Inspired by another thread. Some writing, its context and cadence and content, just tugs heartstrings. Good writing can inspire wonder, astonishment, joy, grief. Good writing is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
Then there’s the other kind, on the other end of the curve. Once you move away from the good side of the fence, and skid faster than you’d expected across the hump of mediocrity, and plunge into groan-worthy hell.
I always used to think that holding one’s head and groaning at a bad piece of writing was just a bit of hyperbole. And then, a couple weeks ago, I somehow found myself at a showing of the film “Jeepers Creepers” with some friends. Now, the bulk of the script resided firmly on the leeward side of mediocre mound. Spongy, slightly rancid, predictable. Then this line was uttered, in all seriousness, by a “psychic” character who wandered into the set:
“I don’t know if it’s a devil…or a demon!”
And I put my head in my hands and I groaned. It literally hurt me to hear that. I think one of my friends patted my shoulder and told me it would be all right and over soon.
Stephen King’s THE REGULATORS was the biggest piece of crap I have ever read. The writing was absolutely atrocious. If a nobody submitted the same book to a publisher, it would have been thrown in the garbage after page one.
FOUR PAST MIDNIGHT had some interesting stories, but once again the writing was so incredibly bad, it made any enjoyment impossible.
Just like David Mamet, SK shows that there are projects that he really doesn’t give a damn about.
Beat me to Stephen King.
Everything I’ve read of his makes me groan.
Sorry, I just don’t get the attraction. Read…oh, say Smilla’s Sense of Snow for actual prose and you’ll see what I mean.
Eleven Bizarre Tales, by this something-or-other Asian guy. none of the tales were bizarre in the least. too dang predictable. now residing in the trash.
…I bought a whole bunch of the BBC’s “New Adventures” and “Missing Adventures” books when they first came out.
There. I said it. I owned up.
Film and TV tie-ins aren’t often great literature. (I think this is because authors don’t have much of a chance to use their own creative voice when they’ve got to conform to the conventions and continuity of an ongoing franchise.) Sadly, the Doctor Who tie-ins are at the bottom end of the quality scale. I think this is because the BBC books essentially took over from the old Virgin line, and when that was set up, they started by accepting unsolicited manuscripts in a sort of open competition… and all the fanfic writers came crawling out of the woodwork.
The results, in quality terms, range from “dismal” through “genuinely embarrassingly awful” to “when I win the National Lottery I am going to hire hit men to cut off this person’s typing finger”.
I suppose, in a weird way, the twenty volumes now cluttering up my flat are useful, as a sort of insane “how-not-to” guide to writing. Basically, if you don’t write like these people, you’re doing it right.
Some examples? Well, when you pick up a book, and on the title page it says “The Devil Goblins From Neptune”, and it goes downhill from there… Or the one who went all literary and clever, with multiple shifting first-person viewpoints - nice trick, except his characterization is so flat you can’t tell them apart. Or the one that contains (amongst many idiocies and plot howlers) the simile that’s left an indelible scar on my brain; a sinister gentlemanly type stands out in a seedy Victorian dive like (I quote) “a diamond on a plate of kippers”.
I could go on, but I’m beginning to have flashbacks, so I’d better stop.
Clive Cussler. I grabbed an audio book of his from the library. It was the audible equivalent of watching a train wreck. Unabridged, it was 10 or 12 tapes, but could have been 2 tapes shorter if he hadn’t given every mesurment in both metric and inches. His similies could gag a goat. And he has the annoying habit of including himself as a character in the books that is just too cute for words.
How can I let a thread like this pass without bringing up the classic Fanshawe, he of the many pseudonyms, the Ed Wood, Jr. of paperbacks.
I first encountered him as Pell Torro, and his Galaxy 666 perfectly exhibits his “crack open the thesaurus and pile on the synonyms” style of padding your word count.
I just read my first Clive Cussler novel, Cyclops, a few weeks ago at the cottage when I had nothing to do, and it was the worst book I’ve ever read. Jaw-droppingly, stupefyingly bad.
Sue Grafton. Hers isn’t the worst writing I’ve read, but it teases; she has a mildly interesting plot, and you don’t want to throw the book across the room at the first page, and then all of a sudden her first-person narrator knows something she shouldn’t know. Then it happens again. And again.
For example: the character claims to know nothing about clothing, yet identifies another character as wearing an Armani (or some expensive designer) suit. Was his tag sticking out? Is that how she knew?
Or: the character (Kinsey Millhone?) claims to know nothing about sailing or boats, and yet correctly identifies a type of boat and describes in detail how it’s rigged.
I could forgive her (maybe, but not her editor) if I had been reading her first book. However, I was reading something in the middle of the alphabet.
Nobody’s mentioned John Grisham yet? Inconceivable!
I listened to the audiotape version of The Firm once, and heard the absolute worst sentence I’ve ever come across in a work of fiction. I rewound and listened to it several times to make sure I had heard correctly and, yes, I had. I’m pretty sure I’m remembering this sentence correctly now, since its pure ineptitude seared it into my memory.
In a scene where the protagonist is talking to his wife, Grisham unleashed the following sentence: “‘Yes’,” she said, agreeing with him."
HUH? What could possibly have got into Grisham’s mind to make him think those last three words served any purpose? How in the name of all that is holy could Grisham’s editor have not cut that sentence in half?
Oh, and The Rainmaker contains the eye-rollingest deus ex machina plot device I’ve ever encountered. I won’t give it away here, but I’m sure anyone who’s read it knows what I mean.
I was stuck in a four-hour line at the Brooklyn DMV about ten years ago, and the only thing I had to read was his first mega-mega-bestseller…I think it was ALONG CAME A SPIDER.
Holy shit…he just swiped everything in SILENCE OF THE LAMBS that wasn’t nailed down, made the protagonist African-American (and a guy who plays the blues on the grand piano, naturally, when he’s not being a supersleuth), and tossed in a few children-in-jeopardy, possibly as a sop to the Mary Higgins Clark readership.
And he wrote it all REALLY, REALLY badly.
After that experience, I generally carry TWO books around with me.
Hey, if you play Dunegeons & Dragons, it’s a crucial distinction. Devils come frome the Nine Hells, demons come from the Abyss. Silver is best against devils, cold iron against demons…
Since we’re allowed to talk about movies, I have to say the entire plot and a lot of the dialogue from Left Behind. To make it worse, my mom has annoying habit of repeating lines while watching movies, so I had to listen to it in an echo chamber.
I enjoy her books but some of Patricia Cornwell’s dialogue just annoys me. How many people would really say something along the lines of,"…an animal that wanted to eat fresh, raw meat." I can see a real person saying raw meat or fresh meat, but just not the two them together in normal conversation.
I dislike James Patterson’s novels. It just seems annoying to have everyone in his family so perfect.
My mom reads a lot of suspense thrillers, so I’ve read way too many generic psycho-killer-on-the-loose books to go into detail about any one of them.
This is probably mean, and perhaps I’m breaking the Sacred Code of Essay Graders, but a paraphrase (to protect the innocent) off the front page of a paper on a space mission:
Okay, can we say “trite”? Where have I heard the space program compared to a baby learning to walk before? Oh, yeah, in the last eight hundred papers I graded for this class. Not to mention that guy, Louis Armstrong or whatever his name was.
Anyway, it continues:
Hand rails? Hand rails?
If that puzzling reference to home-safety equipment wasn’t distracting enough, the author continues to use the hand-rails analogy.
sigh Only twenty-six more papers to go. At least these young wordwrights are paying me for the privilege of having their work read.
I obviously picked the wrong book of his to read first. Because he starts pulling characters and plots from his other novels in a sort of random manner, not to mention “The Wizard of Oz” characters. Really!
It started out good, but started degenerating after a few chapters. And what really threw me in reading it: the protagonist’s flying car’s computer is named Gay, and his command to her to escape via an instantaneous 1000 mile teleport is “bounce”. So when he wanted her to take them 3000 miles away quickly, he shouted, “Gay bounce! Gay bounce! Gay bounce!”
All I could think of whenever he said that was like of flamboyant marchers in a Gay Pride parade. :D:D
First, any time anyone says the equivalent of “It’s my gift…and my curse” I groan.
Second, if you are beginning your essay with a literary quote, dictionary definition, or the phrase, “Since time began…” your grade should be a maximum of C.
Third, I once read an awful SF book called something like ‘Psychodrome’. It was this thing where there was this show/sport where celebrities would fight battles and stuff and the viewers would experience alongside them using VR and cyberspace and whatever. Anyway, our hero wins a contest to be on the show and then has fantastic adventures.
It was the worst piece of insertion fiction I’ve ever read. The protagonist was the coolest guy in the whole world and did everything great. There’s a beautiful woman on the show that everyone lusts after and she comes into his room naked, wanting sex. When he turns her down because he doesn’t love her, it just makes her want him all the more.
It was awful, awful cack.
Fourth, I’ll second those Doctor Who books someone mentioned. The few I’ve read were not awe-inspiring.
E. Annie Proulx’s books The Shipping News and Postcards were both great reads, two of my favorite books in fact, but then she unleashed Accordion Crimes upon us. God, what an awful book!
But nothing beats Pel Torro’s Galaxy 666 in the groaner department. It’s inconceivable that something so bad ever got published.
One of my colleagues claims to have come across a student essay that began, “Since the dawn of time, the Japanese have been looked upon by their neighbors as a genetically gentle and peaceful race.”
That one is wrong on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin.
The best I’ve seen is the Infamous Cloning Essay. The young lady who wrote this one turned in a draft with the memorable line, “When God created Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, he meant for them to reproduce naturally as a man and woman should and not to clone themselves.” I suggested, in the most polite and PC way I could, that she might want to rethink this argument. So she turned in her final copy…
“The human race today is not perfect. We have not reached the height of our development. Why does our society want to make clones of people when millions of years of development still exist? Take a look at the people living in medieval times. Imagine if that generation had cloned itself. Our lives today would be without the comforts of modern day living we experience …”
That’s when I decided to stop commenting on drafts. I liked it better with Adam and Eve.
