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Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Achilles Heels of Otherwise Okay Writers

Persephone

18:26 / 01.07.02

Neal Stephenson doesn't know how to end his books.

J.K. Rowling writes ugly sentences.

So many bits make up the craft of writing. Imagine that there is a writing chromosome, and on this chromosome a number of genes for character, plot, style, storytelling, etc. And that these genes can be turned on in any number or combination, and that a certain number or combination equals someone who can write, id est can produce books (as opposed to those who just can't.) But which means that any given writer may be missing something or other, and works around this defect, or simply produces defective but otherwise passable work.

Pick any of the authors you know: what have they got? what haven't they got?

Is there anyone you think has it all?

Or anyone who hasn't got anything, and still has books out anyway?

Cavatina

08:24 / 02.07.02

Persephone, I'm tired and hungry, and can't think of much to offer here at the moment.

But John Fowles has just sprung to mind, though I haven't read anything by him for years. His use of literary allusions in his novels (not The French Lieutenant's Woman, which I admired) often struck me as affected and overly indulgent, rather than structurally or thematically enriching.

Which prompts me to wonder what you and others, who've recently read Ulysses, think of Joyce's use of highly specialized allusions based on his private reading and experience - ?

He must have known that very few readers would recognize them without the aid of scholarly annotations. Is writing for a coterie - or worse, a clique - audience a fault or flaw? Or not?

Kit-Cat Club

11:35 / 02.07.02

I think not, if you genuinely don't care whether anyone outside that coterie or clique enjoys your writing. One can scarcely blame the author for hir work being raised to a pedestal not of hir making...

Nina Bawden always finished (finishes? I know she's still alive...) her books very abruptly - almost in mid-sentence - and that was probably because she wasn't too sure how to finish.

Martin Amis, actually, is an author with a big flaw: he simply cannot write women characters well at all. The question is, whether this is because of a failing as a writer or a failing as a person...

Cavatina

11:46 / 02.07.02

I always felt that about Patrick White, too. His female characters were not convincing.

Persephone

01:21 / 03.07.02

I can't bring myself to say anything bad about Ulysses. Maybe I am just too cowed. I always fall back on what Henry James said about the duty of the novelist being to mimic life as closely as possible, and the catch being that everyone experiences life in different ways. So I just assume that Joyce had a way more richly textured interface with life than I do, and that there's one or two people out there at any given time that can read him the way I do Trollope. People like that need books, too.

I think that endings are probably the hardest thing about writing (and, incidentally, Ulysses had a very satisfying ending to me.) I'm forgiving about less-than-perfect endings, just because they're so damn hard.

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