Bad Writing Masterclass: Docile

Last week I put out a call for bad books on Twitter, intending to either do a review or the next entry in my long-running and wildly popular Books I Didn’t Finish series. And I still intend to do that with other nominees, but someone tipped me off to a book so riddled with problems that I realized my review was going to turn into a paragraph-by-paragraph dissection.

The last time this happened was with a certain fantasy novel starring a red-haired lute-playing protagonist, and that resulted in me going through the entire thing and commenting on every single page. With my current health problems I don’t have the energy to commit to a long serialized post format—as evidenced by the multiple aborted attempts I’ve made over the last three years—but the book in question contains enough material just in its opening chapters to fill one or maybe two posts.

The intent behind this isn’t to simply point and laugh; it’s called Bad Writing Masterclass because my hope is that by dissecting the problems with this book, your own writing might improve. Even if you don’t write, maybe this can help you become a more critical reader and stop giving five-star ratings to total gar—I mean, improve your reading experience. Yes.

With that preamble out of the way, let’s begin today’s Bad Writing Masterclass on Docile by K.M. Szpara.

There is no consent under capitalism.

To be a Docile is to be kept, body and soul, for the uses of the owner of your contract. To be a Docile is to forget, to disappear, to hide inside your body from the horrors of your service. To be a Docile is to sell yourself to pay your parents' debts and buy your children's future.

Elisha Wilder’s family has been ruined by debt, handed down to them from previous generations. His mother never recovered from the Dociline she took during her term as a Docile, so when Elisha decides to try and erase the family’s debt himself, he swears he will never take the drug that took his mother from him.

Too bad his contract has been purchased by Alexander Bishop III, whose ultra-rich family is the brains (and money) behind Dociline and the entire Office of Debt Resolution. When Elisha refuses Dociline, Alex refuses to believe that his family’s crowning achievement could have any negative side effects—and is determined to turn Elisha into the perfect Docile without it.

Content warning: Docile contains forthright depictions and discussions of rape and sexual abuse.

That last sentence is bolded on the Amazon product page, and I’m leaving it bolded here. This post isn’t going to be delving explicitly into the rapey stuff, but it’s still brought up in the early chapters, so watch out if you don’t want to read that.

Now, if you’re anything like me then that synopsis immediately set off certain suspicions about this book’s actual purpose and intended function. For the purpose of this post, we’re just going to focus on the writing and politely pretend we can’t see the big horny elephant in the room.

*cough*

So the first chapter opens with our protagonist Elisha reciting the seven rights that are given to Dociles:

After today, I will have seven rights.

“One,” I whisper. “Retention of the right to vote in a public election. Two: the right to adequate care: food, water, shelter, hygiene, and regular medical attention.”

Elisha is in the bedroom he shares with his younger sister Abby, who is asleep. He’s whispering these rights, in full, to himself. And already, two pararaphs in, my reading of the book comes to a screeching halt.

This is roughly the world-building equivalent of desciribing your protagonist by having them look at their reflection in a mirror. There is no earthly reason why Elisha would be doing this; it’s just not a thing people do. What really gets me about this is that having him just think about the rights would probably have been a perfectly devcent way to get this information across; he’s about to sell himself into slavery, we can understand why the exact terms of his service would be on his mind.

I get that exposition can be hard, but having your protagonist recite information they alread know for no reason isn’t any better than putting in “as you know” conversations.

“Three: the right to anonymity of surname.” I squeeze my eyes shut. Pressure builds between my brows. After today, I won’t be a Wilder.

I fully admit that this could just be me, but: Wilder is Elisha’s surname, and we’re seeing it for the first time here. The fact that this is a sci-fi novel that elsewhere shows a propensity for Capitalized Proper Nouns immediately made me assume “Wilder” is some sort of group designation or social class instead of a name.

Yes, this is a nit-pick, but it’s a nit-pick that’s happening on the first page of the book, and the first page is usually all you get to draw in a new reader. The author obviously knew that Wilder is Elisha’s surname, but that’s not immediately clear to the reader.

“Four.” I pluck the photo of my family from the windowsill. “The right to one personal item.”

I know I already talked about this, but I once again want to highlight how unnatural it is that Elisha is reciting the rights to himself out loud as he engages in behavior related to them.

“Five.” I resume my count. “The right to personal physical safety.” My heart beats a little faster. “Six: the right to sexual health and protection from pregnancy.” A breeze cools the heat on my face.

Let’s talk character action.

By the way, we’re on like page two. You don’t have anything better to do, right?

Anyway let’s talk about character action. One specific element of bad writing I’ve noticed in a lot of books is an inability to balance dialogue with character action: the ratio of speaking to doing things is off, so that either characters are blathering away for pages with no description of any physical action so that it seems like time has stopped, or the dialogue is puncuated by too much detailed description of facial expression changes and gestures (frequently involving characters sighing, chuckling, grinning or shaking their heads).

This paragraph is straying into the latter territory; the last sentence in particular is downright comical, which is a problem given that it’s paired with the protagonist talking about being raped. If the list had extended to a few more entries, I’m picturing a butterfly randomly flying in the window just to punctuate the dialogue more.

Of course, none of this would have been necessary is Elisha had just thought about the rights instead of saying them out loud.

Elisha finishes reciting the rights for the reader’s benefit and goes to downstairs to say goodbye to his mother, who’s in a semi-catatonic state due to all the dociline she took during her ten years as Docile. There’s some attempts at pathos that don’t really work because it’s coming so soon in the story and I have no reason to care about either of these characters, then Elisha gets his mother to sign the form he needs to become a Docile. His parents’ signatures are involved because in this brave new capitalist world debt is hereditary, and he’s selling himself into Docile-dom to pay off the three million dollars that’s accrued over generations before the whole family is dragged off to a debtor’s prison.

Dad already signed, assuming it was for Abby, like we’d discussed.

This is another part that immediately brought me to a halt. Elisha’s dad was originally planning on having Abby—whose age isn’t stated but who is described later in the book, in a scene set six months after this one, as only just showing the first signs of puberty—become a Docile. This raises questions that the book doesn’t seem interested in answering.

Let me back up for a second before I unpack this. There’s a mode of criticism I’m seeing more and more that views any immoral actions on the part of fictional characters or problematic elements in worldbuilding as having the tacit endorsement of the author; it’s usually wrapped up in the desire for feel-good cuddles-and-sparkles media that birthed the whole “hopepunk” thing. I have no problem with people only wanting to read or watch that sort of content—to each their own—but it does frustrate me when I read criticism from that angle.

With that said, my reaction upon encountering this sentence is immediate revulsion, not at the harsh world of the story but at the story itself. Elisha’s dad had planned on selling his pre-teen daughter into what basically amounts to slavery, and Elisha’s main objection to this is strategic. Yes, he says that he’s volunteering to go in her place because he’s old enough to consent, but his main hangup around the original plan seems to mostly be that adult Dociles fetch higher prices than children.

Now here’s the part I struggle with: what was the intended reaction to this? Are we perhaps supposed to view Elisha and his father’s callousness as the end product of the world they live in, where people taking drastic action to escape debt is normal and the existence of the Dociles is something no one questions? Maybe. But if so, that leads to another problem: why should I care about characters who are this amoral?

During the grimdark fantasy trend that was all the rage a while back, one of the most common deflections from fans when people pointed out that all the rape and murder was repellant was to appeal to worldbuilding: these characters live in a dark, violent, fucked up world, they’re supposed to be bad people! You’re not supposed to like them!

But that’s not true. On some level, we’re always expected to at least be interested in the protagonist of a story; if we’re not, we have no reason to want to read about them. Usually, we’re also expected to empathize with them on some level and want them to come out on top, even if we don’t agree with what they’re doing. Good writers can make you root for a character to succeed while simultaneously praying they fail. But that’s a very fine line to try and walk, and usually if you present a character whose moral outlook is completely counter to the reader’s, it’s not going to go over well.

This sticking point I have with Elisha and his dad could potentially be alleviated with clarifying infromation. Is there a seperate Docile system for children that guards against sexual abuse and isn’t as predatory all around (ignoring the question of what non-creepy reason anyone could have for buying a child)? Is this maybe not as callous as it first appears?

I have’t actually read the entire book. Maybe these questions are answered later. But they’re not answered soon enough, because I spent the next several chapters thinking “yes, it’s sad that Elisha is in this awful position, but also there was the whole child slavery thing soooooo….?”

If there’s a lesson you can learn here, it’s that you’re walking a fine tightrope when it comes to character morality. If you imply your protagonist is horrible on page three, even accidentally, then a certain amount of people are going to stop reading on page three.

(Also, this whole thing muddies the water around the whole Docile system that I’m really hoping the book bothers addressing. Are child Dociles more controversial than adults? The whole conceit of the Dociles is that people are technically consenting to it, so doesn’t this just totally refute that notion? How do the people running the system refute that criticism?).

After leaving the house Elisha runs into his childhood best friend Dylan, who gives him a blanket for warmth. I’m going to skip right over most of the conversation because Dylan is even blander than Elisha is, but I do want to highlight this bit:

…talking about what we’d do if we didn’t stand to inherit our parents’ debts. I’d go to the University of Maryland, get my teaching degree, put all the tutoring I’ve done to good use. She’d travel to an elephant sanctuary in Thailand that she read about in an old textbook. I told her it probably didn’t exist anymore; she told me to mind my own dreams.

I realize I just made this exact same complaint about The Priory of The Orange Tree, but does this feel incredibly YA to anyone else? Elisha and Dylan are supposed to be twenty-one, but if you didn’t tell me their ages then just based on this conversation I’d have guessed sixteen at most.

After saying goodbye to Dylan, Elisha starts walking to the Office of Debt Resolution in Baltimore…which takes twelve hours.

Think about that for a second. Twelve hours of walking. On broken asphalt. With nothing but the clothes on his back and a blanket. That kind of trek would be daunting even for experienced long-distance hikers, and yet the book breezes straight over it; there’s no sense of the passage of time except for the fact that it’s dark by the time Elisha reaches the city outskirts, and he apparently never eats anything or seeks out water. When he rolls into the Office of Debt Resolution he seems completely fine and not on his last legs with exhaustion. We’re told the walk takes twelve hours, but in terms of actual impact on the story it may as well have been a fifteen-minute stroll.

Why does this matter? Because it’s the sort of thing readers pick up on, and it makes your writing seem sloppy. At worst, it can create the disorienting impression that your characters have unannounced superpowers or that your book’s setting doesn’t obey the normal rules of reality (this can cause actual confusion in the reader if you’re writing fantasy or sci-fi).

The other problem with this section is that the setting description is incredibly scant. We get some important details about the state of Elisha’s world outside the city centres (it’s basically reverted to a pre-industrial state, with much of the infrastructure crumbling), but once he gets into Baltimore there’s only scant descriptions like this:

Buildings thicken the closer I get to the center of the city, and corporate-sponsored clothing thins. People in these neighborhoods can afford to buy their own. Cold claims the sweat on my back, as I fold Dylan’s blanket over the TruCare Insurance logo on my shirt. It was free.

No one seems to notice, all too busy speed-walking to work or breakfast or whatever they do for fun in the city. I’ve only been a handful of times and never for fun. Heard they ride bicycles that don’t move and soak in bathtubs full of chemicals. Along the city blocks, trees grow from predesignated holes in the ground; their branches are trim and tidy, their roots don’t sprawl.

The lack of imagination on display here is profound given that what’s being described is basically just our current reality, but slightly altered.

This problem seems to extend to the entire book. When Elisha gets to the Office of Debt Reclamation the descriptions are so bare that it’s hard to get a sense of space or where he is at any given moment, leading to the impression that he’s moving through a blank void. We later find out that Elisha’s home lacks features like showers with running water, but nothing like that is actually described to us during the opening scene set in his house.

Obviously, over-description can be as bad as under-description and you don’t want to fall into the trap of having your protagonist fixate on things they’d find mundane just for the sake of the reader (keep that in mind by the way, it will become relevant later). But if you don’t provide any description, the reader will assume that everything in the story looks and functions the way it does in real life; thus, Elisha’s house is, to me, a modern suburban home with electricity and central heating unless stated otherwise.

Elisha gets a fake ID from a black market seller, and here I want to point out something I actually liked: the device the seller is using is probably orders of magnitude more advanced than anything we have in real life given that the story is set several generations in the future, but it’s just described as a tablet. Not a vid-screen or a compu-slate or a holographic sci-fi doodad; just a tablet.

(Doesn’t this contradict my last point about informing the reader about the differences between the setting and the real world? NO, YOU FOOL. The tablet’s only narrative utility is to explain how Elisha gets a fake ID card, and thus we only need to know that it’s capable of facilitating that; going into any more detail about the tablet’s technology doesn’t tell us anything useful except that the story is set in the future, which we already know).

Elisha gets to the Debt Resolution Office, and there’s another element worth praising: the entire process behind selling himself into slavery is extremely mundane. The office itself is plain and kind of dingy, the staff are office drones who just treat the entire thing like routine paperwork, even the case worker assigned to safeguard Elisha’s rights can’t help but come across as somewhat clinical. Honestly, it would be extremely effective and chilling if the whole Docile thing wasn’t an excuse to write about…oh wait I’m supposed to be ignoring that, never mind.

Mom sold almost a million in debt for ten years.

And having praised the book twice, I must now go back into criticism mode.

The Docile system is, essentially, a chattel slave economy. I assume the people who buy the Dociles pay the Office of Debt Resolution, which then pays off the actual creditors that the debts are owed to. Okay, sure, in theory that makes sense. But the amounts being paid seem ridiculously inflated: one million dollars for ten years? Is a single slave really worth that much? I know the Docile buyers are supposed to be literal trillionaires and this amount of money would be pocket change to them, but this is a buyer’s market; the Dociles are desperate and the buyers would be able to set almost any price they wanted. Instead, Elisha is told that he could easily fetch five million dollars for an unlimited contract, which would be enough to not only free his family from debt but make them rich, at least by our standards.

But Carol doesn’t react like the man downstairs. “It’ll take the right Patron, but we might be able to make that happen. Come on.” She takes my hand like I’m a small child.

I hold tighter than I mean to.

Remember earlier, when I said Elisha and Dylan felt like teenagers? Stuff like this isn’t helping. I’m not saying it was intentional or anything, but readers will mentally picture your characters according to their behaviour, regardless of what you age you say they are; you can inist they’re adults until you’re blue in the face, but if they act like kids your readers are going to keep picturing them that way. When your book includes graphic rape scenes, that’s not really what you should be aiming for.

“—you will spend the rest of your life speaking when spoken to. So, for god’s sake, son, if you have something to say, say it now.”

A thin layer of tears seals my lashes together. When I open them, her face runs like rain before my eyes. She called me son. Her voice didn’t sound much different than Mom’s in that moment.

“I’m scared.”

Actually, let’s talk about Elisha.

He’s…eh. I’m making noncommittal gestures at my screen right now because words can’t adaquetely describe the depths of my indifference. He doesn’t have much of a personality, except that’s kind of vaguely nice and he’s all sad because he’s going to be a Docile, and he cries pearly tears of angst. I guess that makes sense, this is a hurt/comfort slavefic so you need the woobie protagonist to be all soft and squishy so that—

I mean, you should make sure your characters are interesting. People aren’t going to sympathise with them just because you put them in a tragic situation. Yes.

Anyway, Elisha gets trotted out for his potential buyers, and his case worker’s choice of clothing is revealing in more ways than one.

“I don’t have any underwear here.” I sift through the pile.

“You won’t need any. Go on.”

I hike up the jeans. I’ve never worn a pair so tight before. The shirt hugs the lines of my arms and chest in ways that would make farmwork uncomfortable

Ostensibly, the Docile system isn’t necessarily about sex; one of the men who comes in to evaluate Elisha is looking for a labourer or domestic servant (and is for some reason willing to pay millions of dollars for one). So then why the sexy outfit?

…I mean apart from the obvious reason, if we’re pretending this isn’t all just a justification for consensual non-consen—

Shit I’m doing it again, we better move on. Let’s get to the second POV character, Alex the trillionaire who’s going to end up buying Elisha.

I arrive at the boardroom before everyone else. Our meeting isn’t until 8:00, but the sunrise looks even better through the SmartGlass that surrounds the space than it does outside. Nanotech enhances the burnt-orange and red-wine sky against the gray-blue ripples of the harbor. Sensors warm the room slowly and strategically so that the brisk transition from Baltimore winter to climate-controlled office doesn’t shock my body.

Sharp-eyed readers will notice that this is the opposite of the thing with the tablet that I praised earlier: Alex is noticing the technology in his office, even though it’s probably something he sees every day. But it gets worse!

Though most of Bishop Laboratories is underground, the boardroom is situated on top of the Maryland Science Center. The institution was nearly bankrupt when my family stepped in to save it, several generations ago. Dr. Alexandra Bishop I, my grandmother, all this is her legacy. I sit in the warm leather chair where she first declared her intentions for Dociline. Where my father, Dr. Alexander Bishop II, developed Formula 2.0, and where I will soon begin work on Formula 3.0.

This is written in first-person present tense. These are supposed to be Alex’s thoughts being conveyed to us in real time. For some reason, he’s sitting down with his morning coffee and thinking about his backstory, which he is already intimately familiar with due to it being his backstory. It’s more clunky exposition.

Alex has a boardroom meeting with some executives, including his father, who interrupts the proceedings to harangue Alex about how he needs to settle down with a long-term partner and stop moving from boyfriend to boyfriend all willy-nilly; for reasons that are never really explained, the company’s future rests on Alex not being seen as a playboy. But if he’s not willing to commit, then buying a Docile is the next best thing! Somehow. None of it really makes much sense.

This feels like an author creating a problem for themselves and then hamstringing the story in order to solve it. In this case, the decision was made to have Alex not decide to buy a Docile of his own volition—not for moral reasons, his family created the entire system and the first thing we see him do is get coffee from a company Docile—which necessitated a convoluted and nonsensical reason for why he has to buy one. A better solution: just have Alex decide to buy a Docile. We don’t even need a reason, it’s already been presented as something people of his social class do on a regular basis.

While we’re on the subject, apart from the dude who was looking for a labourer none of the people we see really have a good reason for wanting to buy Alex; one woman is interested in him because she…doesn’t want her daughter sleeping around in college? So she’s buying a Docile so the daughter will only have sex with him? Or something? This brushes up against the Thing We’re Not Talking About, but if the book had allowed itself to be more open about the Docile system being solely about sex then none of this would be necessary; the Dociles are sex slaves and the people who buy them want a sex slave to do slave sex with. No further explanation is needed.

“Appearances matter, Alex. You know that. The CEO of Bishop Laboratories will be perceived as incompetent—naked—without a partner or a Docile on his arm.”

But…why? Is it a part of this society’s culture that people without long-term partners are unfit to run businesses? If people value steady relationships then how will having a Docile—a “relationship” that’s purchased for money—fit into that?

“If you cannot handle dating, and you cannot handle a Docile, then you cannot handle Bishop Laboratories.”

What does that even mean??? None of this makes any sense!

Alex goes to the ODR to pick out his Docile, and there’s a weird bit where the woman handling the proceedings has some sort of laser cane thing whose function is never explained:

I’ve been waiting at the ODR for fifteen minutes when a white woman dressed like a flight attendant enters the lobby through a door marked “Employees Only.” She approaches me, then squeezes the handle of her white cane and retracts its laser length. “Dr. Bishop?”

My assumption is that she’s supposed to be blind—because this book, God help us all, is apparently supposed to be #Woke and has actually been praised as such—but she also seems to be using a tablet. Maybe it’s an advanced future-tablet with haptic feedback that doesn’t require sight? I don’t know. The description kind of makes it sound like she’s carrying around a lightsaber, which I would be absolutely on board with.

This is an example of what I’ve mentioned several times before about not confusing your reader and striking a balance between over description and under description. I’m not saying Alex should have been like “and then I met a blind woman who I noticed was blind, oh my god you guys someone who can’t see isn’t that fucking wild” because I get that that sort of thing can be offensive, but at the same time blind people in our current reality don’t use laser-canes and it’s thus not really clear what’s going on here. I think ditching the laser and just having her use an ordinary white cane would have been a lot better (assuming I’m correct and that is even what’s happening).

Anyway so Alex and Elisha meet, and I actually like the interview scene that follows. The dialogue is good and there’s some nice tension and chemistry; it wold be a genuinely great scene if I didn’t know where this is all heading.

And I think that last note of semi-positivity is where we’ll leave Docile. I’m going to keep reading as much as I can stand and will probably summarize my thoughts on where the story goes in a future post. If people really enjoy this I’d be open to doing a part two or even three covering more chapters, but again, I can’t commit to doing the whole book.