Red Rising: Writing vs. Plot

Thoughts on Red Rising by Pierce Brown - MILD SPOILERS

🟡 Mild Spoilers 🟡

Spoiler warning for Red Rising by Pierce Brown

This entry version contains mild spoilers for Red Rising. That includes:

• Details about the beginning of the story.

If you have read the book already, or if you don’t mind spoilers, I have written a version of this entry with moderate spoilers (it includes twists that happen in the first half of the book). If you’re interested, click here.

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I started reading Red Rising¹ in February. A friend recommended it to me—she had been talking about the series for years and lazy me took ages to give it a shot. But this year I’m committed to doing more reading, 1. as an alternative to other less satisfying ways to spend time, such as scrolling through YouTube shorts (they will be the death of me); 2. as a means to become a better writer by observing what other stories do right and, in case, wrong; 3. because I love reading.

Well. I have to say, at first, I was underwhelmed.

In the first part of the book, we are introduced to the horrid slave-like living conditions of the protagonist, Darrow, and his people, the Reds. Darrow is a young miner of helium-3 on planet Mars. In the first few chapters, the little good that he has in his life is taken away from him.

It’s a solid beginning—the young hero is unjustly stripped of what they love and now they are cornered. They can’t pretend nothing has happened: they have to fight.

Still, it didn’t appeal to me. I wonder why that is, and the explanation I came up with is that to care for a character I need to relate to what they care about. But, if all that they care for is taken away from them… they have nothing. And losing everything is (thank goodness) not something I can relate to, a lot.²

But the one thing that made me seriously consider putting the book down was the writing style. To be more precise, the misuse of full stops.

Here is an example: in this quote, Darrow talks about the “Laurel”, a prize for the best mining clan.

The Laurel. Twenty-four clans in the underground mining colony of Lykos, one Laurel per quarter. It means more food than you can eat. It means more burners to smoke. Imported quilts from Earth. Amber swill with the Society’s quality markings. It means winning. Gamma clan has had it since anyone can remember. So it’s always been about the Quota for us lesser clans, just enough to scrape by. Eo says the Laurel is the carrot the Society dangles, always just far enough beyond our grasp. Just enough so we know how short we really are and how little we can do about it. We’re supposed to be pioneers. Eo calls us slaves. I just think we never try hard enough. Never take the big risks because of the old men.

Brown, Pierce. RED RISING Omnibus: Books 1-3 of this heart-pounding and instant bestselling SF series! (p. 23). Hodder & Stoughton. Kindle Edition.

Yes, it’s one huge paragraph. I don’t know about you, but I start hyperventilating in my head trying to keep the pace of those sentences: they are short, broken, all with the same rhythm, when they could be woven into one another instead.

Varying the length of sentences is what makes the reading rhythm flow. It’s a difficult art to master and I’m by no means saying that I’m good at it—I’m talking as a reader right now. I would have been fine with reading a couple of those paragraphs, but the whole book reads like this. It got really tiring, really quickly.

But I kept on reading, because I trust the judgment of my friend, and I really wanted to understand what she liked about this series. And good thing that I did.

I’ve been analyzing The Story Grid³. In chapter 7, Shawn Coyne writes this:

A Story can take the reader through expertly crafted sentences with innovative metaphors that would be the envy of Proust. Technically, its sentence-by-sentence craftsmanship is beyond reproach. And perhaps many novels are honed to line-by-line perfection through a dynamic relationship between the writer and a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence editor. But for all of the minutial skill of these novels, the Story may have absolutely no narrative drive.

[…] On the other end of the spectrum, a writer’s prose that wouldn’t challenge an eight-year-old’s vocabulary or ability to follow a sentence can be impossible to stop reading. And when one finishes that book, it’s most often disingenuous for the reader to say that he wasn’t satisfied. He may have quibbles, but he read the whole thing to the very last word. That’s a Story that abides Story form but will not end up in the pantheon of Western civilization.

Shawn Coyne. The Story Grid What Good Editors Know - Shawn Coyne (Kindle Locations 400-421). Kindle Edition.

To sum it up, a book may be beautifully written, and be a bore to read—but a book with a gripping story can be impossible to put down, even if it’s terribly written⁴.

I experienced exactly that with Red Rising.

Now, I need to spell it out, Red Rising isn’t badly written (seriously, I don’t have any authority to give an objective judgment on writing anyway). What I’m saying is that I didn’t like its writing. Also, I didn’t find it terrible, it just annoyed me a little. I found myself once in a while lifting my eyes from the page stifling a groan because some sentences sounded particularly cringe or because some paragraphs felt long and fragmented, like the one above. That said, honestly, I’ve read worse.

But I wasn’t excited about the plot and the writing was meh and I was sighing a lot. Until something happened in the plot and suddenly I was really interested.

I like once in a while to read a book “blind”—meaning, I start reading with as little as possible information on the plot and setting. I even avoid reading the blurb. So, all I knew of Red Rising was that my friend liked it because of the worldbuilding (she didn’t reveal anything else; she knows me well), and that it was sci-fi. That’s it.

That’s why I didn’t see the twist coming at all, and when it hit me, I went from vaguely annoyed to fully invested. I remember it clearly: the change happened from one page to the next. One page I was slouched on the sofa, the next I had propped myself up, eyes widened, and a voice in my head went, HERE WE GO.

[If you want to know what that part was, here is a version of this same entry with moderate spoilers. All that I write about happens in the first half of the book only.]

From that moment on, the narrative absorbed me. I had not seen that twist coming, but as soon as it was revealed it felt… inevitable.

That and all that happens later kept me glued to the pages.

What about my gripes about the writing style, you ask? Forgotten. Not completely (I kept on groaning every once in a while), but as soon as the plot interested me it was so much easier to forgive it.

It’s an interesting realization. I’m not saying that writing style doesn’t matter at all—that’s not right. But this experience helped me realize that, for the books that I want to write, the plot comes first. I want to improve my writing too, but what I wish even more is to be able to create such a bloodydamn good story that keeps the readers turning one page after the other, just like I did with Red Rising.

In the end, I read the whole first trilogy (Red Rising, Golden Son, Morning Star). I enjoyed it a lot. Have you read the Red Rising Saga, too? What did you think of it?

Did you experience something similar to what I did with other books?

If you have any thoughts on what I shared, let me know by simply replying to this email or leaving a comment!

Take care,

Rye Youbs

1. Red Rising by Pierce Brown — a sci-fi novel with strong Hunger Games vibes. I enjoyed the first trilogy, which makes for a great, full-rounded story (also, the very convenient price of 6 euros for the Kindle version was just too good not to buy). I know that there are more books, but I don’t know if I’ll read them, yet.

2. On the protagonist losing everything they got — it doesn’t quite work for me as a starting point of a story, as it doesn’t help me to create a connection to the character. But, if I already care for the character, it lands much better: seeing a beloved character lose all they have makes me feel something. Also, there’s nothing that grips me more than following a character recover and build up after they’ve lost.

3. The Story Grid: What Good Editors Know by Shawn Coyne — this book is specifically for editing: it’s not that useful unless you have a draft to work on. My main takeaways: readers may not be fully aware of it, but they expect specific characters, scenes, and movements in your story, depending on the genre that you pick. The best way to learn what they are is by dissecting stories that work. Delivering all that is expected in a fresh, new way is the challenging part, and makes the difference between an okay story and a great one. The book also gives instructions on how to create a spreadsheet to analyze your draft—I love it.

4. On books well written but boring, and books badly written but gripping — I need to point out that Coyne isn’t saying that one type is better than the other—there’s a whole differentiation between literary and commercial books that he makes, that justifies the existence of both kinds (he also doesn’t use the word “boring”). His point is that as a writer you need to know what you want to write and adjust your expectations accordingly.