Time now, for the redundant portion of Father Nature's Corner, where we produce another post in the occasional series entitled "Cedar's Mountain's Classics", in which we take an old post from the original five year odyssey that was my first blog and retool, revamp, regurgitate, reactivate and simply reanimate to something very new and very shallow.
Today's post will be a rarity, since it will be a serious look at bad writing. Post #495 Don't You Write Like This, originally started off as a hilarious look at bad writing and everything connected with it, basically mine with specific examples pulled from the book that I don't like to talk about. However, by December of that year, I had a serious change of heart.
While I didn't mine riffing on myself or my bad writing (still don't), I was having 2nd & 3rd thoughts about using the book I don't talk about to riff about. The 2nd & 3rd thoughts were mostly about how I was trying to revamp/rehabilitate my reputation as a writer and highlighting a book that should have been burned in an open bbq pit and not self-published (through a vanity press) or even see the light of day was detrimental to that end result.
So what I wound up doing was to delete any direct link to that book. So if you should find yourself exploring that tag, any link that brings you directly to that book have been eliminated.
Even though you'll never be able to purchase the book (the only thing that book was good for was that the remaining 30+ copies have allowed me create my business Books by G.B. Miller) from anyone except me, and I care way too much about my readers and blogging friends to every foist that piece of garbage on anyone ever again, I strongly recommend that anyone who is thinking about writing to read those 7 posts in their entirety.
Those 7 posts constitute the best guidebook you'll ever need on how not to write.
So my friends, thus ends the quarterly-to-semi-annual confessional post. We return you now to your regularly scheduled Monday program of whatever it is that is gumming up your dull day and making you want to tear your hair out with a pair of zirconium encrusted tweezers.
(c) 2014 by G.B. Miller. All Rights Reserved.
That bad, huh? Hey, but you learned from it and got better.
ReplyDeleteAlex: I spend roughly two+ years battling back from that book. Yeah, it was just that bad.
ReplyDeleteI doubt you were ever bad, G. You remember, I used to work at a publishing company. The writers who were hard on themselves were generally good to very good; the ones convinced that theirs would be the next Oprah book of choice were universally terrible.
ReplyDeleteM: Yes I do remember that. As I understand, those were very scary times for you.
ReplyDeleteMy writing really was atrocious then. It had its moments, but by and large, it took another four plus years to get to the level where I got a few stories published.
Often you are too judgmental of yourself and others. A writer should write to convey a message.
ReplyDeleteG.A.: I think early on I was way too judgmental of myself and others. I like to think I've grown as a writer, and I like to think that the messages I convey as a writer have vastly improved over the years too.
ReplyDelete