Tag: Rules of Writing

This is an email from a Castalia House author who shall go unnamed, but obviously isn’t John C. Wright.

Well, now you’ve done it.

One of your strongest points in your discussion with Stefan on Crime and Punishment was how Dostoyevsky focused on the moral decay caused by material naturalism and did not and likely could not possibly have seen its system-wide effects.

Now, today’s post about bad writing makes a similar case that Modernism, and in particular its virulent Boomer strain – Postmodernism – is culture cancer.

Many people could see that Modernist literature was, at base and overall, simply not as deep or interesting as those books which had not gottenn caught up in Modernism’s well-crafted, insubstantial mopefests.

The clue that Modernism was a dead-end can be found in its best products: As I Lay Dying, The Wasteland, Invisible Man, Heart of Darkness and The Aspern Papers are ALL, at heart, about how writing from a Modernist perspective is a pointless, disjointed exercise that renders a man insignificant. Wait for death, write or don’t…in the end Material Man is a Hollow Man. If even Modernist novels don’t like Modernist novels, you know you’ve chanced on a Very Bad Idea.

When the reactionary Post-Modernism came along, the self-defeating problem became clear. There were plenty of sane readers who said, “Okay, that way lies madness. Taken to its logical conclusion, PM could lead to the end of literature!”

It is no coincidence that the era of the blockbuster genre novel exploded in a major response to academic Post-Modernism. Everybody read Dr. Zhivago or Sidney Sheldon. No one read Alphabetical Africa.

BUT…Post-Modernism clearly was not contained to academic literature. Sidney Sheldon’s soap operas were not merely pop-classic melodramas, but were materialist ones. The casting couch ultimately made starlets powerful, taboo relationships were taboo because of society’s evil, not personal sin. Ursula Le Guin’s adventure stories became feminist meditations. Stephen King’s pulp adventure horror veered badly into religious ignorance. John Updike was…Updikian.

Now, these books and hundreds more were still, in form, traditional, popular novels. They just had some spots of odd, discolored PostModern crust on them.

The spots showed up in movies and television: Laugh-In, All in the Family, the Brady Bunch, Planet of the Apes, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Heck, the massive blockbuster Jaws opened up with a nude girl being bitten, dragged, mauled and eaten by the literary aquatic symbol for Death incarnate, a “Great White” no less. That’s Post-modern action: no heroes, no villains, just young, bare, feminine annihilation.

But those spots are hardly noticed in the work by most people at the time, whether it is a bit of King’s “tornado-faced” lady (bad writing) or the now iconic but originally “ironic” “Episode IV” scroll in Star Wars.

But they got everywhere, and, while it occasionally worked (the unvarnished, unapologetic racism in The Godfather I and II was possible under a sort of Post-Modern “honesty” at the time), most of the time, these spots show up as an anachronism, a ‘breaking of the fourth wall’ or just bad dialogue.

And today?

We don’t even have personal pronouns anymore.

Our culture adopted a literature that had, at its core, an anti-communication ethic. The more obscure, the more personal, the more disconnected a “text” was from its meaning, the more “authentic” it was. The more “identity” it had.

Post-Modernism didn’t just end literature. It ended communication.

I think that’s why there are so many landmines of bad writing today. I think that’s why you can emerge from a writing program or college less literate than when you came in, even if you were borderline literate to begin with!

Bad writing is cancer.

Speaking of bad writing, this 2001 Atlantic essay on the form and purpose of modern literature is magnificent. The author, BR Myers, rightly crucifies several doyennes of modern literature, including one, Cormac McCarthy, whose popular appeal I have never understood in the slightest. Read the whole thing. It’s long, but it’s well worth it.

Parallelisms and pseudo-archaic formulations abound: “They caught up and set out each day in the dark before the day yet was and they ate cold meat and biscuit and made no fire”; “and they would always be so and never be otherwise”; “the captain wrote on nor did he look up”; “there rode no soul save he,” and so forth.

The reader is meant to be carried along on the stream of language. In the New York Times review of The Crossing, Robert Hass praised the effect: “It is a matter of straight-on writing, a veering accumulation of compound sentences, stinginess with commas, and a witching repetition of words … Once this style is established, firm, faintly hypnotic, the crispness and sinuousness of the sentences … gather to a magic.” The key word here is “accumulation.” Like Proulx and so many others today, McCarthy relies more on barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage than on careful use of just the right words.

While inside the vaulting of the ribs between his knees the darkly meated heart pumped of who’s will and the blood pulsed and the bowels shifted in their massive blue convolutions of who’s will and the stout thighbones and knee and cannon and the tendons like flaxen hawsers that drew and flexed and drew and flexed at their articulations of who’s will all sheathed and muffled in the flesh and the hooves that stove wells in the morning groundmist and the head turning side to side and the great slavering keyboard of his teeth and the hot globes of his eyes where the world burned. 
(All the Pretty Horses, 1992)

This may get Hass’s darkly meated heart pumping, but it’s really just bad poetry formatted to exploit the lenient standards of modern prose. The obscurity of who’s will, which has an unfortunate Dr. Seussian ring to it, is meant to bully readers into thinking that the author’s mind operates on a plane higher than their own—a plane where it isn’t ridiculous to eulogize the shifts in a horse’s bowels.

As a fan of movie westerns, I refuse to quibble with the myth that a wild landscape can bestow epic significance on the lives of its inhabitants. But novels tolerate epic language only in moderation. To record with the same somber majesty every aspect of a cowboy’s life, from a knife fight to his lunchtime burrito, is to create what can only be described as kitsch. Here we learn that out west even a hangover is something special.

[They] walked off in separate directions through the chaparral to stand spraddlelegged clutching their knees and vomiting. The browsing horses jerked their heads up. It was no sound they’d ever heard before. In the gray twilight those retchings seemed to echo like the calls of some rude provisional species loosed upon that waste. Something imperfect and malformed lodged in the heart of being. A thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace itself like a gorgon in an autumn pool. 
(All the Pretty Horses)

It is a rare passage that can make you look up, wherever you may be, and wonder if you are being subjected to a diabolically thorough Candid Camera prank. I can just go along with the idea that horses might mistake human retching for the call of wild animals. But “wild animals” isn’t epic enough: McCarthy must blow smoke about some rude provisional species, as if your average quadruped had impeccable table manners and a pension plan. Then he switches from the horses’ perspective to the narrator’s, though just what something imperfect and malformed refers to is unclear. The last half sentence only deepens the confusion. Is the thing smirking deep in the eyes of grace the same thing that is lodged in the heart of being? And what is a gorgon doing in a pool? Or is it peering into it? And why an autumn pool? I doubt if McCarthy can explain any of this; he probably just likes the way it sounds.

No novelist with a sense of the ridiculous would write such nonsense. Although his characters sometimes rib one another, McCarthy is among the most humorless writers in American history. In this excerpt the subject is horses.


He said that the souls of horses mirror the souls of men more closely than men suppose and that horses also love war. Men say they only learn this but he said that no creature can learn that which his heart has no shape to hold … Lastly he said that he had seen the souls of horses and that it was a terrible thing to see. He said that it could be seen under certain circumstances attending the death of a horse because the horse shares a common soul and its separate life only forms it out of all horses and makes it mortal … Finally John Grady asked him if it were not true that should all horses vanish from the face of the earth the soul of the horse would not also perish for there would be nothing out of which to replenish it but the old man only said that it was pointless to speak of there being no horses in the world for God would not permit such a thing.
(All the Pretty Horses)

The further we get from our cowboy past, the loonier becomes the hippophilia we attribute to it. More to the point, especially considering The New York Times’s praise of All the Pretty Horses for its “realistic dialogue,” is the stiltedness with which the conversation is reproduced. The cowboys are supposed to be talking to a Mexican in Spanish, which is a stretch to begin with, but from the tone in which the conversation is set down you’d think it was ancient Hebrew. And shouldn’t Grady satisfy our curiosity by finding out what a horse’s soul looks like, instead of pursuing a hypothetical point of equine theology? You half expect him to ask how many horses’ souls can fit on the head of a pin.

All the Pretty Horses received the National Book Award in 1992. “Not until now,” the judges wrote in their fatuous citation, “has the unhuman world been given its own holy canon.” What a difference a pseudo-biblical style makes; this so-called canon has little more to offer than the conventional belief that horses, like dogs, serve us well enough to merit exemption from an otherwise sweeping disregard for animal life. (No one ever sees a cow’s soul.) McCarthy’s fiction may be less fun than the “genre” western, but its world view is much the same. So is the cast of characters: the quiet cowboys, the women who “like to see a man eat,” the howling savages. (In fairness to the western: McCarthy’s depiction of Native Americans in Blood Meridian [1985] is far more offensive than anything in Louis L’ Amour.) The critics, however, are too much impressed by the muscles of his prose to care about the heart underneath. Even The Village Voice has called McCarthy “a master stylist, perhaps without equal in American letters.” Robert Hass wrote much of his review of The Crossing in an earnest imitation of McCarthy’s style:

The boys travel through this world, tipping their hats, saying “yessir” and “nosir” and “si” and “es verdad” and “claro” to all its potential malice, its half-mad philosophers, as the world washes over and around them, and the brothers themselves come to be as much arrested by the gesture of the quest as the old are by their stores of bitter wisdom and the other travelers, in the middle of life, in various stages of the arc between innocence and experience, by whatever impulses have placed them on the road.

The vagueness of that encomium must annoy McCarthy, who prides himself on the way he tackles “issues of life and death” head on. In interviews he presents himself as a man’s man with no time for pansified intellectuals—a literary version, if you will, of Dave Thomas, the smugly parochial old-timer in the Wendy’s commercials. It would be both unfair and a little too charitable to suggest that this is just a pose. When McCarthy says of Marcel Proust and Henry James, “I don’t understand them. To me, that’s not literature,” I have a sinking feeling he’s telling the truth.

The essay finally made it clear to me what these modern literaturists – one hesitates to call them actual writers – are doing, and it’s not dissimilar to what the gammas are doing with their terrible, narcissistic metaphors. Their words are not meant to be read as words as such, but are meant to be lightly scanned, so that an impression is formed by that superficial contact.

That’s why there is so often no meaning to be found in their works, that there is neither action nor character to be found in the texts. No one actually reads these books! They are, instead, scanned, with no more comprehension of the empty contents surveyed than the whole language reader grasps the phonetics of the words he is reading.

I was talking to one of our authors today, trying to understand why authors so often make a certain style of mistake that has puzzled me for years. He actually managed to articulate it, and I found the explanation to be rather fascinating as well as potentially useful to those who are trying to improve their literary style. I think it is something that separates bad writing from competent writing.

What we were discussing is the nonsensical metaphor or simile. Now, I have used a nonsensical simile at least once myself, although I did so knowingly, as it was an inside joke. Some old-school Ilk might remember the phrase “then it hit him, like a cheetah” from Rebel Moon. That was something my best friend’s brother used to say, because my best friend’s brother is a complete goofball who gloried in saying nonsensical things like that. The point is that I knew it was a silly simile and horrifically bad writing, although I suppose it is not a nonsensical simile from a technical perspective, since being hit by a cheetah at 60+ MPH would presumably be the sort of thing that would bowl one over.

However, as the writer explained, the mediocre writer doesn’t know that the metaphor or the simile is nonsensical. To him, it is an emotionally true connection, and therefore it makes sense, even when it objectively doesn’t. For the purposes of reference, here are the four examples from the rough draft to which the author, Johan Kalsi, is referring, a bizarre metaphor that completely mystified me, and not only because the author utilized it FOUR FREAKING TIMES in a single scene.

Jeckell’s broad, sleepy face held his lips in a strange smile, as if he had just caught a mouse between his teeth. 


Jeckell continued to chew on his mouse, doing nothing to wipe his face clean of its aura of smug supremacy.


Jeckell stopped gnawing the imaginary mouse for a moment.


Everyone gasped. Jeckell stood up and punched the table in front of him, his jaw clenched back down on the mouse.

I like to think that my editorial comments were polite, professional and helpful: “What the fuck is going on with this guy chewing on a nonexistent mouse? What does that even look like? Lose the fucking mouse!”

I mean, this was, by any measure, bad writing. Fine, everyone commits their clunkers from time to time. But this is a weird mistake, and one I see far too often these days, with authors using words they apparently don’t understand and images that simply don’t make any kind of sense. Fortunately, Mr. Kalsi was able to put this particular example into perspective that at least make a modicum of sense, and should help people avoid making this particular mistake.

• I was trying to emulate Asimov’s long Q&A scene from Foundation, which I don’t like, and I was being lazy – I hadn’t figured out good words to make the bureaucrat both human and annoying, so I just wrote that mouse thing in, because I had an image in my head of this fat old barn cat I came across when I was a kid. I opened a bag of feed, and this cat was in there, chewing on a wriggling mouse. It was a disturbing, vivid, shocking thing, and I still remember that cat’s dead eyes looking at me like, “What, asshole? Just watch it wriggle.”
• Emotionally, I thought of the bureaucrat like that – this perfectly harmless guy that the First Technocrat had known for decades, who suddenly held his life in his hands, and didn’t care a bit.
• Of course, some random personal memory means nothing to you or any other reader, and that’s why it is such an annoying dig at the reader.
• A bad writer or a lazy writer won’t see when he does this (I think it got mentioned 3 times in a page or something, and I didn’t even remember I had written it at all when you pointed it out to me.)
• A gamma will cling to this personal image as a secret king thing – “Oh, the peasant reader doesn’t get me – I’m a genius!” and as an excuse thing when the criticism comes. – Delusional
• The old big writers I can think of who did it a lot were Stephen King (the lady in Misery has “a face like a tornado” twice in two pages, for example – memorable for the wrong reasons) Piers Anthony and Philip Jose Farmer.

It’s always interesting, and amusing, to listen to science fiction writers debate the topic of “strong female characters”, particularly in the modern context of Princess Kung-Fu. That, of course, is the unstoppable martial art practiced solely on film, by every kick-ass female character who appears on screen.

And everyone – everyone – does it. Even those who correctly criticize the Buffies and Emma Peels do it in their own way. Consider Declan Finn describing what he presumably considers to be more realistic versions of female fighters:

Five-feet tall (really 4’11”) Goldberg is a computer nerd. She used to work for the NSA, but went over to the Secret Service to audit security, since she’s not tall enough to jump in front of Presidents. Her fights included: punching someone in the balls, and dropping low and cutting their Achilles tendons.

This reveals the fundamental problem with science fiction writers: they don’t get into fights. Oh, they are more inclined than most to get into word spats and verbal scrums, and even to engage in the proverbial handbags at dawn, but virtually none of them, of either sex, have ever punched anyone in the face, or been punched in the face.

For example, any time anyone mentions “punching someone in the balls” as an effective fighting technique, you know they have never actually seen anyone get struck in that manner in a combat situation. You see, there is this useful little substance called adrenaline that tends to fire up when people are engaged in combat of one form or another. It is why someone who is shot five times in the chest can nevertheless stagger forward and bury a machete in a policeman’s head. It is why someone can have a black belt’s sidekick ride up his extended leg, crush his balls between the heel and the pubic bone, and nevertheless continue fighting at full speed for 90 seconds without even slowing down.

And then, after the round was over, grimace, sink to his knees, and ask those who’d been watching, “did he hit me below the belt or something?” I once got my nose broken in a ring fight and didn’t even notice it. You can’t write about potentially lethal combat and ignore the effects of adrenaline. Actual conversation from my fighting days:

Vox: Why’d they stop the fight?
Alex: It’s the rule. Have to stop the bleeding.
Vox: Who’s bleeding?
Alex: You are. Like a stuck pig.

As for “dropping low” to attack someone’s Achilles tendons – plural, no less – that sounds like a wonderful way to get kicked in the face. There is a good reason wrestlers go for the waist, not directly for the legs, after all.

Seriously, no writer should even think about writing a hand-to-hand scene until he – or she – has been punched full-force in the face by a strong man and by a weak woman. Nor should he do it until he has punched both a strong man and a weak woman in the face. Better yet, exchange blows with a strong woman and a weak man too. The experience will absolutely prove educational and should suffice to illustrate how utterly absurd 99 percent of all hand-to-hand combat in film and fiction is. I mean, one might more reasonably, more convincingly, just give the woman wings and a devil’s tail, with which combination she defeats bigger, faster, stronger men by flying out of their reach, wrapping her tail around their neck, and strangling them.

Of course, even then, a sufficiently strong and alert man would simply grab her tail and bounce her face off the ground. All right, strike that, all the succubi don’t know kung fu.

Anyhow, if you would like to read a much more realistic depiction of how hand-to-hand combat in science fiction would work in any universe where F still equals MA, I suggest reading “The Amazon Gambit” from Forbidden Thoughts, set in the Quantum Mortis universe. I wrote it, in part, to illustrate the one way the women can be effectively used in combat.

However, comic readers need not worry. Alt-Hero will certainly contain female superheroines such as Dynamique, Kosmik Girl, Vespra, and La Fille Furie. And they will be lethal superhumans who kick prodigious ass, they simply will not necessarily be able to match fists with the likes of Capitán Europa, the head of the European Commission’s Global Justice Initiative, or Michael Martel, better known as Hammer.