I’m a really fussy reader, at least in terms of the craft side. I will go pretty much anywhere SO LONG AS the writing is technically good.

This means that I have no fault lines as a reader —

— the less conventional the choice (of character/setting/plot/conflict/structure), the better the writing has to be.

Whenever I teach a workshop, aspiring writers are always repeating “rules” to me. You can’t write a romance in first person, for example (sure you can: I have, a bunch of times) or you can’t write a romance from the POV of the hero. (Hey, I’ve done that too. No visible scars.) The thing is that I believe an author can write pretty much anything, can structure a book any old way – so long as it works. I have no taboos or danger zones – in fact, I like when something is fresh and surprising and really good.

But the things that surprise me with their unconventionality are the things that need to be done better, in terms of craft. Essentially, I have to be so caught up (by the voice, by the pacing, by the characterization, whatever) that I don’t notice that things have gotten weird. That’s not easy to do, so most unconventional stuff fails for me.

I think there’s a lot of lazy writing published, although I don’t know if there’s more of it in genre or not. It drives me crazy. I wrote a blog entry/rant recently about lazy writing essentially because I chucked a book at the wall so hard it dinged the plaster.