5 Famous Writers With Flaws Everyone Tries to Ignore

Charles Dickens didn't believe in any of that shit and used coincidence the way other writers use verbs. His stories are littered with coincidence. A Tale of Two Cities has important plot points centered on the fact that two characters look the same. Oliver Twist features an orphan rescued from the world of street crime by a benevolent upper class family, only to discover that he's the long-lost nephew of that family (and the long-lost half-brother of a man who'd been pursuing him). In Great Expectations, characters overhear conversations that are incredibly unlikely to have taken place in their presence and accidentally bump into each other in places none of them would ever likely be.

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"Wouldn't it be weird if we lost touch with each other and independently came back here for no reason at all 11 years from now and everything wrapped itself up happily?"
"No."
"Oh. Well, all right then."

I should point out that Dickens didn't do this lazily; his use of coincidence was a wholly deliberate writing choice. Dickens found his own life full of coincidences and felt that the world was much smaller than we perceived it, that people we felt were a great distance away were in fact much closer. So this is arguably a stylistic choice, rather than a flaw, and I encourage you to think just that as you wait for life to provide you the coincidental happy ending you so richly deserve.

Although most famous for Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is itself not exactly a lipstick-stained love letter to totalitarianism, it's Orwell's other famous work, Animal Farm, that we'll talk about here. Animal Farm is an allegory about a bunch of animals who take over their farm and install a new form of government not dissimilar to Soviet communism. It's a satire, which is fine, but it's done in such an over-the-top manner that it feels obvious, even garish. It's like something you'd use to teach a baby about satire.

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"Now, as you can see, this is more of a Juvenalian satire rather than Horatian and ... hey. HEY. Pay attention."

There's nothing subtle here at all. Everything that happens in the novel is an obvious stand-in for a real-world event in the history of Soviet communism. Everything the ruling animals (pigs, naturally) do is transparently evil and sinister. It's like getting hit in the face with a sledgehammer that has "SATIRE" written on the handle, and it utterly dulls the effect Orwell intended. By the end of the novel, when the pigs are so indistinguishable from the evil humans they supplanted, the reader is practically screaming at the novel, "YES. I GET IT."

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I'LL NEVER EAT NOTHING BUT PORK AGAIN.

The problem with Moby-Dick is that a summary of the plot contains about as much text as the actual plot itself gets in the book. The remainder of the 800-odd pages are devoted to incredibly detailed descriptions of whales, the sea, whalers, whalers on the sea, sealing whales, and a thousand other things. Also, just for fun, there are 3,600 words describing the color white.

This picture is not worth a thousand words, not to Melville.

Obviously a book can be about more than its plot, and passages devoted to setting, character, and theme are all perfectly worthwhile ways for an author to tell a story. Indeed, in Moby-Dick, an awful lot of subtext and commentary are included in these days-long passages on the sea, and it wouldn't be the same book without them.

It'd be a shorter book that everyone loved.

And that's ignoring the character of Tom Bombadil, who is problematic, to put it mildly. He's introduced out of nowhere in an early chapter, strongly hints that he's the most powerful being in the universe, sings a bunch of stupid fucking songs, and then disappears. While singing a stupid fucking song.

To say that this is a confusing momentum killer is understating things a bit.

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You really need to sing it to capture just how stupid it is.

Even his better works relied on plot devices that reek of implausibility. Just about every play he wrote had someone disguised as someone else, with little reference to age or gender or who they were disguised as. He basically invented the Scooby-Doo unmasking scene, and the only reason he isn't credited with it is because scholars got so sick of it.

"Why, if it isn't the old carnival owner, King Lear!"

His history plays are also a little uneven. Some of them are very good, while others (King John) a little less so. And almost all of them have really blatant propaganda-like tones, in general designed to make the current ruling family (the Tudors) look more regal than they are. Henry VIII, for example, contains an extended procession extolling the virtues of a young princess Elizabeth, who was of course the queen through most of Shakespeare's life. But really just about any of the plays in the Henry and Richard series have a taste of this Tudor glorification, including Henry V, Richard II, and especially Richard II Part 2: Richard III.

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In which the last king from the House of York, Richard, is presented as a kind of puppy murderer.

Chris Bucholz is a Cracked columnist, couldn't hold a candle to any of these writers, and is clearly intensely jealous of that fact. Join him on Facebook or Twitter to mock him for it.