Bad Writing Masterclass: A Discovery of Witches

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this, but we’re living in the golden age of witch-fic. Books about witches are inundating the fantasy and YA shelves; you can’t swing a black cat without hitting four novels with crystals and pentagrams on their covers. This has come alongside a trend of literary novels infused with the earthy scent of pagan-influenced folk horror, as seen in books like Max Porter’s Lanny.

I don't know whether all of these books are chasing a big trend-setter or if a bunch of authors have decided to become wiccans or what, but this is all extremely My Aesthetic so I’m on board with it. Last week Deborah Harkness’ entire All Souls Trilogy popped up in the Kindle daily deal for less than a euro (including the intriguing “All Souls real-time reading companion”, whatever that is), and since I suspect that those books may be part of the impetus behind the trend, I heartily smashed that purchase button (because the last time I impulse-bought something from the Kindle daily deal, it went very well). Can the first book in the trilogy provide the witchy content I crave?

A Discovery of Witches follows the exploits of Diana Bishop, a daughter of two powerful witch dynasties who abandoned all things magical after her parents died during a witch-related excursion to Africa. She’s now working as an Oxford scholar, studying the birth of rational science during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; this is supposed to keep her far away from her family heritage, but it backfires when a mysterious alchemical treatise finds its way onto her desk. A whole host of witches, wizards, daemons and vampires pursue Diana for the enchanted text, chief among them being sexy vampire scientist Matthew Clairmont and before long Diana and Matthew are off on a whirlwind adventure to unravel the mystery and stop a magical war!

Actually wait, no, that’s slightly inaccurate. When I said that witches and vampires are “pursuing” Diana, what I really meant is that they’re showing up at the library and hovering nearby in a way that could be sort of construed as vaguely menacing. And Diana and Matthew never got to their whirlwind adventure during the chapters I read, because they’re too busy pointedly not doing anything that would drive the plot forward.

Here’s what actually happens during the opening chunk of A Discovery Of Witches: Diana finds the alchemical journal straight away (that’s great, the plot is happening), we get a very long run-down of her past and why she abandoned being a witch (not a good sign, but I’ll allow it as long as something interesting happens soon), then she...shoves the journal back into the stacks because she doesn’t want to have anything to do with it (oh no), then she goes home, then she goes back into work the next day and meets Matthew, then she goes back home again and has a long phone call with her sister, then she goes back into the library again and a bunch of magical creatures show up and hover around aimlessly until Matthew scares them off, then she goes for a jog followed by some rowing in the river, then Matthew shows up again and vaguely implies that something interesting might be happening, then Diana has another very long phone call with a friend back in America, then she goes for another jog and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

Maybe I stopped at just the wrong time, maybe on the very next page the Bodleian Library explodes and Diana and Matthew get into a car chase with forty wizards. Or, you know, just have a conversation that directly advances the story instead of dancing around it because Diana doesn’t actually want to be involved in the plot. But my god, when I got to that second jog my soul cried out for release, I felt the vacuous edge of oblivion approaching, and I deleted the book from my Kindle without reading another word.

Folks, today we’re squaring off once again with our old nemesis: Nothing Fucking Happening.

I’m about to spend a very long time somewhat mean-spiritedly ripping on the first six chapters of this book, but first I want to briefly touch on a few problems I had with it that are stylistic rather than flaws in the writing.

This is basically an urban fantasy novel, just with the dial set more towards the “fantasy” part. Which is appealing to me, because the tendency of urban fantasy to have supernatural entities skulking around dive bars and seedy strip clubs is one of the many things I dislike about that genre. Unfortunately, its treatment of the fantastical elements is still crushingly mundane. One reason I’m interested in the witchy corner of the market is that these books’ magic systems tend to draw heavily on “real” magical practices, which are often performed for religious or ceremonial purposes and don’t necessarily come with the expectation that they’re going to result in anything concretely supernatural happening. This naturally leads to a fairly soft magic system centered more on atmosphere and aesthetic, as opposed to wizards using D&D skill systems to throw fireballs around, and that fits neatly into my own fantasy preferences.

So I was pretty disappointed when Diana describes her relatives using magic to clean dishes and other twee Harry Potter crap (maybe Charmed would be an even better comparison). There are suggestions of more esoteric magic in Diana’s mother’s uncontrollable powers and the alchemical text at the heart of the story, but in the part I read it was all Diana moving books with telepathy or witches knowing when the phone is about to ring. 

While we’re on the subject, the witches in this book are kind of hard to pin down. They consider themselves to be non-human entities like vampires and daemons, and being a witch seems to solely be a matter of heritability rather than a religion or a system of practices that anyone can take on. But they also celebrate Mabon and shit, which is explicitly described as “a wiccan holiday”, and Diana mentions her aunt trying to get her back into the witch fold by dragging her to “a pagan festival.” So, like...what’s going on there? Did they decide to infiltrate the neopagan scene when it started several decades ago? What happens if you show up to Stonehenge at the solstice and start doing telekenisis in front of all the druids?  I admit I may be overthinking this, and it’s entirely possible the book gets around to explaining it, it was just a slightly jarring way to start the story.

This book came out when Twilight’s influence on the YA genre was still very pronounced, and while it’s not YA, I still couldn’t help but notice that Diana and Matthew end up awkwardly sitting near each other in the library in a way very reminiscent of the Biology Class Scene Heard Around The World, or that Matthew sneaks into Diana’s apartment and watches her sleep, just like a certain fanged teenage heartthrob (the circumstances are actually less creepy, though--he breaks in because he thinks she has the manuscript and he wants to steal it, and then he gets mesmerized in some way by her latent magical powers). And of course, this was still an era where “female protagonist meets sexy vampire” was still impossible to write without living in Twilight’s shadow.

As I said, these are all stylistic things that bugged me, personally. From here on out I’m going to be talking about problems that I feel come as close as possible to being objective writing flaws. I know that’s not supposed to be a thing--I guess there are people who like having their time wasted--but the start of a story is meant to hook the reader, and A Discovery of Witches is a textbook example of how not to do that.

Right off the bat, I’ve said this before multiple times, but I absolutely loathe when the protagonist in a novel doesn’t want to be part of the story. It leads to annoying scenes where they refuse to do something--like use magic to learn about the alchemical manuscript’s creator--that you know full well they’re going to end up doing anyway, and it almost always results in the protagonist being a passive agent who gets dragged along by the story instead of causing the story to happen via their own actions.

I get that reluctant heroes are a common trope, and it’s not necessarily a problem that your protagonist isn’t super enthusiastic about getting involved in an obviously dangerous situation. But the main character should want something that they don’t currently have, a goal to strive for that necessitates them enacting some sort of change or pushing the plot forward in some way. At the beginning of A Discovery Of Witches, Diana already has what she wants: to stay as far away as possible from the magical world. Her life is pretty much perfect, which means she has zero incentive to get involved with Mattew and whatever is going on with him.

That could itself be a source of tension--Mattew and the alchemy journal come crashing into Diana’s life and upend it, and she has to get to the bottom of the mystery in order to go back to normal--but for that to be the case, something needs to actually happen. I have no doubt that something does eventually happen in A Discovery of Witches, but it takes far too long.

Of course, it’s not accurate to say that nothing happens in the opening chapters of the book. Diana does spend much of this time trying to figure out who Matthew is and why he’s interested in the journal. The problem is that she could find out all of that information by just asking him--she keeps running into him, after all--but she can’t do that because she’s not supposed to want to be part of the story. See how frustrating this is?

In addition to all of this time-wasting, A Discovery of Witches features not one but two long phone calls in which Diana rings someone--her sister, and then a friend from America--to have a chat about the plot. If any writers are reading this, here’s a free tip: if you have a scene where the main character calls someone not otherwise integral to the story in order to have a long chat about the plot that would be happening if they weren’t too busy talking on the phone, think really long and hard about whether that scene needs to be there. If you decide it does, delete it anyway, because you’re wrong. I have literally never encountered a scene like this that wasn’t a massive roadblock in the story; A Discovery of Witches having two of them within the space of a few chapters stretched my already-frayed patience to the breaking point.

Even before all of this, the exposiiton dump about Diana’s past was setting off alarm bells. It’s the narrative equivalent of a run-on sentence, the book clumsily getting all the backstory into a few breathless pages so it doesn’t need to be addressed later, when all the exciting non-story is happening. The effect of this is like having a stranger sit next to you on the bus and blurt out their entire life history with no prompting: “I’m the daughter of two famous witch bloodlines, and I liked magic because my mom used it to clean the dishes but then sometimes she lost control and it was scary so I didn’t like magic so much, and then they went to Africa and died and I decided to stop being a witch and then I went to live with my aunt and then I became an academic and I did really well at academicing and then I moved to Oxford and…” 

For all my complaints, I don’t think this is actually a terrible book. There is an interesting urban fantasy mystery buried beneath all the non-plot, and the prose isn’t terrible despite the odd clunker (someone’s eyes are described as being “clouded with confusion”). I just wish it was more interested in actually telling its story.