100 Actual Worst Writers Of All Time

1) Adam Thirlwell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/24/adam-thirlwell-author-author

"...had taken the pseudonym of Daniel Kharms (a name derived from English, with its charm, its harm)"

2) Laura Barton obvs ffs

3. Kate Harding

4. Jerry Jenkins

5. Dan Fucking Brown

(for the dismal quality of his actual writing, for the baneful trends he begat upon popular American fiction, and for the dumptruck o' cash he gained from the whole grim enterprise)

6. James Patterson (or the army of hacks that writes his books for him)

yeah, I recently found myself in a situation in which I had a fair amount of hours to kill & nothing to involve myself with, save for a copy of Kiss the Girls. I finished the thing in a matter of hours (not boasting of my speed-reading ability - I'm actually average at best in that regard - I'm just underlining how vapid his writing style is) & immediately forgot what I had read, like I had just seen a Bruckheimer film or eaten a large quantity of bland junk food: there was enough there to propel me through the experience & nothing overtly offensive to the senses or anything - it was just perfectly empty. In terms of crime/detective fiction, then, I guess it was sort of the anti-James Ellroy.

7. Tim LaHaye and/or Jerry Jenkins

I thought you were saying Daniel Kharms was a bad writer and I was FLABBERGASTED!

Jeff Archer is surely a rolled-gold certainty in this category.

'As The Crow Flies', all 700+ pages of lazy, bombastic self-indulgence, is the most egregious example of his trademark turgid prose, shallow characterisation and ludicrous coincidence-driven plot-progression. He never misses an opportunity to pat himself on the back for his own clever research, and his habit of pointlessly obscuring details (that you realise don't matter much wnen they are finally revealed 300 pages later) was nearly enough to make me throw the book out of the train window somewhere between Perth and Adelaide.

anne rice. (i actually liked interview with a vampire when i was 17, but i couldn't make it past about page 50 of lestat, and then a few years later i tried one of her witch books and it was just godawful.)

(with pop novelists especially, you can tell that once they reach a certain level of success they're able to just ignore their editors, and their writing gets predictably worse and worse.)

Archer's books allegedly have to be extensively rewritten from the manuscripts he turns in, so christ alone knows what his actual writing's like.

9. It's gonna be easy to fill this list up with hacks and pop fiction so I might as well start the "how dare you diss my favourite author?" bunfight by citing D.H. Lawrence as probably the worst critically admired writer I've ever read.

You bastard. I'd save him for his travel writing and lit crit stuff alone.

Yeah his criticism is worthy, the novels not so much.

I can live with his poems, to be fair. But fuck me his novels have got some bad bad sentences happening.

is your username from a dh lawrence novel?

11. Michael Bracewell!!

well...not really, this is just based on me picking up England is Mine again the other day and being shocked at the quality of the writing. haven't bothered with any of his other stuff.

xpost haha no? which one?

12. Thomas Friedman

13. a baby

14. Ayn Rand

James 'Celestine Prophecy' Redfield.

erm sorry, that's #15.

16. Daniel Handler

okay, maybe it's not fair to put a writer on the list when i've only read one of his many books, but that one book (adverbs) inspired a feeling of revulsion and hatred toward the writer that i had never experienced before. also, there's the accordion playing, the multiple pseudonyms, etc. etc.

thank you, noodle vague.

Don't know that he's one of the absolute worst, in that he can write, but Iain Sinclair is annoying to anger-inducing levels.

#12 otm

also thank you for DH Lawrence. I cannot for the life of me get into any of his novels.

18. V.C. Andrews

bbbbut Flowers in the Attic... you know, for kids (I remember liking that story at age 9 or so).

19. J.R.R. Tolkein

20. Will Self

21. Carol Ann Duffy

22. Philip K Dick

This thread could get ugly.

was about to suggest Phillip k Dick, what a bloody mess.

23. Me

24 Paolo Coelho

25. J.M. Coetzee - sorry, but it's true :( :( :(

26. Jeff Noon

27. Michael Crichton

28. Stephen King after Misery

29. hegel

30. E.E. "Doc" Smith, although you have to love him too really.

31. Henry James

32. Bram Stoker

33. C.S Lewis

Primarily for the God-bothering bilge, but why not let's chuck Narnia in there too.

Matt DC out of his mind.

might as well say tove jansson and get inb4 someone riling me up

20. Will Self

― Henry Frog (Frogman Henry), Wednesday, February 4, 2009 7:20 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

21. Carol Ann Duffy

― Henry Frog (Frogman Henry), Wednesday, February 4, 2009 7:21 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

22. Philip K Dick

― NotEnough, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 9:01 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

suggest banned btw

34. Carlos Castaneda
35. Richard Bach
36. Deepak Chopra
37. Sir George Trevelyan
38. Lobsang Rampa
39. Shakti Gawain

And yes I have read books by all of them.

good for you, cozwn.

just a wee joke, let's be cool

40. a illiterate man

my my, i think we all need to go to the chall-opticians!!!!!

Yeah I think we need some justifications too. Self I can see as irritating and sometimes over-reliant on schtick but no way is Great Apes a 100 Worst Writers of All Time book. I was gonna defend Tolkein on the grounds of "not as bad a writer as his copyists or C.S. Lewis even" but I see Henry chucked in C.S. Lewis who seems kind of fair enough here. Dick did some hack-work - hardly seems to justify 100 Worst Writers status. Have to concur that nominating Henry James just seems plain crazy. I know trolling for fun and profit is grebt but challops without justification is too bleeding easy, c'mon.

Also we could have a huge debate about what makes a good/bad "writer".

i would rather we just keep posting writers till we get to 100 and then we lock the thread and put it in the faq

Yeah I think we need some justifications too.

otm. i gave a citation with mine. and also thirlwell, being a published novelist and guy-on-the-granta list, is sort of more 'important' than yer laura bartons and other pondlife. it struck me as the worst assembly of words i had read from a writer of his 'stature' (he is also an all souls fellow!) in a long time, anyway.

justifications for my nominations:

13. a baby

― max, Tuesday, February 3, 2009 8:55 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

a baby is a really bad writer because he can barely hold the pen and doesnt know any words

40. a illiterate man

― max, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 6:37 AM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

because he cant read or write

If you're saying "lists of 100 are stupid and should be ignored" then yeah but can use thread for discussion anyway. If you're saying "discussing stuff is stupid" then ho hum.

I've only read 'my idea of fun' and 'junk mail' and they put me of ws (what initials!) for life; strikes me he is an ideal candidate for this list cos of his whole style, but i know some'll enjoy him.
toklein plain couldn't write prose for adults and tlotr is def a monument to this worst writer concept.

*put me off, lol

I was challoping really but I've found reading Henry James to be more tedious than reading pretty much any other canonical writer. I find the more a character's thoughts and motivations are spelled out to me the less I care about them (although ironically I was also going to nominate William Gaddis because Carpenter's Gothic irritated me so much).

I'm aware none of this is exactly a radical or original standpoint but I haven't read enough hacky fantasy writers to contribute anything serious.

also there's no need for anyone (not looking at anyone in particular) to get butthurt over this
thread, it obviously could only ever be a bit of weekday fun, no agreement could be possible.

What this thread needs is excerpts of really atrocious prose to illustrate the point.

There is a whole category of writers like PKD and Tolkien, who are not great writers in a technical sense, but have some other quality to their writing that nevertheless sets them apart for the bad or merely average and certainly disqualifies them from being considered the "Worst Writer evah!!".

I'm thinking HP Lovecraft, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke etc. Mainly genre writers. Anyway there are some merely terrible writers:

Exhibit 41:

David Eddings

- rumour has it that anything half-decent of his was written by his wife.

Also to justify Bram Stoker's inclusion, Dracula is a terribly, terribly written book even by the standards of pulp fiction...and it is the best thing he has done. I read some horrible Mummy novella that I think I was forced to hurl across the room because it was so bad.

Also Jeff Noon - one of those horrendous "trendy" SF writers, who just comes across as a very pale William Gibson imitator. And I want to include William Gibson on this list so bad as well...

Just to clarify - you're saying Asimov and Clarke are bad "but"....?

Because I would have to say that was crazy talk.

They may not be the world's best prose stylists, but I doubt they're the worst, and they could spin a yarn.

i like reading them both on science.

41 terry pratchett smug, unfunny, reactionary, in the grand tradition of iris murdoch

To be honest I don't even know what great writers in a technical sense means.

Also MattDC - try A Frolic of His Own for Gaddis.

"The contrails of the more distant aeroplanes were like incandescent spermatozoa, sent out to fertilize the universe."

Guess which national treasure

"a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot"

same author, same book

Amis fils

Well, it's Amis Jnr. And, even worse, you can see him sneering it as he goes. Make him 42.

xp

"a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot"

The man is insane.

Don't actually mind that second example. 'The planes left cum stains in the sky' would have sufficed for the first though.

You're mad. I see that Emma Brockes calls that second one a "flash of brilliance". It sounds like William McGonagall to me. Only worse.

There is a whole category of writers like PKD and Tolkien, who are not great writers in a technical sense, but have some other quality to their writing that nevertheless sets them apart for the bad or merely average

This was what I meant by Philip K Dick. He's not a technically good writer but I enjoy his exploration of ideas. I thought that's what we meant by "Actual Worst Writers" as opposed to just "bad writers".

Sounded more like Captain Beefheart to me.

x-post

Hehe - now that's different. That might well be enjoyable.

Except I don't think Amis was trying to be Beefheart... personally I can't stand Amis's look-at-me-mum-I'm-writing-sentences style of prose, but I know it's an issue that divides people. That spermatozoa quote I've seen used in reviews both to demonstrate how appalling he is and how brilliant he is.

Anyone ever read any vanity press fiction? The kind of book that gets "distributed" to family and friends, then the remaining 974 copies are taken to the tip 10 years later during a garage clear-out. This thread inspired me to dig out an article by Ramsay Campbell in an issue of Shock Express (exploitation culture zine from the 1980s) where he reads one such tome - "Science Fiction Stories" by Mark David Tingay. An example :

"Then after a couple of seconds, the block of ice was sinking beyond belief, then it fell deep down into the mountain's core. When the block of ice was falling very fast down this form of rounded tunnel,its presence was magnetic...Then the block of ice came to a stop.It had landed in a marsh, and the temperature was cold at the start, now at boiling point as the ice floated around in the marsh.The temperature was increasing with every second, then as the block lay there, it started to melt until John finally was floating on his own...Then, as the ship came into dock, it roared then turned into a golden shade, with John as the top figure."

I went to a talk about Becoming A Writer or something with various local published authors reading from their latest novels, and after everyone else had read a brief paragraph or two this fantasy author read an entire several-page battle scene, with people slipping in spilt innards and everything. Felt like hours.

(Yep, I do realise I'd be on this list if I wrote anything in longer form than ILX posts.)

Don't know that he's one of the absolute worst, in that he can write, but Iain Sinclair is annoying to anger-inducing levels.

― James Morrison, Wednesday, 4 February 2009 07:01 (5 hours ago) Bookmark

Please don't make me repost Robin Van Injury here, because I'm sorely tempted to

(I am arguably a Sinclair stan though so rose-tinted glasses and all that)

many xxxpost to Ned

Come on, I think it is quite clear what I mean by "technically good" writers (i.e. they use language deftly, they can construct believable characters, they write with a tight structure, and so on), even if we might not all exactly agree precisely on the definition.

PKD is not a conventionally good writer - half his novels appear to have been written at breakneck drug-fuelled speed, have sub-plots and themes that are introduced and then abandoned with little logic beyond the need to get the damn thing finished, are structurally exasperating and so on...and yet many people (rightly) would agree that they are still very much worth reading for a whole host of reasons.

Similarly Asimov's Foundation series is all plot, contains very two-dimensional characters etc but to say he is a bad writer would be crazy, if we assess his overall popularity and importance to the genre.

Lovecraft - surely I don't need to explain why someone would find old HP to be a bad writer? But the single-mindedness of his approach, both stylistically andn thematically still make him worth reading.

Anyway yes there is obviously something confusion here - when I think of classifying the "worst writer" I think of writers who are irredeemable on every level, even within their genre; by that criteria I don't think PKD, Tolkien, Asimov, Lovecraft should be included in this list for the reasons above. Others like NotEnough have clearly taken the thread title differently, so whatever really.

dame cartland

michael winner a fair pick?

robin sharma

and oh jesus stephen donaldson.

I remember a previous ILX Lovecraft thread singling out, among other things, the sheer bonkersness of the measurement "five-tenths feet", which has sprung into my mind from time to time ever since.

stephen donaldson for sure:

http://news.ansible.co.uk/plotdev.html

I'm more than happy with look-at-me-mum-I'm-writing-sentences style(s) of prose, and I completely object to "keep it simple and unpretentious" as a general dictum. I guess some mediocre writers could improve by reining themselves in, and I know overly ornate prose can clunk like lead rain on a tin roof, but I still generally prefer splatter-gun heroics to tight-lipped good taste, if that's all either party has. Except when I don't. I still think good taste is usually a bad thing.

Dick's having written bad books doesn't make him not a conventionally good writer, and his best work is very "conventionally" well-written indeed I think.

xpost to my last one:

"Clench Racing:

The rules are simple. Each player takes a different volume of The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, and at the word "go" all open their books at random and start leafing through, scanning the pages. The winner is the first player to find the word "clench". It's a fast, exciting game -- sixty seconds is unusually drawn-out -- and can be varied, if players get too good, with other favourite Donaldson words like wince, flinch, gag, rasp, exigency, mendacity, articulate, macerate, mien, limn, vertigo, cynosure.... It's a great way to get thrown out of bookshops. Good racing!"

xpost to Noodle Vague

I agree with you, although I don't think I have ever read a conventionally written PKD book. Even the most famous ones go off on bizarre tangents that few other writers would dare mess with.

What do you consider his best work?

I think Do Androids Dream... might be his best sustained writing. I don't think tangents or under-developed sub-plots need to be technical failings, they're pretty common to all kinds of writers. Only a strict Leavisite interpretation of the novel gets overly hung up on looseness in structure. I guess I judge an author's "writerly" qualities - which aren't the only qualities that makes somebody worth reading - on a sentence-level basis. Something to do with the music of the prose, altho I can be wildly inconsistent about what makes good/bad music.

Well I guess it's down to taste. Showy writing styles alienate me, I prefer the prose to be reasonably - although not entirely - unobtrusive. What primarily interests me about reading is mostly not at sentence level. It's like song lyrics - as long as they're not atrocious I don't particularly notice them.

there's good-showy and bad-showy; the latter is much easier to write than the former. i think more technical things like a pleasing rhythm can be learnt relatively easily. but there is no reason at all to go around writing things like "had taken the pseudonym of Daniel Kharms (a name derived from English, with its charm, its harm)," unless you're a total wanker.

I don't want to make a split between style/content, which might be why I don't think style can be unobtrusive.

xpost well yeah I agree there is just bad prose, allowing for differences in individual perspectives, but it feels almost rule-less to me, or describable only on a case by case basis.

Actually I might want to step further back and make some wild claim about the badness being part of the reader's process as much as the author's, but I'm too busy to think that out sensibly right now.

Or also there is a thing which as far as I know everybody who tries to write creatively does sometimes where any semblance of sensible meaning gets subsumed in the pleasure of assonance and stupid puns. That doesn't mean it should be published with a cool head.

I don't think style can be unobtrusive

Depends to some degree on the reader I suppose. There is obviously no such thing as a neutral style, but there are some styles that invite one to focus on the style, and others that don't so much. The latter don't have to be pedestrian, they simply have to be written in a way that draws the attention elsewhere, to the intrigue, to the character, to the atmosphere or whatever. And obviously there are some schools of criticism which focus on the sentence-by-sentence style, and others that don't. There might be some literary vs genre aspect to that as well.

How are we mentioning PKD here before L. Ron Hubbard?

Of current literary types Dave Eggers and Jonathan Safran Foer should be on this list.

David Eddings

- rumour has it that anything half-decent of his was written by his wife.

It isn't a rumour, he said so himself years ago.

Khaled Hosseini - Such awful lazy ugly writing, in terms of both prose-style and plotting.

totally serious nom for Immanuel Kant. He was brilliant, but was a terrible writer.

actually lots of philosophers would be in the running here (like hegel mentioned by estela upthread)

i'm surprised nobody has mentioned dreiser yet. i love some of his stuff, don't get me wrong, the novels build up this unrelenting momentum, but just going by how he puts sentences together, he's really doing some terrible things to the english language. apparently he grew up speaking mostly german.

Did I miss it, or has Terry Goodkind not been mentioned? I couldn't get through 40 pages of Wizard's First Rule. Considering I've read McKiernan's Iron Tower trilogy multiple times, my tolerance for crap fantasy writing is pretty high, so Goodkind must be something special.

When estela nominated Hegel I immediately thought of Kant as well but I've only read him through translators, he's trying to get across complex ideas (rong ideas imo but still) and I am a sucker for knotty writing, really. Even so I agree he didn't do himself any favours in the writing stakes vs. say David Hume.

What was that book from the early '00s or maybe late '90's that read like it had been written by a pilled-up three-year-old? It was a club-kultur cash-in IIRC. Whoever wrote that, anyway.

Also, Irvine Welsh.

James Frey?

http://www.runwiththewolves.com/runwiththewolves.tem/jewel.gif

daniel quinn

whoever wrote bridges of madison county

um... that was me. thanks goole.

no offense max, i really enjoy your contributions on this board, but that book was gash

Needs more cowbell.

stephen donaldson for sure:

i think i started the first book in that series about 4 times in high school (because i had friends who loved it), never got past page 60 or 70. it felt like a chore.

an example of a guy who i love when he's good but boy can he be bad is ray bradbury. especially his later stuff where he wants so much to be a real writer, the prose just gets all awkwardly lyrical, like cement curlicues.

(not that i'm nominating bradbury for this list; three or four of his books are total classics.)

I've heard tales of German students who'll read Kant in English because the original German is written so badly. His pre-Critique of Pure Reason stuff is much more readable, though. But then I always end up liking the style of philosophers who are thought of as terrible writers, so what would I know.

Lawrence, yes

Rushdie

Pynchon except in the short works

all Amis's later long novels, after the mid-1980s

Kingsley Amis, at least sometimes

Jacques Derrida

Hegel

Lacan

Heidegger

man Britishers really hate Amis, don't they

I don't; I love some of his work

but like I say, from appalling London Fields on, the big novels are all pretty atrocious

London Fields had its moments, but the Information is a riot

and yeah Night Train was awful too

but one of the "actual worst writers of all time" no way

Terry McMillan

couldn't get thru any anne rice

Grisham

Exhibit 41:

David Eddings

- rumour has it that anything half-decent of his was written by his wife.

I had to read one of his books to review it: it was credited to him AND his wife, and it was ALL bad. All 800 pages of it. What a load of shit.

NO WAY does kingsley amis belong anywhere near this list, i mean even if you dislike the actual content of his books he's clearly not a hideous hack like most of the ppl mentioned.

Rushdie

Pynchon except in the short works

― the pinefox, Wednesday, February 4, 2009 10:09 PM (44 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

*sigh*

KA wrote like a hack, at least sometimes, later in life.

No Martin Amis as a whole isn't one of the worst at all - at his best he's astonishingly good - but those terrible books swing him way down, and god knows when he was last at his best, in fiction at least. Really the old interviews with Mailer, Updike, Vonnegut and the like are masterpieces next to so much of the fiction. One of the greatest book reviewers of all time, I think.

Pash--Boxy and Star by Daren King?

Eddings is fine for maybe one book until you realize that no, he isn't going to stop writing like that, and yes, he does think his odious characters are self-evidently awesome. It's amazing how some mass-market authors generate great characters out of showing them in their best light in nigh-impossible situations (R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt Do'Urden and co. come to mind, or Tad Williams' Otherland novels) while others generate "great" characters by spending hundreds of pages having them blatantly tell the reader they are awesome (Eddings, to a lesser extent but especially in his later books Goodkind).

http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/10/f4/e0f3793509a0e1ca8d442110.L.jpg

Okay that's not fair, now Jewel is on the table.

Boxy an Star is good !!

OK, all this canon challops and yet no one has even bothered to mention JK Rowling or Stephanie Meyer.

Or William McGonagle. Maybe poets dont count here.

JK Rowling isn't a bad writer at all, she just is brimming full of cliches and the mainstream audience that latched onto her books weren't genre-jaded enough to notice.

I will not touch a Stephanie Meyer book with a ten-foot pole, especially now that I know what they're about.

vampire abstinence?

Irvine Welsh had some pretty good observations about some of the areas of life he was writing about but they weren't necessarily profound or the book didn't have a great deal beyond a simple narrative. And sure it's that annoying "rock n roll" literature but still not bad

Grisham's non-fic bk An Innocent Man is pretty well written and interesting; there are many worse bestseller-type hacks who are worse writers/prose stylists/whatevs - the truly atrocious james patterson, for example

Kingsley A did get sort've lazy towards the end of his (looong) career but I've yet to read anything that was actively BAD

i thought the writing in trainspotting was phenomenal!

samuel richardson

tracer, this isn't meant to be snarky, but have you ever read any james kelman?

JK Rowling isn't a bad writer at all, she just is brimming full of cliches

i would suggest that this could contribute to someone being a bad writer. My problem with her (and I liked the books, story-wise, mostly) is that her dialogue is really fucking lazy, she writes speech patterns like this all the time:

"it's blah blah blah, isn't it?"

"you can blah blah blah, can't you?"

etc. I recognize this a being true to (mainly british) speaking habits but it's annoying as fuck to read over and over and over again in a 600 page book. Dialogue in a novel isn't and shouldn't be identical to spoken english.

yes i have ward, though he seems a very different kind of writer to me

BTW Eggers gets a bad rap - I liked his first novel, but I have to admit the second one (Velocity) was tedious shit.

Anyway none of these people are bad writers whilesoever fanfic and slash exists.

they both write in glasgow dialect but frankly "how late it was, how late" is pretty rough going until you get past the first 20 pages or so. "easy reading is hard writing" is a debatable proposition but on that score at least welsh has kelman beat handily.

xposts

^ sure, but thinking of authors that might be worth thinking about:

i've read four recent chuck palahniuk novels in the last few years, and two of them, haunted and snuff, number among the most annoying and pointless books i've ever read. lullaby was more tolerable, but equally lazy. choke was okay. i can't call him a "worst writer", cuz he knows how to put the words together, but man he gets on my nerves.

same goes for george saunders. cute, simple & "shocking" just isn't doing it for me, especially when there's some pretense of profundity. smug, sneering nothing of a new yorker piece from last week made me want to kill the author. like dumbed-down jimmy corrigan with no pictures.

infinite jest is one of the worst things i've ever tried to read. loved wallace's short stories & essays, but that book is just hideous. like what would happen if you locked a very smart tennis player in a room for a year, with only a typewriter and a mayonnaise jar of crystal meth to keep him company. apologies to the deceased.

j.k. rowling, for her part, does her job remarkably well. nothing great, but capable and (i would think) unobjectionable.

that "sure" in response to trayce

i would suggest that this could contribute to someone being a bad writer.

Her core ideas weren't very imaginative but I thought she expressed them well in the one book I read (the 3rd one). I could see why non-fantasy people went apeshit over her.

xps: Tracye are you trying to get me to evoke Stephen Ratliff?

Hahah I had to google who he was and OMG lol.

i still think that Marabou Stork Nightmares redeems welsh, and i think that self, while unpleasant at times and with a tendency to push buttons for effect is still pretty good at what he does (How the Dead Live is one of the better ones here.)

i don't want to get into infinite jest here, but i completely disagree with contenderizer, although i assume that wasn't meant as a nomination for this thread.

nah, not nominating any of the above, and maybe one day i'll come back to IJ and love it.

who really sucks? i dunno ... piers anthony?

not to derail, but did you finish IJ? i have a theory that it is mostly hated by people who only managed to get partway through (or skipped the endnotes), and totally redeemed after multiple points of near abandonment if you manage to slog your way to the end.

Yeah I dont get a lot of these: Pratchett and PKD are fine, easy reads, that doesnt make them bad by any means, unless "among their decent work is also some patent shite" means "BAD RITER" which I think is rather unfair.

Piers Anthony was an okay writer before he reached the point where he should have been stopped and no one did.

xpost - no, i didn't finish IJ. tried twice. i am annoyed as much at being defeated by the novel as by the style (which was also annoying).

Who really sucks is obviously 100 people we've never heard of, which is why thinking about people who get paid/critically acclaimed/crazy fandom is more interesting. Unless we can find some real A-Grade dreck to lol over.

I got a third of the way into Marabou Stork Nightmares, figured it was a rip of Iain Banks's The Bridge, and lost all interest.

http://trekiverse.us/stephen/

There you go, Noodle Vague.

i am annoyed as much at being defeated by the novel as by the style (which was also annoying).

you aren't "defeated" by a novel you don't finish reading. . . you just don't finish it.

other xpost - yeah, was gonna say something about piers anthony after the first couple xanth books, but elected to keep it simple, cuz he just SUCKS after that. orn/omnivore/ox and chthon/phthor are pretty damn cool.

xxpost

Really all the Internet's done is allowed thousands of people to read stories that back in the day would only have been seen by terrified kidnap victims.

btw, i totally agree w/que here, and IJ is the only beat my head against the wall book that i ever finished and totally reversed my midbook opinion on. also, in case this is making it sound like everything gets all tied up in an end of book aha moment, i want to demystify that by saying that is definitely not the case.

xpost hahahahaaaahaha

you aren't "defeated" by a novel you don't finish reading. . . you just don't finish it.

― Mr. Que

re what john said:
i wonder if the ending "redeems" infinite jest as a whole in the same way that the final act redeems "westward the course of empire...". cuz it totally does, and in the context of a longish short story (or a short novel or whatever), that kind of trickiness seems acceptable, even praiseworthy. but i would feel ripped off by a superlong novel that really only functioned as a death-march-style shaggy dog story -- even if it had a substantial intellectual/emotional payoff.

i guess i'll find out one of these days...

i demand a justification for coetzee on this list. i would also demand a justification for rushdie except i think i can imagine it and i don't care.

rushdie smashed padma lakshmi, gets him a pass from me

he goes in the category of "writes in a showy way well," imo.

had a fatwa against him, seems like kind of a likable guy

they both write in glasgow dialect

My second airing this week for the old "TRAINSPOTTING IS NOT SET IN GLASGOW" pedantry.

RL Stine, people.

Or William McGonagle.

McGonagall is a good answer here.

Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

oh, c&ping from wikipedia fail. first line should be "Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv'ry Tay!"

OMG I have opinions about things OK:

Daniel Handler

Given that the basis of this thread is really "most overrated writers of all time" -- i.e., we're judging people against established expectations here, and not the overall spectrum of quality -- why on earth pick out this dude?

Stephen King after Misery

I'm totally unconvinced this cut-off point has any real collection to dude's powers as a prose writer

a boobjob of a raindrop gutflopped on his baldspot

It's the overkill that over-kills it: if this were just "a boobjob of a raindrop" I'd quite like it, but the idea of making anti-beautiful poetry out of some of the funniest and least pleasant sounds in the English language afterward (gutflop baldspot) is an error here

Foer

Bagging on recent favorites is kinda the opposite of a challop, given that it's pretty de riguer -- plus in this case weird, in that the obvious criticisms of this dude have to do with his sensibilities and his ideas, not his generally stipulated writing ability

Irvine Welsh

Get OUT: I mean, geez, starting off, raw writing talent was the one thing dude had going for him! Like, see above re: people where that seems like it's just unquestionably not the issue

Rushdie

I already said "yeah, this is versus expectations," but I will take this opportunity to pull the "worst of all time???" thing

BTW Eggers gets a bad rap - I liked his first novel, but I have to admit the second one (Velocity) was tedious shit

You Shall Know Our Velocity is the first one -- by "first novel," are you mixing up the order of that and the mostly fictional Sudan one, or talking about the memoir?

same goes for george saunders. cute, simple & "shocking" just isn't doing it for me, especially when there's some pretense of profundity.

OMG WTF OMG which George Saunders are you talking about, because OMG WTF -- you're referencing some of his recently New Yorker stuff (what, like Shouts & Murmurs bits?), but I totally hope you're not saying this without having read the good bits of Pastoralia or something -- there's like a pile of stanning I'm totally holding back here

infinite jest is one of the worst things i've ever tried to read.

BIGGER PILE OF RESERVED STANNING, besides which I'm going to take a wild guess that your issues with it were not based on some sense that DFW was a less than competent writer?

horseshoe i was waiting for you to show up!!!!

and you too nabisco!

way to stan!

I mean okay I'll dribble some stanning here: the idea that Infinite Jest required "slogging" to some presumed bounty created by the ending is a losing proposition, insofar as what about the book itself? I mean, ideally books are read because they're enjoyable to read, and I kinda worry about the number of people who seem to read Infinite Jest in some spirit of edification or even self-improvement, like there's something to be gained from getting to the end -- the joy of it is in the reading! It's funny and immersive and involving and includes really massive amounts of great writing! That's the punchline, the fact that it's awesome! I suppose if you feel differently you are way better off not reading it, because there is nothing so much better than that lurking around the corner -- but this makes me want to have very long conversations with people wondering what is so grueling or impossible to enjoy about the text itself, which I and obviously others find just wonderful to read on its face.

I mean if the issue is an ominous sense of "but where is this GOING" one possible answer, if you're into it, is "for the time being it is moving steadily around a place called Awesome, so why exactly am I in such a rush for it to leave?"

T.D. Jakes

nabisco's attitude abt IJ is a great attitude to have about any big book frankly!! should be posted in positive attitudes thread!

lol max i was originally going to write "i'll kill you" regarding coetzee but i decided to calm down.

but yeah, this thread was designed to piss me off.

it delights me that someone said d.h. lawrence, though, even though it is probably not true.

this isn't one person, but i'll blame dean koontz for it anyway, and nominate the one page chapter as one of the worst things in the world to happen to genre fiction. every one page chapter has to end with some sort of soap opera/televisual "cliffhanger" even if it's just someone stepping outside or picking up a phone. and WHOLE novels are written in this way. and usually these books are written by some of the richest writers on earth. which kinda makes it even more maddening. cuz if you add up a word count of what they wrote you get a short novella/long short story at best. lazy-ass motherfuckers.

52. jeff of celticsblog.com

its not just listing coetzee, hs--its writing "coetzee. sorry, but its true"--this is a slightly different rewording of the banned phrase "actually, coetzee is a terrible writer"

ok scott that just made me realize a very important person to add to this list:

http://www.jamespatterson.com

6. James Patterson (or the army of hacks that writes his books for him)

― President Keyes, Tuesday, February 3, 2009 12:41 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oops, plus ward said it too

CHAPTER 2

Then he slid his hand across the front of her face. He sneered. Her mouth hung open. Her arms were bound behind her.

As a silver Lexus snaked its way towards the little cottage, it began to rain.

at least the chapters are short

i am genuinely puzzled about this coetzee thing. i love henry james a lot more, but i can see why someone would be turned off by his style. how is coetzee bad? someone explain!

sorry, but its true

looool i'll kill you

sorry but true

i am really good looking -- sorry but its true

lol

dont hate me because sry but true

sry but tru

srybutru

to clarify, nabisco, i loved reading IJ all the way through, but there are points that really are work to get through (the looooong description of the mechanics of the tennis lung being one that i remember having some WTF r u doing to me moments with) and i get why it can feel sort of masturbatory at times, but almost everyone ive known that has had that "this is a drag" reaction to it that has soldiered through has become a superstan by the end. i mean, it is work, not because its long, but because of the whole DFW aside laden prose style, which doesnt initially click with some people (and never does with others).

You Shall Know Our Velocity is the first one -- by "first novel," are you mixing up the order of that and the mostly fictional Sudan one, or talking about the memoir?

Sorry yes I meant the memoir was the first one. I think of it as a novel. He embellished the fuck out of it after all.

Has anyone here actually read "Dracula"? It is out of control. He namedrops all this barely invented stuff, and it's all letters and journal entries. Consequently, an average chapter reads like this:

CHAPTER 37

My sweetest, dearest Lucy,

I dictate this missive to you on my newest acquisition, the 'type-writer.' It allows me to record my thoughts with an alacrity that nearly matches that of my curious new dicto-phone. Yet the next luxury I plan to purchase is as old-fashioned and ripe with symbolism as love itself: a ring of engagement. My kindest and most beloved Lucy, would you please place your lilywhite hand in mine in acceptance of matrimony?

Ilx needs to give proper respect to the badness of the roman Emperor Nero. Surely when discussing the worst writers of all time, it behooves one to look beyond the past few decades.

Nero took the first prize in every poetry reciting contest he entered and he entered quite a few. He recited both his own works and the works of others. The judges knew he would toss them in a cellar and torture them raw if he didn't win, so naturally he won. He greatly enjoyed wearing his laurel crowns to supper.

one really obvious candidate i'm surprised no one's mentioned yet: bret easton ellis. good ideas for books, repeatedly ruined by his godawful embarrassing blank prose style. namedropping isn't art.

rowling isn't in the running for worst by a long shot but her dreadful sense of humor probably earns her a place on this list.

really? i like BEE. i find the namedropping thing hilarious and deliberate - afterall, he is satirizing that kind of culture where it's all about who you know etc.

Well ok if we're talking that far back I'd like to have words with whoever wrote the King James bible, that thing is a bleedin mess.

That would be God, miss.

lol

God, worst writer ever, I can get with that.

14. Ayn Rand

― sad man in him room (milo z), Wednesday, February 4, 2009

First one I thought of when I saw this thread. I can't believe Atlas Shrugged was ever even published.

well, considering how well it's sold...

anyway, i feel i should explain the george saunders thing. i started a few weeks ago with the freestanding novella about GWBush, which someone gave me for christmas. and i hated it. funny and inventive, but infuriatingly constricted by its crazy simplified politics (or whatever we're supposed to call these sorts of dumbed-down "ideas about stuff"). then i read the braindead megaphone, which the same someone gave me for the same holiday, and i LOVED parts of it, but hated others. i got the idea that he is what he complains about: megaphonic. an incredibly talented and clever writer in the sense that he seems to view the task set to him (engineer of gas stations), but also a frustratingly narrow and self-congratulatory thinker speaking exclusively to an audience who already shares his general POV. i know that sounds shitty: forgive me. weird thing is that i'm now hooked. have read in persuasion nation and am working on pastoralia. i'm sure that in the long run i will count him among my very favorite of contemporary writers, but for the moment, i am very much enjoying being annoyed by his "limitations". if that makes any sense. (plus this is also how i conduct the romance. fair warning.)

anyway, i feel i should explain the david foster wallace thing. it's not that i didn't like him or what he did. i just didn't like infinite just. that specific book. it felt creepy to me. like the bombed out, hamster-wheeling remains of an intellect that had once seemed compelling. i dunno. maybe i just wasn't in the right frame of mind. that happens a lot.

Silv'ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember'd for a very long time.

vs. "I Just Shot John Lennon"

^ re: Saunders: I like a lot how Saunders latches on to a thought and spins a good yarn about it, losing his mind in some weird, fantastical short story that somehow sticks to a rigid idea. He sure is topical, but I think he uses about as much freedom as he can get vs. a nonfiction political thinker/writer. I do agree, though, that to a certain degree he's loudly voicing single ideas at some points, which can be shticky. A lot of contemporary writers (Franzen, Mitchell, Chabon) seem to stick out in my mind in that way - sometimes limited. I do like most of the books, though.

I forgot John Banville - some of his Frames Trilogy officially qualified, a few years back, as my least favourite fiction by anyone ever, pushing bad Rushdie et al up the chart by default.

My answer here would be the same if I were asked about the actual best writer of all time (or at least my favourite writer) - Alasdair Gray.

Lanark is my favourite book and a work of seamless brilliance but it has to be said he's been responsible for a heck of a lot of unfocused, dithering sludge in some of his other books.

I think there's probably some unfocused, dithering sludge in Lanark, which is still the greatest epic by one of the greatest of post-war writers. (1982 Janine a better constructed and actually more thought-provoking, let alone touching book, though, by my lights.)

I do agree, though, that to a certain degree he's loudly voicing single ideas at some points, which can be shticky. A lot of contemporary writers (Franzen, Mitchell, Chabon) seem to stick out in my mind in that way - sometimes limited. I do like most of the books, though.

― skygreenleopard

agree that these tendencies are very common among young american writers.

in addition to the narrowness, there's an overreliance on cutie-pie, wide-eyed childishness in the tone, a sort of half-mocking "child's voice" style that isn't actually tied to the voice of any particular child.

can you give examples of this? i'm racking my brain trying to come up with an example, and i've read all of his fiction. even his narrators that are young--like the guy in "Jon" never seem mocking or childlike at all

bret easton ellis would be a shoo-in, but then "it's supposed to be terrible!" not sure how i feel about his deal except that i think i'll rub along not reading him ever again.

in addition to the narrowness, there's an overreliance on cutie-pie, wide-eyed childishness in the tone, a sort of half-mocking "child's voice" style that isn't actually tied to the voice of any particular child. it helps get across an ordinary-guy-thinkin-bout-stuff vibe, and allows saunders to slip easily back and forth between irony and sincerity, horror and comedy (a big part of his stock-in-trade), but it seems cheap, somehow. it feels like "internet writing" to me: infantilized, approval-seeking, compulsively self-mocking, and yeah -- often funny and brilliant, too.

whole thing right here makes me qn your ability to accurately judge other writer's technical abilities

bret easton ellis would be a shoo-in, but then "it's supposed to be terrible!"

i've never heard BEE is supposed to be terrible

examples of cuteness: that GWBush novella, a brief study of the british, that recent new yorker story i was railing about ("al roosten"), on and off in the long piece about the texas border. actually, he does it almost constantly -- these are just the most egregious examples i have close at hand (mostly from the braindead megaphone, which is still in my backpack).

opening of al roosten:

Al Roosten stood nervously behind the paper screen. Was he nervoius? Well, he was a little nervous. Although probably a lot less nervous than most people would be. Most people would probably be pissing themselves by now. Was he pissing himself? Not yet. Although, wow, he could understand how someone might actually --

"Let's fire it up!" shouted the m.c., a cheerleaderish blonde too old for braids, whose braids were flipping around as for some reason she pretended to jog. "Are we fighting drugs here today or what? Yes we are! Do us businesspeople approve of drugs for our kids? No way, we don't, we're very much against that!"

opening of the great divider:

Once upon a time, there was a wealthy country. Just to the south was a poor country. Between them ran a border. People from the poor country were always sneaking over, trying to partake of the wealth of the wealthy country. The people in the wealthy country resented this. Or some did. Some seemed fine with it, and even helped them once they got here. Some said it was a crisis and a big wall was needed. Others said: What crisis, it’s been going on for years, plus they work so cheap, you want to pay nine bucks for a freaking quart of strawberries? The national media seized on the story and, as always, screwed it up: reduced it to pithy sound bites, politicized it, and injected it with faux urgency, until, lo, the nation was confused.

neither of the above examples is bad, but they're both equally simplistic, almost aggressivley "digestible" and cutey cute-cute. like smart-guy irma bombeck. like they were written explicitly to make your toilet time zip by.

whole thing right here makes me qn your ability to accurately judge other writer's technical abilities

― Lamp

fwiw i am not a big fan of his nonfiction

I forgot John Banville

I lurrrururuve Banville's prose.

yeah i think he's one of those writers where there's a huge gap between the different kinds of stuff. like his three collections of his short fiction are awesome, great, etc. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was awful awful awful and his non fiction stuff was just ok. but his short fiction is so good, who cares.

that GWBush novella

i take it you mean the Phil book, right?

Has anyone here actually read "Dracula"? It is out of control.

I really loved how postmodern it was, actually.

n addition to the narrowness, there's an overreliance on cutie-pie, wide-eyed childishness in the tone, a sort of half-mocking "child's voice" style that isn't actually tied to the voice of any particular child. it helps get across an ordinary-guy-thinkin-bout-stuff vibe, and allows saunders to slip easily back and forth between irony and sincerity, horror and comedy (a big part of his stock-in-trade), but it seems cheap, somehow. it feels like "internet writing" to me: infantilized, approval-seeking, compulsively self-mocking, and yeah -- often funny and brilliant, too.

applies to the guy i put first on this list. the faux-naif thing.

er, mr que, who reckons that 'american psycho' or 'glamorama' is, like, good writing? it's a minutely realized terrible prose style belonging to a terrible person. for 500 pages. each to their own, of course, but it's a big demand, however well he pulls it off.

i thought you meant BEE was deliberately writing badly

donna tartt maybe? pompous, over-dramatic.

I recently saw the theatrical adaptation of George Saunders's short story "Jon," and Saunders was there for a Q&A afterward. People kept saying things like, "What are you trying to say about American culture?" and "You obviously think advertising is harmful," but he cautioned them not to read too much into that aspect of it, noting that the dystopian elements were a weird and interesting jumping-off point for a love story rather than the basis for some kind of sneaky satirical commentary.

xpost I haven't read The Little Friend, but The Secret History is great, shut your mouth.

fwiw i am not a big fan of his nonfiction

― max

^ this. in the nightmarish, pop surrealist sci-fi short fiction stuff, saunders' stylistic quirks don't bother me in the least. the cute/horrific balace is a big part of what makes those stories work. it's only when he tries to write essays, observations and "mainstream fiction" that the tone becomes cloying (see above).

like how j lethem's style is great for oddball genre pastiche, but maybe not so much for epic coming of age novels about race and culture in america (i'm more on the fence about that one, though).

edit: que OTM. i started with phil and braindead megaphone, more of less by accident, which turns out to have been the worst possible approach. has colored my impression, perhaps unfairly.

how wuz the adaptation jaymc???

haha secret history is the only one i've read. i probably wouldn't have been so critical if the book hadn't been praised to the skies to me.

how wuz the adaptation jaymc???

Pretty awesome. It was done by a small theater company in Chicago where someone just happened to really like Saunders's work, and he contacted him out of the blue, and they collaborated on the adaptation. I hope it gets produced elsewhere.

the worst novel that was recommended to me & i actually expected to be good & i actually read all to the end was that alain de botton joint where dude oh-so-preciously dissects some b.s. relationship and decides hes right about everything - realized the first time i ever saw xkcd this is what it reminded me of

Contenderizer, I think if you read far enough back through Saunders you might (might) start to look on that tone not as some cartwheeling cutie-pie simplification, but as something that can be a whole lot richer than that. In a lot of spaces that tone's deployed as the way various mid-level authority figures talk and think, and it has this way of getting at character that I'd never really seen before Saunders -- he uses forms of that tone to peg people's types far beyond what they're actually saying.

Banville! I tried The Book of Evidence once and just ... never have I felt quite so disconnected from the older Brit lit establishment that gives awards to such stuff.

P.S. If you asked me if I thought Saunders's recent quasi-political bent was an interestingly ambitious thing to be trying to do, I would say yes; if you asked me if I thought it was anywhere near as good as what he was doing before, I would say no; if you asked me if I liked anything in In Persuasion Nation as much as the simple story about the roofers, I would say no, except "Bohemians" was pretty great

I think Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady is the worst writer in the history of fiction and the history of the English language. Both books (the only two I've read, he has a third that I haven't) have a few notably wtf moments that at least brighten things up, but for the most part, reading them is like being forced to eat a boiled orca in one sitting: a grim, wrong chore.

A sample opening to a chapter of Pamela, which reads like the opening to every chapter of volume I:

O MY DEAREST FATHER AND MOTHER!

Let me write, and bewail my miserable hard fate, though I have no hope
how what I write can be conveyed to your hands!--I have now nothing to
do, but write and weep, and fear and pray! But yet what can I hope for,
when I seem to be devoted, as a victim to the will of a wicked violator
of all the laws of God and man!--But, gracious Heaven, forgive me my
rashness and despondency! O let me not sin against thee; for thou best
knowest what is fittest for thy poor handmaid!--And as thou sufferest not
thy poor creatures to be tempted above what they can bear, I will resign
myself to thy good pleasure: And still, I hope, desperate as my condition
seems, that as these trials are not of my own seeking, nor the effects of
my presumption and vanity, I shall be enabled to overcome them, and, in
God's own good time, be delivered from them.

Thus do I pray imperfectly, as I am forced by my distracting fears and
apprehensions; and O join with me, my dear parents!--But, alas! how can
you know, how can I reveal to you, the dreadful situation of your poor
daughter! The unhappy Pamela may be undone (which God forbid, and sooner
deprive me of life!) before you can know her hard lot!

O the unparalleled wickedness, stratagems, and devices, of those who call
themselves gentlemen, yet pervert the design of Providence, in giving
them ample means to do good, to their own everlasting perdition, and the
ruin of poor oppressed innocence!

But now I will tell you what has befallen me; and yet, how shall you
receive it? Here is no honest John to carry my letters to you! And,
besides, I am watched in all my steps; and no doubt shall be, till my
hard fate may ripen his wicked projects for my ruin. I will every day,
however, write my sad state; and some way, perhaps, may be opened to send
the melancholy scribble to you. But, alas! when you know it, what will
it do but aggravate your troubles? For, O! what can the abject poor do
against the mighty rich, when they are determined to oppress?

Well, but I must proceed to write what I had hoped to tell you in a few
hours, when I believed I should receive your grateful blessings, on my
return to you from so many hardships.

aw they hadn't figured out how to write fiction yet in the eighteenth century

Which is why I LOVE 18th century fiction! Srsly all of it I love except Richardson which is *96 tears.*

i sort of want to defend richardson but i never read clarissa and i never will and i don't really know what i'm talking about. pamela is a supercreepy book, for sure.

I mean I read a book like Castle of Otranto and I'm like 'DAMN why does no one write like this anymore?' (Okay I'm not too crazy abt Frances Burney's stuff either but she's not a bad writer.)

re abbot's richardson excerpt
that's brilliant. there is so much sly ambiguity and moral questioning in the way he uses language. he calls forth so many ideas within each sentence, delineating pamela's character and implicitly criticising the social law of her time.

reading Tristram Shandy has really helped me realize how wtf/awesome the 18th century was

i like burney. this is getting into stuff i am a stan of but am embarrassed about being a stan of territory.

(xpost 19th century pretty much sux tho)

If you asked me if I thought Saunders's recent quasi-political bent was an interestingly ambitious thing to be trying to do, I would say yes; if you asked me if I thought it was anywhere near as good as what he was doing before, I would say no; if you asked me if I liked anything in In Persuasion Nation as much as the simple story about the roofers, I would say no, except "Bohemians" was pretty great

Are we making headway in Iraq? Yes. Am I satisfied with every aspect of our operation? No. Do we have a long way to go? You're darn tootin. I hope that answers your question.

but, i can see how it could get wearying.

Clarissa is like 1,200 pages of a woman slowly dying after being raped.

that is crazy talk about the nineteenth century

xposts haha yeah that's what english lit is all about.

yeah...i am not putting myself forward to read clarissa anytime soon, but pamela i will.

Man Henry I wish we could've like sat under a tree and read Pamela together bcz maybe it is something more to you than what it was to me, which was primarily a burden.

Actually I am watching season 1 of Dynasty and Krystal kind of reminds me of Pamela after Pamela got married.

Shamela by Fielding, I am so glad it exists, and it's like he invented Mad Magazine. "How about Everybody HATES Raymond? It took us all night, but it was worth it."

hahaha are you for real?

I think McGonagall's 'The Famous Tay Whale' is even worse than the more celebrated 'The Tay Bridge Disaster': http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/mcgon/taywhale.htm

Some favourite verses:

Then the water did descend on the men in the boats,
Which wet their trousers and also their coats;
But it only made them the more determined to catch the whale,
But the whale shook at them his tail.

I am bad with poetry and often have trouble finding the right meter, but here I'm confident that's not my fault.

And was first seen by the crew of a Gourdon fishing boat,
Which they thought was a big cobble upturned afloat;
But when they drew near they saw it was a whale,
So they resolved to tow it ashore without fail.

two of the next four verses also have a not-really-sensical use of the phrase "without fail".

well, im only going by your excerpt, which i think is compelling. the experience of reading the book is something i can't predict.

In a lot of spaces that tone's deployed as the way various mid-level authority figures talk and think, and it has this way of getting at character that I'd never really seen before Saunders -- he uses forms of that tone to peg people's types far beyond what they're actually saying.

― nabisco

is this kind of comic reductivism unique to saunders? i dunno. i want to say "no", but am not sure where else to look. i pointed at chris ware's jimmy corrigan upthread, though that's not an entirely apt comparison (ware doesn't know when enough is enough, but then again, he justifies the character's childishness by connecting past with present).

plus i think we're just fated to disagree on this, cuz the story about the roofers doesn't stand out as the head-and-shoulders best thing about IPN, though i did quite like it. i probably most liked the long story about the revolt of the advertising mascots.

Oh I thought you'd read the book and had some insight into what the hell its deal was.

Bernard I am about 43% serious.

xp to Henry

i love the 18th century, so rad, its sort of like the 21st century i think, but with more landowners

james fennimore cooper is a true bag of crap writer.

that is a good one, yes

the real answer to this is probably a bunch of supermarket checkout line historical fiction authors none of us can put a name to tho.

Read "Al Rooster" -- don't think it's as good as similar stuff from around Pastoralia, but I really don't think of the tone or the character as particularly cartoonish! I mean, that kind of character works best for Saunders when he's got a person who could seem cartoonish and he invests them a level of dignity, so they're constantly teetering around the possibilities of being noble and being pathetic, and he winds up with lines and turns that are either incredibly hilarious or incredibly sad and usually both at once. Not at lot of that in this one -- it's definitely not his best -- but there are plenty of bits that don't strike me as cartoonish at all, if you're accepting the character as someone extant a dignified.

(Out of curiosity, does something like this strike you as cartoonish?)

The sickness of a kid was—the children were the future. He’d do anything to help that kid. If one of the boys had a bent foot, he’d move heaven and earth to get it fixed. He’d rob a bank. And if the boy was a girl, even worse. Who’d ask a clubfoot or bentfoot or whatever to dance? There your daughter sat, with her crutch, all dressed up, not dancing.

it is cartoonish -- we see immediatly that the POV character is self-deluding, narcissistic and perhaps a bit simple-minded: telling himself nice though untrue things in order to sustain his ego. and it's cartoonish in that this simplification is meant to be funny (on that level it works: this is one of the story's best, funniest passages).

there's something sentimental in the approach, something indie-schmindie. i mean, saunders seems to view sentimentality, hopefulness, and delusional comfort-lying as essential to the human experience, and i guess i agree with him there. but on the other hand, the baby-talk feels like device designed to short-circuit accusations of simplicity/sentimentality in the writing by declaratively foregrounding these qualities, making them the character attributes he's observing? (or something less cynical than that, but similar in effect...)

Yeah okay contenderizer I just disagree with you entirely on that point, and possibly in larger view-of-the-universe stuff. I find that quoted paragraph to be ... well, kinda flatly true, in exactly the terms many average people would think about it. And weighty and complex, really, if you allow the thought the dignity that's inherent in the thought! There's often a lot of funniness in the tone he uses to boil those things down, it's true, but for me it tends to be the funniness of recognition, the funniness of these things seeming shared.

i get that, and agree that he accords "ordinary thought" a kind of awkward dignity, while not denying its ordinariness (in fact he plays up the ordinariness for laffs/bathos, which is a fine strategy, but it can get precious/cloying).

i mean, the paragraph IS true, and lovely, and funny, and human in a smudgy kid-fingerprints on the fridge door sense. but you have to admit that he's also boxing his "al roosten" character into a neat little moral cubbyhole: "If one of the boys had a bent foot, he’d move heaven and earth to get it fixed. He’d rob a bank." al constructs an imaginary problem that he can imagine himself heroically solving -- but even his "heroic" solution is pathetically unrelated to reality. he's not gonna rob a bank. he wouldn't know how. he wouldn't even try. and i would find this charming if, by the end of the story, saunder's condemnation of roosten were not so crushingly complete.

it's an example of what i meant at first when i said i was bothered by the cuteness in combination with the intimations of profundity. gentle cuteness on its own doesn't bother me at all, so long as it's well-executed. in "the secret life of walter mitty" (published almost exactly 70 years ago in the new yorker, weird), thurber presents us with no less cartoonish a character. but thurber's fondness for mitty and his lack of interest in moral judgement makes the cartoonishness inoffensive, even pleasant. plus, you know, the snappy writing.

i get why one might want to turn that idea on its head, to show how cruelly thoughtless escapist self-involvement can be, the horrible character flaws it can paper over, but i didn't get anything out of the experience. it felt more sneery than edifying or entertaining. like a lite comedy version of one of those bug-crushing michael haneke movies.

maybe you're right that we're just too far from seeing eye-to-eye on this...

Shamela by Fielding, I am so glad it exists, and it's like he invented Mad Magazine. "How about Everybody HATES Raymond? It took us all night, but it was worth it."

So so OTM, Abbott

ctrl-f nabisco

ice cold, bro

see, and i thought you was in my corner, deej

6. James Patterson (or the army of hacks that writes his books for him)

Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that's been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AirBorne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.

About the Novel
Earlier, Borders Australia and Random House held a contest to find twenty-eight writers who would be able to write the bulk of the book. The chapters they produce will need to be less than 750 words so, obviously, this book will be a little lighter than Patterson's other novels.

Once complete, Airborne will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition - it will not be mass produced.

Collaborative Writing is So Very Web 2.0
The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives.

Although the James Patterson novel is more of a marketing campaign than anything else - and, in this case, the "crowd" is actually a hand-picked selection of aspiring writers - it's still interesting to see such a widely-read writer embracing the co-writing trend. While those passionate about the subject may say this particular effort doesn't qualify since it isn't truly written by "the crowd," it's events like this that take the general idea behind the trend and cross it over to where it can make a mark on the minds of the mainstream.

What remains to be seen at this point is whether a crowdsourced, co-written novel can actually be any good.

Those interested in following the progress of AirBorne can do so on Facebook, Twitter, and via RSS.

i love the 18th century, so rad, its sort of like the 21st century i think, but with more landowners

― max, Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:00 PM

max, u r a treat.

Stephen King obv

mitch albom

gregg easterbrook

wasn't lots of authors writing a chapter each a fairly common gimmick for novels in the 19th century (at least)? Although Henry James probably didn't ever invite a bunch of randoms on his Facebook to write with him.