Bad Writing...

I've decided the memoir is, or should be, a dead form. Not for all time, just until the bad writers stop writing. Alex, you can write one...Claire too, but most people shouldn't. You see, what I find is that the current crop of crap is written by people who write memoirs because they can't write anything original. So, they take the memoir, use a style that's "simple", such as stream of consciousness, and then ruin it. I've read Kerouac (no, his weren't memoirs, but his style resembles...no, the style I'm reading resembles him)...but fails miserably. Here's an example of what I'm talking about from Goat:

And even though Brett and I have lived here for three years we don't come from here and our dad's a preacher but he's strange (not like hellfire crazy strange, or standing on a sidewalk holding a Bible up in the air strange, but just strange, like once he melted down the gold caps from his teeth and made them into a cross) and he doesn't have enough money to be in the club and neither does my mother (she's a school nurse and when we get sick she's always the one who tells us we'll be better soon, tells us what pills to eat) but occasionally we get invited to their parties because we know the sons and the daughters, and it's always us just standing there with our cigarettes and the free booze, but we know we aren't like them and we douldn't marry one of the daughters because we don't come from where their future husbands are supposed to.

You see...that's just poor writing. The lack of punctuation doesn't add anything. It doesn't make me feel that he's thinking manically or that his life is somehow more chaotic than mine (as Kerouac's does). Instead, it just makes me feel like he doesn't know how to use punctuation--or that he thinks by using a slew of and's, we won't notice that his descriptions aren't very good since we'll be so impressed with his flouting of expected form.

I'm not trying to imply write perfectly, which I don't (look at my overly liberal use of elipses and parantheticals), but still, I'd like to think that if I wrote the story of my life, I wouldn't resort to writing poorly in order to hide the fact that I just haven't thought of a good way to tell it. My old english teacher used to say, "Good writing is good thinking" and I'm convinced this fellow just can't think well.

Here's a Kerouac quote to compare with:

...colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middleclass non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets is each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness...”