Eight signs of bad writing

If your first guess was “a Lee Judge byline” congratulations because that occurred to me as well.

As they say: “Great minds think alike.”

What they invariably fail to add is: “And so do mediocre ones.”

So while you ponder our shared greatness and/or mediocrity, I’ll go ahead with what I consider eight signs of bad writing, but first let me describe what I like to read and that’s a lot of crime novels because they tend to have a beginning, an end and stuff that happens in-between and I don’t like to read about people having a Midlife Crisis or fearing Death or wondering What It All Means, because I can do all that just looking into a mirror.

When I read a book I want to be entertained, not depressed.

I also like well-written history, but that’s hard to find because a lot of historians are great at research, but can’t tell a story for shit.  

Generally speaking, historians can’t bear to leave out any of the research they’ve done so maybe you want to read about Charlemagne the Great or Vlad the Impaler or Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson and the book starts out with his great, great, great grandfather and you’ve got 52 pages of Family Tree to descend before you get to Dwayne and his incredibly-talented eyebrow.

If a historian wants to describe a car accident, he’ll start things off with the history of the automobile and the development of the interstate highway system.

So screw the boring stuff, give me a story that starts like this:

“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”

If that sounds familiar you might have been a fan of the Mary Tyler Moore Show because when Mary Richards showed some of her writing to her boss Lou Grant, he read her that opening paragraph from Raymond Chandler’s Red Wind as an example of good writing and after hearing it Mary said in her best tight-ass voice:

“He writes nicely about the weather.”

Semi-related story alert

Ed Asner played Lou Grant and the Lou Grant character was loosely based on a political cartoonist also named Lou Grant who worked for the Oakland Tribune and walked around with his tie loose and his sleeves rolled up and was built along the lines of a fireplug and none of that is the story I want to tell you.

(Apparently I’ve missed my calling as a historian.)

So Ed Asner gets some kind of award back here (he was born in Kansas City) and I get asked to be the MC and I do my “incredibly charming and funny” bit which is loosely based on my actual character and afterwards, Ed says he and his wife are having a party back at their hotel and asks if I’d like to attend.

And my first thought was: “Wait…is anybody else going to be there?”

Despite the fact that I had absolutely no information about Ed’s personal life (where’s a historian when you need one?) I was afraid I was being invited to some kind of weird “Hollywood party” and if I was going to be involved in a three-way I was pretty sure I didn’t one third of the people involved to be Ed Asner.

Once again – just to clarify – I had absolutely no information on Ed’s recreational preferences and still don’t and maybe I missed the time of my life because I’m insecure, which now that I think about it has happened to me more than once, so as usual the problem is me; an obvious conclusion that has yet to have any discernable effect on my behavior.

OK, so where were we before you asked me to share any Hollywood gossip I might have been keeping to myself for the last 30 years?

Right, eight signs of bad writing and we’ll start with…

1. A dumb hero

When slasher movies became a thing I read something by a screen writer or director (can’t remember which, along with the location of my house keys) and he and/or she said it was much easier to write for dumb characters.

If the character was smart then you’d have to give them a compelling reason to go back into the house with the chainsaw killer and that could get complicated so just make the character a moron and they go back in to find their car keys or possibly mine.

2. Failure to call the police

Should you invite me over to your house and the front door is open and I find you lying in a pool of blood, my first move would be getting the fuck out of your house and standing out on your lawn dialing 911, not exploring your basement to find out if the killer is still down there, cutting up bodies and stuffing the rest of your dead family into the freezer.

But then the movie would have to be about somebody else because me standing out on your lawn telling your next-door neighbor, “Yeah, I wasn’t 100 percent sure he was dead, but he really looked dead and I’m not Marcus Welby or Bruce Willis so I decided to come out here and call the cops and wait for someone with a working set of testicles to show up and do the dangerous stuff” does not sound like a great action movie.

And since failure to call the police is pretty much standard, now every movie has to have a scene where the hero reports his or her cell phone is not getting reception, which is totally believable because whenever I get a call in my own house I have to go down in the basement and sit in a chair which is located next to my washer and dryer and I’m just grateful I don’t need to wear a tinfoil hat and hold a wire coat hanger in the air to improve reception.  

3. A highly-convenient sidekick

Writers will create scenes where the hero is dangling over a pool full of man-eating sharks (a description which seems to indicate some kind of sexism on the part of sharks) and it looks like there’s no escape, but then the hero’s buddy shows up at the last second to get the hero out of the predicament.

Spenser had Hawk, Dave Robicheaux has Cletus Purcel and Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro have some dude whose name escapes me, but all of those characters have highly-convenient sidekicks who seem to do nothing but hang around the periphery of whatever the hero is doing and then swoop in at the last second to save the hero and the writer who has written himself into a corner and my main complaint is I don’t have one of those sidekicks. 

4. Turning down sex

In bad books and movies the hero is always turning down sex being offered by super-hot women because it “wouldn’t be right” which is about as realistic as a hungry Great Dane turning down a T-bone because “I’m not supposed to eat ‘people’ food.”

One of the reasons I liked Body Heat is because William Hurt spent the entire movie thinking with his dick and making horrific mistakes all of which seems pretty believable and overly familiar.

5. Suspects who talk without lawyers

As far as I know I haven’t committed any felonies…recently…but if the police showed up at my door asking me to make a donation to the Policeman’s Benevolent Association, I’d say I have to call my lawyer first. I mean what’s the point of reading all those books and watching all those detective movies and not learning Rule #1:

Lawyer. The. Fuck. Up.

But any lawyer worth a damn would tell his client not to talk, so that’s not gonna work in movies, because interrogation scenes where the main suspect refuses to talk to the police is not exactly compelling viewing, so bad writers have their characters insist on telling “their side of the story.”

Plus if it’s a movie or TV show you have to pay another actor to sit there and pretend to be a lawyer and it costs extra if he actually says anything, which I believe is also true of lawyers in Real Life.

Wandering-premise alert

OK, clearly I’ve strayed from writing about books to writing about screenplays, but it’s all about Bad Writing and I think you should loosen up, gag your inner Mary Richards, go with it and ignore the fact that this isn’t what I said I would do just a few paragraphs ago.

I mean what are you…some kind of historian?

6. Getting knocked out and/or winged in the shoulder

The difference between getting knocked out and having your skull fractured is razor thin and the idea that some detective or bad guy knows exactly how hard to hit someone so they’re unconscious long enough to make a scene work is horseshit and the idea that the knockout victim then wakes up, rubs his head and is then 100 percent ready to go and do math problems and solve crossword puzzles is also horseshit and I know because I once got a fair-sized concussion playing high school football.

The next day I wandered around in a daze and neglected to attend classes or football practice which is a good thing because they probably would have thrown me right back in there so I could get another concussion because back then “getting your bell rung” was considered a minor event and if high school football coaches had been brought in to examine Abraham Lincoln after John Wilkes Booth shot him in the head, they probably would have advised Abe to: “Walk it off.”

Also:

Most of us grew up watching TV Westerns in which guys were always getting “winged in the shoulder” because some mediocre TV script writer had to explain how the bad guy missed from three feet away and then the hero would have his arm in a sling like it was no big deal and by the next episode he was just fine which I gotta think is more of the TV bullshit that also made us think it’s possible to shoot a gun out of somebody’s hand without simultaneously removing two fingers.

Anyway…

Shoulders are fairly complex joints held together with tendons (God’s Rubber Bands; a highly-technical medical term) and paper clips and some form of Celestial Super Glue and you can’t just shoot a hole through all that delicate stuff without consequence, so in reality anyone who got shot in the shoulder would probably need major surgery and since they didn’t know how to fix that stuff in the Old West, from that point on would be known as “Lefty.”

7. One-dimensional characters  

I fell deeply in love with Elmore Leonard’s stuff after reading The Switch because Leonard created a gang of kidnappers who weren’t all on the same page which I think is realistic because in real life three people can’t agree on what kind of pizza to order, much less what they’re going to do next during a kidnapping.

For example: where are all those James Bond villains finding armies of helpers who are willing to die for them and if every once in a while one of those guys in matching outfits threw down his gun and said: “Fuck this, I’m not getting shot for Dr. No; he pays minimum wage, provides no health benefits and these matching outfits look stupid and don’t fit and I specifically asked for an XXL and got a medium” I’d find those scenes just a bit more believable.

8. Cliches

When a writer starts talking about someone with an “iron will” or a “heart of gold” you know they’re “running on fumes” and “beating a dead horse” and maybe “got up on the wrong side of the bed,” but just keep reading because “good things come to those who wait” and maybe he or she will think of something original “in the nick of time.”

“On the other hand” this might be “the pot calling the kettle black” and “what goes around comes around” so maybe I shouldn’t have opened this “can of worms.”

In conclusion, a section of this essay that makes me wish I had one

I tend to write as fast as possible and just follow my stream of consciousness (which is sometimes a trickle and other times a torrent) and that’s how you start a story about bad writing and wind up with anecdotes about imaginary three-ways involving Ed Asner.

But just like the Niagara River, sometimes I come around the bend and see the Falls up ahead and realize I need to get to shore as quickly as possible and end my literary journey, so I start looking for branches to grab on to which is a sign of bad writing and poor planning, but it’s a problem that has plagued authors for a long, long time and if you don’t believe me I have a suggestion:

Ask a historian.