Young Writers Society

outvaders wrote:unrelated, but this is by far the saltiest thread I've ever seen and it's very ironic, knowing that YWS is a very friendly site

let the rivers of salt overflow

Ever step place in Serious Discussion and Debate? Haha.

Wesley Chu; specifically The Lives of Tao. His writing was okay; but the characters and plot were so illogical, I was practically irate while reading the book. The MC -Roen- was whiny and annoying; and he never changed! Tao would constantly be telling him do this and Roen would act like a child who isn't getting his way. I wanted to punch him in the face.
At some point in the book, Tao accidentally gets Roen into a love triangle. For no reason whatsoever Tao never explains that the whole thing was just a setup to get the roommate from flirting with one of the agent's. I generally hate love triangles, but this one was just unbearable, and forced.
And the final nail in the coffin was the fact that the plot never seems to move forward -aside from Roen's training. Within the first hundred pages of the book, a subplot is introduced, and it's never mentioned or thought of again. The whole book just generally meanders and doesn't really move.

James Dashner I actually liked The Kill Order a lot, but everything else he's written is just so bleh. The Maze Runner series was...
...competent.
And his new Mortality Doctrine series is just plain boring. In summary: he's a hack.

Jeff Kinney: Diary of a Wimpy Kid stars possibly the most annoying, whiny, selfish, and just absolutely intolerable character ever created. I'd rather gouge my eyes out with a screwdriver than read one more sentence of that awful series.

Christopher Paolini. I mean it is more of a dislike. His sentences can run on for a while, and they tend to end up bland. I barely got through Eragon my first time reading it. Granted he was 15 when he wrote it, but it was just becoming bland in parts.

Eragon is a Star Wars/LOTR crossover fanfic. Plot: rather Star Wars-y. Everything else: very LOTR without license. Except the writing style. Blegh
(though if I got my epic fantasy novel published when I was 15 I would not even care what other people thought so good on him).

Meh, I actually like Eragorn more than a lot of people. The writing style only annoys me sometimes, and the first book isn't quite as similar to Star Wars as everyone thinks. (Blame the movie for that.) The later books aren't really that bad, though they need some work with pacing, and the denouement is about 100 pages too long.

Though my personal pet peeve is Warriors. I adored this series when I was nine, and I still enjoy the first couple of series and the Super Editions. What bothers me is that the publishing company is still milking the franchise. They just try to make the stakes bigger, then rush everything at the end, and at this point they're recycling the same plots over and over again. The later books also have a lot of small continuity errors. They put out like 3 a year, which explains the low quality.


And then there's Heroes of Olympus. I really wanted to love it. I adored Percy Jackson as a kid and I still like it. I liked the first two books of HoO, and although the problems were starting to show by the third book, I still loved it because Annabeth.

But I think he just wound up with too many characters and too many things to juggle. And all the gods/Titans/what have you all wound up seeming exactly the same and over the top. Still, I stuck with it, buying each book faithfully as it came out. (Also, don't get me started on Nico. Don't. That whole thing was handled poorly.)

In fact, Blood of Olympus was one of the most disappointing reading experiences I've ever had. When I finished, I just put the book down and walked away. I wasn't mad, I wasn't sad, I didn't even care that a series I'd been following for years had ended. It was too perfect and too easy and there were too many loose threads, and in the end I just lost all my investment in the series. And I'm still sad about that.

This all sounds super negative, but in reality this doesn't happen very often. Most of the books I read wind up with a 4 or 5 star rating.

I'd like to put forward the motion that John Green would've been much more noir-appreciated as a YA Poet. His style does revolve around single-shots of quotable lines, but he doesn't have the power of dynamic plots and characters to succeed as a worshiped author...which is a real shame, seeing as he's worshiped by a weeping mass of badbrains teens.

But on that point, I think he fulfills an interesting role in the grand scheme of gateway emotional reading, since readers of his work will stumble into David Levithan, into Catherynne M. Valente, into the poets he rubs elbows with and the authors that relate to his Amazon page (a good number of which are poets I respect).

So on the subject of Green, I respect him as a gateway, but not as a novelist.

I'd say with Christopher Paolini that he appears to me to be a huge fan of padding. Like with Eragon, he spent a lot of time going into unnecessary detail and having random events happen that served no useful plot purpose, just in the interests of making the book longer. In the later books (and I have to admit I only skimmed through a few of them to see what happened) he seems to forego action in favour of exposition. When a significant character is killed off (plot points that seem a little more important) he seems to rush it into a few paragraphs, but he has no problem with purple prose. I also disliked Eragon as a character because he was flat and unmemorable. The only character I connected with in any way was Murtagh because he seemed to have a little more depth and was generally more believable. It's been a while since I read anything of Paolini's though.

Cassandra Clare is another author I dislike, not just because she has the most appalling track record when it comes to her treatment of people who stand up against her, or her alleged plagiarism, but because her books are not particularly well-written. City of Bones felt somewhat unplanned to me towards the end, and whilst I liked the characters on my first reading, when I returned to the book a few years later I realised just how annoying some of them were, Jace and Clary in particular. The borderline incest thing also grossed me out a little, and when I tried to read the second Mortal Instruments book I couldn't handle more than a few pages just because I disliked the way it had been written.

There's not much to say Stephenie Meyer other than the fact I didn't like Twilight. Apart from the decidedly shady morals it teaches, it had a bland, selfish protagonist and the whole series just felt decidedly whiny. I haven't read The Host but I heard that's better.

The Host is definitely better. I like Meyer because of it. Haven't read the Twilight series.