I write much less now than I did before
I don’t watch television. I have never watched a single episode of Lost, Heroes, or whatever the current cool among the internet crowd show is. I don’t watch Battlestar Galactica or Dr. Who or Torchwood.
I never watched Firefly, either. I found Joss Whedon’s writing to be stunted, puerile torture porn and I was bored shitless by it. I found the Lord of the Rings movies mildly entertaining. I hated the books. Still do. As a writer, Tolkien was a singularly brilliant mythologist, but I find reading his prose like stapling my cock to a wolverine. I’d rather read Lovecraft for his prose than Tolkien, let me put it that way.
Lovecraft’s prose was awful, I’ll point out now. He wrote two good stories, The Colour out of Space and The Strange Case of Charles Dexter Ward. That’s it. And I’m pushing it on Ward. If you were feeling really generous you could say that Lovecraft had a lot of good ideas but was hampered by racism, an affected anglophilia and having the curse of being one of the first people to try and do the kind of cosmic, impersonal horror he was doing. But his inspirations, Machen and Poe, were much better prose stylists than he was.
This leads into why I write much less now than I did before, by the way.
I am not a talented writer. I can do one thing well: I can depict violence. That’s about the limit of my talent as a writer. The things I do not watch and the writers I do not like, I do not watch and I do not like in full awareness that I lack even the meager gifts they display. I am not a talented writer. Therefore, I see no reason to write anything at all.
Andrew Hickey said,
April 11, 2008 at 8:18 am
Nonsense.
You’re a fucking *incredible* writer. You might not have the best prose style (and I’m not saying you don’t – I’m a terrible judge of that kind of thing) but your *ideas*, your *thinking*… when you’re on form there are very few people whose writing gives me more of an intellectual rush.
I know what makes you think this, of course, or think I do – I’m in the horrible situation of being trapped with a mind far better than my skills will allow me to express. I’ve never written anything I think of as better than a pale shadow of my intentions, and I can see only the flaws in my own stuff. I’d be very surprised if you weren’t the same.
But you’re genuinely *good*. In my experience very few writers ever say anything I’ve never thought of – sometimes the best of them will say something and I’ll think “that’s what I’ve been wanting to say for years and never found the words”. You’re one of a *very* small number where (at your best) what you write is something I’d never possibly have thought of but which works – something truly original. Not always – not even in the majority of your writings – but often enough that I consider you one of my favourite writers, rather than just ‘one of my favourite bloggers’ or something…