How To Write Good Part One: Fred Clark's Holy Fury · 5:40pm Feb 5th, 2017
Hello everyone! Welcome to my new and unrequested series on learning about writing. I've blogged about bits of writing before, but here I want to go from the ground up and do something a little bit more comprehensive. I'm not writing a textbook with every aspect of storytelling covered one after another - hell, my own eyes glaze the fuck over when I see guides for newbie writers with headings and subheadings for 'plot' 'characters' 'villains' with a hundred points in alphabetical order, after all - but instead, I want to go over what I've learned of the craft in kinda-sorta the order that I first picked it up.
Think of it not as an atlas, but a set of scribbled directions. There's a lot of stuff it won't cover, but there might be a few things I picked up that a more general overview would miss.
My Dudes, Fred Clark Taught Me So Much, So, So Much
I've talked about Fred Clark before. In fact, I think I've mentioned him every single time I've ever been asked for writing advice. His Left Behind Analysis is the bedrock of everything I write. There's not a single aspect of fiction writing, bar the business side and maybe editing, where my thinking isn't build on a solid foundation of Fred. Dialogue? Fred. Characterisation? That's Fred. Pacing, plotting, set ups and payoffs? Fred, Fred, Fred and Fred. Worldbuilding? Oh, that's my man Fred all over that.
So yeah, his work is important to me. Still, I've never gone into detail about why his work is so important.
In short, he took the worst books ever written, and turned them into one of the greatest writing guides in the modern English language. To get Hegelian about it, Left Behind is the thesis, Fred Clark is its antithesis, and his analysis is the synthesis.
Before I get into his analyses, let's talk about the books. The Left Behind series are a dozen-odd books, by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye, about a Christian apocalypse: the Rapture, the (singular, lone) Antichrist, "biblical" "prophecy," seals and bowls, four horsemen, end-of-times stuff. The two lead characters are Buck Williams, a journalist, and Rayford Steele, an airline pilot whose wife and child disappear in the Rapture. After God whisks away his chosen in the Rapture - all Real, True Christians and all children under 14-ish - a jaunty Romanian by the name of Nicolae Carpathia takes over the UN and then the world, where he starts ruining things further, because he's the Antichrist.
They're so bad, my guys.
Here's a sampling of the bullshit that takes place in the first book:
-Russia and Ethiopia* launch their entire arsenals, every soldier, sailor, plane, tank and nuke, at Israel. All at the same time. Every plane and every missile is downed by giant hailstones in a blatant act of divine intervention. There are no casualties on the Israeli side, and even the in-flight nuclear missiles land harmlessly in empty fields.
-This blatant proof of the supernatural gets precisely one (1) shrug from our intrepid reporter, and everyone kinda goes about their business.
-Every child in the world disappears. Nobody really cares, and after a few weeks, everyone seems to forget about it.
-An Israeli scientist invents a new form of Miracle-Gro so powerful that it turns Israel, a state with 1/4th the landmass of Scotland, into the breadbasket of the world.
-The aforementioned Russo-Ethiopian invasion occurred because these two states were jealous of this magic formula.
-Born-again Christians use chocolate cookies as creepy sex metaphors.
-The Antichrist takes over the world by reading country names from a list while diplomats cheer for him.
-The phones. The phones!
That's all bad, but I'm only really pointing it out here to give a hint of what kind of bad it is. Those elements alone aren't absolute proof of badness after all. If i’m just pointing out wacky stuff, I could point to equally bathetic concepts and scenes in say, Stephen King's work. But where Stephen King is a good writer who has powered through bad ideas because he’s a professional, LaHaye and Jenkins are not good writers and they are not skilled professionals.
LaHaye and Jenkins fuck up everything. Their prose is shit, their leads are unpleasant, their work oozes sexism and antisemitism, their world is a broken jigsaw puzzle, they tell where they should show and show where they should tell, their climaxes are anticlimactic, they don’t do research, they don’t edit or trim, they’re obsessed with phonecalls, their theology is twisted, they have no concept of human behaviour, their villains are unintentionally sympathetic and their heroes downright repulsive.
Here's where Fred Clark comes in. He’s a writer and former journalist, he’s been a prolific blogger since blogging was a thing, and he’s a damned good reviewer. He’s one of the rare liberal evangelicals, raised in the evangelical bubble, well-versed in both normal Christian theology and the weird heterodox stuff that LaHaye espoused. This puts him in a uniquely good position to review Left Behind as he’s able to both critically examine the work, and also see the shibboleths and dogwhistles that only someone with in-depth knowledge of the tribe would notice.
Fred is a great analyst who writes great analysis. But his Left Behind reviews are exceptional, and strangely, the thing that elevates it from great analysis to exceptional analysis is that the Left Behind books are exceptionally bad. If they were merely mediocre - a Twilight or a Da Vinci Code - the reviews couldn’t teach nearly as much about how to tell stories and write fiction.
They are, in the words of Fred Clark himself, instructively bad.
This level of badness is important, because it gives you contrast. Writing - in fact, most art - is more than the sum of its parts. You might not even notice bad prose in a story if the plot is interesting enough to make you want to speed on through, or you could ignore a slower, picaresque pace if the prose is gorgeous. If a book is merely mediocre, it can be hard to say which particular elements don't work. When a book is all bad, though, it's simpler. Every direction leads up. You don't have to worry that maybe you're missing some greater point, because really, you aren't. Left Behind is truly the sum of its parts.
Conversely, most people's experience with analyzing books - in the classroom - revolves around books that are critical successes or outright classics. You're looking for themes, ideas, prose and plots, figuring out meaning and interpretation. That's all well and good, but it makes a crucial assumption - it assumes that the authors have done their fucking jobs. Character analysis requires the authors to have written actual characters, after all.
When I first started writing stories, I had a lot of blank spots where I simply didn't know what was necessary or not. Am I spending too much or too little time on transitions? Is this dragging out, or is it abrupt? Do the readers have any idea what's going on?
What really helped was seeing it done badly, and seeing that broken down. Something that works in writing can work on a number of different levels, but reasons for failure tend to be much easier to understand. To get that understanding, start with Clark.
Next up: More Fred Clark, and how to write really shitty protagonists.
*Ethiopia?!
ETHIOPIA!
It's kind of like how China's massive food production has led to it becoming a massive agricultural economic pow-pftahahahahahahahaha, oh my god.
Agreed. I don't normally do this, but you can get 900 pages of his analysis on Kindle for under $10. Definitely worth reading.
I have read Fred Clark's entire Left Behind analysis so far. Not even because of the writing craft aspects (On my more confident days I'd like to think that I'm past making 99% of the often bizarre mistakes the authors make) but because Fred writes so damn well that they're a delight to read. I actually picked up his regular blog, even though I'm not an evangelical. It's such a glimpse into a really interesting world and he's just such a good writer!
I remember reading the first couple back in my teens, before ever being exposed to that analysis, and being profoundly weirded out by them.
And yet, I think that Fred Clarke left out a very big part in his analysis: how and why those books got so much notoriety and success in America.
Seriously, there was a time when they were competing with Harry Potter! They were in the same league!
wish i could save blogs
4410364
Favorites bar in your browser?
4410362 He didn't.
As Fred Clark mentions, they're a product of the White Evangelical bubble, which is not a small subculture. These books were permissible literature among families that were nervous about the magic in The Lord of the Rings and may have barely trusted Narnia. They were beyond permissible in a world where Harry Potter was actually condemned as "promoting witchcraft". Do not underestimate the size and scope of the evangelical world.
Fred pretty much hits on exactly why these books sold well: Lahaye and Jenkins are glorified con men, selling terrible fantasies to a wide group of people vulnerable to them.
I can do you one worse: Rush Limbaugh Revere and the Brave Pilgrims!
Picture everything wrong with an educational tv show about history. Now make it even dumber. Presto: Rush Limbaugh's crowning masterpiece.
You enjoyed coming up with that line, didn't you?
I've only really been exposed to the Left Behind series via reviews of its various movie adaptations (Hail Hagan!) and those fall into the same spectrum in terms of movie quality as the books apparently. The difference I see (based on your bulleted list) is that the movies managed to cut out some of the real stupid and compress the timelines so that things like the kids going missing and no one caring aren't as blatantly dumb.
4410362
The evangelicals are nothing if not committed to blindly supporting that which supports their worldview. You just have to look at the box office numbers for Passion of the Christ to see that.
4410371
Well, um, whoops.
In my defense, I'd started reading the analysis quite some time ago, stopped because...it's very, very long, and I didn't notice that particular part.
...boy, is there egg on my face
4410401
I dunno...I read recently "Hillbilly Elegy", which was a pretty eye-opening book in explaining Trump's rise to power (and generally the fact that there's huge swathes of America that have been completely forgotten and forsaken by pop culture, regular culture, and are completely alien to the other side of America), and the author earnestly said that the Left Behind books were the best books ever written.
Mind, "Hillbilly Elegy" is basically an autobiography, and the chapter in which he said this he was waffling between hardcore ultra-Christianity and atheism, but...I dunno.
Are you sure Left Behind is the worst series ever? I am pretty sure Mission Earth series(1) By Lafayette Hubbard was the worst series ever. I read all 10 books while in high school. I am no longer able to have children thanks to reading this line of books. Furthermore The Geneva Convention states that reading the Mission Earth series to POWs is a war crime .
(1) Not to be confused with Battlefield Earth which was written by someone else with L Ron Hubbard's name tacked on.
Reviews can be a great way to learn. They provide a wide array of perspectives. Consume enough of them and they eventually turn your eye inward to question why you yourself like or dislike particular works, if you don't already. Uncovering that 'why' is where, in my opinion, the real learning occurs.
Hm I've never heard Fred Clark, I'll have to check him out.
This is a really interesting point, actually, because it does seem patently absurd and unrealistic. Yet look at the Israelites, who after a miraculous rescue from Egypt, walking through the Red Sea, seeing God come down on Mount Sinai and nearly peeing themselves from literally hearing his voice, immediately proceed to build a golden calf to worship while Moses is on the mountain top. Or the later Pharisees, who after hearing Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, don't disbelieve it but instead begin to plot his death.
Which, at least to me, is pretty fascinating, and completely unintuitive considering most westerner's emphatic assertion that a simple miracle, a single spoken sentence is all they would require to believe. Yet going by observation, I do see people will hold to what they wish to, and often there is no convincing. And we do accuse plenty of Christians of ignoring the blatant evidence in front of them. Since there is no malady of character given to the religious but not the unreligious, the idea seems to me not so foreign after all.
You have a very, very good taste in bloggers and reviews of terribly shitty books, I see.
Fred Clark's exceptionally good reading overall. Few people these days can get so much genuine righteous anger at the awful things people, who claim to be good Christians, do.
4410442
Citation needed. The Bible never makes any specific claim as to whether the Pharisees believed Lazarus was raised, and for all they knew this was a crazy con man trying to deceive people. Additionally, Jesus was himself technically a Pharisee. His methods of teaching are actually consistent with what we know about how they generally instructed disciples.
Also, the Israelite origin story was - so far as basically every Bible scholar who doesn't (probably incorrectly) attribute the pentateuch to Moses seems to claim - not actually written until after the fall of at bare minimum the northern kingdom of Israel, and is dedicated to the idea of showing a rocky relationship between Israel and God.
And also, the israelites were polytheists. It's not so much that they didn't believe God had saved them as they were looking for a better deal.
I’ve bee hearing about the Slacktivist for years, and now I know his name. I really need to check him out at some point.
I’m looking forward to this series. As someone who often struggles with doing the writing gooder, seeing it done genuinely terribly, and the analysis from competent writers that follows, is guaranteed to be enlightening.
I need to read these now. I mean, I remember when LB was coming out - I was into them because hey, I liked Apocalypse stories, and while the Christian eschatological bits were...silly, I was still slightly religious enough to enjoy them.
Now, older and a touch wiser, it will be fun to watch them torn to pieces.
I remember sitting in a Barnes & Noble at the height of the Left Behind craze and being struck by the color scheme of the Christian book section. There were a bunch of Left Behind wannabes, all goth in their angry black and blood-red covers, and the rest were cheery upbeat books in MLP pastels. These colors were all mixed together so that if you stood back and looked at it from a distance, it was like looking into the subconscious of someone repressing hatred and violent thoughts with lunatic cheerfulness. Like a reactor core with rods of deadly plutonium being kept below critical by control rods of lead shielding. I thought that that color scheme provided a lot of insight into Christianity.
4410442
Or how, after Jesus heals a lame man on the Sabbath, the Pharisees who saw him do it immediately begin plotting to use his "Sabbath breaking" to kill him.
But this isn't evidence that people really behave that way, as much as it's evidence that the Bible is fiction. People don't behave that way.
4410564
Hrm. Well, looking at the passage in John 11, it says, "Many of the Jews therefore, who had come with Mary and had seen what he did, believed in him, but some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered the council and said, “What are we to do? For this man performs many signs. If we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our place and our nation.” So it doesn't seem they doubted.
I don't much mind who wrote the Pentateuch when it comes to whether it is accurate or not. :)
I'm sure they had their reasons. People always do. But what golden calf ever parted the sea for them?
4410957
There's precedent in the Bible for what the authors of Left Behind did, is the main point. :) Hardly a defense of the novels, which I've never read, but it was something I find thought provoking to boot.
I don't blame you for believing that, Bad Horse.
4411080 Yes, there is precedent for that sort of behavior in the Bible. You are very good at not getting upset. Thank you.
I read some of the Left Behind critiques, and they are good, or at least satisfyingly vicious, but they teach things like "Have your characters act like you say they would act instead of acting out your subconscious impulses and suppressed rage," which are kind of obvious.
(Are they archived anywhere where I can read just them, without reading all the other blog posts in-between?)
I remember being baffled by the pro-apocalyptic wing within Christianity way back in the late 1970s, when a lot of people were pro-Israel because they thought the existence of an Israeli state would bring about the apocalypse. I've since heard this was a big factor in the US helping arrange the original Israeli state in the 1940s--that Christian US diplomats wanted to help bring about the apocalypse. I still don't understand the logic, but it is a real thing--there are lots of Christians who think, "The Bible predicts that a bunch of awful things will happen before Christ's return, so if I help bring about these awful things, I'm doing God's will and being a good Christian." That isn't even how predictions work in the Bible--that would be like the Israelites worshipping other Gods in order to please God because of prophecies that they would turn away and worship other Gods.
My own parents never had any concern about environmental causes, because they always said the Earth was going to be destroyed pretty soon anyway.
Do you have a favorite? Mine's probably when Buck enters a men's room, doesn't leave for 10 pages, and then that's followed up by 3 pages of phone tag. Because the reader's time is valuable.
4410346
Yep, all this, also true for me. H/T to the OP for directing me there however long ago it was.
4412830
Here ya go.
ETA: Also available as ebooks for anyone who wants to support the blogger.
4412830
I suspect, (and I'm not sure if this suspicion is *more* charitable, or *less* towards those Christians) that it's as much the whole "we'll be swept up" aspect of the Rapture that drives this as any desire to be a "good" Christian. "If the end of the world comes, the first thing that happens is I get to go to heaven and skip it all!" It's not so much wanting those awful things, as wanting the good thing they think awaits them. It's a selfish impulse rather than either a hateful one or a mindlessly obedient one, it feels like to me.
(I'm a Christian myself, but not a Rapture-believing flavor originally and I've wandered far from my roots at this point anyway.)
4412830
It's frustrating, isn't it? It brings to mind what Jesus said to the religious leaders, of all people, "You are wrong, because you know neither the Scriptures nor the power of God."
Our mutual admiration of Fred Clark was one of the factors, if I recall correctly, that got me following you. A decision which I have never regretted.
That said, the one thing I do regret is continually being unable to find/link to your old essay on Mary Sues that got shanked when FIMFic did the mature-blogs purge a while back. I was just trying to find it again half an hour ago, in fact. And I find myself linking to your alien shipping syndrome post at least several times a year. You really should put an index of your writing tip posts on your Fimfic homepage.
And yes, vigorous agreement on the excellence of Clark's series.
4413705
At this point, among Christians I'm an agnostic Christian and among athiests/agnostics/other religions I'm a Christian Agnostic.
4510185 It's an odd place to be in, when you're too faithful for atheism and too skeptical for religion.