It’s not all negative.\u00a0 I had a great time at Dragon-Con,\u00a0 the con-crud is not (so far) really bad, and the bad writing was\/is hilarious.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t trash other peoples’ books in public, so I won’t tell you who wrote this gasper, only that it’s not in SF\/F (I indulged my interest in another genre).\u00a0\u00a0 I won’t even quote it because someone lurking here would undoubtedly run it through a search engine and figure it out, after which someone (maybe a different someone) would hasten to tell the author that I trashed the book, and the author’s fans would then come hurtling down on me, and those who like internet fights would sit around cheering.\u00a0 I\u00a0 have a better idea.<\/p>\n
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I actually read three books over the course of the trip and part of a fourth.\u00a0\u00a0 The best-written was a nonfiction book on Icelandic history; the next best pair were a) mystery and b) science fiction.\u00a0 The fourth is our Lesson of the Week on how not to write.<\/p>\n
What could possibly go wrong with a published book?\u00a0\u00a0 The wrong words, the wrong order, and lack of editing.<\/p>\n
What wrong words?\u00a0\u00a0 For starters, an overabundance of adjectives.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a rare noun that needs two adjectives (and most don’t need even one, if it’s the right noun.) \u00a0 “Furry, round” [noun], “sad, pitiful [noun], “bulky, green” [noun], “harsh, callous” [noun] are bad enough if this is the pattern for most of the nouns on the page, which it was on too many pages.\u00a0\u00a0 And some of the noun\/adjective pairs don’t fit, attributing emotions and motivations to inanimate objects.\u00a0 Overly vivid verbs were another problem, particularly combined with subjects that could not do the action described.\u00a0 Heavy objects “soared.”\u00a0\u00a0 Clothing and body body parts gained agency, apparently moving around independent of the person they were supposedly attached to.\u00a0 Writers have been warned about this–if a reader suddenly visualizes actual shoes “following” something, it becomes a different kind of story.\u00a0\u00a0 There’s said-bookism (characters gulp, hiss, smirk, instruct, etc instead of saying their lines.)\u00a0 There’s a lot of infodump, both in the added descriptions, the extra adjectives and adverbs, but also in the large chunks of text that are irrelevant to the plot, and delivered in long lumps of explanation.<\/p>\n
Why talk about this?\u00a0 Because one way to develop your own writing is to notice what other writers do wrong, as well as what they do right.\u00a0\u00a0 A really good writer is harder to dissect–you as reader are sucked in and carried along, the good writing having its way with you and not letting you notice it. \u00a0 A less skilled writer offers multiple chances to notice when a phrase throws you out of the story, when you’re losing interest during an infodump,\u00a0 when you have to read something right to be sure what the writer meant, when the rhythm of the prose is monotonous. \u00a0 Good writing is more than avoiding error, but competent writing (a step down from good) will avoid the errors that infest bad writing.<\/p>\n
—————-<\/p>\n
So what about the con-crud.\u00a0 Typical–started with dry scratchy throat and has progressed to a fairly typical post-convention array of symptoms.\u00a0 I will recover.\u00a0 I’m hoping for a short bout, but you never know whose virus you’ve got or what it is until it’s fully developed.<\/p>\n
Otherwise Dragon-Con was a lot of fun, as usual, and thanks to my own idiocy (arriving at the airline desk on Thursday without my driver’s license) I now have personal experience that will show up in another book someday.\u00a0 Paksworld isn’t much on ID documentation, but the SF story-universes are.\u00a0 Heh-heh-heh.\u00a0 Not having photo ID did keep me out of some things at DragonCon that I’d hoped to do, but…so it is when you’re careless.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s not all negative.\u00a0 I had a great time at Dragon-Con,\u00a0 the con-crud is not (so far) really bad, and the bad writing was\/is hilarious.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I don’t trash other peoples’ books in public, so I won’t tell you who wrote this gasper, only that it’s not in SF\/F (I indulged my interest in another genre).\u00a0\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61,53],"tags":[62,82,112],"class_list":["post-2305","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-craft","category-life-beyond-writing","tag-craft-of-writing","tag-dragoncon","tag-life-beyond-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2305"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2306,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2305\/revisions\/2306"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2305"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2305"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.paksworld.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2305"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}