The inevitable Hunger Games thread

i mean, it is better-written than twilight, and less horribly anti-feminist, but that is the lowest of bars.

a friend of mine reads katniss as gay, and that's why she's such an unbelievable opaque-to-herself weirdo in general and about peeta and gale in particular. i don't really believe that was collins's intention, but it totally makes sense to me.

an english grad student way to make bad writing more interesting than it is, maybe

i keep calling the books badly written, but like Dan, it didn't really stop me from reading them in a day. i do think they're compelling even if i mostly wish they had been totally different.

i read them all in a day, too! & they are totally compelling and interesting in all kinds of ways. but collins is a terrible writer.

I do think "I didn't buy the way the story was presented" and "this wasn't the story I wanted her to tell" are both entirely valid criticisms btw; I just think in general "this is badly-written" is a lazy way of saying that and I wish people would cut to the chase.

there are lots of great writers who don't really 'cut to the chase,' so i'm not sure that's true

if i had written these novels, they would be all about thresh and gale and i wish she had done more with those characters (not killed thresh off, made gale a person) but i have to admit i think peeta is a really interesting and complex and uncommon character. fuck the love triangle but props to collins for coming up with him.

no no i want to be very clear, i think suzanne collins is a bad writer on basically every level. so yes while its true i wish shed told a different story, and barring that i wish shed told the story she did tell in a different way, but barring even the two of those things i think shes a horrible writer on a very basic stylistic level

by badly written, i mostly mean long strings of undifferentiated, unsubordinated straight narration. this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

the peeta in the movie is godawful btw; not convinced the director read the books.

by badly written, i mostly mean long strings of undifferentiated, unsubordinated straight narration. this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

How is one supposed to avoid that in a book written in first person present tense?

(The obvious answer is "don't write in first person present tense", which to me is a "I don't buy the way the story is presented" criticism, which is also a more specific point to make and actually allows for a conversation about storytelling technique and what could have been more effective/interesting. Hence my assertion "this is badly written" is usually a sign that the person making the comment is being lazy.)

by badly written, i mostly mean long strings of undifferentiated, unsubordinated straight narration. this happened and then this happened and then this happened.

Well, her background is as a writer for children's TV. She claims that when she first started writing fiction (the Underland Chronicles), narrative prose (as opposed to dialogue) was particularly difficult for her.

you can still use grammatical subordination, i think. but yes, reddening is right. some tracking between katniss's pov and a narrative voice would have improved the writing. you're also right; i'm being lazy. i lent these books to my other sister, the non-hunger-games-evangelist, so i don't have them to refer to.

Ah, here it is:

“Prose is full of many challenges and unexplored territory for me because I came to it later in my life… I’ve been doing scriptwriting for 27 years and books for maybe 10 years now. I think I started the first Gregor book, Gregor the Overlander, when I was 38.

“I’d be clicking along through dialogue and action sequences. That’s fine, that’s like stage directions. But whenever I hit a descriptive passage, it was like running into a wall. I remember particularly there’s a moment early on when Gregor walks through this curtain of moths, and he gets his first look at the underground city of Regalia. So it’s this descriptive scene of the city. Wow, did that take me a long time to write! And I went back and looked at it. It’s just a couple of paragraphs. It killed me. It took forever.”

haha yeah her physical descriptions are so terrible

it took me forever to figure out what the big murder clock looked like in the second book. still dont think i could draw a picture of it

You mean the Quarter Quell arena?

that makes sense, John. the dialogue is sometimes good. peeta gets some funny lines.

during all the dialogue-free gritty shaky cam scenes i kinda thought 'this is nice but i'd hate to think what these parts of the book are like'

yes.

btw heres the kind of pargraph that thomp is complaining about upthread, and that makes me call SC a horrible writer:

"When I was younger, I scared my mother to death, the things I would blurt out about District 12, about the people who rule our country, Panem, from the far-off city called the Capitol. Eventually I understood this would only lead us to more trouble. So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts. Do my work quietly in school. Make only polite small talk in the public market. Discuss little more than trades in the Hob, which is the black market where I make most of my money. Even at home, where I am less pleasant, I avoid discussing tricky topics. Like the reaping, or food shortages, or the Hunger Games. Prim might begin to repeat my words and then where would we be?"

the movie is worse, i have to say. like she's not a great describer, but i had some sense of the world of the books that was totally absent from the movie. also the movie did nothing with the proliferation of screens, always performing, being watched, which, really? movies were built for that kind of thing.

i dunno that felt like a dominant theme of the movie to me?

no way. there has never been a movie as bad as "So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts."

and i thought i would enjoy how good tucci and elizabeth banks are but it's almost depressing? they're so much better than the movie. also that girl who played rue. too good for the movie.

xxp but we just got simple shots of them talking to stanley tucci. no like literal proliferation of screens onscreen. maybe it's a small thing but it seemed like such a gimme.

also how did they manage to fuck up the reaping scene at the opening! also a total gimme; you wouldn't think it would be possible to film a non-harrowing version of that, but i was like, yawn.

I found it harrowing, ~shrug~.

i thought it was pretty harrowing! strong holocaust imagery + stuff. all the kids were out in their shtetl finest waiting in lines

http://hungergamesmovie.org/images/KatnissAtReaping-600x399.jpg

not to ruin this thread but she is Such A Babe

i blame the director; a lot of the acting was bad in a way that suggested to me that he didn't understand the characters. like, jennifer lawrence is supposed to be good, right? but she just played katniss as blankly confused. katniss is constantly furious! and the lenny kravitz casting could have been so good, but he wasn't arch enough. (maybe lenny kravitz can't act, i don't know.)

i don't know; i like and get books a lot more than i like and get movies. but the movie was terrible imo.

jennifer lawrence looks a little like renee zellweger to me, before renee zellweger started hating her life, or whatever happened there.

as a longtime opponent of the advancement of squinty-american actresses in hollywood, i am pro-jlawrence and object to the zellweger comparison

i mean renee zellweger circa empire records! she used to be adorable. i want to like jennifer lawrence, but i can't bring myself to watch winter's bone because i can't watch sad movies anymore.

oh god horseshoe winters bone is really so good

So I learned to hold my tongue and to turn my features into an indifferent mask so that no one could ever read my thoughts.

To be honest, I find this sentence to be very evocative of the type of high-minded, self-absorbed, convinced she is amazing teen that Katniss is at the beginning of the trilogy. Basically, I don't think Katniss is either likable or particularly clever at the beginning of the trilogy and I feel it's reflected in the prose, which after all is supposed to be her real-time inner monologue.

I don't think she ends up waxing poetic by the end but from what I remember, she is much less arch and self-righteous by the end of the trilogy.

Also keep in mind I read a lot of TERRIBLE science fiction and fantasy to the point where a lot of bad writing doesn't even faze me anymore so there should be an unspoken mountain of salt taken with this defense, because that sentence is pretty awful.

you must must must watch WB horseshoe!

:( fine, but if i become inconsolably sad for weeks, i blame you

I will take that responsibility

djp, that sentence isn't really "high-minded, self-absorbed, convinced she is amazing teen" so much as not something a human being would ever think

like if someone told you that they were turning their face into an indifferent mask, you'd be like wtf lulz stfu

a human being would at least throw a comma in there somewhere

if the the only 2 options are overly serious young adult novel diction and wtf lulz stfu text speak then perhaps it is you who should stfu

xpost

i think this sentence is worse:

"Discuss little more than trades in the Hob, which is the black market where I make most of my money."

i believe there's an interesting way to write about someone trying to conceal their feelings from other ppl, even from a present tense first person perspective. that's kinda one of the problems here, i think, and in general what i think ppl actually mean when they say a book is poor writing. i don't think it's laziness. i think it's that ppl can recognize when an author spent a minimal amount of time thinking about how they write things and how they represent ideas in language. collins is an author who - for better or for worse (for better for her, she's rich!) - would rather tell the story in the most expedient way possible. that's what makes the writing poor.

yeah clumsy exposition is always the most hilarious thing to me (xpost)

haha sometimes these books read like the publishing company had a gun to collins's head and she had to pump them out in 24 hours each.

xxp

a human being would at least throw a comma in there somewhere

I wouldn't!

fine, smart guy, a comma wouldn't be correct, but it's there's too much explaining packed into one sentence.