bad writing Archives - Author K. Williams

♦Welcome to another edition of the Open Book Blog Hop!♦

Topic #324
Do you remember the worst thing you have ever written? Will you share?

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The worst thing I had ever written is probably somewhere in the stacks of notebooks housing unfinished works I began in the 1990s. I never threw them away. The idea was that maybe there was some merit to the ideas. However, once my pen had run dry on the stories, I shelved them, and I have not looked back.

waste basket with crumpled paper, scrap pile — Photo by Steve Johnson on Unsplash

To tell you which of the multitude is the worst would take going through them all. Although I have hung onto them, I have no interest in peeking into those notebooks at this point. That said, when I begin the next leg of Trailokya, I will be cracking open the giant binders that contain a very different book series. That series does have merit, and I have never forgotten it.

Rewriting the work from high fantasy to a paranormal and science fiction based story is going to take some doing. That said, the story is worth that journey. I had always known its place wasn’t in the fantasy realm I had created for it. I felt like I was retreading ground already well-travelled. That annoyed me to death. It needed to be more unique. Until Trailokya came to paper, I had not come up with any ideas on how to do so.

I am thankful for the Trailokya series forging a world in which I can work apart from such heavily trodden ground and create a deeper, richer world all my own. All those dreams from my childhood through to today have helped me flesh out those ideas. This makes me happy. The story is definitely worth returning to and saving from mediocrity.

I think it will be fun to explore the mythos of alien races and worlds that humans have already built a culture around in the Roswell era. If you’ve read my series, you’ll note that the Aghartians reflect the race known within the community as Nordics. The other races will be there as well, cetians, zeta reticulans, lizards and so on. However, I will not be closely following what is already believed to be fact about them within that community. Frankly, none of it has been proven true, and that gives me a lot of leeway, while giving me an anchor within established human ideas.

Open Book Blog Hop — Learn to let go of what is not serving your growth and success, including bad writing.

Mythology will still take a great presence in the story, and humans will definitely be there to screw things up as they are wont to do in most stories. Yes, there will be a strong female lead to take charge of this tale, too. I’m still considering some tie-ins, such as Shee (sidhe), Cursia, Belial, and others.

I do remember throwing a very early work in the trash after high school. Most of that has faded and I can’t tell you anything about it, thankfully. I am sure that some of the ideas have been recycled in some fashion in my other work. That was a very freeing moment for me, besides. I had parted ways with something that was truly unsalvageable and I recognized that. As a writer, that is a necessary skill to have. Not all of us are so willing to part ways so permanently with our worst writing. The permanent loss of material is pretty scary. Have you ever accidentally deleted a word file? I have. I will never recover from it, even years on.

Let’s hop through the links below and find out about the other author’s worst writing experiences…

Roger Ebert’s site is far kinder than I in their review…

So I’m late to the game on critiquing this film. I was just able to obtain a copy and sit through the entire two hours and give it an honest viewing. It matters to me to not write a review or opinion on a work without seeing it first. In some cases, when I think someone who worked on it is deplorable (not their performance but personally), I will make my opinion known that I won’t throw down anything on seeing it, not even besmirch my Netflix with streaming it.

Crimson Peak (2015) was directed by my favorite director, Guillermo del Toro, and stars one of my favorite actors, Tom Hiddleston. Hiddleston is surrounded by a kick ass cast, and they each perform admirably. The sets are lavish. The tone is just right. The score appropriate. The costumes were great (except that crazy puffy sleeve thing Wasikowska wears about the last half of the film). In truth, the film delightfully reminds me of the old Hammer Films of which I watched growing up. There is nothing that utterly disappoints in this film. Yet, it still fell flat with most viewers. It has less than a 7 rating on IMDB. It received a 70% from Rotten Tomatoes.

There were such high hopes for this film. I was really excited to see it, but was confused and let down to find out some things were amiss.

To be certain you understand, it is a paranormal thriller. Yes, it breaches the walls of horror for some devices, but it is not a horror film. It is a thriller, first and foremost. That is where, I think, they initially went wrong. How so? Well, they labelled Crimson Peak a fantasy, drama and horror…yikes! How did they figure that was right? So wrong! How do I know? When you mislabel something’s genre(s), you set yourself up for the wrong sort of expectations. Your audience arrives expecting things and if you don’t deliver, or are weak on the delivery, they will be disappointed. Audiences were disappointed by the lack of all those things which make either fantasy, drama or horror. It was light on all of these. If they had called it a historical paranormal thriller, audiences would have been well pleased…

Except that…

I realized while watching Crimson Peak, exactly what is wrong with the film itself, not just it’s marketing. The writing felt trite, if not amateurish in the execution of the story. The exact issue with the story is something I have spoken against many times: over sharing!

Someone once critiqued OP-DEC telling me that I should have given more information to the reader about Carsten, that that would have built better tension. I was like, are you kidding me? How do you figure telling everything about him is going to raise the stakes? It spoils everything. It let’s you (the reader) off the hook, you’re now in on it, and then you’re just waiting to see the reaction of the other characters as they discover what you already know, instead of being on a journey with those characters. It places the reader in this position of smug know it all. It’s boring. It’s uneventful. Most readers can tell you exactly how the characters will react when they find out the truths coming to them, and how they will come, when they will come. Why? Because when you reveal too much (over share), you give your story away. It becomes predictable. Predictability is death for a thriller. Crimson Peak was far too predictable, because the film unfolded tell after tell.

For my thriller, I refused to take the advice about sharing more on Carsten. In fact, I have doubled down in the sequel for extra measure. I am not sure what is up with the desire to over share. I’ve seen it asked for by others, professionals, and delivered in several works, and it fails those works every time in my opinion. They become trite, PBS (or BBC) productions from the late 1980s. You lament that this amazing idea wasn’t fleshed out with the gusto of mature writing, but instead was left to the hands of a green apprentice. At least, that is the sense the reader comes away with. Unfortunately, the writers are never that green and should know better. To be honest, the viewer/reader has no patience for that, nor should they.

If Crimson Peak had held back the tell-all scenes and focused on their tale unwrapping from Edith Cushing’s (I see what you did there!) point of view, it would have been a much stronger tale. Another rewrite was in order, perhaps, maybe two. That polish and more care with the genre labels, and the film would have done stellar. As it is, it just seems a ghost of it’s own potential.