All That and a Can of Chips

Teal Deer (TL; DR)

All That and a Can of Chips

I keep thinking about a post I saw on social media recently. I can’t remember the exact wording, but the gist was an author saying that it’s insulting when a reader tells them that their book is fluff or an easy, mindless read. The reader is being squeeful, but the author considers it a diss. And I couldn’t diss-agree more. What’s wrong with being an easy read? Books should have degrees of difficulty. They should appeal to particular people in particular moods. Some stories lend themselves to discourse. Others are a timepass—meant to occupy you for a little while without any stress involved.  

I call it a craving for “brain candy.” As both an author and a reader, that is a positive thing to me. Candy is delicious. It’s not a serious and fancy meal, it’s a treat. If you tell me that you didn’t have to think while reading Tikka Chance on Me, I am completely okay with that. Some books aren’t meant to tax your brain. And that’s a craft choice on the writer’s part as much as it is a reader preference issue. Because an author’s voice and tone in a contemporary rom-com will be different from that of a historical romance or a dark romance. The pacing is probably different, too. (If there’s no specific choices being made in those regards, I can safely say you might be doing something wrong.) Obviously, an Ali Hazelwood book won’t read the same as Tolstoy. And that’s the point! Do you want a rom-com to be a Very Serious slog that you have to do a book report on? No. I’m pretty sure the only meet-cute in Anna Karenina is between her and the train.

I can tear through four books in a row from certain authors. Like inhaling a can of Pringles. Some other writers? I know that one book of theirs might take several days or even weeks to get through. Because my brain processes their work at varying speeds and varying levels of comprehension. It all depends on voice, on prose, on pacing. Generally, paranormal romances about angels or vampires, with light world-building, won’t take me that long—but one of Nalini Singh’s Psy-Changeling or Guild Hunter books…? I quickly realized they were too detailed and dense for fly-through reading. Beverly Jenkins’s books are chock-full of real historical facts and events, and it’s like you’re auditing a semester-long class with banter and love scenes. (I love that about them, by the way.) I take my time. I do have to tax my brain a little—and I go in knowing that! Avid readers have a pretty good sense of what they like to read—and why and when those particular titles will work for them.

If you are writing rom-coms and you expect reverent reactions like you wrote War & Peace, I don’t know what to tell you. Touch grass? Adjust your expectations? Take an edible and chill? I get it: You worked really hard on this book. Maybe you call it your “book baby.” You wept, you didn’t shower, you ate string cheese and drank Red Bull for months. Do you want your reader to suffer that entire process, too? When, the whole time, you were aiming to create a warm love story to soothe and distract them? Unless you’re like Hanya Yanagihara with A Little Life, and your goal appears to be putting people through the wringer and scarring them forever, shouldn’t we be thrilled to just successfully entertain? If the books are “like crack” to your audience, thank goodness for a safe addiction.

At the end of the day, or at least at the end of this piece, we as authors are lucky every time a reader tells us they enjoyed our work. Fluff, timepass, guilty pleasure…sure, in other contexts, they can be considered derogatory terms. But when someone is couching it within “I liked/loved/inhaled this,” it’s praise. Far better than someone telling you that you wrote a piece of crap. Personally, I’d rather be Pringles than poop.