Forward the Complaints

I hate forwards to novels, I really do. They like the bad opening narrations to movies that the execs force of the production crew because they figure the viewers are too stupid to figure out the plot of the movie on their own. The analogy isn't perfect, since the motives aren't entirely the same. But the end results are: they completely suck the life out of a creative work before you've even had a chance to experience it.

There are two ways a forward makes an appearance in a book. The first is that the author himself had some bit of writing he couldn't figure out a way to insert in the novel, so he just puts it in the front. When done well, they're known as a prologue and can enhance the reading experience. In Fantasy novels they're practically a requirement, as it's a safe assumption that anyone reading such a work is not intimately familiar with the world the story takes place in. While there's something to be said for preserving the sense of mystery and wonder which is the point of escapist fiction, giving the reader a general idea right at the start may be wise to prevent readers from throwing the novel aside in frustration and shouting "I don't understand a damned thing going on here!"

Sometimes, however, it can be a form of exposition that not only has no logical place in the main body of the novel in question, but is also written in a different format/style from the rest of the work. But the author thinks it's such a clever bit of writing, or that it's absolutely essential that you know the back story behind Jack P. Protagonist's great-great-uncle Wally, that he puts it in regardless of the fact that it's jarring and extraneous.

However, that is not the kind of forward I'm talking about. The kind I'm referring to is the kind publishers awkwardly cram into new printings of novels. I guess the mentality is that someone is more likely to buy a copy of a book they already own if they see the words "With A New Forward By X!" on the front. Many times, X is the author, but not always.

The ones by people who aren't the author are the ones that really annoy me. They're usually written by a critic or a professor of literature or someone else who's supposed to have at least a technical understanding of the structure of a novel, and is asked to write a few pages on why this particular novel stands out among others. The problem is, the author of the forward seems to assume that, since he's already read the book, so has everyone else. This, if you're not careful, you'll have the entire plot of the novel spelled out for you, with plot twists and all the other real interesting parts, completely spoiled before you've reached page one. They must get the idea from movie trailers, another medium who seems to get off on blowing surprise twists for the audience.

I mean really, is it that hard to believe that I want to actually read the book I just bought? If I wanted a quick run-down of what happens in the book, I could just look up a synopsis. If I want some crackpot's interpretation of the book's symbols and themes, I'll head down to the local bar. It's getting so a beer costs less than a paperback in any case.

Of course, wannabe Devil's Advocates out there might be asking "Why not just skip over the forward?" Which is of course a valid counterpoint. And really, nine times out of ten, it's not an issue. However, there is a case where the forward becomes very hard to avoid. My job involves a lot of driving. On some days I may be in my car for several hours out of my shift. So one thing I've taken to doing is listening to audio books while I drive. And in that case, I can't just flip pages until I've gotten to the actual story. I've got to sit there and fast forward and rewind through the damn thing until it seems I've gotten to a spoiler-free point. And at that point, the experience becomes a jarring sequence of hearing bits of the first few pages of the book and hearing lines like "...and at the time, no reader could have imagined an author would actually kill his..." and "The pounding outside grew ever louder as..."

Also, it seems to be required to at least once in a forward to use a phrase to the effect of "...in a manner with which writers of lesser caliber cannot compete." Now, I admire your ability to write a sentence so that it doesn't end in a preposition, but can we please remove the phrase "writers of lesser caliber" or "writers of lesser talent" from the vernacular of critique? It's used so much that it would seem that every author who's ever lived is the supreme example of his craft. It's getting repeated so much it's starting to have about as much semantic content as when reporters say "startling new developments." All it tells you is that you're about to read/hear some stupid fluff piece and can stop paying attention.

Just as bad as forwards are the back covers of books (movies as well, but generally not as much). The blurb on your average back cover/dust jacket has an annoying tendency to give you the plot of the book to as far about about 3/4 of the way through. If you're foolish enough to actually read that, you might as well just open the book to the last chapter and start from there, because that's about the only part of the book that hasn't been spoon-fed to you already.

It might seem nit-picky, and that's because I'm a nit-picky guy. But really, it's like if the original trailers for Citizen Kane had said "Never before has so much to-do been made over a sled!" Then you walk into the theater, and you see this reporter trying to figure out why Charles Foster Kane's last word was "Rosebud," and you're like "Dude, it was his sled when he was a kid. Why did I pay good money to see this?" And yet it still happens all the time. Amazing.

-Long Days and Pleasant Nights