1. They started writing/getting published before writing styles changed and editors really started looking for stronger, more active, tighter writing (more showing, less telling, etc.), and therefore the authors are grandfathered-in. Although, I do have to say that some of these types of authors who’ve basically refused to change with the times are seeing their book sales drop as readers become more aware of what’s good writing and what’s weak/lazy writing.

2. Their books sell based on their brand-name as best-selling authors. People who love John Grisham or Tom Clancy are going to buy their latest titles without even giving a thought to what the story is about or whether it’ll be well-written or not. These authors established themselves not through the strength of their craft, but by the strength of their storytelling. So it all goes back to what every editor panel at every writing conference says they’re looking for: a great story (and they’re really like it to be well written with strong attention paid to the craft).

First of all, cute holiday story! I wanted to write one for the contest but with schedule don’t know if that’s going to work out…

On a totally different note…is it just me? I’ve been really cracking down on my writing…done so much revising on my manuscript…and have studied so much about writing style, show vs. tell, etc., that now I can’t read/listen to a book without picking apart the writing in my mind. It’s becoming more and more difficult to read books that a year ago I really liked.

“Gasp. They really “told” that sentence.”

“He really butchered that point of view!”

“He used the bad “felt” word!!!”

On the same note, if you’re a big name author can you get away w/breaking the rules? A lot of big name CBA authors (whose names I won’t mention) publish several books a year and are breaking multiple rules all the time. It gets on my nerves a little. To steal a line from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”,

“Why, oh why can’t I?”

With the exception of the excerpted “unused prologue” from Ransome’s Honor, pretty much all the writing excerpts I’ve put up here have been things I wrote before I really started studying and applying the so-called rules of good writing. (To coopt a line from Pirates of the Caribbean: they’re more “guidelines” than “rules.”) That’s why, for me, it’s really been an exercise in humility for me to post these without completely revising them so that they do abide by all the good-writing guidelines—because I know they don’t.

What I hope to do through this is exactly what you mentioned—show something that makes you realize it doesn’t comply with the fundamentals of good writing, because that means those fundamentals are now so ingrained in you that you can pick out what isn’t well-written.

But I see a lot of breaking those rules in what you’ve posted. Is that because you’ve been writing long enough that you’re allowed to break the rules or what?

To answer your second question (as I’m not even going to think about the first one!), I don’t set out to have a holiday scene in each of my stories, but there are so many major holidays celebrated in the U.S. that with my contemporary novels, it’s hard to have the story take place over a span of time when there isn’t a holiday.

However, in my historical series, I don’t have any holiday celebrations. Not only did the Georgian Britons not celebrate holidays with the same abandon and everything-stops kind of mentality that we do now, I’d have to put so much explanation into the whys-and-wherefores of the traditions that it would take away from the storyline. So I’ve taken a page from Jane Austen’s book(s) on that one—it might be mentioned, but just in passing and as something that takes place off page (like the mentions of Michaelmas in S&S and Persuasion).

Do you have some kind of holiday scene in every novel you write?