post itt writers you think are bad

(sincere)

My only experience with ppl who've Studied Writing were the scriptwriters in my comics group and yeah they had major hangups about three act structures and the like, I guess TV writers aren't invited to deconstruct as much as lit writers are. It got very frustrating, sometimes seemed like they believed there was one correct way to tell a story, also a strange insistence that every character have a fully detailed backstory, everything had to be explained.

God that stuff drives me up the wall, you hear it so much these days not just from scriptwriters but also ppl who have internalised all this nonsense from podcasts/tvtropes/goodreads or wherever it comes from, this half baked third hand theory of narrative stuff… I joined a book club recently and I would have bailed immediately if someone used the word “pacing” or the like

(It wasn’t like that at all luckily, everyone just spoke normally about how they liked the book, what it seemed to be attempting & how successful it was — & obv you can talk about story mechanics & stuff but just not in the most rigid & banal way possible please)

Maybe, but it’s her third book. Her second was the wretched THE AUTOGRAPH MAN.

ha ha oops! there was even a part of me that thought "wait should I check there's not some other second novel I haven't heard about?"

Proposal: the people of today who match up temperamentally with people thirty years older who love Denis Johnson & such now read e.g. Ben Lerner

not saying Ben Lerner writes like Denis Johnson but I think he applies different fingernails to the same itch

no he fucking doesn’t

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.

― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra)

i mean, i get it, my mommy didn't love me either. i suspect mike pence calls his wife "mother" for related reasons, though i don't know that for sure. on a personal level, though, it's just really frustrating. speaking as a Woman of a Certain Age, people look at me either as a "MILF" or, worse, as a "mommy dommy". it is one of _the_ hardest things about dating for me. these constant memes about people talking about how much they want a mommy, and so of course when they look at me that's what they see. sigh.

Aw I liked The Easter Parade. But it's true I never finished Cold Spring 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.)

― Blitz Primary (tipsy mothra)

try the book on tape of it, it runs a lot faster. at least in its original release. i hear they reissued it at its "proper" speed, but where's the fun in that?

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

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

this is one of my other problems as a writer, i start writing and all the truly nasty shit i try not to say or do around other people comes out. i got some extremely fucked up shit in my head. but goddamn all anybody i know ever writes is trauma porn. i don't want to write trauma porn.

I’ve been reading an unlikely amount of 50s short stories lately and it’s wild how many “parties” seem to be happening in them, several times a week. It seems like there would be social networks that would support a cocktail hour literally every night of the week, at different people’s houses, and people would just live in each other’s houses practically. Did this really happen? In a certain moneyed set, I guess? And I guess the amount of alcohol consumed and the general age of the participants (pre parenthood) and the total lack of anything that could be called feminism would lead to some hanky panky (at best) but probably pretty easily shading into abusive, sex pest behaviour

― Humanitarian Pause (Tracer Hand)

meanwhile i'm out here reading the Beebo Brinker novels lol

this was my favorite column online. i wish they hadn't stopped it. other than the interviews, it was the only thing i wanted to read on PR's site. unlike the interviews, you can actually read this column without subscribing. which is nice of them.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/columns/feminize-your-canon/

― scott seward

(note to self: do not use this as an excuse for a "trans joke")

as for parties, people still go to them.

― difficult listening hour

and still drink way too much and get into fights at them.

Not challopsing here, but I was starting the Ann Tyler novel 'Breathing Lessons, not having read any of her books. The writing was so poor, uninteresting, and pedestrian in the opening paragraph that my feeling was 'if you can't be bothered to write, I can't be bothered to read it'.

An example of the offending prose style:

Deer Lick lay on a narrow country road some ninety miles north of Baltimore, and the funeral was scheduled for ten-thirty Saturday morning; so Ira figured they should start around eight. This made him grumpy. (He was not an early-morning kind of man.) Also Saturday was his busiest day at work, and he had no one to cover for him. Also their car was in the body shop.

― Bob Six

i find that paragraph totally engrossing, but i'm fascinated by the mundane and quotidian. i wish there was more of that in my life. hell, i wish i was confident enough in my own writing to _write_ shit that mundane. that's part of the pressure i feel as a writer, you need a _hook_, you need to _sell_ yourself. there are so many books out there, and asking somebody to take the time to really get into the rhythm, the flow of a work, to breeze through something and get a larger impression rather than these tiny immaculately crafted jewels of sentences, crystalline in a way that makes you forget what you're reading... god, i couldn't read a whole novel like that. it's exhausting. please, tell me about what you heard on the radio, particularly if it's not going to be in any way meaningful later. ramble. that's what i want to hear.

that's what i miss about newspaper columnists - we miss out on the ephemeral. everything has to be important. blockbuster mentality. i wish there were more people like lewis grizzard writing today. do i like lewis grizzard? do i think he's a "good writer"? no. i still miss him. him and erma bombeck. not mike royko. i don't miss mike royko.

In the spirit of the thread I will say that the last book I put down without finishing was Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides. To me that was bad writing, mainly because it seemed to be constantly trying to do too much but also in a different sense too little.

― o. nate

i've definitely heard of that one. i've heard some people trust say it's pretty cringe. :( you know, uh... i'm a big advocate of "write what you know".

The author decided to write Middlesex after reading the 1980 memoir Herculine Barbin and finding himself dissatisfied with its discussion of intersex anatomy and emotions.

wait what

this dude decided he _didn't like how an intersex person wrote about themselves and decided he could do better_?

i'm sorry, that is _peak cis dude_ right there

we should have a reading club where we all read fuccboi.

― scott seward

oh my god yes

one of my least favorite things to do is to read really good writing

because i read it and i say to myself "oh my god this writing is _so good_ i could never write as good as this"

i'm pretty sure i could write at least as good as _fuccboi_

possibly even better

i couldn't get _published_ but at least i could _write_ better

-

that madison smartt bell book makes me think of the cover of pink floyd's _meddle_

-

My god, yes, so much poetry is abysmal. LG, we have a name for a certain type of poetry or "hybrid" writing among my friend group: "MFA-core." What's funny, of course, is that many of us *have* MFAs, but we were lucky enough to not fall into the usual traps of them, or to have teachers that eschewed the styles so seemingly preferred by the tenured Creative Writing Professoriate. Like, my teachers were all absolute fucking weirdos who broke the rules all the time, one of them didn't even have a college degree!!

― butt dumb tight my boners got boners (the table is the table)

"mfa-core" as a writing style frustrates me _so fucking much_

like there's so much i appreciate and like about literary writing but god it is so fucking _gatekept_

i hear about the really brutal editing process that shit goes through (and i saw "shulie") and it's absolutely terrifying to me, i feel like some of those folks regularly tell that anecdote about jo jones throwing a cymbal at charlie parker's head

ha ha oops! there was even a part of me that thought "wait should I check there's not some other second novel I haven't heard about?"

I'd also add that ON BEAUTY was pretty good, but then if I took an EM Forster novel and did a search & replace on all the proper nouns I'd probably be able to write a pretty good book too.

On Beauty gets most favorable mentions on ilx, seems like.
I'm among the ILBers who have enjoyed Harry Crews's A Childhood, The Biography of a Place in recent years---still haven't checked out Larry Brown, but this thread still makes me think I should:
Obit: Larry Brown

Some reviewers who love A Childhood don't like his novels, but when I do see favorable mentions, A Feast of Snakes is usually in there (incl. on ilx, I think, not seeing it now).

i love his novels. a feast of snakes is great. read larry's stories, dow. you'd like them.

I own A Childhood, A Feast Of Snakes, and Florida Frenzy, a collection of magazine oieces, some of which are pretty great. I’ve read a few more of Crews’ novels and remember liking Body, The Gypsy’s Curse, The Knockout Artist, and Car. They are not subtle books.

I'd also add that ON BEAUTY was pretty good, but then if I took an EM Forster novel and did a search & replace on all the proper nouns I'd probably be able to write a pretty good book too.

I barely remember the plot in On Beauty - I could probably make a decent stab at it because I know it's Howards End, but I don't even know if a bookshelf falls on anyone - but found the characters unforgettable, and it's not like they're just slight twists on Forster's.

one of many things I enjoyed about On Beauty was the way Smith depicted relations between boomer/gen x parents and their early adult/late teen offspring, hilarious and spot-on

that annoying cliche that literary novels are all about “middle aged academics sleeping with students”; this applied to like 2 books 50 years ago & doesn’t reflect anything about anything in 2024

this is the plot of a pretty good denis johnson novel (the name of the world) lol

Emily St John Mandel. I tried Sea of Tranquility, but got stuck after barely a few pages. This sort of thing - bland, repetitive, too many vague nouns:

In Halifax he finds lodging by the port, a boardinghouse where he’s able to secure a corner room on the second floor, overlooking the harbor. He wakes that first morning to a wonderfully lively scene outside his window. A large merchant ship has arrived, and he’s close enough to hear the jovial curses of the men unloading barrels and sacks and crates. He spends much of that first day gazing out the window, like a cat. He planned to go west immediately, but it’s so easy to linger in Halifax, where he falls prey to a personal weakness he’s been aware of all his life: Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.

yeah that’s a deep snooze

yikes. i didn't like Station Eleven either.

That "wonderfully" really gets me. Doesn't add to the sentence. If something's lively, let it be lively, don't know what wonderfully has to do with it.

Yeah "wonderfully lively" made me oof too — the kind of thing that makes you suspect a lack of editing.

Not sure I agree - the "wonderfully" adds to the sentence because it provides the character's reaction to the liveliness. With a different character, it could be depressingly or terrifyingly lively.

Not read the book, but I see that it has multiple central characters. I'm wondering if the style of that paragraph is reflective of the whole thing, or just this character.

lively means full of excitement, active, outgoing--I don't see how something could be depressing or terrifying about that. If so, you'd want to use a different word than lively. depressingly exciting? eh not really

a writer writing about someone looking out of their window constantly is just a writer writing about themselves

and still drink way too much and get into fights at them.

I don't know anybody who's ever started a fight in 30 years of partygoing. I still do see a lot of bad potato chips, though.

lively means full of excitement, active, outgoing--I don't see how something could be depressing
or terrifying about that.

It absolutely could, if the character's a) miserable and resentful of human activity or b) in a state of nervousness that makes the amount of human activity happening outside intimidating to them.

I mind her flat, almost YA style maybe a little bit, but not that much really since she’s got other things going for her.

I don't know anybody who's ever started a fight in 30 years of partygoing. I still do see a lot of bad potato chips, though.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

it's good that you don't know people who've started a fight at parties, just means you got your head together more than writers back in the day did :)

Edwin is capable of action but prone to inertia. He likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.

Honestly, it was this sequence that bothered me the most. Why is she telling us this? Is there not a more artful, perhaps descriptive way of expressing Edwin's inertia? It's closed writing that leaves no room for any sort of ruminative energy. Bland and utterly boring.

Edwin is capable of action

He likes sitting by his window

He doesn’t want to leave

All of these could have been excised and the passage would read better. This just looks like 'draft 0', i.e. the writing phase when you get it out of your head and onto the page. After that you should be doing multiple edit runs and removing this kind of terrible prose.

that paragraph looks like student work. a creative writing class exercise.

this is also why i'm really picky when i'm reading modern writers writing about "olden times". so many of them can end up reading like a parody.

https://unherd.com/2024/09/the-worst-novelist-in-the-world/

I hesitate to brand someone a "bad writer" though I'm often disappointed when I dip into rave-reviewed contemporary fiction. For example I found the flowery and self-consciously "literary" prose in Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies almost stomach-churning. And though I haven't actually READ her novels, I find it hard to believe that NYT journalist Taffy Hyphenated Last Names is any good at fiction.

Her stories about Florida made no impression on me.

Scott, that's s link from a terf rag to an article written by an anti-woke "comedian". Not flagging that up to scold you, don't expect anyone outside the UK to know any of these terrible peopld.

I tried reading Matrix by Groff (I think I even posted about it here) and it was just awful.

I didn't hate Fates and Furies. The prose didn't strike me as especially brilliant or awful. But I read a lot of airport-level crime novels, so I'm pretty tolerant.

"Scott, that's s link from a terf rag to an article written by an anti-woke "comedian"."

i actually read it in the washington post but then in WaPo it said it was adapted from that magazine so i thought i would just cut out the middleman! yeah, i don't know the writer or the mag. someone can take it down.

if it makes you feel better i had no idea andrew doyle was an anti-woke "comedian" writing for a terf rag. i'm kind of surprised, honestly. good on doyle for managing to write about a 19th century writer without taking potshots at "wokeness". sometimes i feel like all these people do is sit around complaining about "wokeism", so it's nice to see one of them doing something apparently completely unrelated for a change.

yeah, i'd never heard of him. and the article isn't bad for what it is. those books sound like they would be a hoot to read out loud.

i posted a woman stand-up on the stand-up thread who i thought was pretty funny and then i kept looking for her stuff and i find that she opens for joe rogan and is or was a part of the gross Kill Tony crew of bro-dude comics and, well, the more you know! you know? i am so anti-rogan at this point anyone who is in any way connected to him...bleggggg....

Yeah tbc the article seems unobjectionable! But click on the "more by this author" link and...

For example I found the flowery and self-consciously "literary" prose in Lauren Groff's Fates and Furies almost stomach-churning. And though I haven't actually READ her novels, I find it hard to believe that NYT journalist Taffy Hyphenated Last Names is any good at fiction.

groff is terrible!!! will never read a taffy etc. novel because none of her magazine profiles evinced anything resembling a style or individual voice, every one i read was boring and mediocre to me

yeah, i'd never heard of him. and the article isn't bad for what it is. those books sound like they would be a hoot to read out loud.

― scott seward

oh yeah _irene iddlesleigh_ is terribly written and pretty hilarious... mark twain called it "one of the greatest unintentionally humorous novels of all time".

there apparently used to be competitions for who could read aloud from the book for the longest without laughing... in my youth people did that with a story called "the eye of argon". pretty mean-spirited in this case because jim theis was literally 14 years old when he wrote it and "published" it in a fanzine that had 50 copies sent out... after the ridicule his story got he never wrote anything again. he could have become a good writer if he hadn't been ridiculed so badly. or he could have stayed terrible. i guess we'll never know.

it's kind of interesting, seeing doyle talking about ros... rowling named one of her characters "mcgonagall", after an infamously bad 19th century poet. i'm a history nerd myself, i'm fascinated by the distant past and its standards, but the way they look at it, i have a hard time relating to that. like, for instance, he writes this article claiming that ros was a troll, that she was deliberately writing bad fiction to tweak the noses of the establishment. this interests me because this is clearly how doyle sees himself. he creates false caricatures designed to ridicule ideas he disagrees with, but never discloses that his work is disingenuous. and then he declares victory when people take the things he's saying as being spoken in good faith.

and that's the thing, isn't it? anything someone says to me, i assume that they mean it. it seems kind of rude to assume someone's just lying to make me look stupid. my experience is that most people, in fact, aren't lying to try and make me look stupid.

and i just don't think that's the mindset of people like doyle and rowling. they seem to, like, assume that anybody who disagrees with them is acting in bad faith, and that therefore it's futile to try and talk to them in good faith. so it's fine for them to lie and manipulate and distort. i just don't think most people see the world like that. and so it makes sense to me that a lot of people believe the things these "anti-woke" people say. why would they assume they're being lied to?

reading that Emily St John Mandel paragraph reminds me of what modern lit fic has done to me. it makes me crave good description. i feel like half the modern novels - more than half really - i read are written by authors with no descriptive powers. or they don't find it worthwhile to describe people/places/things. set a scene. describe the landscape. the clouds. the sky. whatever. maybe its too old-fashioned. or maybe nobody goes outside. and people are just writing variations on themselves so they don't need to let us know what people look like. its weird though. that i can read a book peopled with people and have no inkling what people look like. so, now i like it! especially in old books. people were so amazing at it. you could live in those books. if i taught a writing class i would make people go outside. go stare at something. come back when you've got two or three pages. they could take a thesaurus. no phone. do that every class for a semester. for the next semester i would have them transcribe passages from old books every class. in longhand. they would hate me probably...
i mean, i used to get totally bored by long descriptive passages that went on forever in books. but its kinda like how i used to hate long drum solos on old records. now i like them. because nobody does them anymore.

Given that you may not gafc bout Halifax and sitting by a window---is this better, tolerable, even? I tend to edit as I read, although it doesn't (I don't) always help.

In Halifax he finds lodging by the port, a boardinghouse where he’s able to secure a corner room on the second floor, overlooking the harbor. He planned to go west immediately, but it’s so easy to linger in Halifax, where he falls prey to a personal weakness he’s been aware of all his life: he likes sitting by his window. There’s a constant movement of people and ships. He doesn’t want to leave, so he stays.

that is totally better.

"gafc" seems like it should mean something, but I just meant "gaf."

Even improved with compound sentences there's still a clipped quality to the cadence.

I had to look it up, I guess I read that novel and it left zero impression. Station Eleven was better but it (series and novel) fell victim to the downfall of society being a more interesting setting than the aftermath.

Every doomed society is doomed in its own way