Good and Bad Writing

Vocabulary exercise: Misogyny almost always obviates progeny.

I know good writing when I see it, but I don't always want to read it. You have to work so hard at it, and I've gotten too lazy in my old age. Faulkner could just drive me crazy he was so hard to read, yet I could see it was great stuff. Hemingway was easier but still no walk in th park. I recognized how carefully Hemingway chose his words, little words, to be sure, but still within sentences built like a Frostian stone wall, each stone handled and pondered over until just the right shape was found to fit just the right hole. Faulkner's sentences were like strings of Christmas lights taken from storage before treeing, all tangled and with some bulbs burned out or missing, two or three strings plugged together in a frustrating maze. Who needs to work that hard at reading? Every now and then, I do, but not often. I hate careless writing, stuff that comes too easily, to the writer as well as the reader. Some writers become so satisfied with commercial success, they give up the labor. I can spot it in a minute. James Patterson wrote very well in his first three or four years, then he discovered the joy of commercial success and built himself a prose machine, cranking out book after book, sometimes as many as four a year, many of the recent ones written with a variety of other writers. And it's all like bland pudding with little nutritional value or taste. To mix my metaphor, it's like Milk Dud prose--soft and sticky and finger-messy, and it gives me a belly ache after just one box.