One More Writer Scribes the Formulaic Plot...

I'm sure most of you have heard my tangent of how much I hate some so-called writers that have bestselling books with the same formulaic plot where you can essentially move one character from one book to another and still have the book make sense. My previous example of this: Nicholas Sparks. Boy/girl meet; boy/girl can't get together due to social differences/time constraints/something in a bottle; boy/girl finally get together for 2-3 chapters; boy/girl suffers tragic death/debilitating disease/obvious contrived fate. I'd rather watch Nancy Grace for days on end while sitting on a stiletto heel than read another book written by Nicholas Sparks.

Jodi Picoult has fallen into that same category for me. After reading three of her books now, I've decided that she is the female equivalent of Nicky baby. The only differences I've decided are that her books are a lot longer. She also does so much heavy foreshadowing in her books that to not figure out the ending by Page 12 means you aren't really paying attention to what she's written. Which you don't need to, because you can figure out the entire book by Page 12. It's like she's smacking you in the face with her "surprise" ending.

Of course, having not become a national bestselling author myself, I have little room to talk. This tangent would be a lot longer, but I still haven't fixed my keyboard's space bar, and it's rather like playing Whac-A-Mole. If you like Jodi and Nicky, well, um, that's great. Let's just not talk about them again.