Ready?....Here goes:
Sometimes I hate good writers.
Whew, I feel better already....
As a certified wordnerd and aspiring novelist, I usually enjoy good writing. I love finding witty, brilliant, subtle, and blood-freezing authors in libraries and on the interweb. I like them because they entertain me and take the edge of my aesthetic appetite (see blog title and overarching philosophy). And when people are reading my unfinished stuff, my favorite bit of feedback, the one that makes me toasty inside and keeps me at my keyboard, is not "This is really good and polished and stuff" but the half-exasperated "You can't DO this to me! I need more! Don't you DARE kill that character off!" That way I know it's no longer an academic exercise but an enjoyable experience for the reader. And that's what it's all, ultimately, about.
(Aside: bonus points if you started singing the Hokey Pokey song when you read that line.)
Now, there are many online writing sites out there and occasionally I get dumb enough to check them out. This is always a mistake, and a near occasion of sin, because much of the writing is SO BAD. All the authors seem to be fifteen or so. I was fifteen once, and I learned something from that horrible experience: DO NOT PUBLISH WHAT YOU WRITE AS A FIFTEEN YEAR OLD. Until you can look back at some of your angst-ridden, self-indulgent rants and cringe and want to claw your eyes out, you're still in the "tripe" stage of writing. Don't worry, we all go through it. Some of us, though, go through it publicly, and this creates a negative experience for the reader, who is forced to sit in a cold bath and put extra glass shards in her shoes to combat the rising tides of Pride In One's Developed Authorial Prowess.
My general response, then, to reading bad writing, is a wince, a swelling of vicarious embarrassment and sympathy for the fledgling author, the realization that there are some pieces that constructive criticism cannot save, and almost immediately thereafter a self-congratulatory round of "I'm not as bad as that, thank the Lord I'm not as bad as that, in fact, I'm much better than that, in fact, I'm the best ever."
Time for the cold bath.
(Intermission no.1: a trend that really grinds my gears in recent fantasy literature, professional and otherwise, is the ubiquity of exotic/archaic spellings. Vampyre. Faerie. Magick. Werwolfe. Okay, I may have made that last one up. But you get the idea. Usually it just makes people look pretentious and is an attempt to hide their hackneyed concept/plot behind "unique" or "creative" spelling. A caveat: I do prefer 'faerie' to 'fairy' IF you're talking about Wild Hunt Fair Folk type beasties and not tiny, possibly winged, Artemis Fowl-style things. But even better than faerie is fay/fae. Best of all is the euphemism -- the idea is that these fairies are so terrifying (what with their packs of ghostly mastiffs hunting the souls of dead children and hexing innocent farmers into insubstantiality) that no one wants to say their proper name aloud. Because I am a Terry Pratchett fan, my preferred euphemism is "the Lords and Ladies," but there are others. End Intermission.)
Then there are the thresholders. The ones who have clearly been writing for a while and have some sense of what they're doing, but still have a few brain-itching flaws. Everyone seems to be so kind and encouraging to these people. And sometimes, technically, there's very little wrong with their writing that could not be ascribed to a matter of taste. But when you stumble upon one of these actually-not-half-bad writers, especially after reading a few poems about how no one understands the cry of the darkness with the sweet taste of bloode and going on the inevitable resultant superiority trip... well, the defensive insecure little girl in me who read too much Strunk and White and not enough Natalie Goldberg starts to get snappy. "Oh, yes," she sneers, "that metaphor was indeed striking, but your exposition is clumsy, your voice insipid, your characterization uneven, your pacing slightly off." (All this, needless to say, in her best upper-class British twit accent).
And really, there is no call for that. The writing is decent; get over it. Yes, there are others in the world besides me and my pets capable of writing decent fiction. Are the criticisms unfounded? No. But do I perhaps need to chill out and congratulate someone on a nice piece that they've probably put more work into than you've done in a year of recreational scribbling? Most certainly.
(Intermission no.2: the above does not cancel out my belief that when it comes to writing, there comes a point where either you feel it or you don't. Some people, with hard work and dedication, can transform themselves into very good writers who nonetheless will remain very good forever and never quite get to great, because feeling the differences between the words and sensing the rhythm of sentences and the rightness of dialogue are not natural to them and can never quite be taught. Now, for every really good writer who will never be great, there are probably five potentially great writers who, because of laziness or cowardice, will never get much past mediocre. But I think it's still something to keep in mind. End Intermission.)
Finally, there are the legitimately good writers. The ones who might (gasp) be a bit better than me. More drive, more heart, more raw creativity, more experience, a more lyrical mind, better educated, snappier, more decisive. Doesn't matter, really. They're better. Or at least as good as. And these are the writers whose work we enjoy, even though we notice a resistance to that very enjoyment deep in ourselves. Definitely not charitable or in keeping with the philosophy of The Snarling Id (namely: aesthetic pleasure is to be cultivated regardless of personal prejudices). But there, and a result of that same frightened inner child that took such pleasure in tearing down the awful and OK writers. Something I'm working on, and something I wanted to get off my chest.
Any other talent-haters out there, who must struggle not to be outright envious and hateful towards people who outskill you at your chosen skill?
On the lighter side, to cheer us all up: more hypothetical band names
Life Force Cubicle -- this one is a Google translator version of the Russian word for hemoglobin. I'm thinking office industrial, with some Lady Gaga-esque birth imagery and staplers used as percussion.
Asymptote of Insanity -- if the genre mathcore has not yet been created, I propose a long-haired make-up-wearing screamer call up his bass-playing buddy and start it. Could be the biggest thing since Nirvana.
Finally: a song, highly applicable to the fifteen year old writer of tripe. (I love ya, girls. Keep on writing.)
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