post itt writers you think are bad

no need to explain yourself, thread is for catharsis not debate

ok i already regret this mods lock thread

j/k

these books are made for junkin

every single writer at every single metal site I regularly use for recommendations is bad

Goethe

ok lock thread now

There are many ways for a writer to be bad, many fewer ways for them to be good, and almost all of them yield somewhat mixed results. If they have a following, there's bound to be something mixed in with the crappy aspects that their followers rate much higher than you do, while what disgusts you hardly registers with their fans.

For me, the worst writers are not those who write appalingly bad sentences, but those who reinforce their audience's worst traits and convince them those traits, like selfishness, hatred or arrogance, are not really bad at all, but actually good in ways that others are too blind or stupid to see.

Or, I could just say 'Jordan Peterson' and leave it at that.

roth

stalin

noah berlatsky

Nathan J Robinson

Having read two of her books — one which I liked a lot until the end absolutely shit the bed, and one which I disliked all the way through — Ottessa Moshfegh.

lauren oyler

roth

― difficult listening hour, Tuesday, February 9, 2021 10:39 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Crazy From the Heat is a great read

Orlando Bloom

jeet heer

neal stephenson

guy who wrote the Bible. boring af

uh, there were a bunch of guys who wrote it ... they even like named some of the books after themselves?

no i think it was a guy named Michael Bible?

All those postwar realist "big" American writers, Bellow, Updike, Roth etc

xpost Thx, very nearly sprayed a mouthful of soup across the room just then

Nathan J Robinson

he's a great choice for this thread

Joan Didion

dave marsh

Poe

Lovecraft

George Gissing

ben lerner

Brad i love you but this will just turn into yet another "the pictures are not on trial" fuckwits of ilx thread

i say "will"

Jurgen Habermas

Not sure if I entirely mean this or not but dang he can be a slog, however insightful

No bad writers, read everything.

this thread should have been about other ilxors only for that extra needle

I am a bad reader

I don’t necessarily think Ann Beattie is a bad writer, but I’m not sure whether she’s a good novelist.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/book-review-a-wonderful-stroke-of-luck/

Read what terrifies you. Read tweets.

I don’t necessarily think Ann Beattie is a bad writer, but I’m not sure whether she’s a good novelist.

https://bookandfilmglobe.com/fiction/book-review-a-wonderful-stroke-of-luck/

― We’re Up All Night To Get Lochte (Raymond Cummings), S

I have the same problem with her stories. I read ...Dana Falcon at the start of lockdown.

going for maximum controversy here, everyone ready?

David Walliams

Brad i love you but this will just turn into yet another "the pictures are not on trial" fuckwits of ilx thread

― The Scampo Fell to Earth (Noodle Vague), Saturday, February 13, 2021 5:27 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

i feel like “this thread is a terrible idea” is there subtextually in the opening posts

Anyway Comrade Alph otm everything is good nothing is forbidden lol for biden

it is important to recognize what is bad so it can not be respected and/or repeated

ok yeah i know that recognizing it doesn't actually help

My moaning about other people's moaning is just as bad

Anyway D H Lawrence is for shit

otm

I dig many of his poems and stories, though I'm frightened about rereading WIL.

Bob Vickery

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

This thread makes me feel sane. Have always been mystified by how Groff is so popular. Just can't read her stuff at all.

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

I find this really weird too. I've seen some people speculate it's something to do with TV being the most popular storytelling medium, but idk. There's a sense with a lot of fiction that everything is sort of ethereal or gaseous or something, like lack of descriptions of anything, nobody has a last name or maybe even a first name, no anchors in reality even in stories that aren't subverting reality in any other way.

I don't really like it, not least because after a certain point people are just doing it because they read other people doing it. But also I like things to have a sense of the real world even if within that a lot of elaborate fiction can still happen. Cheever for me is a good classic example of very real settings but plenty of experimentation and even magic or unreality in a few stories. I personally really like that.

there's a lot of stuff in fiction or non-fiction, and also in journalism, that i see and think 'why are you writing like this', and the answer i think is usually 'because i saw someone else do it'

virality i suppose.

yeah that edit dow is wayyyyy better.

scott, waterface: Glad yall like it better. The hyperabundance of specifics in the original vs. inertia of character suggest anxiety---of narrator, and maybe of character, with what he regards as "a personal weakness" that he's "been aware of all his life:: what, since birth? But anxiety, self-distrust, conflictedness, can feel like that. Still, she doesn't need quite so much to make the point. xpost clipped cadences help make it here, and specifics, what where he is and thinks and feels all function as enough description for me, in this case, in this little excerpt.

Tell and show can be the same thing if you portion it right, don't go on and on. In On Writing, Stephen King says he knows that he over-describes, over-explains, because he's afraid he won't be understood, that he's still little brother who drops the ball etc.

yeah people talk about 'good telling' v 'bad telling' or whatever. none of these things that seem like rules are really rules, just techniques to consider, i think.

This, in The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck which I thought was exceptional, doesn't read too different to the Station Eleven bit?

She sits on the very same footstool she always used to sit on as a child when her grandmother was telling stories. This footstool was the one thing she asked for when her grandmother offered to give her something for her new home. She sits in the hallway on this footstool, leaning against the wall, her eyes closed, not touching the food and drink a friend has set before her. For seven days she will sit like this. Her husband tried to pull her to her feet, but he couldn’t manage it against her will. When the door clicked shut behind him, she was glad.

But the woman has just lost her child so it feels like it fits the scene and the character. Not that the whole book isn't as sparse, but it's a hard book about hard lives. Sometimes it's startling in its simplicity:

On this seventh day the daughter realizes for the first time that she herself is also a daughter, one who has been alive all this time and whose life is only now, with a short delay of seventeen years, breaking down. No one can predict when it will be revealed that a wish is going to be left unfulfilled. Her mother sits down beside her, takes her hands, and says: Your father was beaten to death by the Poles.

And it makes you pause with an original idea:

Even before this, she’d thought at times that deprivation made people more alike, made their movements, down to the gestures of their hands and fingers, ever more predictable. When she encountered other people in the woods who were also looking for wood, she saw their bending over, their breaking twigs, their stripping off the dry leaves — exactly resembling her own bending, breaking, and stripping. When it came down to surviving the hunger and cold, and nothing more, all human beings adopted this same economy of movement, perhaps still common to them from back when they were animals, while everything that distinguished them from each other was suddenly recognizable as a luxury.

But could you still accuse the writing, if not the emotion, of blandness?

I haven't read The End of Days, but I hate-read Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos. The obsessive and icky older-man-dominating-a-younger-woman plot and the secrecy and deception of the GDR in East Berlin at the end of the Cold War were the ostensible heart of it, and it was painful to read.

In retrospect there were a lot of clues given in the book that made it seem more complex than I initially thought and make me ~kind of want to revisit it, but I probably won't

I didn't enjoy Kairos, I think perhaps on some level it was very good but like you I found the characters, especially the man, and their relationship unbearable. I liked her other two novels though, especially Visitation.

i'm reading Kairos right now and i'm finding it extraordinary

the thing i think isn't being discussed here yet is the way that some fiction really works on accretion - it relies upon the build-up of sentences, of certain colours and weightings, to achieve its effect. like stacked cups. it needs basic sentences and bland sentences to off-set the colourful sentences and add up to a larger effect. cathedral-building lol! it's difficult, and with lesser writers it results in just chewing on an affectless mash, but i really love what Erpenbeck manages with Kairos (even in translation!). even if i don't always appreciate the characters' moves, she expresses the truth of the world with such an interesting mixture of what seems clear-as-glass and emotion-laden or sensory. it's an effect i think you can only achieve over many sentences and paragraphs, not by weighing one metaphor at a time. it's not an atomized style, in other words, if that makes any sense.

i don't think that's the effect ESJ-M is going for, or Groff, but it's a characteristic of many of the authors i love. even someone like Delillo, who writes these delicious chewy ultraviolet individual sentences - the reason his great books are so great is the way they add up to something, there's a macrostructure going on at the same time as the microstructure. architectural, yeah - not people wrongly use that term because of the way he likes to describe how systems work. it's architectural because the sentences form something together, a silhouette or a scaffolding that the reader intuits without ever being shown.

A student giving a presentation about their aesthetics this morning listed an ESJM book as one of their favorites. Luckily they saved themselves by listing The Mountain Goats as their favorite band.

I like p sparse sentences just fine, and I also like more chaotic sentences. I think tho some of the stuff bemoaned upthread is sort of about how much information you are given via those sentences. Or what sort of information. I'm not looking for like a detective novel plot only type scenario but I like details of place, colours, sounds, times of day, these things also layer on top of each other. I accept that nobody has to include those things tho, it's just a preference. And even saying that I'm sure there are writers I like that don't do this.

I mean, I also like spare sentences, but found the excerpt given above (of ESJM’s prose) to be in need of perhaps more clipping, as dow’s version was much better than the published version.

One of my favorite novelists of the past few years has been Vigdis Hjorth, and her sentences tend to be pretty snippy, but as sean gramophone noted, the way they build has a hypnotic effect— rarely have I wanted to put one of her books down, as the sentences seems to be just about to break apart into a total fiasco at any moment.

"Luckily they saved themselves by listing The Mountain Goats as their favorite band."

obviously a Marxist...

Oh yeah, they’re an English major with Creative Writing and Anthropology minors, and they use gender neutral pronouns, of course they are a Marxist

Hm, losing "He is capable of action but prone to inertia" bothers me tbh, it may not be something important but it's something imparted - that he's not just a dreamer.

"He is capable of action but prone to inertia" sounds like an extract from a school report.

lol otm

i don't think that's the effect ESJ-M is going for, or Groff, but it's a characteristic of many of the authors i love. even someone like Delillo, who writes these delicious chewy ultraviolet individual sentences - the reason his great books are so great is the way they add up to something, there's a macrostructure going on at the same time as the microstructure. architectural, yeah - not people wrongly use that term because of the way he likes to describe how systems work. it's architectural because the sentences form something together, a silhouette or a scaffolding that the reader intuits without ever being shown.

Funny, I read The Names within the last year and I found the sentences (mostly) beautiful but overall it didn't add up to enough for me. Then I read Underworld and LOVED it. Tried Libra and couldn't get into it. The big thing that's missing for me is characterization, I don't need a ton of it, but all of his characters talk the same and are kind of these blank slates. I think he does a much better job of characterization, though, than someone like Pynchon.

Hm, losing "He is capable of action but prone to inertia" bothers me tbh, it may not be something important but it's something imparted - that he's not just a dreamer.

Not trying to pick on anyone here, so no offense, but I think what bothers me about this and the other long except above is the strongest/most interesting emotion or characteristic here is the intertia. I want to hear way more about the intertia. Everyone's capable of action. Unless you just sit on the couch all day. So let's hear more about that. What do they dream about? What will make them get off the couch?

What was the description of the window the other day, lively? And someone suggested depressingly lively? Same thing. If someone looks out a window and thinks a scene is depressing, that's way more interesting than if the same scene is lively.

it needs basic sentences and bland sentences to off-set the colourful sentences and add up to a larger effect. cathedral-building lol! it's difficult, and with lesser writers it results in just chewing on an affectless mash,

This, exactly. A bland sentence "The scene out the window was lively." accompanied by a wild description of color, sensory detail etc