JKR Pulls a Paolini

[epistler]

Well, at least in one important respect.

NOTE: THIS IS ABOUT ROWLING'S HORRIBLE WRITING AND NOT HER HORRIBLE OPINIONS. So let's not get side-tracked with arguments about that, okay?

Now we've got that out of the way, you may have heard that Rowling's new "Robert Galbraith" book is - to put it mildly - an embarrassing trainwreck. A couple of things jumped out at me from this article which sounded both pertinent and familiar:

If you become an extremely successful author, your publisher is less likely to care about the quality of the books you write. If everything you write is guaranteed to sell well because you have built a large audience, then the editor may be disinclined to reject a new manuscript even if it is obviously terrible. Perhaps they will try to offer some constructive suggestions. Or perhaps they will just print whatever you submit, knowing that the purpose of a for-profit publishing company is to sell as many books as possible, not to sell the best books possible.

In other words this is why Rowling was able to publish a novel that contains pages upon pages of fictitious tweets bullying her painfully obvious self-insert*, and also why Paolini was able to publish an excruciatingly long and boring mediocre Star Trek episode with Venom shoehorned in mostly in order to give his latest Sue lots of pointless superpowers.

[*Seriously, if you can make it to the end of the extracts presented in the linked review without losing the will to live you're a stronger person than I am]

I think we can take a few lessons from The Ink Black Heart: First, every writer needs a good editor who can tell them when they have produced something that shouldn’t be published, and as you become more successful and sycophants begin telling you that your farts smell like roses, it is more important than ever to have people around who can say “no.”

Indeed.

Comments

[epistler]

I don't know if JKR is the reigning example of "early 2000s icons who've ruined their own reputations by their own awful actions" because, well, there's some pretty stiff competition - but she's got to be up there, and it makes me both angry and sad.

Same here. I've started to feel like it's best not to risk giving anyone my admiration any more because it seems every time I do I end up regretting it. Can't I keep at least one personal hero without finding out they're a horrible person and/or watching them crash and burn??

Also, I read the review Epistler linked, but my eyes glazed over at the wall of text (wall of tweets?) in the middle of it; dear God.

Yeah, I really wasn't kidding about that. Dude, one or two tweets AT MOST. Summarise the gist of what's being said, and I'm sure we'll be fine! Good grief.