cellini's Diaryland Diary

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Bad Writing is Very Depressing

Is there anything half so depressing as bad fiction? I mean, really bad fiction?

Without getting into a whole explanation of it, I am occasionally active on a board where my activities can involve advising writers on technical matters relating to firearms and naval tactics in the age of sail as well as critiquing their writing.

So today I decided to plunge into the critiquing side of things. I grabbed something from the slush pile, thought for a moment and then started to write up a response before being so repulsed by the whole thing that I just had to close the window.

God bless the very kind, patient people who wish to help untalented writers polish a reeking lump of shit into a polished, reeking lump of shit. I could never teach a creative writing class. Or participate in a fiction writing workshop.

I did all sorts of writing workshops when I was a teenager. I'm very familiar with how it all works. If you think fiction can be bad, try leading a group of high school students workshopping poetry or songs. Unless you have a group chosen for being gifted, it is a miserable experience. God forbid anyone say anything negative about little miss sunshine's poem because this is about her FEELINGS and her FEELINGS are very important. Very important and always right and thus there can not possibly be anything wrong with little miss sunshine's poem. Oh, no.

I have some suggestions for this particular writer. Complaints, really. In the form of direct insults.

How do you explain to someone who is 35 years old that we do not need 5 expositional paragraphs explaining the character's life story in order to follow a very short story about a hunting trip? DON'T TELL ME. SHOW ME.

Even if you cut that crap out, his sentences just suck. There's always words that just don't need to be there. Then there's no real story. Just some stuff happening. What are we left with here? There is nothing to salvage.

Dude, you're just a shitty writer. Please stop writing and take up golf or whatever it is that people do.

Maybe this is why I have come to appreciate the genre of comic books (or graphic novels or whatever the fuck) more in recent years. The medium allows for an exceptional economy of words. So much shit can be cut.

4:45 p.m. - 2007-08-22

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