My theory is that it's partly a consequence of technological progress. It's far easier for a small production company to get hold of the equipment and technology to create a superficially well-made product than it was a few years back. What we get has its equivalents in self-publishing where much of the "slush-pile" of under-edited, poorly thought out, badly written texts has moved from the desks and bins of literary agents out into the "published" world of Amazon and others.

Since I've dabbled in scribbling myself, I've seen dozens of scripts from fellow would-be authors, and the bad ones often have a similar feel to them. They have a shaky story-arc often with a weak resolution. Almost always they have a few well-realised passages and a handful of good ideas. It's the result of starting out with a few well-realised passages and a handful of good ideas and hoping that the story and its conclusion will somehow emerge. Well, sometimes it does and maybe one time in ten it'll be pretty good. Problem is that when you've put in the work to write 120,000 words it's SO tempting to think 'job done' instead of either biting the bullet and starting the massive task of editing, or binning the lot.

A fair few Netflix and Amazon films I've seen in the last few years have just this feeling. One hour ten minutes into the plot and the director suddenly realises the film has to end soon, so the last 50% of the story is crammed into 10% of the time. The director/screenwriter has no idea how to resolve the tangled web of clever ideas from the start, so doesn't really bother. Something terrifying is happening which we never quite see and after hours of brain-wracking nothing original emerges so it turns out to be (a) a demon from "another dimension" (b) a demon from "hell" that arrived through "a portal" (c) one or more main/secondary characters "possessed" by a or b (d) something with a very fuzzy explanation to do with technology gone wrong (e) too bored to think of any more cliched endings.

I'll save it for one of her nights out, when I'm not (re)watching Kick Ass, Sin City, The Usual Suspects, Bad Lieutenant Port of Call New Orleans, or some equally high-minded production.

This is semi-plausible as far as it goes ... nevertheless it does appear there is some kind of market for this bilge -- else no one would distribute it.

I blame cell phones, twitter, and the general slide into sub-literacy, where YA-level plotting is married to extreme violence and CGI. Profit!

The kalsarikänni playlist...

Just so.  (rave)

Oh, there's definitely a market for it. Netflix, Amazon etc. pay big fees for the A-list movies they show which means they can't just offer the full library of "decent" quality film making for ever, even if the licence-holders let them do that, which they don't. That means they have to take what they can get at as low a price as possible simply to fill their lists up. It explains the upsurge of in-house film and TV series making which would have been unthinkable a decade ago when the prevailing management wisdom was always to stick to core business. It also explains why around 45% of all the offerings online are now foreign language. 

I don't think the analogy can be taken too far. There are hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of e-book self publishers. And the average person who feels they have a movie in them is more likely to head for YouTube or Vimeo than set up a production company.

They're probably encouraged by the general, abysmal level of most mainstream stuff.

Indeed. There are plenty of supposedly top-notch movies that would be no better than the dross if it wasn't for shed-loads of cash and better acting. As my first witness I call Interstellar which was launched as some sort of high-concept equivalent to 2001 A Space Odyssey. Well, tbh I have my doubts about 2001 other than it being a being a pretty amazing feast of visuals, but Interstellar is a definite stinker plot-wise. It has all the hallmarks: plenty of clever scenes, a big bag of ideas, but a resolution that is so fuzzy and blurry in its smoke and mirrors nonsense that they might as well have had Gandalph appear, wave a wand and declare that it's all OK now. When I look at the serious debates around nonsense like this or the mangled Reader's Digest philosophy of something like Arrival, I can't help but notice the contempt poured on a film like Jupiter Ascending which never aspired to being more than entertainment.

Interstellar was hilariously bad. I just started watching Nolan's Dunkirk which, hopefully will continue along a more grounded (/believable) track. Granted it is history-based fiction rather than speculative.

I've haven't done the sums for a while, but my novel Jackdaw - which, I make no bones, is a pot-boiler; but, I hope, a tolerably good pot-boiler - had made me £1,300 about a year ago, even given the niggardly percentages of Amazon. I do sincerely thank reviewers ;-). I deliberately wrote it as a movie, but alas, Hollywood has not yet bitten.

That's not a bad amount by any reckoning. Particularly when you bear in mind that the average income for people who identify as full-time authors in the UK is in the region of £13,000. 

 

Yours and others' reviews always help. I always get a boost in sales after a review. I don't know how Amazon's algorithms work, but the word gets out somehow.

Fuck me, that's dreadful. There must be some very, very bad writers among them.

There are some very, very, bad writers amongst the world's best sellers.

Conversely, I know some wonderful writers who hardly scrape pocket money from what they turn out.

Mrs.D, a prolific reader has remarked how some recently published* works sport dumbed-down plots and weirdly mangled and ungrammatical Engrish (punctuation optional), seemingly pitched to the modern, sub-literate audience. (I'm content with perusing picture books mostly) Yeah, it's not about the quality.

*actually printed with hard covers, fulsome praise quotes and everything, available in the lieberry.

Indeed, some of the stuff churned out by even some quite respectable publishers is desperately in need of more editing. It's a sign of the times; most authors earn publishers next to nothing so don't get the editorial oversight they need because it's expensive. Successful authors are often handled with a light touch so as not to jeopardise the money flow - and they often need as much if not more editorial control. Commerce is king in the end. And that explains the endless flow of celebrity shit masquerading as everything from writing for children (hard to find a celebrity who doesn't think they can somehow write for children) to great art.

Dan Brown was the one who floored me. I picked up The da Vinci Code out of a sense of obligation when it first ran away with itself. I wasn't hoping for Austen, but I was expecting basic syntax and the rational use of words.  Don't get me wrong: the narrative rattles along energetically (if predictably) enough: but I'm not sure I've read worse English in any professionally published work.

Yeah, I didn't want to mention him because I suppose he is doing something well - and I think you've hit on it. The stories rattle along and are easy to follow. But, my God his writing is utter shit. No grasp of grammar at all: commas in the wrong places, sentences that end in the most implausible. Constant use of pointless and almost meaningless adjectives, adverbs and analogies: the very wealthy man glanced at his watch... Oh and the ridiculous over-use of ellipses... Then there are simple mistakes because he grabs at ideas he thinks he knows. My absolute favourite, 'P a n d o r a is out of her box.' I can't help wondering whether Dan thinks his masterwork, the Da Vinci Code, is actually based on fact rather than being mainly plagiarised from another load of old bunkum (The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail) by authors who were completely taken in by a hoax perpetrated partly for fun, and partly as a bit of self-promotion by some French tricksters.

Incidentally, the earnings figure I quoted of £13000 came from figures the Society of Authors published a couple of years ago and it seems that this applies to writers of novels, short stories and book-length non-fiction work. I'm assured it's possible to earn a great deal more (3 or 4 times as much) if you put the famous novel on the back burner and concentrate on magazine short stories, filler pieces bordering on journalism, journalism, competitions, commercial blogs, etc. etc. That does surprise me and I suspect that in order to achieve this one would need to work very hard indeed.

 

Just out of interest, why is there some kind of word filter on P a n d o r a? Doesn't appear to be something I've set in the past so I assume it's forum wide. Maybe/maybe not.