All Carrots are the Same in the Dark

Like that title? It’s a line of dialogue I “borrowed” from a German soap and “repurposed”. Two practices I'm very much in favor of. Words are meant to be played with, after all. They're meant to be strung together like Pop-It Beads, taken apart and used again. However, there are times when our glib reusing of words goes a little too far.

I recently read the second book in a new erotic/paranormal/LGBT series—and lord knows we don't have enough of them, IMO. I thought it showed promise. Now, I’m not so sure. Book 2 featured a sizable subplot involving the main characters from Book 1. There’s nothing wrong with that of course, in fact it’s one of my favorite things about writing series, the chance to go back and revisit couples whose HEAs are still WIP.

Since, as I mentioned, this is an erotic series, I can especially understand why the author might have felt the need to bring in additional characters. For reasons which I can’t go into without giving away too much of the story, the main characters in Book 2 really can't get together until close to the end of the book. Obviously, she had to show somebody having sex during the first 7/8s of the book—right? And, yeah. Been there, done that too.

However, I'm really kind of fuming at this point because as I was reading the final love scene between the subplot characters it began to sound familiar. Really familiar. Almost as though I’d read this same, exact scene somewhere before…

I know what some of you are probably thinking, at this point. Aren’t most sex scenes simply replays of other scenes you’ve read or written or watched before? Isn’t it all just a matter of sticking Tab A into Slot B?  Or, in other words, aren’t all carrots the same in the dark?

See what I just did? See how I changed that same string of words from dialogue to title to cogent point?  Keep that in mind as we go forward.

Let’s get back to the question, whose answer, by the way, is no. I, and most of the authors I know, work really hard to make sure that we don’t just blatantly repeat things; that we make each scene, and each character as unique as possible. We make an ongoing effort not to replay the same relationships in book after book, not to use (or overuse) the same words, to make sure our descriptions are fresh and different and new.

And, yes, part of the reason for that is because we’d be bored out or our minds writing the same story or the same characters or—god forbid—the same sex over and over and over again. But mostly we do it out of respect for the characters, the story, our readers and the craft of writing itself.

But getting back to my story...

At first, I thought it was accidental. Perhaps the author of this once seemingly promising series had  been distracted and didn’t even realize she was using a lot of the same words to describe her characters and their actions. I even tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, thinking maybe she was doing it on purpose (albeit clumsily) to really hammer home the point that these characters were still the same people who’d been having sex in Book 1.

After a couple of pages, however, I realized it was more than that. She'd virtually lifted an entire scene from the first book and dumped it into the second book with only minor changes.  There were identical descriptions, identical bits of dialogue, whole paragraphs that had been copied verbatim. This continued throughout the otherwise decent, fairly lengthy and supposedly pivotal scene.

And, no, in case you’re wondering, this was not a flashback either. That’s something else I’ve done and it’s another practice I favor. Revisiting scenes from previous books, reminding readers about scenes they may have loved reading as much as you loved writing them—that's all good. But this… This was something different. I don’t even know what to call it. Laziness? Carelessness? Egregious disrespect?

Maybe she thought she could get away with it; that we wouldn’t care because it was just sex, and isn’t it all the same anyway? Maybe she was working on a deadline or had a word count she needed to meet and nothing else was coming to mind. Clearly her editor didn’t seem to mind. And, yes, same editor for both books. I checked. I get curious like that!

As a reader, however, it left me feeling frustrated and confused; wondering which scene had been the “real” scene and which was the counterfeit?  It was the literary equivalent of breaking the fourth wall, or like cutting the strings that had kept my disbelief suspended. I could no longer think of those characters as even the tiniest bit real or view their relationship as anything like authentic.

I feel as though I've been cheated out of something that could have been wonderful. And I think  the author cheated herself as well. I'm sure I'll approach every new book she writes with trepidation (if at all) wondering when’s the next time the fictional world she's created—with no small amount of skill, incidentally—will suddenly, and for no good reason, come crashing down around me.