An Open Letter To People With Pens
July 3rd, 2007 at 11:50 pmDear Aspiring Failed Authors,
Look, let’s just get this out of the way. Tolkien is great and all and I throughly love the land of Middle Earth, but the tradition of creating songs and inserting their words into a book is not only annoying, it’s retarded. Stop copying him. If I don’t know the tune the words should be sung to, then it’s just a poem. And I think it’s an established fact that poems suck. They’re like riddles, but with less fun and more desire to stab yourself with a spoon. He was only able to pull it off because you knew that if you just grunted through it, the next page might have some goblins or trolls or talking trees. Your story most likely has a romantic love triangle and/or a possible clue to who committed the murder in the first chapter. Chances are people are only reading your book because they’re trying to fill the time before the next Harry Potter book comes out. You could have flying space aliens bring back Abraham Lincoln in your story and nobody would really care. They’re just thinking to themselves how in the world is Harry going to get Snape. So please, for the love of all that is Holy, just stop.
And with that, enjoy your 4th of July tomorrow everybody.
caitlin
July 4th, 2007 at 03:54 ami’m surprised you don’t like poetry. as a general field. i don’t expect that you’d like it all, but i don’t love all country. i can appreciate songs that are worthwhile
Goob http://www.shyzer.com
July 6th, 2007 at 01:29 pmI have three or four country songs on my iPod, but when there are 4,996 other non-country songs, I have no trouble saying “I hate country.” It’s just far too easy to forget about the less and 1% of 1% that you do enjoy. Hooray for broad swaths of generalization!
That said, I can’t think off the top of my head a single poem I enjoy. I don’t care who I’m reading. Shakespeare, Whitman, Tennyson, Angelou, Wordsworth, Yeats, Keats…you name it, I’ve yet to read a poem that I’ve enjoyed. In fact, this has me thinking about American authors in general or books that are considered to be Great American novels…but those are other Shyzer posts I need to write for a different time.
Am I saying poetry is useless or easy to write? Na, but it certainly isn’t for me. But like I said, you put a poem to a tune and suddenly you’ve got yourself a song. And we all know I love me some music.
How are things with you by the way? Doing well?!
Ally http://www.in-effigie.com
July 7th, 2007 at 12:41 pmI have a book that does have poems in it (”Haunted” - Chuck Palahniuk)… each short story is preceded with a poem in free-verse. It’s somewhat successful because the poems are fairly straight-forward and they tie in with the short story well.
However, reading a book with a supposed song throughout.. and not knowing the tune.. I’d probably find that annoying.