Wednesday, July 18, 2012

On Writing

I've suddenly realized that most of the things I've read lately aren't really that good. In a writing sense.

Let's take, for example, the Song of Ice and Fire series. What's interesting about it is the story. GRRM likes to wax descriptive in the food porn and the porn porn sections, but none of the prose is really particularly good. I never find myself struck by the beauty of the writing.

I guess it's kind of cheesy to say, but my favorite author is Douglas Adams. It's not for his plots (although Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency does work out so deliciously) but for the genius with which he puts words together on the page. He's kind of my un-motivation for writing a book, in a way, because I know that I could write something technically better than Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer, but even if I had a thousand years to practice writing I'd never be able to bust out something even as good as the phrase "black-jeweled battle shorts."

Also it makes me super angry when people tell me that they can't bring themselves to read the Hitchhiker's Guide because nerds have ruined it for them with their incessant quoting about the towel thing and the whole 42 business. This is another example of my ongoing distaste for nerds, which I should probably write a post about at some point. If you are one of these, try Dirk Gently. You've probably never heard anything from it cause most of the terrible sorts of nerds don't seem to get past The Restaurant at the End of the Universe for whatever reason.

And even though the same people who have ruined Monty Python and the Holy Grail do their best for the first Hitchhiker's Trilogy book, I don't think they'll ever ruin it for me. It's a book I keep coming back to when I'm feeling down, and it really seems to help. I read that a lot of people have told that to Douglas Adams, and he was working through a depression when he was writing it. I could use it now, but I can't find my copy.

But see this is the point. His writing sticks with me in a way that JK Rowling's and GRRM's just don't. The only parts I chance to remember are the hilariously bad ones. So many of the phrases in Riddley Walker are burned forever in my mind, like "sarvering gallack seas" and "lorn and lone and oansome." Or from "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius": "One of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had stated that mirrors and copulation are abominable, since they both multiply the numbers of man." It's like eating frosting! The good stuff becomes a part of the general mish-mash that's floating around in my head and periodically resurfaces. I want more of this kind of writing, but I also don't want to get into "the canon" cause it's SO BORING. Have you ever been forced to read Heart of Darkness? Or To the Lighthouse? I want good books but none of the ones everyone's reading are really good in the way I'm looking for.

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