person likes a certain storyline, it’d be easier for them to find similar works. But after a while tropes became a kind of clickbait and many writers use them to promote their books. Instead of telling the plot or the idea of the story, they only have to say: “it’s a new spicy enemies to lovers novel”. And that’s literally it: success is guaranteed.

I understand that most of the storylines get repeated, in fact, I think it’s almost impossible to create something entirely new, cause there’d be at least one other author who wrote a similar thing. But it’s one thing to create your own story even if it gets compared to other works in its genre, and it’s a whole other thing to make the trope as your core structure and move according to that.

Books without a conceptual ending

This one is perhaps the most controversial, because I know that many people love open endings. But I never did. I don’t like getting involved in a book only to leave it like that – without a proper conceptual finale. I’m mostly okay with a finished story that leaves one door open. For instance, to guess whether the main character survived the gunshot or not. But I don’t really understand the point of writing a story and giving it no development or resolution. It looks more like a philosophical treatise or an essay, rather than a fictional story. And sometimes the absence of a proper ending feels like an excuse for poor writing, as though the author himself didn’t have any idea what he’s writing and why. So he just leaves it as it is, hoping the readers will do his job and come up with an interesting conclusion.

After yet another critique article I feel the need to mention that these are solely my views and feelings on the things that I don’t like. And just because I personally consider it bad, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s objectively bad. I know that many people actually enjoy the tropes, the romantasies or instapoetry, and that’s fine as well. At the end of the day, it’d be too boring if we loved and hated the same things, wouldn’t it?