Writing Analysis: John Scalzi

Long ago, I wrote this post: Dialogue Tags: The Bad, the Visible, the Audible, and the Absent

In one part of this post, I said:

Look at this tiny sample of dialogue, from Scalzi’s REDSHIRTS, which I just listened to. And it was really good, btw – an excellent choice for audio format. But look at this:

“I was promised a long story,” Duvall said, after they had gotten their food and drinks.
“I made no such promise,” Dahl said.
“The promise was implied,” Duvall protested. “And besides, I bought you a drink. I own you. Entertain me, Ensign Dahl.”
“All right, fine,” Dahl said. “I entered the Academy late because for three years I was a seminary student.”
“Okay, that’s moderately interesting,” Duvall said.
“On Forshan,” Dahl said.
“Okay, that’s intensely interesting,” Duvall said.

Notice something? Every single line is tagged and in all but one case, the tag is “said.” Besides that … the sentence pattern is nearly always the same. Of course I selected this tidbit on purpose to illustrate a point, but I promise you that the overall feeling you get, given Scalzi’s writing style in this book, is that every single line is tagged with “said.”

I wonder how many readers actually start to notice all those “he said, she said” tags? When you’re reading, I wonder if you don’t just skim over this dialogue so fast you really don’t notice the tags? But I can tell you, when you’re listening to this in audio format, those tags sure catch your ear. They don’t sound exactly silly, but they start to pick up a fingernails-on-a-chalkboard quality.

I’ve read, I don’t know, a few books, three or four or five, by John Scalzi, and I’ve found them okay. When I read his version of Little Fuzzy, Fuzzy Nation, I thought this version had prose that was more facile than H Beam Piper’s original, but had less heart (for lack of a better term). I don’t remember whether I really identified why I got this impression. Maybe I couldn’t tell at the time. Maybe I was just mildly annoyed because Scalzi made the Fuzzies have three sexes, which was all him, that’s not in the original, and the reason this annoyed me is that there are evolutionary reasons you get two sexes, not three. This goes back to the fundamental division between “individuals that make big gametes with extra stuff in them” versus “individuals that make little gametes with just the DNA in them,” and this is why plants AND fungi AND animals all have two fundamental sexes, not three. This is not random chance. It’s true you can then do stuff on top of this division, eg, workers vs reproductives in bees, but this was not how Scalzi did it, so it was mildly annoying. But not nearly as annoying as the way he handled dialogue tags in Redshirts. Which I got used to and so I did enjoy the story, but still.

So, the other day, Lise Andreasen sent me an email with a heads up to this recent post of hers: Oh, Scalzi, and I immediately thought of the above and was very curious about this post.

Lise says: Recently I’ve been reading my way through one of those bundles. In this case so, so many books by John Scalzi. A lot of reasons for that. The bundle was cheap. And I liked Redshirts, and Fuzzy Nation, and some other stuff here and there. Oh yeah, Old Man’s War. It would be nice to read the rest of the series. But the language is increasingly rubbing me the wrong way. So many words could be deleted. A lot of sentences could be shortened. And in some cases, a sentence is simply constructed wrong or represents a falsehood.

Those are the ones I’ve definitely read, so that’s good — though I don’t remember Old Man’s War very well. Wow, there are seven books in the series, I didn’t know that. Anyway, what are some examples of phrases that bother Lise? There are quite a few listed in her post, but here is my favorite:

… Ghreni’s brain decided…

(A quirk with this writer, where a person and their brain isn’t the same thing.)

I laughed. I haven’t read enough by Scalzi to notice this; it isn’t something that caught my eye when I’ve read books of his. But it is funny! I’m not sure I remember seeing this in anyone else’s books. I’m wondering why you would ever type that, instead of “Ghreni decided.” Oh, you might, if you were saying, “Ghreni’s brain pulled him toward option A, but his heart urged him toward option B.” Other than that sort of construction, it does seem odd! But you know what else strikes me is that “Ghreni” is pronounced almost like “Grinny” when I read it, which is a strange and offputting name. I sort of wonder, seeing this, if Scalzi is an author who does not subvocalize — I mean, who is not an auditory writer — and who therefore isn’t bothered by things like the sound of he said … he said … he said … at the end of every single line, or by names that sound a little strange.

Anyway! One major takeaway here is that (A) Scalzi is a very popular author, and (B) but his writing doesn’t appeal to me particularly or to various other readers. It’s not a new and stunning revelation to point out that readers have diverse tastes, I know that. I just wonder if the readers who particularly enjoy Scalzi’s work tend to be less auditory when they read than, say, I am? That seems possible.

I’ve also known authors who said that they could hardly read most books because, as they became more experienced as authors and therefore more sensitive to sentences and paragraphs, any sort of bad writing bothered them more and more. I’m kind of relieved that this has happened to me only to a moderate degree, because I can enjoy books that aren’t that well written, as long as SOMETHING about the book appeals to me enough. There are limits, sure. But within those limits, which are fairly broad, a lot of writing styles can work for me well enough.

But I don’t have anything of Scalzi’s on my immense TBR pile, and perhaps this is part of why.