3 Key Takeaways – Faebound by Saara El-Arifi

This is part of my ongoing video series of Three Key Takeaways from books I’ve read – the lessons we should take as authors from what worked and what didn’t work. You can view the original video here with the transcript below: https://www.tiktok.com/@rhiannondaverc/video/7347715070224370976

I’m a professional ghostwriter, and these are my key takeaways from Faebound by Saara El-Arifi. This is my extremely shiny Fairyloot edition. Very nice.

So my first key takeaway is this, editors are really important. So important. I’ve noticed this trend, and I’ve talked about it in other videos as well, that publishers, traditional publishers even, are not putting as much investment into the actual editing of the book these days.

And I’ve also read accounts from editors themselves who are saying that their role in publishing has actually shifted. They are not able to do as much editing these days because their role involves so many other things. So it completely makes sense that the level of editing that we’re seeing in traditionally published books has gone down, especially in books that might be mid-list or debut authors where they don’t want to invest as much time and money just in case it turns out to be a flop.

I will say that I did finish this book. I finished reading this book. I enjoyed reading this book.

I wanted to get to the end to find out what would happen to the characters. So in that sense, it’s not as bad as some of the books I’ve read recently, but there were some errors which were quite glaring to me as someone who is an editor and knows the correct structure of things. So, there were grammar and sentence structure errors throughout the book, which I found to be a bit off-putting, and I really wish that they had been taken care of because that would have made the experience so much better and it really would have raised my opinion of the book.

And I’ve seen other reviews from readers saying they couldn’t get through it because of the grammar errors. For some people that’s just too off-putting and they can’t keep reading. I find it difficult as well, but I do think that the plot and the characters were compelling enough in this book that it dragged me through to the end anyway.

But I imagine how much better it could have been if an editor had really put their all into this. There’s another rule that I want to talk about that was broken pretty badly in this book, and it is the same character letters rule. And I’ve probably said that really badly.

But basically what it is, is that if you have characters in your book, don’t name any of them starting with the same letter. The reason for this is that it can be really easy for the reader to get these characters confused in their mind, especially if you’re someone that reads books over the course of just a few days, you know, reads through them really quickly. Or if you’re someone on the other hand that will have maybe one day a week where you get a chance to read for an hour or less and then, you know, during the week you don’t have that time.

So, you’re coming back to the book and trying to remember every time you come back what you’re actually reading about. Having characters start with the same letter can actually make it really confusing in both cases because you’re not getting to know the characters deeply enough during your reading sessions to be able to keep them distinctly apart in your head. So this happens a few times in this book.

One of the examples that came to my mind really easily is that there was a character called Golan and there was a place called Gural. And those are close enough that a few times they were mentioned, because of the context of the sentence not being clear enough, I had to remember which one was being talked about. You know, you could say I want to go back to Gural and that’s a place and you can say I want to go back to Golan and that’s a person and actually that context doesn’t actually tell us in that sentence which person or place to expect.

So, you actually need to remember which one the name refers to. So you can see how that can get a little bit confusing if you’re not deeply, deeply immersed in the book. And there were a few other examples as well but that’s just one that really stuck out to me.

My second key takeaway from Faebound is that you must not let plot holes linger in your book. Almost all of the reviews that I read that were less than five stars mentioned the plot holes and I really noticed them as well and it’s again unfortunate. If you’re an author make sure that you go through your plot with a fine toothed comb as part of your editing process.

Make sure that there are no plot holes. Beta readers are great for this as well because they can actually look at your work in a way that’s different to how you’ve seen it. I know I, personally, when I’m writing I’ve had beta readers turn around and say “why don’t they just do this this and this that would make so much more sense” and I go “oh, you’re right”.

Or one time I had a book where they were buried in an avalanche, Don’t Go Outside if you’ve read my work, and they were struggling to get access to clean water and someone who’s a beta reader who actually had experience with this kind of environment pointed out the tanks and the pipes are usually underground so there wouldn’t be a problem. So, you know, I then had to rethink the logic of the scenes that I was writing. So make sure you don’t have plot holes and, you know, use beta readers, use friends and family if it comes to that to read through your work and go okay this doesn’t make sense and then you either explain how it makes sense within the book or you change it.

My third key takeaway from Faebound is this, as I’ve said you know I’ve had many problems with this book, however I actually enjoyed it and the reason for it is this: compelling characters can overcome a multitude of sins. When I started reading this and I saw that there is a black lesbian elf I was in. We have really compelling characters in the, without giving too many spoilers, within the world that they visit where I wanted to know what was up with them, why do they seem shady, what’s going on behind the scenes.

I wanted to figure out what their motivations were and find out more about the characters. I wanted our protagonists to survive. Also disability representation very strong in this book.

So all of that together I wanted to find out what happened to these characters and even though there were some issues with the book they did not stop me from reading on because I wanted to know about the characters. So characters are so important. It’s one of the reasons that editors and everyone involved in the book industry is always saying character driven novels are so important.

Characters are important because you can have a lot of problems with your book but – the characters are strong? Okay, people are going to keep reading. You can have a lot of problems with your characters and people will just stop and they won’t care.

I read a book recently, you’ll have seen one of my other key takeaways videos where I didn’t care about the characters and that was one of the biggest problems with the book, and it took me months to finish the book because I just didn’t want to read it. The only reason I finished it was because a. I had a lovely Fairyloot edition just like this one and b. I knew I was going to film a video about it, otherwise I wouldn’t have finished. So if you want readers to finish your book, if you want readers to love your book, characters are the key.

Those are my three key takeaways from Faebound. If you have anything that you’d like to add about this book please let me know and if there are any other books that you would like me to take a look at please recommend them in the comments as well and I’ll see what I can do.