If They Can Do It, Why Can't I?: An Exercise in Pretentious Writing

I’ve read a lot of books as of late, and I’ve noticed that many authors strive to write in a way that makes them seem like God’s gift to writing. They’re always trying too hard, adding in needless descriptions and directionless metaphors purely to fuel their superiority complex. This is how I interpret it, anyway.

The most recent examples I can think of to illustrate this are Bunny by Mona Awad and My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh. While the premise of these books are quite slay to me, the use of participle phrases are abhorrent and lend nothing to the plot or character development whatsoever. Though I enjoyed the books on a surface level, in the end, the pretentiousness of the writing trumped my enjoyment. Authors like these seemingly use words only to give themselves credibility, to make it seem like they know what they’re doing—“Look at me! I use big words!”—when they in fact do not.

So I thought to myself: if they can do it, why can’t I? I have a big enough ego, I can use a thesaurus, and, since this is my blog after all, I can use commas and run-ons and subjectless sentences to my heart's content!

I aim to craft a narrative with an objectively unlikeable narrator (of course) who has an ego that rivals mine (obviously) and describes things as if they were plucked straight from the pages of 2014 Tumblr (duh). I hope you dislike this prose as much as I disliked writing it.

Note: I have adopted a character for the entirety of this blog post. I do not think I am a great narrative storyteller, nor am I an asshole. But I think I know how to make myself unlikeable.

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Disclaimer: This is bad writing. It is supposed to be bad. I do not usually write like this (I promise).

Shelby Monroe would have died anyway. She was too stupid, too dispensable. It would have happened sometime. That week, that month, that year. Soon. And when it finally did, the world kept spinning.

It was quite amusing, actually, the day of her funeral. I noticed they hung up her cheer uniform on the wall above her casket. I could tell it was her spare because it wasn't tattered. Didn't have brain matter on it. They didn't see me laughing to myself.

Shelby Monroe would have died anyway because she needed to. It was written in the stars, just like it was written in my diary.

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I met Shelby on the second day of school in fourth grade, the second day because she was so nervous about her first day at a new school that she ended up missing it altogether. Typical Shelby. Typical anxious Shelby. Could-never-get-it-together Shelby.

Luckily, she healed a little under my guidance. Made friends. She floated among friend groups just as I had. Just as I taught her to. But we always stayed close, had sleepovers regularly, pined over the boys in our class, became each other's pen pals. Shelby Monroe and I were inseparable.

We were until she died, anyway.

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There you have it, folks! All I could bring myself to write. I shan't proofread it because it seems like some books nowadays forego that process entirely. Now I kind of want to explore the death of Shelby Monroe with my own writing style to see what happens. Stay tuned!