Bad Writing

You can have a relatively good grasp on the English language, and still write poorly. This may mean you are a bad person.

Okay, that’s a little too harsh. I am thinking about other creative writing I have read. Personality comes through in expository writing also, but interesting things come out in fiction.

In writing about fan fiction specifically, I think I have mentioned (besides the obsession with sex, though apparently that makes it specifically “slash” fiction) that there is often too much emphasis on how special the protagonist is.

When it’s written by a teenager, that makes perfect sense. That’s a time in life when you are trying to establish your identity and find your strengths, and your direction in life, and if that ends up playing out with a bit of popular culture that resonates with the writer, that’s fine. It’s normal. One hopes that at some point the writers will develop an understanding of their unique worth, developing their talents and working through weaknesses, and learn that each person is special, and they don’t need to be more special than anyone else, but that’s a lot of maturity and it takes time. It takes time to develop writing skills too, though, so it works out.

Sadly, this maturity does not always happen. I am thinking of writing I have read. It was not fan-fiction. It was also not published. It was just stuff that people wrote to be creative, and maybe they had thoughts of doing things with it somewhere down the road, but it was not very good. I may or may not be related to these people.

The one writer only had three short pieces. One was an essay, and the other two were short fiction about a rabbit. The fiction showed a lack of judgment regarding puns and repetitions, going far too long with one list, and not being funny, even though they were totally supposed to be funny. All of them displayed some resentment, and some concern over specialness, which was unfortunate for an adult male. Those things totally made sense if you knew the person, because that’s how he was in life.

The other had a few short stories and some poems. I remember my initial impression was just being shocked at some of the content, because I thought we had the same morals, and yet her characters did not act in a way reflecting that.

What strikes me more looking back is how often things changed. When the singer got into drugs, first it was shady maneuvering on the part of the bad boy, and then it was totally an accident, that he never intended, and he wasn’t so shady and the other love interest wasn’t so good, and then she was a burnout and then she was not and there was just no consistency. The other story was like that too, where the father was bewitched, or just evil, and the heroine was strong and plucky, but just really needed to rely on the hero. 

Again, when you know the writer, that makes perfect sense. She has no core, and so she floats around a lot, trying to find what works in the moment, and I know that now, and I figured it out long after reading her writing, but I hadn’t realized how far back it went. When I was a teenage girl and she was a young adult, I didn’t know it, but it was there.

Some of it I relate to. I totally get the paradox of the desire to have a strong heroine, and yet the allure of a rescue. At some point though, you realize that you can’t always have it both ways. Having the heroine rush into the burning building, and get people out, but then what? She goes back in and gets smoke inhalation? She almost made it out, but not quite? If the need for a rescue means she did something stupid, I don’t want it. You just can’t have it both ways all the time, and independence and competence are good.

To be fair, part of that for me was realizing that no one is coming to rescue me, and I just better be strong and independent on my own.  And it’s not that it never makes sense for the hero to swoop in on a white horse—sometimes it does. Unfortunately, this particular person has never moved beyond wanting other people to fix things for her, and most of the time it is stuff that it is not even possible for someone else to fix.

Even reading her recent poetry, there is no center. Things go back and forth, and they follow a pattern of kind of how things should be, but it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work in the same way she doesn’t work.

I know all of this sounds very harsh, and well, it is kind of a fraught relationship, but my point is that personality and character and opinion bleeds into your writing in ways that you are not even aware of. It is a very personal thing to share your writing, because hey, that’s me there, and yet the urge is there to share. Of course, the readers are bringing their own selves into it also, with interesting results there too, so hey, that’s just human relationships, with the regular set of human complications, which I will probably write about tomorrow.

In the meanwhile, there is a moral to this story, that I absolutely want to share, and it’s not just for writers. You can’t get away from yourself, so you better be someone that you can live with.