This week I’ve gone bad. I rail against bad blog conventions, and then refute my own point with a link to an excellent post that breaks my rules. Go me. Then there are bad endings, bad TV and an argument for bad writing.
Meanwhile, prompted by Alexandra Sokoloff, I obsess about lists. Hilary Mantel finds her inspiration deep in her Daily. And Larry Brooks tears a movie apart to find the bones of story within its still warm flesh.
Oh. Almost forgot one bad thing. There’s bad sex. And at least one throbbing organ. I promise.
I’m a great maker of lists. There’s not a problem in life or writing that I haven’t broken down into heavily doodled bullet points. This week, Alexandra Sokoloff explored the power of lists as a trick for getting out of a writing impasse. Scroll down, and you’ll see one of the commenters adds a useful list of his own: ten links to Viagra sites.
Although I love to make lists, I usually ignore posts with titles like 15 Reason Your Writing Smells of Cheese or 10 Sexual Euphemisms to Spice up Your Prose. I think its a lazy convention and it smacks of marketing. I don’t like the smack of marketing. The sin is compounded if the poster uses one of those glossy image services, and adds a picture of a woman pointing at cheese (that’s for the cheese headline). Or a pretty woman with thick framed glasses suggesting naughtiness by holding a finger to her lips (that’s the sex one, do keep up).
And then, this week, Darcy Pattison described 5 likely reactions to novel feedback, and I found that I didn’t mind the format at all. Which means I’ll have to re-examine my prejudices yet again. The reactions are: ‘Yes!’ ‘Oh!’ ‘No? Uh-oh!’ and ‘Huh?’, and each one corresponds to a potentially useful type of input. Oddly she left out one of my favorites: ‘march out of the room in a defensive huff’.
Not sure if it’s new, but io9.com has sub-branded a book section called bookvortex where they’ve been been running posts about writing all week. These included a set of questions put to a range of contemporary SF writers. The questions that grabbed me were: what do you do when your novel goes off course? How do you bridge the gap between two cool moments in a novel? And what do you do when a key character goes wrong?
I sometimes poke gentle fun at Larry Brooks because of his tendency to throw brickbats at his ideological opponents in the structure wars. But I always return because his site is useful and entertaining. This week he presents one of those simple but incredibly useful ideas: deconstructing an existing work.
I have a hard time with reality — which is one reason for my compulsive list making. But let’s face it, the real thing is infinitely preferable to reality TV. Which takes the believable, interesting, compelling and sexy parts of life, folds them up and flushes them away. Then it replaces them with a tired set of conventions and advert-break tension points. So I should have hated Nathan Bransford’s post about the lessons writers can learn from Reality TV. I didn’t. In fact it’s an entertaining analysis of the things you should learn or know in order to engage with the publishing industry. I’ve bookmarked this and I’ll return to it when I get to the query letter stage. He missed a trick though. He could have named it 5 Things I Learned About Writing While Watching Reality TV.
Booker Award winner Hilary Mantel wrote a piece this week about inspiration. She tried to answer the perennial question: ‘where do you get your ideas?’ In her case, the answer is: the newspaper small ads.
I have a theory that all good people suspect they’re just not as good as they should be. Maybe that’s what makes them good, what it takes for them to keep trying, instead of, say, tailgating people in their enormous SUVs on the freeway and flashing their ridiculous halogen high beams right in other peoples’ eyes. (That was a random not-good person. Others are, of course, available).
This week furnished a good few brands of badness. We’ve already seen bad TV, now let’s get to some bad sex.
The time has come once again for the Bad Sex Awards, and the Guardian celebrated the fact that Philip Roth has won a place on the shortlist with his new novel. He’s up against some stiff competition, though. It should be noted that this is an award for bad writing about sex, and not for writing about bad sex. Though, to be clear, it does cover bad writing about bad sex.
Author Sarah Duncan posted a penetrating piece on the Guardian’s blog about the difficulties of writing well about sex. Apparently it’s all in the head — and this paragraph is just too good not to quote:
So what’s left? Well, how about emotions, physical sensations and images. In the middle of sex I’m not thinking, ooh he’s just thrust his throbbing organ against my front bottom, so why should a character? Instead of writing about actions, I concentrate on the responses, how it feels both mentally and physically. Get into the head of the character and you can create the illusion that yes, this is real, this is happening to you the reader.
Which about takes care of my teaser all on its own.
At Write To Done Glen Allsop argued the merits of writing rubbish. A trick I favor, though it’s by no means uncontroversial.
At the Self Editing Blog John Robert Marlow discussed the bad ending. He actually described seven variations. He called his post Coming to a Bad End. Now how might he have made it more snappy? And where’s the picture of a girl pointing at a dead end sign? Honestly. Clueless.
