The inevitable Hunger Games thread

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.

i find show, don't tell to be an annoying and not always accurate piece of editorial advice, but collins could have benefited from it.

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.

lotta commas there

h8 u guys

i picture that sentence with an engine room, and a tiny scottish man yelling, "i cant do it suzanne, i cant add another expository clause, theres just not enough power"

only vaguely related: i was rereading pale king the other day and wondering how long dfw spent on some of those sentences. i know he didn't write them in one go. he clearly labored over them.

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

there are posters on this very board who write things like that on a daily basis in their interactions with each other so I really don't know what to say to you

at this point I really just want to go back to my original statement, which was "the way she wrote didn't get in the way of my enjoyment of the story"

i'm kinda really picky about the fiction prose i read tbh, so probably a bad example on the other end of things. i've complained loudly on ilx about how terrible i thought GoT was (another piece of media where i thought the movie/tv show was much better than the original work)

Yeah, I would agree w/that. Her prose is definitely clunky and graceless in places, but the imaginative plotting compensated, IMO. Honestly, I read so few novels outside the realm of Serious Literary Fiction that I was excited to submit to a page-turner.

(xpost to Dan)

there are posters on this very board who write things like that on a daily basis in their interactions with each other so I really don't know what to say to you

also, i don't hold a super high opinion of every single poster on this board (tho i do of some!)

I am holding my tongue and turning my features into an indifferent mask so nobody guesses who DJP is referring to

this feels exactly like the harry potter arguments

it's a page-turner for kids, it's kind of like...stylish prose isn't even important, plotting is. at this kind of book's best you don't notice the lumpen prose because you've already turned the page