Hi all,
A bit of a niche question/discussion, but I wanted to ask about people's experiences/thoughts with insular writing communities that often encourage what many would consider 'bad writing habits'.
I was recently contacted by a friend who asked if I was available to commission for writing elements of a D&D campaign for them. I don't know the first thing about tabletop games, so I said I'll do some research and get back to them.
After looking at a bunch of D&D-focused accounts (or what I initially *perceived* to be such), I found my Twitter 'For You' Tab inundated with posts from accounts that appear to be roleplaying characters from original characters to household names.
But what I noticed is that, despite presumably being different people, they mostly had this streamlined, very Archaic, very dry writing style that had weird quirks like the omission of pronouns and determiners.
So sentences that should read like 'Her fingers trace across the menu' actually read as 'Fingers trace across menu'. Sentences are prone to using the most complex synonym possible, most even incorrectly, as well. All eyes are optics or orbs. The floor is terra. Everyone guffaws instead of laughs. Things are curious but not interesting. There's this kind of pretentious, kingly air to the narrative voice of both Alexander the Great and Spider-Man.
It feels like an exercise in reducing sentences down to nouns, but despite reading, in my opinion, terribly, this style is seemingly lauded by big chunks of the wider community.
I hesitate to call it 'purple prose' because purple prose is only necessarily bad when the reader considers it so; but if a community enjoy writing what OTHERS would consider purple, then should this mechanical, dry, vague, wordy way of writing not be considered its own community-specific style? Can this 'style' be dissected on the basis that bad writing habits have manifested as a result of social media word/character count restrictions? Should attention instead be turned towards the possibility that they enjoy writing but don't actually read, so they mostly don't discern between well-written and over-written?
I'm of the mind that even writing badly is still a good thing as long as you're writing, but the asterisk that silently gets tacked onto the end of that is 'as long as they're striving to improve'. But it really feels like, despite writing a lot (and seemingly for years), they seem to have settled on this amalgamation of bad writing as their standard.
Has anyone seen this manifest in other circles or communities before? I feel a bit mean because I've accidentally turned over a rock and showed it to the public, but I think it's interesting that, on a sub where the consensus is that you can't go far as a writer without reading, there's this pocket where that exact mindset has manifest into this upside-down perception of what writing should feel like to read.