When good authors write books I don't like
Oct. 7th, 2008 03:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn order of increasing incompetence:
-Jhegaala (Brust). The writing was fine (it's a stretch to say I didn't like it, actually), but it was way depressing. I don't think I laughed once the entire book. This is very weird for a Vlad book. A couple of days later I picked up Dragon on a whim and randomly riffled through it-- Dragon isn't one of my favorites, and it deals with war and death-- and I laughed out loud twice in the span of the two random pages I read. Is Brust, like, okay?
-The Sledding Hill (Crutcher). Seriously, what happened?? Chris Crutcher is one of my favorite (mainstream) YA authors for unflinchingly looking at traumatizing YA events (abuse, teenage sex/pregnancy, abortion, disability, suicide... the list goes on). And one of the things I love about him is that he has great sympathy for his protagonists, who usually do some seriously boneheaded things, and while his adult villains are pretty much solidly black-hearted, with the young antagonists there's always the potential of redemption. So then he ups and writes this book where the protagonist is nice and sweet and thoroughly boring, and faces off with a book-banning crowd made of Evil Religious Types (come on! I thought you were better than that!) and all the Young Evil Religious Types stay that way except one who was Sekritly Gay All Along. I mean, that's all well and good, but there's no paradigm shifting at all, which there is in his best books on both the protagonist and antagonist sides. I was just rolling my eyes the entire time.
-Invasive Procedures (Card and some other guy). If I'd read the Foreword before checking this out, I would've realized some other guy actually wrote it. It took less than a chapter before I thought something was off, and about three chapters into it I said, "There is no freaking way Card wrote this."
Thing is-- you may hate his worldview or his style or his characters or his recent LeGuin-Syndrome tendency to insert random rants into his books, but the man has basic writing skills down. Let's compare two excerpts:
"Nafai woke before dawn on his mat in his father's house. He wasn't allowed to sleep in his mother's house anymore, being fourteen years old. No self-respecting woman of Basilica would put her daughter in Rasa's household if a fourteen-year-old boy were in residence -- especially since Nafai had started a growth spurt at the age of twelve that showed no signs of stopping even though he was already near two meters in height." (the first paragraph of Memory of Earth)
"It was [Monica's] eyes they talked about most, those strikingly green eyes, followed by her brown hair, which extended to her shoulders in layers and curled slightly upward at the tips. Her face, free of makeup-- because her father had told her as a teenager that she didn't need it-- was narrow, angular, and spotted lightly with freckles. She wore black slacks, a white cotton blouse, perfect for the perpetual spring of Los Angeles, and a gray pair of running shoes." (where I gave up on Invasive Procedures in Chapter 3)
Okay. The first excerpt gives a lot of information. You're so busy processing, okay, there's something interesting with the way that genders work in Basilica, and the way children are trained-- as well as, hmm, there seems to be just a hint of self-consciousness to Nafai's point-of-view (we're not sure at this point whether it's pride or embarrassment, and it later comes out that it's a bit of both)-- that it hardly registers that he's also told us that Nafai is a teenager, and tall, and gangly and uncomfortable with his body, and I bet I could draw a thumbnail sketch of him without any more information at all (well, if I could draw). It draws you into the story, and only secondarily gives descriptive information.
The second excerpt is static. It is so busy giving dumb extraneous detail about striking green eyes (Mary Sue alert!!) and what color clothes she wears, as if I care, that it hardly has time to clumsily hint at some sort of father-daughter relationship (which is NEVER followed up on, at least as far as I can tell in my admittedly haphazard skimming). In the hands of a more skilled writer I guess it might hint that she has no fashion sense, because honestly, black slacks and running shoes? But, I mean... I have much less of a sense of Monica than I do of Nafai, even though the paragraph on Monica had a lot more descriptive words in it.
(edited to make excerpt credits more clear)
-Jhegaala (Brust). The writing was fine (it's a stretch to say I didn't like it, actually), but it was way depressing. I don't think I laughed once the entire book. This is very weird for a Vlad book. A couple of days later I picked up Dragon on a whim and randomly riffled through it-- Dragon isn't one of my favorites, and it deals with war and death-- and I laughed out loud twice in the span of the two random pages I read. Is Brust, like, okay?
-The Sledding Hill (Crutcher). Seriously, what happened?? Chris Crutcher is one of my favorite (mainstream) YA authors for unflinchingly looking at traumatizing YA events (abuse, teenage sex/pregnancy, abortion, disability, suicide... the list goes on). And one of the things I love about him is that he has great sympathy for his protagonists, who usually do some seriously boneheaded things, and while his adult villains are pretty much solidly black-hearted, with the young antagonists there's always the potential of redemption. So then he ups and writes this book where the protagonist is nice and sweet and thoroughly boring, and faces off with a book-banning crowd made of Evil Religious Types (come on! I thought you were better than that!) and all the Young Evil Religious Types stay that way except one who was Sekritly Gay All Along. I mean, that's all well and good, but there's no paradigm shifting at all, which there is in his best books on both the protagonist and antagonist sides. I was just rolling my eyes the entire time.
-Invasive Procedures (Card and some other guy). If I'd read the Foreword before checking this out, I would've realized some other guy actually wrote it. It took less than a chapter before I thought something was off, and about three chapters into it I said, "There is no freaking way Card wrote this."
Thing is-- you may hate his worldview or his style or his characters or his recent LeGuin-Syndrome tendency to insert random rants into his books, but the man has basic writing skills down. Let's compare two excerpts:
"Nafai woke before dawn on his mat in his father's house. He wasn't allowed to sleep in his mother's house anymore, being fourteen years old. No self-respecting woman of Basilica would put her daughter in Rasa's household if a fourteen-year-old boy were in residence -- especially since Nafai had started a growth spurt at the age of twelve that showed no signs of stopping even though he was already near two meters in height." (the first paragraph of Memory of Earth)
"It was [Monica's] eyes they talked about most, those strikingly green eyes, followed by her brown hair, which extended to her shoulders in layers and curled slightly upward at the tips. Her face, free of makeup-- because her father had told her as a teenager that she didn't need it-- was narrow, angular, and spotted lightly with freckles. She wore black slacks, a white cotton blouse, perfect for the perpetual spring of Los Angeles, and a gray pair of running shoes." (where I gave up on Invasive Procedures in Chapter 3)
Okay. The first excerpt gives a lot of information. You're so busy processing, okay, there's something interesting with the way that genders work in Basilica, and the way children are trained-- as well as, hmm, there seems to be just a hint of self-consciousness to Nafai's point-of-view (we're not sure at this point whether it's pride or embarrassment, and it later comes out that it's a bit of both)-- that it hardly registers that he's also told us that Nafai is a teenager, and tall, and gangly and uncomfortable with his body, and I bet I could draw a thumbnail sketch of him without any more information at all (well, if I could draw). It draws you into the story, and only secondarily gives descriptive information.
The second excerpt is static. It is so busy giving dumb extraneous detail about striking green eyes (Mary Sue alert!!) and what color clothes she wears, as if I care, that it hardly has time to clumsily hint at some sort of father-daughter relationship (which is NEVER followed up on, at least as far as I can tell in my admittedly haphazard skimming). In the hands of a more skilled writer I guess it might hint that she has no fashion sense, because honestly, black slacks and running shoes? But, I mean... I have much less of a sense of Monica than I do of Nafai, even though the paragraph on Monica had a lot more descriptive words in it.
(edited to make excerpt credits more clear)
