Eric Hook's Blog - Posts Tagged "writing"
Bad books make good writers
Growing up, I read a lot of good writing. You might not agree with that statement once you go through my shelves, but the point is that the writing was good enough to intimidate me. I had bestsellers recommended to me by friends and family and classics thrust upon me by English teachers. Between the two categories, I believe I received a decent education on high quality writing. My writing style may be heavily influenced by the ‘good’ books of that education, but I also came away from those books with an overwhelming feeling that ‘good writing’ was pretty well handled. I never finished a Stephen King book and said to myself, ‘damn, I should become a writer.’ I was left by my own bookshelves with the impression that the category of ‘writer’ was quite full, and I was never inspired to try it myself, not even as a hobby. I remember I wrote a paper for Biology class on the disease Kuru and began the paper with a dramatic scene of some villager dying of it in a hut deep in the jungles of Papua New Guinea. My teacher pulled me aside and told me that I had a gift for creative writing, and I should keep doing it. I was very thankful for the compliment, but nothing clicked in my head. I still wasn’t inspired to pursue creative writing, to write short stories or novels beyond what was required for English class.
But then I got married. I won’t get into the very understandable collapse of my first marriage here, but what I will say is that she had a taste in books that was very… hit and miss. She loved anything popular, and that meant that yes, she read Harry Potter and even gave the Dark Tower series a shot. It also meant that she read – and loved – the Twilight series. Now, sometimes in a marriage, one does things that they don’t want to do just so they can relate with their spouse, and reading Twilight was one such endeavor for me as a young husband. I was working a 3rd shift security job in a Chemical plant at the time, and started reading Twilight so she and I could have something to talk about together. I hated it. Now, Stephenie Meyer isn’t going to cry herself to sleep over the people that dislike her books, she’s doing just fine. Twilight wasn’t written for guys like me anyway, but I just couldn’t get over what she was doing to vampire lore. In a way it was positive. When the Zzz monster would come for me at 3am, I’d be too busy raging to myself over her vampire design to get so much as a droopy eyelid. However, that mental spiral also continued when I was trying to sleep. Insomnia was already an occasional problem, so the last thing I needed was to compound it.
One day, I rage quit reading one of the books, spontaneously pulled up a Word document and started writing. I found her vampire novel so offensive that I felt I needed to balance it out with some writing of my own. As much as I disliked the entire premise of her book, and most of the literary elements of her series, she also inspired me to write. Through reading this book series, which I disliked immensely, I learned two things:
1. If Stephenie Meyer can be a professional writer, so can I. The world of fiction writing isn’t nearly as saturated with geniuses as I thought. There’s plenty of mediocre hacks who make a living writing, and dammit, I could be one of them.
2. As much as ‘good writing’ had influenced my style, it took the absolute RAGE of having to read a book I hated to inspire me to create something.
So, I kept writing. I wrote about 36k words that first week, and kept writing steadily until I had a decent little novel. I’d never written anything longer than a short story for a Creative Writing class, and I had a full novel in a couple of months. I learned a lot from that book, and one of these days, I’ll actually publish it. In the mean time, I wrote another book, ‘Denithor the Librarian,’ which has pretty well consumed me, and now I’m trying to make my way through the murky waters of trying to find success as a self-published author. And, as much as that process is scary, the writing has never stopped. The words continue to flow, because at the back of my mind I know that if I ever get stuck, I can always just read some bad writing – something I absolutely despise – to get me back on track.
But then I got married. I won’t get into the very understandable collapse of my first marriage here, but what I will say is that she had a taste in books that was very… hit and miss. She loved anything popular, and that meant that yes, she read Harry Potter and even gave the Dark Tower series a shot. It also meant that she read – and loved – the Twilight series. Now, sometimes in a marriage, one does things that they don’t want to do just so they can relate with their spouse, and reading Twilight was one such endeavor for me as a young husband. I was working a 3rd shift security job in a Chemical plant at the time, and started reading Twilight so she and I could have something to talk about together. I hated it. Now, Stephenie Meyer isn’t going to cry herself to sleep over the people that dislike her books, she’s doing just fine. Twilight wasn’t written for guys like me anyway, but I just couldn’t get over what she was doing to vampire lore. In a way it was positive. When the Zzz monster would come for me at 3am, I’d be too busy raging to myself over her vampire design to get so much as a droopy eyelid. However, that mental spiral also continued when I was trying to sleep. Insomnia was already an occasional problem, so the last thing I needed was to compound it.
One day, I rage quit reading one of the books, spontaneously pulled up a Word document and started writing. I found her vampire novel so offensive that I felt I needed to balance it out with some writing of my own. As much as I disliked the entire premise of her book, and most of the literary elements of her series, she also inspired me to write. Through reading this book series, which I disliked immensely, I learned two things:
1. If Stephenie Meyer can be a professional writer, so can I. The world of fiction writing isn’t nearly as saturated with geniuses as I thought. There’s plenty of mediocre hacks who make a living writing, and dammit, I could be one of them.
2. As much as ‘good writing’ had influenced my style, it took the absolute RAGE of having to read a book I hated to inspire me to create something.
So, I kept writing. I wrote about 36k words that first week, and kept writing steadily until I had a decent little novel. I’d never written anything longer than a short story for a Creative Writing class, and I had a full novel in a couple of months. I learned a lot from that book, and one of these days, I’ll actually publish it. In the mean time, I wrote another book, ‘Denithor the Librarian,’ which has pretty well consumed me, and now I’m trying to make my way through the murky waters of trying to find success as a self-published author. And, as much as that process is scary, the writing has never stopped. The words continue to flow, because at the back of my mind I know that if I ever get stuck, I can always just read some bad writing – something I absolutely despise – to get me back on track.
Writers are made in life, not classrooms
It shocks me how bad at writing successful writers are sometimes. I’m currently watching a very popular show with my wife and the writing is so awful sometimes that I hope to God it’s AI. But I know the truth. It’s not AI that’s writing the show, it’s a kid straight out of college. AI is, therefore, probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but ultimately it’s the kid that’s reading his or her copy at the end of the day and saying to themselves, “yep, that’s definitely the way human beings talk to each other. Also, this plot definitely makes sense.” It makes me think about my own writing from when I was in high school or college, and how utterly cringey it is to me now. I had no idea how to write people of different ages or personalities, largely because my experience with those kinds of conversations was so limited. I also couldn’t write a logical or interesting plot because my life had yet to follow a logical or interesting path. I had limited experience with complex sequences of events because school is a simple, sometimes illogical universe. It’s not a real place, with realistic consequences. You can get in a fistfight in a classroom and it’ll result in detention. If you bomb an assignment, you don’t get fired, you get a bad grade. School isn’t a real place, and the people in it, including the teachers, frequently have no concept of the real world. So, the fact that the entertainment industry keeps churning out drivel shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. How do you expect to have a realistic storyline with actual human dialogue if your writers all go from college (not reality) to the entertainment industry (also not reality). Say what you will about the alcoholic writers of yesteryear, but most of them lived a real life before they landed a job as a writer (that’s why they’re alcoholics). That real life experience transfers directly into interesting storylines and compelling dialogue. And, I’m not saying I’m one of them, but I can say definitively that the rather complex life I’ve lived to this point has shaped me into the best version of a writer I can be. I’m not saying that I’m great, you can judge that for yourself by buying my book, dangit, but I am saying that without all that life experience I would be a whole lot worse.
