When novels deal in abstractions, they generally go off the rails.
I thought Godzilla was a mess, the monster had no character and the humans didn't either. They forgot to make the movie that went along with all these wonderful effects.
I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.
Jonathan Lethem's 10th novel, 'The Blot,' is engaging, entertaining, and sharp for its first two-thirds. Then it goes to hell.
Personally, I avoid deus ex machina like the plague - if you have to use one, it means you failed to set up the universe and the plot properly. It's like a whodunnit where there's no actual way for the reader to identify the perpetrator before the climactic reveal: there's no sense of closure for the reader.
Remember, remember the 5th of November.
When a locked-room mystery doesn't work, the solution makes you groan, and the book gets hurled across the room.
In writing, I'm totally anti-plans of any kind. All my attempts to plan and plot novels have come to grief, and in expensive ways.
If you have a bad story on your hands, you have a bad story on your hands, and no amount of score re-working is gonna save that.
For 'tis the sport to have the engineerHoist with his own petard.
A novel with a bad middle is a bad book. A bad ending is something I've just gotten in the habit of forgiving.
If you are going to make a book end badly, it must end badly from the beginning.
Once somebody's aware of a plot, it's like a bone sticking out. If it breaks through the skin, it's very ugly.
