Sunday, December 12, 2010

You can improve but there's no promise that you will

A depressing title but the website, "badwritingthemovie", does show how one man moved on.  It also shows the value of editing and letting time remove the immediacy or urgency of your writing before you work to revise and edit it.

The movie maker and attempted author worked to write poetry.  After some time, he sat back to review what he had written.  He expected the early stuff to be terrible, and it was, but also expected to see improvement, which he did not.  Taking crap and making fertilizer, he decided to make a movie interviewing several authors to learn how to write and to explore 'bad writing'.

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UPDATED: Salon Magazine on Bad Writing.
 ...let's consider the original source of Docx's concern: the enormous popularity of Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and the novels of Dan Brown. Certainly, these writers are far from the best their genres have to offer. Even the most vehement of genre champions will not argue that either man is a good, or even adequate, stylist. (Larsson himself seems to have been well aware that he was no Hemingway.) Rather, they are both, in many respects and apart from the whole genre question, fairly bad writers. So why do so many people devour their books?
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