Just what the heck do you mean by "gritty"???

[Jo Zebedee]

The whole gritty/grimdark trend is the fault of lazy writing. A good author can create fear and tension with a few choice words. Poor writing relies on graphic description to get the point across. It become 'and then' writing, which is rubbish. Authors used to rely on the readers' intelligence and imagination to fill in any gaps. Now they treat us like we're ten year-olds.

Readers have to take some blame too, though. If you aren't willing to look at a dictionary once in a while then you will certainly need to have things spoon fed to you.

I think this is incredibly dismissive. Not all grimdark and gritty stuff IS about the lowest common denominator. Some is, sure. But the best is generally delievered by excellent writers who use the graphic nature of SOME of the genre and apply great writing to it. I get really irked at this notion that it's easy to write grit and grimness. It's not. It requires skill in characterization, in storytelling, in pace.

In other words the same skills any writer needs. And sure, like any genre, there will be a share of lazy writers. And, as with any genre, there's plenty of talented writers. I don't think anyone reading Martin and Abercrombie, for instance, would accuse them of having a weak vocabulary.

It may not be to your taste, but dismissing a whole genre as lazy and treating readers as ten year olds (though I do wonder where Lewis and Dahl stand in that analogy) is, to my mind, a pretty lazy argument.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Not all grimdark and gritty stuff IS about the lowest common denominator. Some is, sure. ... easy to write grit and grimness. It's not

Most sadly is about a lowest common denominator or a false belief it's needed to be commercial.
It's really easy and lazy to stick it in. It's really very hard indeed to do it well.

 

[Hex]

The only real "grimdark" I've read is Joe Abercrombie, so I don't recognise this description!

 

[Randy M.]

What I'm seeing said about "grimdark" has been said before about horror and about noir. My reading of noir and hard-boiled indicates it was a mind-set of the time, the 1930s through the 1940s, when as a society we were pummeled by the Great Depression and then WWII, but the attitude and approach has morphed somewhat as it was handed down. I suspect it's a parent or grandparent of "grimdark."

Even back in the '30s and '40s some writers seemed to assume the persona. But then there was Dashiell Hammett, about as hard-boiled as you could get, who came to the attitude and view of life via several years working for Pinkerton's and time in the military during WWI. And there were writers like Hemingway, Cornell Woolrich, James M. Cain, Nathaniel West who don't appear to be play acting, what they wrote an extension of their attitudes and perspective. Woolrich's ghosts, anxieties and self-abhorrence in particular seem barely overlaid by much of his fiction, and from what I've read about David Goodis he wrote with an intensity that stems from mental imbalance. You could lay similar claims on Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick, too, and probably on more recent writers like Karl Edward Wagner and James Ellroy. Most of them did not have the childhood upbringing we associate with health and well-being -- Ellroy's mother was murdered when he was only 8 or 9 -- and the darkness they wrote about was intrinsic to them.

I would be very surprised if the same isn't true now. Sure there may be pretenders (Raymond Chandler was one, to a degree, but he was such a good writer it didn't matter), but the majority will fall away. The writers with a truly dark view will continue on and the authenticity of their work insofar as it corresponds to their outlook will carry their work along, too.


Randy M.