I’m still in a writer’s group, even though none of us have produced anything substantial in years. I read some of one writer’s story about a Nebraska girl who moves to New York to work as a waitress and winds up striking a romance with Roddy McDowell. It was pretty much a fantasy wank, but I didn’t have the heart to tell the author that.
Another writer has a story that kind of parallels the Christian creation of the universe, where angelic beings interact with the mortals they recently created. It sounds intriguing, but it’s really sloppy. She has all the angels change gender depending on their mood, so she changes pronouns to reflect it. That might sound appropriate for today’s changing gender norms, but she approached it more in extreme leftist manifesto fashion, which isn’t going to appeal to the general reader. Every other sentence has an exclamation point, because she thought it was vital to emphasize every time an angel enacted A Miracle of Creation! She also uses “quote marks” way too much: the “gods” feed on mortals’ “essence,” for example. She also doesn’t want “some editor” changing her text and destroying her vision. Hoo boy…
I paged ahead at random in the book cited in the OP to see if the writing got any better. The first thing I saw was this:
“You had plumbed the darkest depths of this world and left a part of the curtain pulled away so that I, too, might peek behind it. This bleak, rusty machine we call life.”
Now I’m picturing a guy in coveralls carrying a plumber’s helper, peeking behind a shower curtain while hoping to unstick the blockage that we call life.
On the Acknowledgements page, the author comments that the book “originated from a dark place, which means it takes the hard work and talent of a great many people to make it bright and good and palatable for public consumption.”
I could imagine what the manuscript looked like before the editor got her hands on it, but that would take me down a narrow hole into unfathomable darkness.
Some shows manage to allude to the boring grind without showing it in real time. There’s the burning-the-midnight-oil montage, the scene that begins with someone looking exhausted from all their hard work leading up to the point where they’re about to find something exciting, the conversations between characters about what they’ve been up to. Better Call Saul uses these to show the endless doc review in the basement for new associates at a big firm, the overwhelming do-everything-yourself nature of being a solo practitioner, and other realities of the practice without slowing the roll of the main plot.
It’s funny you mention these, because while I agree they’re sort of the forms that a lot of lesser authors (some of which I had fun with) were trying to imitate, I couldn’t really get into the originals. I’m trying to think of why that is. It would be one thing if I just didn’t like the genres of fantasy, speculative fiction, etc. But I think it’s more that I have a hard time taking it seriously, at least in its pure form. If it’s goofy and bad, I don’t have to take it seriously, and I can enjoy it as brain candy. If the world-building has a grimy layer of realism, like the maddening bureaucracy of the Ministry of Magic in Harry Potter, or the violence and death of Game of Thrones, somehow that makes it work for me. Or maybe I’m just an illiterate drunk with NASCAR tastes.
I’m someone who reads and forms a “mental movie” while I’m reading. As long as the writing is not SO bad that it prevents me from getting in the sort of reading flow that lets the mental movie start playing, I’m good. At that point, it mostly becomes about the story and action. But bad writing can be so clunky that I’m actually having to concentrate on the words and sentences to figure out what’s going on in a way that I don’t have to with better writers (or translators for some works, I suppose).
Conversely, I don’t get a lot of enjoyment out of just reading well-written English for its own sake. A bad story is a bad story, and I’m not going to be interested, no matter how technically proficient the writer may be.
The best of all worlds is when the story is compelling AND the writer is good at their craft. Someone like a Patrick O’Brian or William Gibson is where it’s really at for me - the skill at writing makes the mental movie that much better.
An analogy might be that reading is like driving on a road; the writing itself is the road, and the scenery is the story. Some people like driving for its own sake, and they’re more concerned about the road, the pavement surface and its interface with the tires, and the curves, etc… while others are more concerned with the scenery and the eventual destination, and as long as the road isn’t so shitty that they are forced to concentrate on staying in their lane, not veering off on weirdly designed curves, or having the bumps vibrate the fillings out of their teeth, they’re happy looking at the scenery and enjoying that aspect of the journey.
This drives me crazy. Once you notice a writer depending on a word or phrase, it really stands out.
This makes me sad. I love both Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vince. I’ve read a bunch of her books. Liked some more than others, but I haven’t hated any of them and I’ve loved a few.
With a little editing, I think this could be a contender for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. E.g.:
“It was your darkness that made me fall in love with you, Allison - darkness of depth, I mean, the way we can peer down a narrow little hole and have our vision robbed by the mesmeric distance of it all, the never-ending-ness of it.”
The entry has to be “the opening sentence to the worst of all possible novels”.
This drives me crazy. Once you notice a writer depending on a word or phrase, it really stands out.
This makes me sad. I love both Ruth Rendell and Barbara Vine. I’ve read a bunch of her books. Liked some more than others, but I haven’t hated any of them and I’ve loved a few.
I’ve started picturing Allison as the woman in the underground den in Gary Larsen’s Far Side cartoon, to whom the snake is saying "You’re the first woman I’ve ever had down here, Barbara.*
Are you thinking of the Rama sequels? That trash is definitely the fault of Gentry Lee. I didn’t see his name anywhere on the 3001 credits, though.
If you want to read real crap, try Lee’s own book, Cradle, which might have the worst sentence ever written in English. And I have read the works of the Rev. Fanthorpe.
My friend is adamant about how awesome Stephen King is. She reads a great deal of non-fiction and quasi-fiction, but he is the greatest. I should read his stuff. Well, for the most part, his subject matter does not attract me, but I did read a short story, something about telepathic brothers, that appeared in Omni about forty years ago, and there was a weird goopiness to the way he wrote that reminded me of what my mother cooked that one time that coated the house with a smell just off-putting enough to almost make me nauseated and seem to be stuck on everything in the kitchen for a week.
Oh, but I cannot judge from that one example from all that long ago. I can, though, because I have seen The Shining and The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and as good as those were, I can see in them exactly the quality that put me off of his writing. I do not eat green bell peppers because just the smell gags me, and I do not read King for a like reason.
I’ve liked movies made from Stephen King books better than those books of his I’ve read. He’s not a great writer, and he tends to go on and on and on and on. Movies tighten the stories up.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Arthur Hailey, author of industry-centered fiction like Hotel, Airport, Wheels, and similar dreck. I admit that when I was a kid Hailey was sort of a guilty pleasure, but then, so were The Hardy Boys.
Every blurb about Hailey praised his “meticulous research” about the inside workings of the industry he was novelizing, which was basically true. He’d typically devote a year to doing research before writing the novel. The trouble was that he would then spin totally formulaic plot lines, complete with mandatory sexual dalliances, and the “inside info” he had gleaned would be scattered randomly throughout, usually doing little or nothing to advance the plot.
It was a successful schtick as his books were best-sellers, but literature it was not. Hailey himself disclaimed any pretense of literary achievement and described himself as “just a storyteller”, but he wasn’t even that. He was more like a guy tweaking computer-generated standard plot lines.
I can’t disagree with anything you’ve said, yet at the same time: I loved Arthur Hailey. For many years when I was a teenager/young adult he was my favorite author.
Yeah, as I said, it was a sort of guilty pleasure when I was a kid. One can’t be too hard on escapist brainless fluff – sometimes it’s just the kind of rest that the mind needs!
The book series I’m still reading and don’t like much has a real problem with ages. The first book had a girl who’d just turned 16 (in March) and was in sixth form, ie a year too young for sixth form - and all her friends were in the same year but also 15 or just turned 16. That does not happen. (Skipping grades is rare, and would be mentioned).
Then this book has someone who adopted a daughter due to infertility, then fell pregnant, which is a trope, fine. But you can’t adopt a child via the usual means in the UK due to infertility when you’re 25, which is the age she must have been in 1999. It just doesn’t happen. Even adopting privately would be difficult, but this was supposed to be them giving up because they couldn’t have a child and nobody knew why. At 25. No.
And a kid was convicted of a horrendous crime as a child. In the same book, that changed from 10 to 12, which is legally and emotionally significant.
His GF can’t move out of her mother’s home, either to her own place or to her Dad’s (who wants to have her live with him, and has a room for her), because she’s too young, legally. She’s 19. This is Wales. That doesn’t happen.
The main character’s ex is missing and possibly working as a high class escort, kidnapped and trafficked… Except she’s about 45, is assumed to be an actual target rather than a madam, is still working as an escort for very rich men who are known to hire underage girls, and… that doesn’t happen.
It happens with almost every minor character where either their age is mentioned or something places them in a generation. If someone went to Woodstock as an adult, they are not in their fifties now. Two people who were born in 1969 and 1985 cannot have gone to their first concert as an adult on the Depeche Mode tour in 1984 and realised they were both there.
Apart from the ongoing story of the missing ex, these could all have been corrected by someone saying “oh right, change that.” It’s bizarre and annoying.
I couldn’t make myself do it. It felt like the reading equivalent of an ironman course where you have to go over every obstacle twice, people throw adjectives at you, all your team-mates are arseholes, and you never even signed up to an ironman course in the first place.