Exchange of Realities

As most of you have probably gathered right now, I am one of those people who is death to bad writing. So you can imagine my response when, last Saturday, this scan of two pages of monstrosity from vandonovan from LiveJournal was tossed to me by one of my friends. (Warning: the second page is verging into NSFW-territory, and the entire piece is Not Safe For Human Consumption. If you’re morbidly curious but value your sanity, just keep reading the diluted version in this post instead.)

The prose wasn’t just purple, it was ultraviolet. It was beyond ultraviolet; even a honeybee might consider it outside the visible spectrum. It was nails on a chalkboard, it was the smoke from burning milkweed. Its metaphors were a swarm of mosquitoes, packed so tightly together light could barely filter through and humming like an alien ship firing up its world-destroying laser. To say that it hurt to read is like saying that it is warm in Tuscon in the summer. To try to imitate its style was to invite one’s own eyes and ears to bleed like a slashed-through extra in a cheap movie.

Yes, that’s how this Ron Miller fellow writes, only the metaphors make less sense and have a higher density.

I came out of the experience with one resolution: To explain just what the problem is so this travesty against the printed word never happens again. So—allow me to begin the dissection. The scene is such: Princess Bronwyn has just dropped her transparent cloak (the word you want is translucent, Mr. Miller) and is being ogled by the faerie king Spikenard. (Credit for using a real plant, but Valerian is a real name, is harder to insult, and is in the same family. Couldn’t he have used that instead?)

“This is what he saw:” Okay, so you’re blaming this travesty on your current viewpoint character. Really smooth, Miller. For the rest of you who are worried about your impact on your reader: Don’t begin a sentence this way, let alone a paragraph. It’s dull. It’s prosaic. It’s…. his writing style is infecting me. I must be strong….

“Bronwyn standing pale and tall in the nervous light that shimmered through a vibrating canopy of green leaves.” He already described her in the first chapter, according to vandonovan, so all of this is redundant. We know she’s tall. We know she’s pale. I would assume we know it’s nighttime.  Moving on!

“The shifting bands of milky light and emerald shadow made her seem luminous, translucent, as though she were a tallow candle glowing beneath its own flame. Like a porcelain lantern. Like a curtain fluttering in a window at dawn.” …all right, so I’m going to assume nighttime and a full moon. That I can live with. Now let’s move on to the similes. We’re fortunate here; these similes maintain something approximating parallelism, with all the parallels being to things that are pale, backlit, and prone to changes due to their own fitful motion. The problem here is just that there are so many of them, all at the same time. Does the phrase “Less is more” mean anything to you?

“Like a ghost that came and went with the twilight and darkness, that first veiled and then revealed.” Now we’re getting problems. For one thing, twilight and darkness don’t alternate. First you have twilight, then you have darkness. (If you’re into Stephanie Meyer books, then you move on to other things that sound like Castes from Exalted. Let’s stay out of those for now.) For another, veiled and revealed are transitive verbs. They demand a direct object. Do you see a direct object here? Is the ghost flapping a curtain over the window, then taking it off, then flapping it again? Is it trying on one of those old-fashioned veil-hats the femmes fatales in noir movies wear? WHAT IS IT VEILING AND REVEALING?

“Her hair had the sheen of the sea beneath an eclipsed moon.” ….if the moon is eclipsed, it’s nighttime. If all you’re going by is the moonlight, there’s not going to be much of it. Is the sea even going to have a sheen? “It was the color of a leopard’s tongue, of oiled mahogany. It was terra cotta, bay, and chestnut.” Clearly, Mr. Miller, you have never seen the tongue of a leopard, or you would know that they’re not brown. The rest of the examples are at least in the same color family, I’ll give credit for that, but anyone who’s even lived with an equestrian knows that bay and chestnut are mutually exclusive, even if they are pretty close to the same color (and that would be redundant, which doesn’t help any!) , so are oiled mahogany and terra cotta (how red are we going here?), and I don’t even want to think about all four at once.

And this? This is just the warm-up. Come back tomorrow as we get into the truly scary parts of the prose… if you dare!

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