Books you would have written better.

Now, I'm not talking about books that just 'weren't your style' or were things you didn't like. I personally hated every second I spent reading 1984, I never want to see it again, and I really cringe when I know high school students are reading it. BUT, it's amazingly well written. It is (despite me not liking it) what I consider a well-written, 'good,' book.

In the same vein, there's a book by a French author, set in the 1850s (?) about a group of peasants working in the mines - the mine was called Le Voreaux (which I named my first car) and I can't remember anything else about it other than it was depressing, drear, bleak, and just awful to wade through. I didn't think it was well-written AT ALL. One gets the same idea from Le Mis, and much more enjoyably. BUT it's a representative sample of that time period and writing style (I'd mention Charles Dickens as a similar idea, but I think I'd get flamed...) so, despite me thinking it was a bad writing STYLE, it was a good example of what it was intended.

On the other hand, something like Heart of Darkness (which I also didn't like) I think could have been more effective if it had been written differently. I disliked it, but more because I was bored. There were none of the powerful stirrings caused by 1984. The whole time I was reading it, I was really wanting to take an editing pen and just re-write it to make it more effective, more interesting.

Finally, there's something like Dracula, which I (sadly) read AFTER I had read Frankenstein. Comparing the two, I was highly disappointed in Dracula, and if I ran the universe (... another thread, strangely enough) I would have enjoyed Dracula much more if it was as in-depth and character driven as Frankenstein.

I have already decided it is much easier to say "I could do that, better maybe, even" than it is to get off my butt and do it. I have tried writing nonfiction and it was not easy. I can' even imagine my being self disciplined enough to write an actual novel.

I may be a minority of one here but that's my point of view.

hehe - oh no, I didn't mean "me/you" personally writing them better - just that you WISHED they had been written better/differently. Perhaps by your preferred perfect author.

"you would have" from the thread title perhaps better written as "you would wish were"

Ben Franklin said that when he wanted to read a good book, he wrote one. Or at least I heard that somewhere.

Ditto on Dracula and Heart of Darkness.

Solzhenitsyn's later works read like he just emptied the contents of his desk onto the page. I wish The Red Wheel was more of a November, and less an experiment. Especially November 1916.

Funny thing about people's tastes. I loved every word of Les Miserables. Every one of them. I also read Dracula, then Frankenstein. I hated Frankenstein. Talk about boring and pedantic. Ugh. Dracula is one of my favorite adventure/horror stories.

While I have never thought that I could write better, I have wished that some mystery authors would have written better. There have been some fun themes which fell short in the execution or dialog. Perhaps the author was more concerned with quantity than quality? Which is one reason I have never taken up a pen to write. I've read enough humdrum, soso stuff, I don't think I need to add to it and I don't feel any stirrings of genius within. :)

I'm with MrsLee. I've read Frankenstein twice, and I hated it even more the second time. I know, I know. It was written by a teenager. A brilliant one, maybe... but still.

Maybe I'd make the plot EVEN MORE transparent:

Oh, I know this ruthless horrible decaying killer is after me and all those that I love. I think I'll leave my new wife alone in the other wing of our home for a few hours, and see what happens...

;o)

Maggie, could you please make that a minority of two? I write non-fiction almost for a living, and it's a pain. Then I talk rubbish at tea (just like here in the GD), and the sweet young lassie in the office next door says brightly that I ought to write a novel, it would be great humour. No Des, it isn't going to happen because it can't.

#7 hfglen - happy to have you in my corner.

Harry Potter and the whatever whatever.

Rowan, I thought Dracula wasn't awful, but it felt like some Victorian equivalent to a Dean Koontz book. Overdone yet unconvincing characterization, pointless digressions, unimaginative plotting. I think the only sections I completely enjoyed were Harker's imprisonment diary and the captain's log.

As for books that I'd like to see rewritten, a couple of Chuck Palahniuk books come to mind. Actually, Choke has been rewritten as House of Leaves, although the latter expands the protagonist's adventures in very interesting ways. (Well, technically I think HoL came first, so it's a case of retroactive rewriting.) And if I had dictatorial powers and a pathological disregard for authors' feelings, I'd probably force a skilled genre author (Ligotti, Campbell, Vandermeer) to rewrite Haunted so it didn't suck.

>1 RowanTribe: I think you're thinking of Germinal by Zola. The Dickens comparison isn't too far off-- both authors wrote novels that were meant to be highly popular and reach the masses. So you've got two authors aiming for mass distribution, not just the intelligentsia, which is something you might want to take into your analysis of how they were written and why they were written in that manner.

(me, I love Zola, hate Dickens-- but I concede your point about the writing)

YAY! Germinal! That's exactly what it was. And yeah, that was my point - they're both very specifically TRYING to write that way - I don't like it, but I KNOW why they did it.

My re-writing mental exercise is with things that don't really have a reason/excuse for being (in my opinion) bad.

And it is funny - most people either like Frankenstein OR Dracula. I haven't met many who like both.

I like both. =)

I actually prefer Dracula, it's one of my favorite books, but I don't dislike Frankenstein. I took a class entitled "Detectives, Criminals, and Monsters" in which we read both, and did discover that odd discrepancy. Most people didn't like Dracula, which I struggled with understanding because I never want it to end!

I like both, too.

Yeah, me too. I'm rereading Frankenstein over lunch at work, and now that it's come up I think I'll hit Dracula afterwards.

Dracula is the best!

Many, many fantasy books that I've read. I read them and think "wow, what an interesting premise/plot/world/character(s). Too bad the writing is such crap."

I used to write a lot, and I never actually thought the stuff I wrote was all that great most of the time (unlike kids today, omg, one thing I hate about the internet...) so I do have some inkling of how not-easy a thing it is to do, but there is just so much crap that I don't even understand how it gets published. Don't editors exist? Aren't they there for a reason? Why...why...?

I could probably have written Eragon better if I was older. Replace the Star Wars cliches with better characters, and go more with the mythic role of Dragons rather than a Pern rip-off, plus you would have to make it funnier...

One book I definitely wrote better when I was older was "Immortal Part I: Revolution of the Living Dead", which was one of mine. I cannibalised all the good bits and the world I made for it in order to create a slightly more serious, but universally humorous interpretation of my mythos.

"Small Worlds: A Miscellany" (no touchstone for it) was one of my worst efforts since "The Big Evil Thingies", which was so bad that I destroyed all traces of it when I was 9 years old. I have been told some of the stories in it were good, but I really admit it could have used an edit.

I'm taking no chances with "Family Matters", my NaNoWrimo novel which is the end result of ROTLD being rewritten.

I always thought I could probably have written The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time better, since unlike Mark Haddon, I actually have autism, and would pull off a more realistic portrayal of such a child that would have it. Curious Incident cheesed me off to no end, because it gave a completely wrong impression of people who have what I have.

I really wonder if I might have been able to write other books better, but usually I accept that the way a classic of literature is done is better than a happy ending tacked onto Hamlet for example. But Eragon and Curious Incident should have been written by someone like me, just to see what would happen...

For me, I'd like it if Arthur C Clarke had perhaps taken a few lessons in characterization and plotting... now don't get me wrong, I'm a big ACC fan (probably comes from hailing from the same part of the world) and he has some fantastic and thought provoking ideas, but (just like my theory of "classic scifi" books) his concepts and ideas really take the lead over his characters and plot.

I'd rewrite The Ancient Future trilogy. It had a lot of potential, but needed a big heavy handed editor to fix the inconsistent language and style and perhaps a fault or two for the main characters.

Phrasing like "Thee all hath done so" makes me squirm, although the idea to use the older style language was great.