Subject: Why does bad writing happen?
Author:
Posted on: 2015-02-23 23:56:00 UTC
By the age of 16, shouldn't you have grasped the concepts of plot, conflict, and character development? Why are we still seeing suethors at age 18? ;;
Theories, anyone? (My personal theory is that english teachers are getting worse. TT)
(You probably don't remember me, but I'm trying to be more active here. :|)
Education here in Israel is pretty terrihorribad. While there are some good writers here, most Hebrew fanfiction I've seen is a barrel of whaledreck, and those good writers are pretty old, anyway.
We don't really learn to write fiction correctly. While there are some goodfics, I'd say the overall quality is pretty bad, though I don't exactly read a lot of French fics.
(Meanwhile, fanfiction in Corsican simply doesn't exist.)
Especially the ones that anyone can access. Why does bad music happen? Why does bad drawing happen? Why does bad dance happen?
The answer is gonna be pretty much the same. There have been plenty of good answers so far, but I wanna touch on a couple aspects that haven't been discussed so much:
1. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Not everyone can be strong at writing/singing/underwater basket-weaving. This does not make those people stupid or lazy, it just means their talents lie elsewhere.
2. Not everyone has access to the same level of encouragement or instruction in their art. To use a personal example, my parents read to me every night as a kid—specifically, they would read to me from books that were more advanced than I could yet read myself, so I was exposed to things "above my grade." Naturally, when I started writing, I based my stories on the stories I knew and impressed everyone by making a chapter book in third grade. The books I knew had chapters, so obviously my story should have them, too. Each chapter was about a paragraph or two, of course, but OMG, this little third-grader is so advanced! I was praised and encouraged and given every opportunity to succeed, I have smart parents who speak and write well, I went to good schools, and I'm naturally a perfectionist, so I try to do things right just for the sake of being right. (And I can get a little pissy when challenged about my rightness.)
I had every advantage. Not everyone does. Some people aren't read to from chapter books at a young age. Some people aren't told by their families that writing well is valuable and praiseworthy. Some people don't get to go to great schools. Some people's parents didn't receive a college-level education and therefore can't set a college-educated example. Some people don't go out of their way to learn how to use semi-colons just for the sake of being right. If they find out they're passionate about writing anyway, even if they're naturally talented, they're gonna have a much harder time getting really good at it.
This is one reason we don't attack authors. It is quite possible that they are intelligent, wonderful people who just happen to have written a bad story because, for whatever reason, writing is more of a struggle for them.
THAT SAID... if you're dedicated enough to read/watch/play the canon five times, write a story based on it, and get access to the Internet to post it... you have all the resources you need to at least get the canon details right, not to mention spellcheck. I think there's a noticeable difference between a story by someone who's trying but just doesn't know what they're doing and a story by someone who's chucking canon and logic out the window for the sake of forcing their "original" ideas on the world and expecting to be lauded for it. The former don't make good missions and don't deserve to be sporked anyway. The latter do.
~Neshomeh
I suppose I never thought about it that way. ^u^ This ties things up nicely, I don't even have anything to say! Thank you for contributing!
Lest I come off as bragging about how awesome I am with all my talent and advantages: My early writing still sucked.
Behold, my earliest extant fanfic, written when I was about 14 IIRC. Witness the transparent, paint-by-numbers plot. Witness the wooden portrayal of the canon characters and the 2D, generic bad guy. Witness the excessive angst of the OC, who gets an entire chapter to tell her oh-so-tragic backstory and immediately win over the characters I like. Witness my godawful attempts at being clever and witty. Oh, and be glad FF.net doesn't allow fancy formatting like Quotev, or the whole thing would be in green Comic Sans with an intrusion of 20-pt, bold, underlined italics to show just how loud a particular psychic shout was. >.
Fortunately, I was very gently called out on having written a Mary Sue and began learning why that was a bad thing. A couple years later, I found OFUM and the PPC.
Oh, and my original writing was even worse. Bring a barf bag.
~Neshomeh
It was just like something I would have done. XD
My first ever story I wrote was called "The Three Trees" and I wrote it when I was four. Basically, the three trees are sisters, one likes music, and the other two don't. One day the first tree starts humming and then the other two hum along. The end!
You know what might be cool? If ex-badficcers on the Board shared samples of their bad writing and we all critiqued it. Is that a thing already?
In fact, an extra proposal: what if after getting critique, we rewrite a part of our old badfics, taking all the advice on board? I do keep saying any premise can be written well...
hS
Seriously, I am so up for that. I even have a terrible fic ready for sporking... from, like, not very long ago. I was a stupid git, and now I am a stupid git masquerading as a marginally less stupid git. Progress! =]
...if making high self-esteem all-important plays a role. How many here have read Screwtape Proposes a Toast?
Another factor might simply be late bloomers. I was in my early twenties when I learned about Mary Sues, and I was still in denial about Rheim son of Sirrus' urpleness for a few months after.
And bad writing and faulty observation are nothing new. Look up Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses some time.
I suppose that might be the cause. .u.
I searched it up and it's quite...interesting. XD Mark Twain: (one of) the original PPCer(s).
In Waiting For Superman, an excellent documentary about the US education system that you should all watch immediately go do it do it now, there was a statistic mentioned that I think might be a bit relevant. In a survey of general test scores, US schoolchildren - of the age bluefa mentions and the nationality that generates a huge proportion of fanfic - actually came near the bottom in every single category tested...
Except confidence.
As Gwen Cooper put it in Miracle Day, "Hm. Just about sums it up."
They both intertwine, but can also work independently. (I also won't be offering any comments on SPG stuff, because I've always been good at that, so I don't know where it comes from.)
1/ Well... they're teenagers. Virtually all teenagers, whether they be 14 or 18, see themselves (mostly unconsciously) as the centre of the world. They think that their troubles are unique in all of history, that everything which upsets them was deliberately designed to do so, that everyone is thinking about them all the time, when in fact, the people around them are just as self-centred.
And what does that produce in stories? Main characters for who that is literally true. I came to writing fairly late; the first story I class as a 'real' story was written when I was 14 (and was, I think, the only lengthy bit of fiction I ever had to write for school). And it was... pretty bad. A teenager (because another component of this is that you tend to write characters your own age, because you know you're competent and can do stuff!) discovered that the world was going to be destroyed, and singlehandedly came up with and implemented a solution. Because of course he did.
And the next one was... well, not quite as bad, but still the same. It's actually available online for the sole purpose of showing what teenaged writing looks like; it was written in about 2002, when I was 16 - the age you claim I should have 'grasped the concepts of plot, conflict, and character development'. Want to reconsider that? XD
The thing is, it's hard. All protagonists are the centre of their story; no matter how much you read (and believe me, I read a lot), it's hard to spot how that differs from being the centre of their world. Jacob Ethrax solves everything singlehanded - well, so does Sam Vimes, so what're you complaining about? Spotting the difference - that Vimes has to work within the system, rather than remaking it in his own image - is... well, see point 2.
2/ Practice. I talked about this last week; I'll quote a section of that post here:
They write badly because they don't know how to write well. Look at Rings of Power, a mission I did into a story I wrote. I have a whole bunch of writing from about that time which consists of:
-Group of people encounter situation.
-Every single thing which happens in the area affects them.
-No-one can solve anything without their help.
-They get all the good stuff.
I did the research. I knew the layout of Lothlorien, and the timeline of the books. I didn't make up nonsensical, non-canonical stuff. But I hadn't learnt enough to let the protagonists operate in the world, rather than warping it around them. If they ran into trouble, it was specifically aimed at them - because that makes for added tension, right? R...right?
The vast majority of badfic writers are young, and still learning to write - heck, I was probably sixteen or seventeen when I wrote that, not even that 'young'! But it's very rare that people can write really well without lots and lots of practice. No, reading a lot doesn't help: it takes practice to realise that you are doing it differently to Terry Pratchett, or J.K. Rowling, or what have you. And you won't notice by reading back your own story, either.
And to add to that: the fact that you can't see the difference also means that you won't have a problem putting it online. Why should you? You can't see anything wrong with your story! And experience has shown that your reviews will consist in large part of people saying 'gud story i want to kno what happens neckst' - so it must be good! - and the occasional person who says 'your a tebirrle writer you should kill yourself and ***** your ***** with a *****' - or even just 'this is a terrible story your character sucks stop writing', which feels exactly the same. Actual constructive criticism is really really rare.
3/ Wait, didn't I say there were only two points?
4/ Hang on, stop
5/ making ne
6/ w po
7/ i
8/ n
9/ ts will you cut that out?
... thank you. As I was saying: I think the PPC is really good for young writers. I don't mean the writers whose stories we go into - I mean us, the community. My logic is this:
Young writers have a hard time making their characters not be the centre of the world. But the PPC is a soulless bureaucracy. However fabulous your agent is, the boss won't like her; Intelligence won't give her better missions; Makes-Things won't make new tech for her; and she will never actually fix the problem of bad writing. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it is very hard for a PPC agent to be written as the centre of the world; the world she inhabits just doesn't care enough about her. And that's what writers really need to learn.
hS
@u@ My head is spinning, but in a good way!
^u^ Thanks for contributing!
Seeing as I am one of those people who wrote a badfic and was over the age of 16. From my personal experience English teachers aren't teaching enough SPaG stuff, sure they cover the basics but then they move on to studying Shakespeare or Lord of the Flies and expect essays on that instead, there's very little creative writing done in schools, at least that I'm aware of, only one piece of coursework out of the ten or so I did during GCSE English was creative writing (it's also the one of the two things I got an A* in in GCSE), and even before GCSE there seemed to be very little stuff done on creative writing at all. The other problem I had was my handwriting, it was and still is horrible and the English department at my school were SO focused on getting it legible that I missed a huge amount of lesson time in favour of trying to get my fingers into a position they couldn't physically bend themselves into, thus I still don't know how to use things like semi colons correctly.
I guess what I'm theorizing is that English teachers aren't necessarily teaching us enough about creative writing for people to write things like fan and original fiction, well with decent SPaG and good grasps of plot, character development etc. And without studying further, or with friends more well versed in using the English language to help, Suethors could just not be aware that what they're doing is wrong, especially seeing as most reviews on fanfiction go along the lines of "Great work, please keep it up" and only a very few people actually take their time to stop and point out what is going wrong, and even then it may not necessarily be done in the most friendly fashion.
Storme Hawk
I have actually never written a particularly well-thought out original work before. It's all essays and prompts. @_@ Of course, education isn't the only problem, but it's a big contributing factor!
English teachers continue teaching SPaG through at least sophomore year of high school, but don't really cover anything new since sixth grade. My freshman teacher required us to cite in MLA format without teaching us MLA format; when I asked, she said she wanted us to "figure it out." Giving any more than mild criticism in peer review is also strongly frowned upon, which may be a lot of it, and an English teacher has never given lessons on not making Mary Sues. (None of mine, anyway.)
I think it's more likely they're doing one or both of two things: typing up on a smartphone and not bothering to fix errors or just being lazy because, while they know proper grammar, they don't think they need to use it in fanfiction.
One small note, however: none of my English teachers have taught semicolons. I actually learned that from the PPC. :P
The English classes I've had in high school focused mostly on analyzing other works. And by that, I don't mean the characters as, you know, characters. What we analyzed were how characters and plots were metaphors for other things. We never learned how to write.
Really, the closest thing I had to a writing class was AP English Composition, but it really just taught us how to analyze a piece of literature to meet the teacher's expectations. I never learned how to write a good essay or a good story in that class,which is hilarious considering the teacher was obsessed with 'good' essays.
I learned my SPaG by following examples in books, and reading in general. Of course, though I learned the best stories are ones with believable characters and engaging plots, I didn't learn how to do that except for trying it myself. I failed horribly, but at least I learned.
Part of why some Suethors might have horrible SPaG is because they honestly don't realize what they're doing is wrong. I've complained about my English teacher not knowing the difference between your/you're, but it's a valid complaint since these are the people we pay to teach that sort of thing. Would you let a doctor give you the wrong medication? Then why are we letting English teachers teach improper grammar?
Sorry, got off on a tangent there. What I was going to say before I got sidetracked is that some Suethors might think they're so good already that they don't need to improve or get a beta. And yes,I'm speaking from personal experience.
For your point about maturing by 16, I'd say not necessarily. It really depends on your education and your interests. If you start writing at 12 or 13 sheer practice will make you improve over time, but if you start later you'll take longer to get good. There's a difference between grasping a concept and being able to execute it.
When it comes to repeat offenders, or just bad writing in general, my theory would be that Suethors view the act of writing differently than we do.
Most of us are, more or less, serious about writing. Even if we're not shooting for a professional career in it we want to tell compelling stories and create or interpret characters in engaging ways. When it comes to fanfics we want to tell more stories in the worlds we've come to love. When people write badly it's at best a waste of potential.
But look at the excuses Suethors throw out when they're criticized. "It's just fanfiction!" "Get a life!" For them, fanfiction is a tool for their own entertainment, mostly escapism and wish fulfillment. It's a hobby and it just has to hit the right buttons for the author and maybe people with her tastes. To them we're taking everything too seriously. And if it was their private space instead of the internet, they'd have a point. The wiki covers the issues with criticism pretty well.
Basically my guess is that Suethors, in most cases, probably could write better, but they don't see a need to because "it's just for fun."
Everybody writes for fun, and everybody has written a sue or stu once in their life. Heck, writing a sue can help you improve your writing and characters, and it's pretty hilarious. But if your story won't hold much interest for others, you shouldn't tack it online for the world to see. Alright, show it to a couple of friends, or if you want to get serious, a beta reader. But if your fic is appealing to your own interests, and not necessarily others, then don't post it.
Either way, your post is quite enlightening. Thank you for throwing some light onto the shadowy depths of a suethor's mind. ^_^ Someday, we might finally find out why sues hate dresses so much. And can somehow have anorexic-thin limbs while sporting double-D sized knockers.
From what I can tell, Sues hate dresses because the writers feel insecure about not being traditionally feminine. Which, well, does make sense, but it tends to just translate into silliness. Mainly because they're translating anger and frustration at the messages of society into superficial anger at a thing.
This was probably too in-depth for the question of why Sues hate dresses, but oh well.
And the other question is a reversal; it's wish fulfillment about being *even better* than the other people at being "beautiful" as society sees it.
I think I've seen something on tumblr explaining as trying to make the character more "not like other girls." The entire mindset of a Mary Sue is to be special, so it's not much of a surprise that they'll try to break away from the (disappearing) stereotype. In badfic, practically all girls besides the sue and her friends are depicted as shallow, attention-seeking, prissy, bratty, etc. to make the sue seem more "outcast." It's pretty sad, now that I think about it. :|
...when are well written. Heck, I found a fic with a Mary Sue protagonist with many crimes against canon. But the Waterbending Sue and her 60 page epic through Middle-Earth, was so compelling, engaging and heartwarming; that I decided against reporting it as a badfic. Seriously, it made me enjoy a Romance story, and I hate Romace.
(The prequel on the other hand... Let's just say I'm completely willing to kill The Avatar)
The Holy Grail legend is page-turning despite the Suvian nature of Sir Galahad.
Is interesting despite Galahad, not because of him. In fact, he's one of the least interesting characters there - hell, even the bit knights are more interesting than Mr. Incorruptible Pure Pureness.
Wow. Never seen a fanfic like that! Sounds interesting, though! ^u^
If the story is enjoyable, that is, enjoyable beyond reading how hilariously bad it is, then a Mary Sue isn't that bad. It is incredibly hard to /find/ that, of course, but hey.
One fic I recall comes to mind, and coincidentally enough it's also an Avatar: TLA fic. Well, minus the crossover, haha.
Sokka; Master of the Black Sword. 200K+ words, dead-fic, and adds in a large amount of Lovecraftian influenced lore and elements. Sokka becomes a (Spoiler) version of the Avatar, the Incarna. While he certainly gains power, he doesn't end up sidelining anyone out of importance in the plot, and the antagonists, both canon and not, are still treated as a threat. (Then again, maybe it's not really Sueish since it's a well written AU? Haha. I won't ask anyone to find/read the fic just for input, though. It's a long read.)
I find that, when reading a Sue, the first thing to make the experience un-enjoyable is their personality. Aside from the usual unbelievable traits most sues have, which bend the story to comedy Spork-worthy levels, I find reading about a nasty person being nasty to the canons because they have a Tragic Past(TM) or what have you isn't really fun, to me.
Once beyond that, balancing out the power seems the biggest hurdle. I'm sure the Waterbending Sue faced a lot of hardship, even if not all on the battlefield. As long as you never have to ask yourself 'Why don't they just solve the plot/issue with their powers, if they have so many' then you can have some suspense.
I recall a Negima/Naruto crossover, where Naruto had so much power almost right from the start that he never faced any ACTUAL adversity the whole fic. I even read a forum where the people on it sporked it (So I read it twice, I guess. *Lashes back with flail*) and came to the conclusion that Naruto himself was the Final Boss/Big Bad Evil Guy, since he was now so strong, and had so much power from both canons that the /Villians/ (The Akatsuki, Madara, Tobi/Obito) were all the underdogs in the story, clearly facing someone they can never beat.
Well, that and the fic had a billion other things wrong with it, SpaG aside, but the main thing is, if the protag is unbeatable, and you can't create ways to challenge them (Like say, Superman writers do)then it's hard to have any investment beyond lols.
Heh, I guess I went off on a tangent here. The Naruto/Negima fic is Naruto Chaos Mage, if anyone is interested in reading it. I'll even throw in a complementary whip so you can physically pain yourself while you melt your brain! The link to the Sporking can be found here, because it will be much more enjoyable, I assume you.
I mean, at the time superheroes where unbeatable and had little personality (Effectively turning them into a bunch oof Canon Stus/Sues). But who did not enjoy Batman or Superman kicking a lot of ass? Because millions did.
To anyone curious, here is the fic I was speaking about: Strange Love Found in a Strange Land (WARNING! Do not let Agent Acacia near it, she might kill it! [On second thoughts, do not let anyone from the LOTR Division near it!])
I can certainly see why she would. The fic is a bit rough around the edges. It's been a while since I read the Sokka fic I mentioned, and I have a tendency to remember anything as being better then it may have been, so it could also be rough as well.
The name of the Sue makes me imagine Terumi ala Blazblue trolling around LoTR. Well, perhaps Mei Terumi from Naruto would fit better.
Your are also correct, or so I think anyway, about the comics. We all know that the hero will save the say, in the older ones anyway. Now having cliff-hanger's and trilogies is pretty common in comics. I haven't seen much of anything Superman related, minus a review of the latest film (Man of Steel) and Superman Vs The Elite (Highly Recommended. Superman is voiced by Sephiroth in it!).
But I remember watching plenty of Batman; The Animated Series as a young Caddy, and enjoying it. That's around the time when I recall Batman becoming more complex, compared to the Adam West one that I was also watching.
In the end, it's good the PPC isn't about policing fanfiction, or these gems we like would make us dirty cops, hahaha! Well, that and Sporking a fic over 100K words is a daunting task unless you can find a nice cutoff point.
I also found this: Avatar: The Last Kryptonian
Neither Stephanie Meyer, Frank Miller, M. Night Shamayalan, and a very long list of other known Creators that cannot grasp at least one of those concepts. And they have made a career of that!
So, no, you cannot blame the English teachers about that. School in general is more to blame, because of the lack of encouragement for creativity in traditional education for children, leaving the world with a deluge of bad fiction, written by uncreative teens and adults, that do it just because they can, or for a paycheck, or for being crazy.
I can agree wholeheartedly with this. ^_^
And to answer your question, I guess some people never really learn how to take criticism. I wouldn't know, I'm not a psychology major. *shrugs sadly*
The sad thing is, for some people, even hinting at the fact that their character is a sue sends them flying into a rage. You can't really make it through life without some crit flying your way.
On second thought, the mind of the Suethor is too logic-deprivated to try to understand.