Writers Tricks of the Trade Volume 6 Issue 3 | Page 11

WHAT IS WITH ALIENATING
READERS LATELY?
FRED RAYWORTH
A pet peeve of mine is alienating readers. When an author preaches
either politics, religion or sex to the reader through the guise of a fictional story,
that pisses me off.
I don’t care whether I agree with them or not, when a book is advertised
as fiction of any genre, unless it plainly says it involves such discussion in the
blurb on the back, I expect to get what I’m paying for. If I want discussion, I’ll go
to the non-fiction section!

RIGHT-WING LEFT-WING
I read a lot of thrillers. When I find an author that writes decent, to my
specs, third-person, past tense, fast-paced, short (or relatively) paragraphs,
scenes and chapters, I’m there. They also have to have positive endings.

Fred Rayworth
A man of many
talents
VISIT FRED’S OWN
BLOG
http://fredrayworth.com

Once I find those authors, I keep a lookout for them. I think a lot of
readers are the same way, right? When you find someone that writes what you
like, you stick with them.
What happens when they suddenly (the “ly” word is deliberate here)
make a left or right turn? I’m not talking about changing writing styles, though
there IS that. I’m talking about going all cause on you?
In my case, I have two thriller writers. One I’ve been a huge fan of for
two decades. The other, I’ve liked okay for maybe the past year. I’ve been
growing on this number two guy.
I just read the latest novels by both guys. The first one uses his “thriller”
as a platform to deny global warming. I’m not talking just about a plot device,
but he comes close to author intrusion in spots to hammer his point home to
the point where I almost threw the book down. It wasn’t even in the character’s
heads as much as coming from blatant… well, you get the picture. It’s not
whether he made any legitimate points or not, either. It’s that I didn’t buy one
of his thrillers to put up with that. I wanted to be entertained, not get mired in a
philosophical discussion on which scientists are right or wrong. Thriller? What
thriller?
On to book number two. In this supposed thriller, it was merely a vehicle
for Obama bashing. Might as well spell it out for what it really was. Like the
previous example, the bashing was so blatant it should’ve been on the political
discussion instead of the fiction shelf.
WRITERS’ TRICKS OF THE TRADE

PAGE 3

JULY-AUGUST 2016