post itt writers you think are bad

I also don’t see anything objectionable about Fizzle’s quote. I pretty quickly figured out where I was, what was going on and something about the character. Sadly that is more than I could say for many random passages from contemporary literary fiction.

xp to three days ago -- read the conroe review until i hit the quotes from the book, one of which milo z posted. i could not believe they were real, lmao what trash

the rhys bowen quote is terrible writing imo

So I guess Hardy Boys and Tom Swift are terrible writing?

i didn't even say that rhys bowen was terrible writing, just that passage. read the OP and stop being so defensive

Ok. Still don’t know why it’s terrible..

Sorry if that was a bit pointed. I’m probably just grumpy from recent attempts to read lauded novels that are so overwritten that the story gets buried under the pick-me prose style.

gritty war realism tone, but also wodehousian satirical jollity? can we have both? let's find out!

evelyn augh

I mean, if all you want is “ I pretty quickly figured out where I was, what was going on and something about the character”, then good writing would be things like:

John, a nice man who was also a thief, stood in a big wet room called an aquarium, planning to steal a wet thing called a fish.

Never steal anything wet

Particularly enjoying '"Bugger," he muttered' with its cadence of 'Murder She Wrote'

The writing in that rhys bowen excerpt was entirely adequate to its purpose, in that it had a useful amount of vivid detail, painted a clear picture of what was happening to the character and made the character's reaction quite clear. But the character's reaction was so incommensurate with the details that preceded it that it was a purely stupid caricature of the Old Etonian stiff upper lip.

I give it a mixed review. Bowen can write well enough, but has a dull and impoverished imagination.

How is it possible to "write well enough" and yet have a dull and impoverished imagination? Good writing requires imagination.

The writer who uses the name Rhys Bowen also publishes a series called "Her Royal Spyness", so I think they can fuck off.

Clunky info dump in the middle of an action scene always the mark of a dreadful hack imo, reflected Bananaman Begins as he clambered over the dead hijacker to grapple with the controls of the 737

I've read a lot of bad sci-fi (and bad press releases in my job) and as a result prize any writer who can write basic, legible sentences, imaginative or otherwise.

Obviously I'd rather be stuck on a desert island with a single Iain M Banks novel (bad sentence writer) or Riddley Walker than the complete past and future works of Rhys Bowen. But legibility isn't nothing! There's leagues between that silly Bowen paragraph and, e.g., a Dan Brown preposition soup.

I will accept "Hugo wasn't sure whether he himself had been hit" is a crap sentence.

I suppose there's not much risk of any ILXor picking up a Tom Hindle crime novel, but the one I had to read for book club did seem to do well enough that he's published two more since, so: whole plot hinges on a last minute reveal about the main character being duplicitous but since it's written in that same character's internal monologue it makes absolutely no sense that he'd be self censoring this until the last page. There's also a bit where he says something like "I followed, not even swerving to sniff the delicious smells coming from the dining room", thus implying that usually this impeccable detective just wanders off whenever he smells food - amusing but not the intended effect.

Glad he can sniff smells

if that bowen thing was a schoolboy novel from the 40s it would be acceptable. actually it sounds like its a from a brit kid novel from the 20s.

anne helen petersen

Never steal anything wet

― Bad Bairns (Boring, Maryland)

i always appreciate a good _Catalina Caper_ reference

It's a phrase I never thought I could use in conversation

This is simplifying things a bit but I generally prefer a compelling story plainly told to a nothing-burger told with great sophistication.

I don't really know anything about this guy, but good Lord

I think we can all agree, regardless of ideology, that Chuck Wendig should face capital punishment for this contribution. pic.twitter.com/N8AACIoigR

— Good Tweetman (@Goodtweet_man) September 5, 2024

i remember the ‘00s where every other dude blogger wrote like that

lol omg

Feh indeed

I've read and enjoyed two of Wendig's books, Wanderers and The Book of Accidents, but everything else I'm aware of him being involved with (a ton of Star Wars shit, apparently?) marks him as must-avoid otherwise.

i remember the ‘00s where every other dude blogger wrote like that

Yeah. I'm also reminded of certain ILXors from back then.

I fuckin wrote like that back then alright lol, but yes, it is 2024 and capital punishment is about right

This is simplifying things a bit but I generally prefer a compelling story plainly told to a nothing-burger told with great sophistication.

I would tend to go the other way - don't really care about plot if the writing's beautiful - but I do think that's tougher to pull off in English than, say, French or Portuguese.

horror writers tend to be suuuuuuuuuuper geeky/cringe whenever they write anything that isn't a story or novel. stephen king being an exception. he has written good stuff on writing and books and movies. but he can also make you cringe. they are lost in their childhood minds. actually sci-fi writers (men) are like this too. they somehow miss a lot about modern life when they write about it. they have very narrow viewpoints which i always find surprising about people who have such wild and often truly creative imaginations.

Yeah, the only SF writers I can think of who aren't complete nightmares on social media are William Gibson (posts links to interesting articles about weird technology stuff) and Samuel Delany (posts pictures of himself and his boyfriend/husband being happy and old together).

i always assume any columnist writing about porn is simply making good on the lie they told their spouse about why they were visiting The Sites

like goddammit now i have to convince my editor to let me write this and i don’t even have an angle.. how many words can i waste at the top here hmmm

writing about porn is like dancing with a fish on a bicycle.

fwiw I think it's strange that we have this easily accessible resevoir of our society's secret desires and it doesn't come up in thinkpieces more often! like for instance if you want a quick insight into the USA's fucked up relationship to race...

I am not suggesting Mr Wendig is the man for this task, tbc

they are lost in their childhood minds

if they were lost in their childhood minds surely they wouldn't have to do nearly as much posturing

For every socially incompetent horror writer there’s one who is socially and personally adept. Kind of silly to paint with such a broad brush imo.

Actually I bet it’s less 1:1 but I’m sensitive about horror writers

yes there are. they are women and/or non-binary!

"if they were lost in their childhood minds surely they wouldn't have to do nearly as much posturing"

i think they live inside their own heads and create their own worlds and when they leave those worlds and come out into the light they can sound immature or like teenagers.

and, no, i don't think its all writers or all male writers. but it can be a problem with genre writers.

Got blocked on BLuesky by Kelly Link for criticising Wendig once. Even the good ones stick up for the shitty ones. They've got their own nice little community of reacharounds going on.

like for instance if you want a quick insight into the USA's fucked up relationship to race...

Or family! the endless "in-law" "step-mom" narratives. (Of course Sophocles is like, yeah bro.)

No mention of Kerouac in this thread, fish in a barrel but he's who comes to mind.

i always assume any columnist writing about porn is simply making good on the lie they told their spouse about why they were visiting The Sites

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

idk about columnist, but i've read some really interesting writing about porn. or, i don't know. i mean honestly i'm not actually sure what porn is. it's something i'm trying to navigate. i'm on these all-ages servers and i want to share aksak maboul's "cinema" and then i look and oh wait that's an erect penis, isn't it? the lines people draw...

like if we're talking horror writers and porn, for me, horror _is_ porn. that's one of those things that i guess a lot of people would disagree with but me personally? i got trauma and fiction helps me understand and heal from it.

xp - Kerouac +1 and raise you one Richard Yates

Aw I liked The Easter Parade. But it's true I never finished Cold Springs Harbor. I was just ... not very interested. (Richard Ford has a similar effect on me, at least at novel length. I like some of his short stories.)