Good Writing Bad Writing and Market Forces

What is it that drives some novels to the top of the commercial bestseller lists while other books wallow in low bestseller rankings? What makes a blockbuster? Great writing? Maybe not.

A while ago I published a blog, lower the curtain, in which I speculated on when and why the author of a thriller series should end and end it. In the article, I mentioned that the writer, Lee Child, was about to publish his 22nd Jack Reacher novel, midnight line. Well, that’s history and #23, Past, will be available in November 2018; Big news for Lee Child, his publisher, and for Jack Reacher fans around the world.

After writing the article, it occurred to me that I had never read a Jack Reacher novel. And since Lee Child is a first-rate novelist, with his Jack Reacher series a worldwide bestseller, I decided it was time to correct that anomaly and find out what all the fuss was about. I would join the crowd and read to myself from Jack Reacher.

I went to downtown Chiang Mai, to The Lost Book Shop, my favorite bookstore, and bought five Jack Reacher paperbacks: Killing Floor, The Hard Way, One Shot, Bad luck and trouble Y do me. Second-hand, they were cheap but in good condition. Back home, I got into them.

i started with killing floor, the first in the series. Written in the first person, the story was solid and quite exciting. But, like many of today’s novels, I found her bloated and overweight. My edition weighed 525 pages. I think a good comprehensive edition would have reduced it to 350 or even less and produced a more compact and much more dynamic book.

The next one was the hard way followed by bad luck and trouble. Both were disappointing and in my opinion poorly written and edited and horrible scoring. Written in the third person, I was surprised by its banality. I found the narrative staccato awkward and full of redundant sentences and too much description of people and places. Many sentences lack verbs. And for me the abundance of one-word sentences and even one-word paragraphs was painful. If you had sent this material to an agent, you would certainly have received an immediate reject notice. then I read make me and i felt the same. she had started reading deadly shoot when i picked up a copy of Staff what, how killing floorIt is written in the 1st person. It was okay and I enjoyed it to some extent. never went back to deadly shoot. And I stopped reading Lee Child.

On second thought, it seems that the series has been written by two different writers. And in a way that is true. In the third person novels, Lee Child tells the story. In the first person stories, there are six, Child hands the pen to Jack Reacher. And Reacher delivers the best book.

Writing in the first person allows a writer a free hand, the opportunity to break free from many grammatical and syntactical constraints and speak as he feels through his narrator, as Mark Twain did with Huckleberry Finn. Language can be crude or elegant. The narrator can be a gentle Dr. Jekyll or a brutal Mr. Hyde. The character of the protagonist is revealed through the narrative tone. And, naturally, Jack Reacher, the lonely, rugged individualist drifter, couldn’t care less about the niceties of English grammar and good prose as he tells his story. Right?

This freedom, I think, is one of the reasons many writers choose to write in the first person. Third-person narration is a more difficult scenario with law and order and rules of engagement that the omniscient narrator must adhere to or face the consequences. Some writers can switch and write well in both. According to the evidence, Child is not one of them. Lee Child is a carefree writer who has completely rejected the discipline of grammatical rules and guidelines. I think he should have stayed in first person throughout the series. And that way he could have blamed Jack Reacher for any crude and vulgar anomalies.

The old advice “show, don’t tell” is good advice. “Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the flash of light on broken glass.” (Chekhov). It was the core of Hemingway’s ‘omission theory of the iceberg’. I think it also reveals a writer’s respect for his reader. Of course, a good writer uses both; he shows and also tells. Lee Child prefers to tell, not show. And that shows us.

The lack of editing in Lee Child’s novels is chronic. You come across a lot of unpublished self-published books on Amazon, where many publications aren’t even self-published. But Lee Child’s novels come from a publisher. So why didn’t his publishers put his publishers to work and control him? It may be that now that he is so established they will leave him alone. In an interview, he once commented that his publishers are “Afraid of making me angry.” Really?

Lee Child seems to be a nice guy. He had setbacks and he overcame them. I admire that, and his consequent success should be applauded. I’m sure you’d enjoy a good chat and a few beers with him. In interviews, he is open and honest. He has said that he does not seek prizes; his goal is to offer entertainment; his way. And this he does, and his books sell like fresh bread in a famine. But how come? What he gives?

A long time ago, ‘in the past’, I had a sweet girlfriend in Toronto. Clare was well read. She loved good books, and her library revealed a Catholic taste in its mix of classics and contemporary writers. She had read the work of George Eliot middle gait in college and wrote an essay about it. He admired a lot of good writers and poets. But he loved Harold Robbins.

Robbins was, and is, one of the best-selling writers of all time, writing more than 25 bestsellers and selling more than 750 million copies worldwide in 32 languages.

Under Clare’s pressure, and to please her, I got into it starting with The Carpetbaggers. I moved to A rock for Danny Fisher and so on. I didn’t read the entire Robbins corpus, but I did read some of it. And yes, I did enjoy them, though I didn’t rate it too highly as a writer. Like Lee Child, Robbins wrote the way he liked. He seemed like he had never heard of the ‘point of view’ rule, so very often you didn’t know which character he was thinking of what.

One day Clare was reclining on her sofa flipping through the pages of Robbins’s latest book, The Adventurers. I joked with her. I told him that I thought Robbins was not a great writer; shit, really. I explained that and she agreed. “You’re right, Tony,” she said, laughing.

“Do you agree?” I said, surprised.

“Yes,” she agreed. “I agree.”

“Did you read it though?”

“Yes,” she smiled. “She’s crazy, I know. I can’t explain it, but I just can’t get it out.”

Rick Gekowski is a writer, broadcaster, rare book dealer, and former Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Warwick. In 2011 he was the Chairman of the Jury for the 2011 Man Booker International Prize for Fiction. The Guardian newspaper once said that “Gekowski likes to be around a better class of books than the rest of us.” Impressive, right?

However, in an article published in The Guardian, Gekowski came out of the closet and confessed to being a Jack Reacher addict who can’t wait to get his hands on the latest Lee Child novel and devour it. It’s a bit like discovering that a world-renowned company blue cord The chef secretly sneaks out in disguise to a highway transport cafe to eat greasy burgers and fries loaded with red sauce.

In his article, Gekowski admits that, “… nobody, I imagine, values ​​Niño for the quality of his prose. It is difficult to find, in the entire corpus of the work, a single sentence worthy of independent admiration”. However, like Clare with Robbins, she can’t put Lee Child down.

One reviewer accused Child of writing ‘garbage’; a little harsh, but true. From my point of view, Child’s prose is boring, clumsy, overwritten and uninspiring. Compared to Lee Child, Harold Robbins was a disciplined literary genius. To me as a writer, Child is horrible and the Jack Reacher series is bad writing at its core. An English teacher might as well use it in class to demonstrate what NOT to do. But does it ever sell! More than 70 million worldwide. Plus all those Amazon downloads. wow. But how? It sure beats me.

Here is a question I ask myself. Would the Jack Reacher series be the hit it is if it were well written and thoroughly edited? And answer? Probably not.

Lee Child is British, English and well educated. He speaks the language of Shakespeare. So I have to assume that his bad writing and disrespect for English is deliberate. It’s pretty obvious that there’s a huge market for this material, and Child, with the full agreement of his publisher and his docile editors, is delivering the crap he wants. And getting rich in the process. It seems that his readers not only don’t care, they seem to even love the literary dregs of him. It’s probably another publisher conspiracy. But to me, it’s another sad reflection on the dumbing down of Western civilization.

Typing ability was the first to drop. Think of those college grads who can’t write a simple job application letter and need to hire professionals to do it. Now it seems that the ability to read well is running out.

So there you have it. Bad writing sells; great moment. But I do not advise going there. It’s a swamp in Quagmire. Lee Child was lucky; most likely you are not. Keep your feet on solid ground and stick with some good writing? He sells too, though not as frenziedly as the Jack Reacher stuff. But don’t be discouraged. Respect the English language. He’s cool, tough and virile, with a body of literature behind him that’s second to none. Use it well and write to the best of your ability. And make every word count.

P.S.

Jack Reacher is becoming a small industry. In addition to the movies, with Tom Cruise in the biggest casting mistake in movie history, there’s now a Jack Reacher online game. And for that morning cuppa, Jack Reacher Custom Coffee is available: ‘Rugged. With body. Battle Tested’ plus a matching coffee mug to drink it from.