post itt writers you think are bad

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.)

(Cold Spring Harbor)

Hate his whole thing — every book is essentially the same about a married man etc. DULLSVILLE USA

Yeah that whole school of postwar post-Hemingway white male American writers hasn't uh aged well. (I just wiki'd Richard Yates and learned his daughter dated Larry David and was supposedly the model for the character of Elaine lol. So there's that.)

I mean that’s great that his daughter has achieved fictional immortality but he had nothing to do w that. I bet he was a terrible selfish dad. His books were full of selfish men.

The Easter Parade is so sad. and really good. and about two sisters.

his stories are awesome too.

yates is kinda the beginning of carver and not the end of hemingway. he doesn't remind me of hemingway at all. more of a post-john o'hara writer.

definitely not someone i would call bad. i wish i could write that bad. but bad is different for everyone. franzen would be my american ennui sad king bad writer.

not that i've ever been able to make it through a franzen book...

I found the prose in Revolutionary Road really beautiful and finely wrought, but in service of a pessimism that wasn't proven, just assumed.

i don't think those big post-war american novelists were bad *writers* precisely

a lot of them were sex-obsessed and/or alcoholic sociopaths tho!

see patricia lockwood's essay on updike

honestly should have said 'misogynistic' instead of 'sex-obsessed'

i could never read updike. richard yates seemed really modern to me. updike always seemed like a 50s writer to me no matter what year it was. plus, yates wasn't big. nobody read him for years. the new yorker constantly rejected his stories. he never had a story in that magazine while he was alive. i can't read a lot of the 50s people. i can't read styron. i did watch him die though and i did clean his death bathroom a couple of times. someday i will write a poignant short story about that. i used to love saul bellow but i haven't read him in years. i do like cheever's short stories.
those early john o'hara stories are really cool. same with some of irwin shaw's stories.
reading an entire book by jack kerouac would be torture. i could never do it. i was in love with his shirts though.

everyone in the 50s was misogynistic and sex-obsessed and drunk. even the cats and dogs and children.

i don't think those big post-war american novelists were bad *writers* precisely

Depends what you mean by bad writer, I guess. Can you be a capable stylist and also be a bad writer? I'd say so. I've been turned off by the writing in books for lots of reasons — some because of basic clunky mechanics, others because the author's voice is unconvincing or annoying or bigoted, or the plotting is terrible, all of those count as part of "writing" imo.

But sure not all of those big names are bad writers. Just a lot of them not writers I want to read.

some ppl are adept at putting together words and sentences and paragraphs in an appealing fashion but choose subjects and plots and themes that are abhorrent

i mean, not to mention money

I made it a third of the way through Dharma Bums three times and On the Road once before I gave up on ever finishing something by Kerouac.

I read On The Road in high school and didn't hate it, but I was in high school. Later I tried The Dharma Bums and I couldn't get past the ridiculous names he gave the characters.

I pulled my copy of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway off the shelf the other week and read about a half dozen at random. His parodists get him completely wrong.

Recently tried some James Salter - just seemed like overwritten sophisticated blah. Give me Updike over this any day.

everyone in the 50s was misogynistic and sex-obsessed and drunk. even the cats and dogs and children.

― scott seward, Friday, 6 September 2024 bookmarkflaglink

Maybe American writers.

Male ones.

i'm working through the Richard Ford edited "Book of the American Short Story vol. 2" - Granta, 2008 - and am coming across some of these famous post-war men that i'd never read before. the stories he cherry picks are all amazing in their own ways. But I realised i'd never read Updike - a novel or a short story before - and the story included, "Natural Color", is both 1) extraordinarily written - vivid and sharp, perfectly conveying the kind of panicky, unruly emotion that adults usually need to tamp down and 2) utterly poisonous; would i want to spend more than these few pages with these people? no i would not

I think "bad stylist" is a conversation that interests me more because "bad writer because shitty views" is a conversation that is had all the time.

Personal preference tho, not trying to thread police.

A case of someone who is sometimes one of those things and sometimes another, but also sometimes totally brilliant: Tom Wolfe. I love a decent amount of his ‘60s work, The Right Stuff is pretty great, but he is obviously objectionable on some ideological levels — and I think he is actually a BAD fiction writer. I don’t know why I read “A Man in Full,” much less why I finished it, but that book has some terrible writing in it.

You listen to Know Your Enemy, right? Their recent Wolfe episode was pretty good.

Yeah, I think I mentioned this before, but A Man In Full was my first "this is a book by a respected author but it is...bad?" experience. Even as a teenager living on a different continent I could tell Wolfe's attempts at capturing the voices of protagonists of different races weren't a success.

the bonfire of the vanities was not great either.

You listen to Know Your Enemy, right? Their recent Wolfe episode was pretty good.

I saw they'd done one but haven't listened yet. Definitely a good subject for them.

It's interesting that Bonfire and Man in Full were such big hits at the time, and people actually read them.

Today, if I looked a block of ellipsis-filled Tom Wolfe text, my first response would be "I am not reading that." It's funny that a paragraph of copy can just look dated.

if i have to read "solar plexus" or "rutting" i am going to 100% blame tom wolfe

it's not that these men couldn't string words together it's that they chose such a narrow swath of humanity to write about. personally i find that dull.