Strange writing

[chococomilk.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any of LKH's books past Harlequin, as they were so trippy and orgy-tastic by that point that I felt ashamed to be seen reading them even by my family, but curiosity got the better of me and I went to read an excerpt on Amazon of the latest book, "Bullet", to see what it was like. Immediately, this two-sentence gem leapt out at me:

"Monica's son was under five, so he didn't count as male yet. He was just a generic child."

I was under the impression that if he's Monica's son, that means he is a male. You can't be called somebody's son unless you have male genitalia. Since when has biological sex been determined by age? And what is a "generic child"? Does she mean that to Anita, Monica's son is unremarkable from other five year old boys? Is that because Anita isn't a mother, and is blind to the powerful individualism mothers ascribe to their offspring from other people's? Is it because he has very ordinary features - brown hair and brown eyes, the most common of phenotypes?

"I heard my name squealed out, in that high-pitched generic toddler voice."

What is a generic toddler voice? Squeaky? Of course it is - a boy's voice doesn't break until puberty. I think I can see what she means, and from Anita's perspective that all children seem alike is probably understandable since she doesn't have any and doesn't know anyone who has any, but it is a remarkably clumsy bit of writing. There's a lot of commentary on the sheer avalanche of sex scenes in LKH's novels, and on excessive word repetition (e.g. spilled) but has anyone else been turned off by the lack of writing quality?

Comments

[chococomilk.livejournal.com]

The sad part is that she does know how to write, but the decline in her finished product is due to not just a) too much sex and b) inability to harm characters because she believes that loving them justifies coddling them, but also because c) she rushes to finish the novels and thus sacrifices the time necessary to self-edit and to pace and plot, and d) she won't allow an editor to tackle the clumsy passages where she rambles and extends scenes far beyond the length they need to be with unnecessary words. There's also e) she hasn't been able to separate out the story she wants to tell and the story that she ought to tell. Even though she loves her characters, they can't always get what they want and never get hurt, otherwise it isn't a story, is it?

Bullet's first chapter is an excellent example of d). It took her seven or eight paragraphs to get to actually seeing Monica's child, including bits about scaring a small girl with her gun and commenting unnecessarily on all the children present that are irrelevant to the story.

It takes the entire first chapter to see Monica, except despite explaining she was looking for her to return a costume that got left behind, I didn't see her actually hand it over. Since I haven't heard of Monica (Robert's girlfriend) for several books, it seems strange that after she betrayed Anita that Anita would be running errands for her. The second chapter seems to be composed of Anita coming downstairs and looking for Micah in the crowd - and being unable to spot him as they are the same height. There is then oodles of unnecessary description of Micah.

[wellowned.livejournal.com]

there's always unnecessary description of the slaves to the doomcrotch. i mean, it's just in case any of her readers have forgotten their super special attractiveness, and how anita has all these men in her life that are all vertically challenged and still the hottest things on two legs and make her doomcrotch tingle whenever they breathe.

personally? if i were a new reader, i'd put the book down the moment i saw all that purple prose. it annoyed the hell out of me in Emma, and that's classic literature. i'm not gonna read pages of description of unnaturally sparkly eyes when i could actually get involved in real action/plot/etc.

[chococomilk.livejournal.com]

She's clearly missed the memo that in a series, you need a very brief description when recurring characters appear in a new book at the maximum to refresh the reader's mental image rather than a vomitous outpouring of verbiage.

What gets me though is - they aren't super special attractive. They sound like their appearance is incredibly weird. Who wouldn't stare at some dork with hair all the way down to his feet or the guy with "leopard" eyes?

And wait - there's purple prose in Emma? I found it mind-numbing and Emma herself is a whiny fool, but I missed the purple prose.

[wellowned.livejournal.com]

well, what i meant was Emma has mind-numbing description of room, each character in the room, so on and so forth. maybe not purple, but definitely tedious.

and no, the guys *aren't* super attractive. but she's trying to market them as such and it's just not working at all.

god, honestly she could spread that description of each character out over each chapter and it would be more tolerable. one chapter to mention (in passing) how comfortable it is to lean against someone her own height. another chapter where someone does a double take at the eyes. etc. the info-dump is annoying as hell.

[magdalen77.livejournal.com]

I got tired of her constantly referring to Monica betraying her and that made Anita never trust her. As far as I remember when Monica "betrayed" her it was more out of cluelessness and Monica believing it was either right or okay to do it. And wasn't there some hint that Monica had been vamped into the "betrayal". But Micah betrayed her knowing it was wrong and with his own full knowledge. I guess if you're a human tripod with "kittycat" eyes you get a pass, but if Anita doesn't consider you fuckable you can never redeem yourself.

[alex-lebeau.livejournal.com]

No, no. You get a pass if you have a (painfully huge) penis. Females are teh eval.

[graesea.livejournal.com]

I respectfully disagree with you. Hamilton doesn't know how to write. This is evident in her books, her idiotic tweets, and her blog. I don't know who helped her write the first half dozen AB books but it wasn't her work alone, in my opinion. There's simply too much disparity between the early work and the present offal.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

I believe that there's been speculation that her first husband (model for Richard) helped, but I don't think it's ever been defined to what extent he may have helped. She also had an editor then.

LKH has said that Gary (husband #1) was opposed to adding erotic elements to the series, but I want to say that's the limit of her remarks on the subject.

[chococomilk.livejournal.com]

Writing is in two parts: having great ideas, and putting great ideas down on paper in a coherent way. That vampires are legal citizens is a great idea. That there are government employees who tackle the ones who step out of line with a special license is a great idea. That lycanthropy is treated as a highly infectious blood disease with all the prejudice that comes with is a great idea. And so on.

She has quite a standard writing style, not flair, but it was appropriate to the genre to write that way. Plenty of people enjoyed the books to start with until Anita started having boatloads of sex and did a 180 from no-sex to always-sex without any moral dilemma over it (although plenty of whining). LKH was never destined to be a great writer, her books were always going to be mass market fiction rather than century-surviving classics, but she WAS a competent writer.

Losing the editor has taken the leash off her wild imagination. Every writer wants the readers to love their character and for their character to have great powers and a happy life and to get what they want, but it's an impulse you learn to rein in because no one wants to read about characters like that. Now no one is there to tell her, "LKH, introducing this ardeur thing is a bad idea because it will look like now Anita isn't just a slut, she also has a venereal disease to prove it." An editor ought to have seen this justification-for-lots-of-sex plot thread was an extremely bad idea and tantamount to character destruction - but she wasn't using one as people had allowed her to think her shit was gold.

I personally believe that these days, when she churns out a book a year, she sits down on the book and just writes whatever comes out of her skull and packages it up as the final product without going back and checking for consistency and coherency in her writing, looking for ridiculous verbiage like "generic" and "spilled" that ought not to be there.

[desert-vixen.livejournal.com]

She seems to have picked up enough fans who don't care.

Even a lot of us who really enjoyed the series to start have a hard time reading them now, because either a) we know where it's all going, and that's painful or b) we start noticing all sorts of flaws that we overlooked/didn't care about in the beginning.

The biggest problem is the one she's admitted herself (and the one you identified) - she's promised Anita that she won't lose anyone she cares about. And at this point, that's about the only thing that would get me to read another AB novel - if she killed someone who was actually important AND they STAYED that way. Micah gets my vote.

The sexy parts...aren't. At all. Aside from the repetitve bits (tight and wet, etc), the bad descriptions (like fresh rainwater and meat? ew.), the oh-so loving detail given to fellatio, there's just all the way-too-much-talking during group sex.

But I'm not saying anything you don't already know...