There’s a post on Writer’s Digest titled “8 Basic Writing Blunders” directed at writers of fiction. Pretty standard stuff: avoid clichés of one sort or another; don’t tell the reader what s/he’s supposed to think; don’t be all preachy; don’t use more than one coincidence to drive the plot. But notice who wrote the article: Jerry B. Jenkins.
You’ve gotta be shitting me! Jerry B. Jenkins? The Left Behind hack? Writer’s Digest is posting advice from one of the worst best-selling writers ever to kill a tree? The co-author of 4800 pages of pure cliché-ridden dreck?
Read my romp through the Glorious Appearing, the 12th installment in the Left Behind crap-fest. My post comes complete with a top-10 list of worst sentences. To whet your appetite, take a look at this gem: “What was happening on the dirt ramp and the wood stairs dwarfed mass tragedies due to fire in crowded buildings.”
The point of this post (I think) is that it’s hard to take Writer’s Digest seriously. A bigger point may be that how-to posts for writers are bullshit. For some reason I don’t understand, the yearning to be a writer makes people extraordinarily vulnerable. They become susceptible to all kinds of scams and silly know-it-all advice columns. Maybe it has something to do the need for acceptance.
The only thing I know for certain about the Jerry Jenkins post is that the man doesn’t practise what he preaches. But you already knew that, didn’t you?
Poo Emoji by Emmanuel Cordoliani [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)]