The Steemit Slushpile Episode 1: Most Writing Sucks (and here's why)

I'm a professional writer. That is, I get paid to write things. I get paid pretty well, actually, on a global scale, though here in the US it's nothing to get excited about. Point is, I write and edit about ten thousand words, or a little more, every week. I see a lot of garbage (much of it my own). Occasionally, I see something interesting. Once in a great, wild while, I see something good. When I do, I often put it in my Best of Steemit series, one of the longest-running award series on Steemit.

The lead category on Best of Steemit is fiction, and some days--a lot of days--it takes me upwards of an hour to find a post I can feature. I review hundreds of posts a day just for that one category (and I give awards in eight of them). Today I thought, "you know, most of these 'story' posts are terrible. I wonder if the authors know that." Probably they do, and some of them undoubtedly don't care, because they make more per post than I make in two months, so this is, I guess, my chance to say "I know you're making money here, but your writing sucks." Call me Simon Cowell, because it's gonna be seriously snarky.

Cold comfort, but any comfort will do.

So here's today's edition, selected scrolling through fiction posts (because fiction is my favorite) on Steemit and randomly clicking on whatever is under the cursor. I'll quote the story right up to the place where I stop reading, or to the end of the first paragraph, whichever comes first.

#1: "Bonnie, come here!" her mother summoned." Stop. I'm done right here. Look, I know your junior-high English teacher told you to use clever words (like "summoned") for dialogue tags, because "said" is so boring. There's a reason your teacher isn't a novelist. "Said" is a tag that disappears for the reader. It's boring, but it's also invisible. In other words, the reader doesn't see your writing, the reader sees the story. You want that. Every time you call attention to your cleverness with your "summoning", you're taking the reader out of the story and making them look at you. With all the posts out there, if you make me do that in the first sentence, I'm not giving you a second one. It even distracted me from the fact that I can't imagine a non-children's book beginning with "Bonnie, come here!"

#2: It is dawn. Liith emerges from the House of Pain. A hooded acolyte, robed in grey, watches as my love runs to my waiting skimmer. Only when I close its glass dome does the attendant lock the arched wooden door to the outside world. Stop. That's the first paragraph, and I read the whole thing. So that's good. Full marks for using the correct "its" here, which is really complex even for English speakers. There's immediacy here, and the beginnings of something interesting, which is all you want the first couple lines to do. Good work.

#3: The boss man stood in the doorway, his enormous silhouette had a glowing... Stop. These are two complete sentences, which in English is subject and verb. English doesn't separate two independent clauses with a comma. Should be a semicolon, or, if you don't know what that is, a period. Possibly this is good, later on. I'll never know.

#4: This is the tale of a valley nestled in the foothills of the Andes, a place where giant dormant volcanoes wake from time to time shaking the grounds and spitting out dense columns of dark smoke. In Los Troncos it is always winter; on most days the sunny, blue sky alternates shifts with the starry nights that cover the glistening, snowed terrain. There, the trees are grand and mysterious, and upon them the woodpeckers borehole to make their nests. Stop. This has potential, although it starts with odd rhythm, like a fairy tale, but doesn't sound like it's going to be one. The first sentence needs a comma after "time to time", but all in all it was fine until "borehole", which isn't a verb, but is used like one. I'd keep reading anyway. I like the tone.

#5: Grey and translucent it lay there on the cutting board in the kitchen of a corporate-ran restaurant. Stop. It's corporate-run. Also, I don't know about the undefined "it" that's lying on the cutting board. Makes me nervous for the rest of the piece. Next.

#6: I was swinging once again, only this time I was doing it with a purpose in mind. Quite simply Stop. I liked the first sentence. Then the author started the second with a pair of adverbs. I like a good adverb, they're jiggly and fresh sometimes, but two in a row is pushing it. Most of the time, instead of telling the reader "frankly" or "the fact of the matter was" or "quite simply", you should just say what the purpose was. This is one of those times.

#7: *‘You’re 12 years late, give or take’ Darune, an old friend of Zhang’s, pointed at his perpetual calendar watch like they had merely discussed lunch.

‘Sorry, I got caught up with an incestuous tribe of murderers’

Darune's rusty face cracked, and a huge, confused smile escaped ‘…sounds like we have a lot to catch up on! But hell, you've barely aged a decade! We gotta catch up, I'll show you what we’ve done with the place, meet the locals, all that stuff. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised’*

BINGO. Why criticize this? It's terrific. Good dialogue. We get the names of the characters right up front, and they sound like different people when they talk. Excellent work. Not a thing to criticize.

Of course, that post made $1.76. The others? All well above $20, and a couple above $100. Because Steemit is...lemme get my thesaurus here...mendacious.

See you sometime for another edition.

~Cristof

P.S. If you see the above and say, "Man, I do all those terrible things", I have two suggestions for you. One, you can use @gmuxx 's English proofreading service. I recommend it highly. Two, you can go to the Writing Workshop Discord Channel, where there are wondrous souls that will help make your writing not suck.

P.P.S. If you're paying close attention, you see that #7 above is hyperlinked so you can read the rest. You should. Because it's good. I didn't link the rest. I'm snarky. I'm not cruel.