My dog Norma has vomited two times today.
I’m not sure why I feel the need to share such information with those reading this site, other than that it seems much more bold than writing about, oh, the Mets.
More important than vomit, “The Rocket That Fell to Earth” received two nice reviews in the past few days—here and here.
Going back a few posts, I must admit the review from that blog did sort of irk me. Again, not the content, per se. Guy has a right to say whatever he wants. But, especially as I get older and spend more time doing this, I have come to loathe snark.
Snark is, quite often, the way of the blogger. We all can be snarky, obviously, but it seems there are hundreds of thousands of bloggers in this country who learned how to write by watching SportsCenter in the mid-90s, when every other comment was sarcastic and biting and nutrition-less. If you read the review again, you can feel the snark all but dripping off the guy’s pen—he didn’t merely want to trash a book; he wanted to do so in the snarky, smug way that screams, “I’m really, really, really smart! Look how smart I am! I’m smart! See, I’m smart! Smart! Smart! Smart!”
Technically, nothing’s wrong with that. It’s a style, and sometimes it works. But if you’re gonna thrash someone else as a crap writer, well, I’d suggest developing a more unique—and honest—voice. Snark is impactful, but it’s woefully unoriginal.
Actually, scratch that: As I noted in my original post, I don’t believe in thrashing people as crap writers at all. This s— is hard, and even if you think you’re an 8,000,000,000 times better writer than I am (certainly a possibility), one should respect the effort and time put into a book, or newspaper article, or magazine piece, or … whatever.
Amen.
