Yes, this is another Writers Coffee Club post that’s going long and therefore getting posted to the blog. I am usually able to keep my answers short. I’ve started blogging them because threading is annoying when you can’t edit the posts. (Why does mastodon have it set up that way? It is actually really annoying. Short form blogging platforms are hard. They are hard and I don’t understand.)
Okay so–literally how do you know whether something was or was not written without effort? The answer is, you cannot. (Unless it’s AI or a plagiarist, which means: they were not writers in the first place because they weren’t writing.) You can’t tell from bad spelling. You can’t tell from bad grammar. You can’t tell from plot holes. You can’t tell from an abandoned work. You can’t tell from long pauses between chapters or new works that are not the ones you were waiting for. You can’t tell from the writer’s persistent inability to tell the difference between Angles and Angels.
It has to be assumed that someone put effort their work. (Again, unless they are plagiarizing or using AI word vomit. In which case they are not actually writers, they are people who for some reason think they can make money by stealing other writers works.) So, if someone wrote something and then was brave enough to post it somewhere, it has to be assumed they put effort into it. That effort has very very little to do with why the reader might like or dislike something, or why they find it a pleasure to read or not.
Now, confession time: I am extremely picky about what I read. Extremely picky and extremely critical of what I read. (I used to hate read stories I hated, but decided this wasn’t helpful as stress relief.) A lot of my early posts when I was first blogging on Livejournal were about stories I had read, that I would slowly pick apart what worked and what didn’t work about the story. Note: I was honestly trying to be helpful, but when I used the names of the stories I was critiquing I would get comments and when I started doing anonymous analysis I still got angry comments. (The only time I deserved angry comments I feel was when I was writing MST3K style mockery of various terrible stories. I do not do MST3K-style mockeries of stories anymore, not because of a kerfuffle I was in with a number of writers, but because I decided the MST3K-style mockeries were not helpful–and also because not great stress relief.)
So despite being very picky about what I read, I will read:
- Misuse of idioms or sayings common to various dialects of English.
- Egregious misspellings, bad grammar, confused antonyms or homonyms.
- Using the absolutely wrong work because the writer doesn’t know the word isn’t used that way
- Getting near the right word, but missing
- Plot holes
- Poor execution of otherwise interesting concept.
- Literal translation of a work that manages to make the story or characterization incomprehensible.
This is generally because, despite the mess, there is something engaging about a story, even if a lot of the work results in an internal dialog of, “That’s not a thing that would ever work…that word does not mean what you think it does…that’s not how that saying goes, and not what it means anyway…did you do any research at all?” Some of the writers you encounter might only speak/write English as a second language. Some of them might be too young to be able to do good research (or may not understand why it’s necessary). Some of them may have dyslexia and most of their spelling mistakes are because of that. (Never, ever rely on your spell checker or your grammar checker.) This is not to say I won’t bounce hard off a story–I do have opinions on what I like to read after all–but I have made an effort to lower my expectations of good grammar in certain forums and archives.
More succinctly: my feelings about the quality of the writing was generally completely separate from the pleasure I took in reading the writing. And yes, I did get derailed from “even bad writing requires effort.” to “learning to read with lower quality expectations: a journey” but after all the writing, I get to the short answer: All writing takes effort. Whether the reader likes and appreciates that effort is another matter.
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