As writers

As a writer, I wish to be a better one. As a "good American" writer I do my due diligence and read American writers. Maybe not all, but the important ones at least. Tonight I watched only part of a documentary currently available on Netflix on Jack Kerouac. I couldn't watch it all. They colored the narrative on Jack's life with countless excerpts whose beauty overwhelmed me. It was too much for one sitting. As someone who claims to be a writer I sit here ashamed and humbled.

I've read "On the Road" but not Kerouac's other pieces. The excerpts from these other works made me want to cry. Such beauty.

OK, there's no spanking. But......comparing his prose to my own, I feel as if I had been.

Never read Kerouac but I have felt similar emotions when reading some of Lawrence's short stories or Tolstoy's descriptive passages in his great works. I always have a tear in my eye when I read of Anna K's death under the wheels of the train. No point being oppressed by beauty instead be inspired and be grateful.

Writing is a difficult, delicate, god-damned balance. Sometimes I read a published book, either a new best-seller or an old classic, and scoff, knowing I can do better. Then I shake my head at my hubris and remind myself that they're published and I'm not. Sometimes I read the masters and shrink before their wonderful prose. Then I remind myself that they too were beginners once and if I were to peek at their rough drafts, I'd see the same hackneyed mistakes I see in my own work.

Though it makes me despair and quail in turn, I've found that writing is derivative in the best possible way. Reading the greats, whatever that means, helps create better writers. I can only hope my own writing has become more concise and flowery and descriptive and bare as necessary. I hope that I visit the best tropes while standing them on their heads. I realize I never want to have a character exclaim "Holy Cow!" while hoping to find the best place to do so one day.

Also, I avoid the word 'that' as much as possible.

So, yeah, I agree with you KD. Kerouac spanked us all. Thanks a lot, Kerouac.

-LK

I read for pleasure, but I also try to read with a critical eye. I look for what other authors have done and seek to emulate it or pick it apart and apply it to my own writing, other times my inner editor surfaces and I find myself unconsciously editing the work. The one book I know I'm never going to be able to even close to on so many levels is a work of fantasy by Scott Lynch called The Lies of Locke Lamora. I've read that book 16 times, and each and every time I am overcome with admiration for what the author did with the book.

You can find writing mastery in many genre writing, mixed in with the hacks. Roger Zelazny, his "Nine Princes in Amber" was about 180 pages, as were the other four in that series, but my god, what imagination, what talent. He did more in those first 180 pages than most writers do in a lifetime.

Glen Cook - his gritty war torn fantasy novels inspired RR Martin's work. His characters leap off the pages of his books.

Jim Butcher, Steven Brust - the list goes on.

But for spanking, one of the best authors who wrote mainstreams has to be Sharon Green. Masterful, "polished by editors then published by a mainstream publisher" prose with spanking. Some of her spankings are a bit harsh, and she mixes rapes in, but she nailed the "moth to a flame" flirting with a spanking character better than any that I have ever written.

Actually Cook wasn't one of Martin's inspirations. The two do know each other, though. Glen Cook hasn't actually even read all of A Song of Ice and Fire, yet. He said it was based on The War of the Roses and he knows how that turned out, so he only read the first book. Martin drew from a number of sources, he was probably more inspired by actual historical events and cultures than anything fictional. In terms of publishing, both Tad Williams Memory, Sorrow and Thorn and Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, gave Martin the idea that there was still a market for strong, well written, multi volume fantasy epics. Cook probably did very definitely inspire Steven Erikson's Malazan series.

In terms of mainstream spanking description I think Wilbur Smith did a great job. He doesn't put them in all his work, but the spanking in A Sparrow Falls was brilliantly done.

Cook might not have inspired the plot, but he inspired the feel of those novels. One quote I found about the Black Company books was "Steven Erikson cites them as the primary influence on his Malazan series, whilst George R.R. Martin is a fan. A dozen years before Martin made 'grimdark' cool, Cook was already writing adult stories about wars, soldiers and the causes they fight and die for, with no elves in sight and no punches pulled."

Tad Williams - another great. Robert Jordan... His ideas were wonderful, but in my view he devoted too many pages to general descriptions, giving vast amounts of details that didn't advance the plot in anyway. If memory serves, another writer (John Ringo) "killed him off" in a novel (Queen of Wands) exactly for that reason. Then again, his Conan books sometimes included spankings, as does the Wheel of Time saga, and I have a feeling that he was one of us.

But despite my criticisms, Jordan was still a much better writer than I'll ever be.

While grim dark has become the current buzzword it's been around for longer than anyone cares to remember. A lot of the old sword and sorcery work done by people like Howard (the father of the genre) would really classify as grim dark these days. Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword runs the whole gamut, morally ambiguous anti heroes, dark prophecies, plenty of gore, even some incest, that was written and published in the '50's and he does it all in under 300 pages. Despite what he primarily made his name with, Cook is a really funny guy to see on a panel.

I agree about Jordan. He started off wonderfully well and his descriptions made my mouth drop open in awe, then he got almost obsessed with the minutiae of the world. He split his groups of characters up and spread them across the world he'd created. We'd spend time with one group, get absolutely everything described to us and it would be time to go on to the next group. Crossroads of Twilight remains one of the worst books I have ever read. It's over 700 pages long and only about 30 of those contain any forward plot movement. Author and critic Adam Roberts summed the entire thing in the word 'drivel', and he wasn't far off the mark. I think Jordan may have been one of us, he started off subtle, but by the time he got to Knife of Dreams he wasn't even attempting to hide it. I sub titled the book 50 Shades of Wheel of Time or Egwene Gets Spanked.

Martin actually references Jordan in A Song of Ice and Fire. There's a House Jordayne, their sigil is a green quill (the green may be a reference to how much the author made out of the series), and I think they come from a place called Tor Mountain. The publishing house Tor (who published Wheel of Time) is sometimes called The House that Wheel of Time built.

Dark fantasy existed before Cook - but I still Cook as the person who more or less founded Gritty Fantasy. There are points where reading "The Black Company" was like following a unit of grunts is like following a US unit across Vietnam. And I've heard that Cook is a great guy - but he had to ban fans from hanging around his house. Things went missing, including an unpublished manuscript.

With Jordon... Even in one of his early WoT books I can recall three pages of a group of characters crossing a meadow. Three pages of sights, sounds, smells, until I could picture that meadow in my mind. Then the characters walked on, to the next bit, and my reaction was "what a waste of three pages. 'They crossed a meadow' - done. Not even a full line used."

Sigh. but to bring this back semi on topic, I'm sure that Cook, Martin, etc didn't start out writing the way they did. Oh, they might have had those ideas, but they had to write, to horn their craft, before they could convey those ideas. That's another reason I write - to improve as writer. Reading good books can help, but there's no way of improving your writing without actually writing.

Cook actually served in the US military, Navy I think. I don't think he saw action, but he knew plenty that did. He worked on an assembly line in the auto industry for many years and he said that he actually wrote more when he was working than when he stopped doing that. He supplements his income these days by selling books. He did tell a story about how he met this guy at a convention, who clearly didn't know who he was, and he picked out Cook's books and proceeded to tell him what was wrong with them. Initially Cook got his back up, but then he thought 'This idiot doesn't like any of my books, but he keeps on buying them. Who am I to deny him the pleasure of tearing them down?' I'm not sure what Cook did before Black Company, although I do know he attended the Clatron West writing course. He pitched Black Company to Harriett McDougall (Robert Jordan's wife) and Jordan was also present (he still called himself James Rigney them, this was before the Jordan pseudonym). They were the fore runner of what has become known as grim dark, but most people now think it was Martin who started the whole thing because of the popularity of A Song of Ice and Fire. Martin has been a professional writer since the early '70's and ASoIaF came out in 1996. He released a whole bunch of his earlier work in Dreamsongs and he started the Wild Cards franchise. The scene for the opening of A Game of Thrones came to him while he was working writing scripts for the TV show Beauty and the Beast. His original idea of the Hound was based on Ron Perlman.
All writers advise to read and read widely. But yes, writing is also the best way to hone the craft. Writing different things is also useful. I originally pushed back on writing for Bared Affair, because I didn't think I could write in that style, but found that I could and learned a great deal from the experience when I did write articles for the 'zine. I've seen a couple of authors recommend erotica as a useful way to hone skills too.