Though I’m not supposed to, I always think of stories and books (fiction) as extensions of the authors themselves, a reflection on them and their personalities, so that if Dune seems pretty dense and impenetrable it’s because Frank Herbert is dense and impenetrable (at least on the subjects of desert ecologies and Messiahood (and others)). If Stephen King’s writing is breezy and has an Everyman quality to it, that’s because he himself seems to be a Normal Guy (his life has definitely run the gamut of modern American existence, hasn’t it?) Even the people who wrote the Left Behind books - you know that they speak, as their books, in monosyballic declarative sentences, the conspiracy theories in their mind growing more intricate as the night unfolds and the Bible is reread, reread.
So, I don’t know, but I think that if you don’t like, say, Stephen R. Donaldson the writer, you’ll probably find yourself uncomfortable around SRD the man. I know my Lit prof. told us not to “mistake the book for the author”, and I know the truth in that, but I still think their writing style (as opposed to subject matter) tells us a lot about the person writing it.
Agee? Disagree? Don’t Care? Duplicate Thread? Discuss while I sleep… I’ll see y’all in the morning.
Well, I only know a couple of authors personally, and I think the answer is an unenlightening “it depends.” Academic authors often *do *talk like that - more full of ass-covering and buzzwords than a horny donkey at an advertising convention. Writers of angtsy teen poetry do tend to be angsty teenagers IRL. OTOH, one of my mothers is a novelist who’s writing is incomprehensible, stream-of-consciousness surrealism. Yet she’s the most straight-shooting, down to earth practical woman I’ve ever met. One friend who writes the most atrocious florid prose is a stereotypical blue collar Cheegahgo kinda guy when he’s working as a plumber during the day, while an upstanding white boy from the suburbs I know writes fantastic “urban” poetry.
ehhhhh
::Scott wavers his hand, palm down, to indicate “a little of this, a little of that.”::
Ayn Rand, writes in a style which clearly states that “Greed is good.” Meanwhile, fellow atheist, J. Michael Straczynski, who is completely the other end of the philosophical spectrum of her, can write both atheists, and religious characters with an equal amount of believability.