Bad Bad Books

How bad are your books? I mean, the ones you wrote?

I couldn’t tell you that about mine. Not if you tortured me. Because I don’t know.

I was once very shocked when a friend whom I admire as a writer asked me how long I intended to write very bad books. I was shocked, because I wasn’t trying to write very bad books. Or bad books at all. I was trying my d*mndest to write good books.

Having just edited a book of mine from that time period, I both see what he saw, and suspect that he what he saw and what I see are things no reader will see.

Writers read differently, you see. We can’t help it. Particularly if we’re not heavy pre plotters, but “pantsers” or — heaven help me, I’m this more and more – gateway writers. Because what enables us to write is the internalizing of story structure. And the more we internalize that, the more we see flaws readers might just feel as “Well, it’s not as good as the last one, but I enjoyed it.”

I noticed the “flaw” in Terry Pratchett’s Thud (and the one before) when no one else seemed to (The plot structure was borked. The climax didn’t happen when or how it should, and plot threads got lost.) In fact, I’ve started to be able to diagnose writers’ health issues by the scatteredness of their plot.

Which, won’t lie, scares me a little, because Bowl of Red is incredibly scattered, and as I start to revise it, I worry for my mental state (For the record, I think that I’m mostly out of practice. Because I can see the flaws, and when I’m really sick I can’t, I just become bewildered.)

I still don’t think I was writing very bad, or even bad books. Some of the ones from that period are structurally messy and a little odd, but there are authors who have long careers who write books I consider terminally scattered.

Also, I afterwards understood, that particular friend was probably not referring to my books released at the time, but to books he’d thought I’d written. (He presumed that the work for hire I was doing was in media, and had “divined” my pen name for those. For the record, I’ve never written media tie ins. All my work for hire was either historical or ghost writing, one of which made someone else’s career. (SIGH.))

But the question persists and remains “are you writing bad books?” More importantly, do you like a lot of bad books?

I don’t know. I’ve come to the conclusion it absolutely doesn’t matter.

What can I possibly mean by “doesn’t matter?”

Well, a lot of the highly acclaimed science fiction books read like very bad books to me. Even some I liked when I was very young now feel terminally flawed to me, not the least by being infected with not just “stupid seventies ideas” but with “stupid seventies lingo” to the point I can’t re-read them.

And a lot of the books I love and re-read on the regular are considered terrible by all right (left) thinking people: Larry Correia’s, and John Ringo’s, David Weber’s and Heinlein’s and let’s not even mention Dave Freer’s. I think the only author I really enjoy who isn’t considered terrible by a vast portion of the reading public is Terry Pratchett, and I presume it’s because they don’t really understand him enough to be offended.

Shakespeare in his day was considered a very bad writer. He survives all the learned and wonderful stylists of his day.

To me, and according to my lights, I don’t write very bad books. I don’t read very bad books.

BUT you see, I don’t say that according to “literary analysis.” In literary analysis, you examine a book for whatever the markers are of “good literature.” It used to be lots of references to classical mythology, and other things you learned in school.

Now it’s by fitting a Marxist paradigm of critique. You know, good literature is social critique. Which is fine and dandy, but why is that good? And why would I want to read book after book denouncing injustice, as though life were a long struggle session? And what good have any of those books done, except indoctrinate innocent minds into the false paradigm of Marxism? (And that less and less effectively, since those books mostly suck as experiences.) OTOH Marxism is something you learn in school, so putting it in books is a mark of an excellent education. I guess.

I have on my own, and rejecting what I was taught in school (“When I think back on all the crap I learned in high graduate school, it’s a wonder I can think at all.”), come to the conclusion that novels (short stories too, just more concentrated) are supposed to be a ludic experience (enjoyable/playful) which carries us through an intense emotional arc and allows us to experience catharsis. (Okay, I might have borrowed from the Greek ideas of plays, but still. It applies.)

It is by those parameters that I judge my writing, and I’m always happy when someone reads one of my novels and tells me “poor so and so” or “I was so happy so and so won” or- because it means I took them along for the ride.

Some of my books are more satisfactory than others to myself, but that necessarily is also a function of where I am, both intellectually and emotionally, and so can’t be objectively analyzed.

People SEEM to like them?

Which means it’s time for me to stop babbling at you (I woke up with all the symptoms of a head cold, which makes me scattered as heck) and go finish editing Darkship Renegades to go up.

What books do you like/have written that people get upset and say are “very bad?”

Go on. Share. You’re not going to shock me. I read Austen fanfic for fun and relaxation.