And, I might add, I was completely bored reading it, because nothing was happening. Absolutely nothing. Again I say, if the plot is subtle, then language and characterization must intrigue your reader enough to keep them reading. Strout also won the Pulitzer in for her book of interconnected short stories, Olive Kitteridge. In most ways, Isabelle and Amy are like any mother and her year-old daughter, a fierce mix of love and loathing exchanged in their every glance. But when Amy is discovered behind the steamed-up windows of a car with her math teacher, the vast and icy distance between mother and daughter becomes unbridgeable.
I wanted to keep reading. There were a few things that bothered me as I read, but overall I found the writing wonderful and the story absorbing. What do you think makes for a good literary read? What do you dislike about some literary fiction? Rich language, interesting character and, yes, a plot.
As a writer, plots tend to be my bugaboo so I really try to pay attention to plots in literary fiction. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I am absolutely passionately in love with the writings of Rohington Mistry.
He also can make me fall in love with more than one character flaws and all. The plot is never tedious and often comical. Writers are bad because they cleave to the causes of writing badly. Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself. While bad writers may read a great many diverse works of fiction, they are unable or unwilling to perceive the things these works do which their own writing fails to do.
So the most dangerous kind of writers for bad writers to read are what I call excuse writers — writers of the sort who seem to grant permission to others to borrow or imitate their failings. Bad writers bulwark themselves against a confrontation with their own badness by reference to other writers with whom they feel they share certain defence-worthy characteristics.
Bad writing is written defensively; good writing is a way of making the self as vulnerable as possible. When Updike began writing Rabbit, Run all in the present tense, it was either going to be a great technical feat or a humiliating aesthetic misjudgment. Often, the bad writer will feel that they have a particular story they want to tell.
It may be a story passed on to them by their grandmother or it may be something that happened to them when they were younger. And, ultimately, they lack the will to betray the material sufficiently to make it true. Bad writers often want to rewrite a book by another writer that was written in a different time period, under completely different social conditions. Hard Science-fiction is about real science stretched a bit into the unknown. It follows all known rules and then adds something new to experiment with.
Arthur C Clarke is a great example of hard science-fiction. He goes as far as inventing new real concepts in his books.
Soft science-fiction is fantasy with a think paint of space, or time travel. All technology could be swapped out for magic and it would not make a difference.
The Dune series is a great example. So bad science-fiction is one that does not know where it lives. One moment it's hard, the next for plot reasons or ignorance of the writer it becomes soft.
Pure soft science-fiction has another pitfall. It often fails to appeal to science-fiction readers if it only becomes a meaningless backdrop for another genre like romance. Sign up to join this community.
The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group. Create a free Team What is Teams? Learn more. What makes bad science fiction? Asked 3 years, 11 months ago. Active 3 years, 11 months ago. Viewed times. Improve this question. FFN 1, 7 7 silver badges 20 20 bronze badges. The same thing that makes bad action, bad horror, bad romance, bad whodunnit Besides the answers below, bad SF for me is ignoring the obvious ramifications of plausible new science introduced.
Why does anybody on Star Trek die? In episodes they can be copied or reproduced from a transporter pattern buffer. Wouldn't you just store your pattern at the beginning of the day, like taking a shower, and if you die that day just get reproduced from your morning back up?
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