Terrible Writing Advice's book is... mid
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- čas přidán 21. 05. 2024
- Retired people are just NEET's with a better PR team.
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It makes sense that this was published years ago. Good writers constantly learn and improve. That's probably why TWA doesn't promote this book anymore-he probably finds it embarrassing, and I'd like to believe his writing is a lot better now.
Honestly, if your writing is “mid” at worst, you’re probably a decent writer overall.
@@chriscortez2036being mid is better than being bad or worse being boring.
@@chriscortez2036 If your first book is mid then I would say it's pretty good start
@@2265Helloi think more importantly as long as the result isn't offensive or somehow enabling bad things or targets someone just getting something out is already great
@@feritperliare2890 can we not immediately begin with the twitter virtue signaling when nobody even said something related to it? We get it, you are a great person😂
Glimpse into how James's evil twin is passing the eternity trapped in the cursed green screen.
This is officially something I'd watch as a series, now.
Are you sure that's the evil twin?
What
Was he evil because he was imprisoned in the green screen or he was imprisoned in the green screen because he is evil? We will never know....
Painfully average? Sounds like THE GREATEST CZcamsR BOOK IN HISTORY AND ALL HISTORIES BY FAR.
After what Shad did, yeah
To be fair he was a writer before he was a youtuber, so its kinda cheat but yeah for a youtuber book thats godlike
I remember reading this years ago. It's a forgettable story. I will give the author credit for writing a nazi character that isn't a 1-dimensional purely evil being.
The best one i've come across is Obergruppenführer Smith from The Man in the High Castle. Rufus Sewell did a pretty awesome job as him in the show, and Philip K Dick is just a sick writer so that helps i guess
Same, I hate even more though when they are just sad bois who never did anything wrong. Personally I love morally…Pretty reprehensible characters doing goodish things.
@whocareswhatelithinks though Smith wasn't in the book. I am amazed the show writers managed to come up with such a good character on their own.
@@akrybion I knew they added a decent amount, that is truly impressive tho. There is a scene where i was like weeping for Smith. I didn’t think it was possible. I won’t spoil it but he really felt some measure of the existential horror of Nazism and the show did an awesome job of illustrating that that is never good. Even someone as heinous as smith is still a man. It was powerful shit.
Weeping like some grandmother as Col Kurtz put it
bad idea
So saying we hate the green screen gets us more of this? Ok then... I really hate the green screen, and would especially hate it if you kept it up.
definitely..!
Call me a green screen fa- er, hater. Yeah, I do love me some good ol’ HATING on that green screen. I despise it.
Ditto!!
Some of the comments seem to be completely disconnected from the contents of the video.
Video - "The book is okay". Comments "Ha-ha, Terrible Writing Advice is a bad writer". How exactly writing a mediocre book, makes a person a bad writer ?
I'm pretty sure I couldn't do any better on a first attempt.
"If your book isn't good, then it must mean it's terrible"
@@shellshockedgerman3947 it's funny how words for "average" tends to drift towards meaning "bad" in the public consciousness over time. Neutral is too much nuance, everything has to be good or bad.
personally i believe its because people (idiots) use the word “mid” as “bad.” mid = average, fine, passable, good enough, but so many people use it to mean underwhelming, boring, terrible, which…… doesn’t make any sense.
@@lakthederg No, it makes perfect sense, as mediocrity is its own form of badness. Terrible is often preferable to mediocre - at least the former is memorable.
He set himself up to have high expectations foist upon him. Making anything as a critic takes a lot of balls. I respect tf outta that.
His sponsorship wars is the only sponsorship I don't skip😊
I am still grieving the loss of Sir Adblock. ☹️
@@quangobaud A moment's googling to find out who that is. To the great greed we pray.
I do because I can't understand anything with the altered voices. It ends up just being noise for me.
@@yeah5895he has ccs
GREED IS ELEMENTAL.
In that's how it's gonna be, then let me say that I really hate the green screen background and would be so owned if you made it even more bizarre in the future.
Honestly, it’s a lot easier to give the advice or even analyze and critique than it is to actually implement. There’s obviously a bare minimum (looking at you zenith) but I don’t expect people teaching about writing to also write on the level of Stephen King.
Exactly
yes. Too many people seem to think otherwise, however. Too many people respond to criticism with "can you do any better?"
funnily enough, stephen king also has a reputation of giving the absolute worst writing advices any writer has ever heard
@@Designed1 in conclusion, not all workers make good teachers, and not all teachers make good workers
Easy way to add stakes:
If you don't get into the Aeon Legion, you are killed as you know too much.
Some of the people she trains with become Faceless because of exposure to the end of time, and she fears that she might become a faceless too.
The idea feels really cool, if not a bit ambitious. Maybe TWA will revisit it one day and do a revised version. It would definitely fit with the theme of his channel, that artists are always growing and improving.
What I’m getting from this is that this book would go crazy as a TTRPG Setting
Ooo
I think the Feng Shui game is what you're looking for
do you take requests for the green screen? can you be playing maracas wearing a horse mask while wearing a sombrero?
Hmm, tempting.
@@JamesTullos maybe make it a high end patreon reward, voting for what's on the green screen
@@Seergun that might make me pay for it ngl, for the bit..!
Needs more cowbell.
Horse mask is very 2012
I got the feeling that it was over-ambitious too. Too many uninteresting details, too many unneeded worldbuildings, and the fight scenes often felt mechanical like a turn-based game.
A novelist’s first work is always gonna be a bit rough. And to make it a series is double mistake.
TWA seemed passionate about this too, which make me sad to see it turned out like this. Judged by the time passed, and the reactions, there’s likely no second book.
Okay, but now I want to see actual James duel against green screen James. There can be only ONE James.
Based on my experience, if this book really is middling, then that means J.P. has _tons_ of potential and I really hope he's been writing and improving behind the scenes all this time.
Most would-be writers blow on ice. The Critical Drinker's book, for instance, couldn't carry me past one or two pages. I had an online acquaintance who wrote a book and I bought it to support him, but I was there while he was writing it so I knew that it wasn't worth even cracking the book open .
Trent Kaniuga is an artist who came out with an illustrated novel, and I don't know who he got to write it, but whoever it was just didn't have the experience. I was put off within only a few sentences due to poor rhythm and poor logical progression.
The best I've seen is from either David Stewart's "The Water of Awakening," which was about middling and not as boring as you make this one out to be, but certainly not something I'd be interested in reading a second time, and Cardinal West's (AKA, Casimir Laski ) Winter Without End, which kept me entertained throughout most of it, but wasn't strictly my style, and it also maybe went on a little long. Then again, it's called Winter Without End, so. . . .
I've been practicing my own writing for seven or eight years, I'm very close to finishing my first full-length, original novel, and the truth is. . . without heavy revision and likely a bunch of rewriting, I don't know if I'll be willing to inflict it on the market.
The issue with firing off your middling books into the independent scene is that you're saturating it with mediocrity, and you're also saying, "Hello, everyone, this book is the level of quality you're getting with me."
I'd prefer my first book to say something more about me than that I'm a mediocre writer with delusions of skill.
I'll never understand how people like Lawrence Watt-Evans created his first book in one year, and it was pretty good, and then just got a career and kept going after that. I've been practicing techniques and reading books on writing and writing tens of thousands of words, but this guy just _DECIDED_ to be an author and wrote something as polished as The Lords of Dus as his _first novel?_ How even can do what is?!?!?
I'm pretty sure it's called "that brain is not wired like the average". Speaking from general observation, there's people who just have brains wired for a specific thing, who are also wired to REALLY ENJOY doing only that specific thing to near-obsessive levels, and who happen to have the ability to be average-people enough to actually make their weirdness a source of income/career and not get lost in their brain on the way there.
It's very complicated. I suppose, for me, themes, ideas, characters etc. are more important than details of prose. I've never been able to get into literary fiction because I don't find it interesting, regardless of the writing's technical proficiency. On the other hand I enjoy sci-fi books for what they explore rather than the quality of writing (or necessarily characters for that matter). So I would say to focus on that rather than scrutinizing details. But I guess I am also an aspiring author with a mostly finished first novel that scared the publishers away after I got them to actually read my manuscript, so I might not be the best authority on the matter.
@@sonwig5186 You seem to be writing literary fiction, only for sci-fi: So focused on ideas that, just like the literary artist, you may be prioritizing your vision over the reader's entertainment.
Publishers are not necessarily guaranteed to be right about what books will sell, but if they tell you it's, for example, boring, or would appeal only to a very niche audience, then it might be worth reexamining how you're telling your story.
But I haven't actually seen any of your writing, so this is all just conjecture.
You're a good writer. I usually skip ridiculously long comments but yours kept me engaged to the end.
Green screen Tullos:🕺🕺🕺🕺🕺
I have been kinda worried abt twa for a while, thr guy constantly makes jokes abt his bad mental health, and the last sign of life he put out was in december
Yeah same here seems like there's barely any activities on the rest of his platform so hope he's doing fine somewhere
i really hope he’s alright ):
There is a reason i listen to your videos. i CANNOT focus with two james. it's two powerful...
Well, at least it's not terrible.
heh, i get it
Book aside, Terrible Writing Advice has genuine and hilarious content that I love.
Read this with my book club a couple years ago and we'd all agree calling it "mid" is very generous. We got a lot of discussion out of it (and it's been a recurring meme with us since) but all agreed it's a boring mess of a story that feels like Beaubien spawned this whole novel from an idea of the first scene that he wrote on a napkin while eating lunch one day. The characters are all one-dimensional and defined exclusively by the trait plastered onto their name and hammered in constantly through his lackluster prose. The world is interesting at times but any sense of intrigue or curiosity is immediately derailed by how derivative it is, how predictable every aspect of the story is, and how one dimensional all of his characters are. His understanding of history--which should be a major facet of the novel given its subject matter and the world he's created--is also clearly gleaned exclusively from skimming the first paragraph of Wikipedia articles rather than doing some more in-depth research.
A well-researched, better-written story with more nuanced characters could've made for a halfway decent novel but I'm not sure he's cut out for that, despite his youtube channel being all about giving writing advice and tips.
He also desperately needed an editor for this. It was filled with grammatical errors and spelling mistakes in both the digital and print editions we had mixed in the group. It's especially ironic given he published a video about the pros and cons of traditional vs self publishing, and falls exactly into many of the issues he points out as being problems inherent in self-publishing.
brutal takedown lol
It is nice to see The Other James in colab with you
tbf a lot of the book's problems would be solved if he added a love triangle
‘You can’t start with a training arc’ counterpoint: Band of Brothers
Yeah there's plenty of great War films that start at boot camp. It might be overall the best genre for the "Training Arc" since everyone starts at boot camp.
I believe you can make "Don't do this" good if you're good writer
I feel like when it’s a war story, you can get away with starting with a training arc since boot camp is an integral part of being a soldier
Being drafted vs having a choice to join is the difference. We know why the people in most war movies are at boot camp.
Also, Full Metal Jacket. Damn, even the boot camp part is more interesting for some than the full-out war part.
I’d wager he’s improve after this but I guess we all start somewhere
I choose to believe the self-promotion TWA did in his videos was a meta-joke.
I really needed this. A bunch of tomfoolery happened yesterday, my phone's screen shattered, I got threatened with potential litigation over a review I did that I deleted months ago, and my uncle is in the hospital due to a cardiac episode.
I'm going to invest in a punching bag and some form of martial art lessons to let out some rage I've had building up.
I'm WAAAAAY too high for the greenscreen, gonna see this another day
This is how the greenscreen should always be used. Dance for our amusement!!
Based on your description, it's clear the book was setting up all the cool side stories with the ambition to create a multi-book series. My author brain says the timeline-hopping would have played a crucial role in getting Tara into these different plots to resolve them. This makes me a bit sad because it is possible that the first book didn't perform according to TWA's expectations, and there just wasn't enough reward in continuing the series compared to focusing more on the growing youtube channel. I hope he goes back and does complete the series although I suppose there may also be hyperawareness acting as a writer's block. When you know a lot about writing in general, it may make you hyperanalyse each new sentence, and that then makes it harder to complete a draft as you keep editing and re-editing (speaking from experience)
Honestly, in retrospect, some of the examples from the TWA series might’ve come from this-hell, Silverwind’s basically the “Lawful Good Paladin” character in multiple vids.
(the most blatant probably being a bit where, after saying that you should have people using swords in a Sci-Fi setting, asks “What author is dumb enough to do that?” while flashing the book’s cover with a little note saying “A book where that exact thing happens” or something.)
Edit: It’s in his Sci-Fi Weapons vid at 5:29
pure dancing muppet energy coming from the green screen
Prove yet again a good critiquer doesn't mean a good writer, just like a good coach doesn't mean he is a good athlete
he made it like 8 years ago so
@@than0shark But he started to make videos 8 years ago, too, and those videos are good and on point, it's just that he doesn't get the ability to utilize those points on his work at that point.
I believe the word you were looking for was critic
I wouldnt call TWA a good critic, tbh
You can know how to do something and still not be able to do it. If you've learned any art, you'll understand this. The important thing is to keep working.
Oh no, please dont do weird things on the green screen!
I mean there's a world of difference between writing well and not writing badly.
This is getting out of hand! Now there are two of them!
omg the greenscreen has me dying with laughter i love it actually
Isn’t that kinda the point?
His advice is from his history as a terrible writer back in the day.
I guess he took his own advice
I've watched a couple of TWA's videos, and they were pretty funny. I had no idea he wrote a book.
I think it was a few years ago, and around that time he was talking about it on his channel.
... no love triangle?
You’re telling me there wasn’t any love triangles?
Woooooow, that green screen sure is awful. I soooooo don't want to see any more of it. That would toooootallly suck. For sure... yeah, certainly.
Please do more of this type of green screen. Please.
Keep the CZcamsr book reviews coming. Sooner than later, you piss everyone off.
You and your green screen self accurately represents for me what it is like to be plural and to have ADHD. Like what yes sorry I'm listening the other me in my head is doing the cha-cha.
I wonder how well he would do if he wrote another thing.
PS Do more stupid things on the green screen.
Someday James will cover the Video Game Critic, Yahtzee from Zero Punctuation and Fully Ramblomatic. His book trilogy should be something.
I would like him to cover Jam. As the actual odd one out, I would like to see what he thinks about that. No one talks about Jam.
I really liked his XCOM mods, shame he stopped working on it when he started his youtube channel.
This sounds so similar to the premise for the show Ministerio del Tiempo except in that one, they all go on adventures through time every episode
I can't focus on what James says. I can't stop looking at the background!! 🤣😭
11:07 okay let me share some ideas on how to make the training arc work;
1. The characters try to slip into a timeline and train under great leaders and or swordsmen with them realizing their time there even for a small amount of time had an impact whether they like it or not.
2. Maybe have it where the monsters are chasing them through the timeline and that they had to use their recent training to evade the monsters that corrupt everything around them and having to out think their opponent and having to use the lessons they learned from history in order to not repeat some mistakes.
3. Trying to cheat with changing some parts of the timeline events only to realize the horrible effects it has on others whether they meant to or not.
4. Them trying to get a leg up on morally evil competition and choose to go back in time to slightly change events but not directly effect said competition for getting in only to realize the mistake of doing so if they rid of the person from the timeline, having them question their own morals and actions.
5. Having to be put into a struggling position of letting a loved one die or save them and stop their fate with the consequences weighing heavy on the main characters mind.
THERE! Simple ideas that would play into the concept of time travel along with having the character have to overcome obstacles. Again YOU CAN have a training arc be the beginning part but to repeat this again THE TRAINING ARC MUST PLAY AN IMPORTANT ROLE WITH BEING INTERWOVEN INTO THE NARRATIVE THEN!
Love your reviews, James, and while I do respect your opinions on this one, as another author and book reviewer who did a review of Beaubien's work several years back, I have to disagree. And after watching your review, I think it may just be a matter of taste, as the very things you disliked about Aeon Legion were what I liked about it. I think Beaubien's intent was to show a hero's beginning, and the book did this well. It was established in the very beginning that the training to become a legionnaire is some of the most grueling ever invented, and was the very reason why the legion chose people from eras of time where conflict was prevalent. Therefore, it makes sense that Tara's journey would be an especially difficult one, considering how she came from an era of time of relative peace and prosperity, and that this book would be primarily about her journey to simply become a legionnaire.
I'm glad to see you were just as impressed with Beaubien's incredible talent for World building as I was, and while I agree that it was disappointing that he didn't explore more of this world of time guardians and entities born of temporal anomalies and entropy, the book required the time it gave to even grasp how the people of the city of Saturn used their singularity tech, and how it wwas incorporated into how the Aeon Legion did battle. And I appreciated the time that Beaubien took to do this.
So, in my opinion, the story was anything but mid. The only issue I had with it was Beaubien's insistence on turning every single Trope on its ear that he possibly could. Personally, I felt that it made the characters far more interesting with how it made their personalities end up being the exact opposite of what you'd expect for that archetype, but his insistence on rejecting Tera as "the chosen one," to the point where nearly everyone is just plain cruel to her wore on my nerves.
So, at the end of the day, the things that you weren't impressed by, I found exciting, and they left me wanting to read more. It's a shame that Beaubien is either stuck in a rut with book 2, or has given up on it entirely. I've been eagerly awaiting it for years now.
If you look, he hasn't updated his author website since 2019; so if he is working on a second book, or has otherwise moved on to another project, it's possible he wants to keep it on the down-low until it's in a state where it's better to share and advertise. He seems like a pretty smart dude, so I have no doubt he's been able to learn from the mistakes made in his first book. I do sincerely hope that, whatever he's set his sights on now, he's giving it his all, is striving to grow as a writer, and is hopefully having an easier time of it. I think it took him about four years to write Aeon Legion: Labyrinth.
I also appreciate you mentioning his insistence on flipping every trope in the book, as that is something I noticed way back when I read it myself. I found that tendency a little "meh," though that could be because I'd watched a lot of his videos before giving his book a read, so it was a little hard to read the book without thinking about how smug and clever he (or his CZcams persona, rather) must have thought he was in twisting these tropes.
@chansesturm7103 I can only hope that he will return to book 2 soon. And I totally agree. The way Beaubien tries to avoid just about every single trope possible does indeed imply that he was being smarter than the writing turned out to be.
Background james: DO THE MONKEY WITH ME *JOHNNY BRAVO THEME*
To be fair, his channel is about how not to do bad writing, not about how to do the excellent writing
If I compliment the green screen content, do you make more or less of it?
I want more of it, it makes your content 100% main/open tab material
Thanks for reviewing this! I really like twa now but i wasnt sure if i should pick up the book, now i dont think ill buy it but maybe grab it if i see it at the library
Since you're on a roll with reviewing youtubers' books, might I suggest u review the books from HelloFutureMe, Savagebooks, and Xiran Jay Chou? :D Love your videos!
I personally think that you dancing behind yourself is iconic. Keep up he good work
I've been watching since covid. Just haven't been able to stop watching your funny arse in 4 years.
Don’t often see other Beast in Black fans in the wild. Awesome shirt man
Since you brought up training arcs in anime, the way you described this book sounds like my experience watching My Hero Academia. For a whole year, it was just a bunch of battle competitions and training. I was waiting for when the show would go back to the main story but it just never happened.
I find funny how that oppenig is so similar to the show "el Ministerio del Tiempo" (the time ministry) a Spanish show about the secret goverment deparment that protects time. In that one there's basicly the same thing, but with french soilders looking for books on the Napoleonic wars.
This channel is not where I was expecting the 2024 Crazy Frog Bros revival to happen.
I hate it, more please.
As a newbie writer, I think I have the opposite of the worldbuilding problem. I wanna focus on character interaction, and write the bare minimum of where they are or what they can do. I think my worldbuilding is too bare bones at times. I dont even know what my characters look like, I just write what they are doing, in relations to other characters. Anyone else deal with this?
adore the silly editing
Your summary of the beggining sounds like something I would come up with when I was seven. I actually am sorta impressed that JP was able to turn such a fustercluck of an opening like that into something that's MID. Like, you gotta have some serious skill to turn that from D tier to C tier.
I thought i was content with just one James. But now there's two? I didnt know i needed two until now ❤ sick moves, bro
The Comment on how you got more interested in the backstory of the world instead of the story taking place makes me think 2 things
1: Beginer writers tend to focus too much on the worldbuilding aspect of their story to the detriment of their book in general
2: There is a failure in the way the writer presents the current conflict
Like if somehow you manage to make the current events sound as cool as the ones in the past you might get people actually invested in them
Specially in a story that involves TIME TRAVEL you can have your protagonists already know the outcomes of what happens if they fail
But other than that a proper setting of meaningful stakes is key for investment
What if there was some foreshadowing that something weird has been happening in the training facility but the people in charge dont seem to mind cause are too overconfident on their impenetrable fortress´ defenses to hear the trainees warnings that somethings feel off? Then have an attack during the last stretch of training or even better in the middle forcing the protag to learn while fending the threat off
Or any other number of things
great video, hope to see more book reviews.
Bloody hell man, I can't even with that 2nd James. Way too much.
This is one of the best green screen gags I've ever seen.
Oh no, the worst thing you can be, a 5/10!
..apart from a 4, a 3, a 2 or a 1.
No more green screen! (More green screen)
Green screen James is priceless!
hhehe the green screen
It was hard to listen to JP tear down his own book like this
Makes sense that avoiding bad writing produces writing that is merely not bad and nothing more. I have a lot of fond nostalgia for that channel, I hope he writes another book some day, and that it's more than mid :)
The book was OK. Interesting technology. Common concept but done relatively well. The main character wasn't that compelling for me, but I walked away, not regretting reading it.
This is the only time I've ever watched a James video completely instead of just listening to it
I feel like the premise was great, amazing even, but the main character was a boring default 21st century girl to project yourself into and the characters from other time periods who sounded way more interesting get very little development. The plot is bad too but I was willing to forgive that in the sequel since I always thought the book suffered from being planned as a trilogy. So the first book was just training indeed and yeah it was meh but it did leave me waiting for more which I guess does its job?
Yo, next time the greenscreen gonna be the Village People Biker from Hande Hoch
I once read a synopsis of this book somewhere and... Yeah it is really just the prolog of much bigger story. The interesting part is that it is stuck in the prolog instead of before the climax like the name of the wind or The song of ice and fire.
Can we get a meteor shower for the next green screen? Those are pretty cool.
To be fair, I love the green screen. The weirder the background gets, the better. Like the gif in this video :)
A 'Beast in Black' shirt!? Never thought I'd see one of the CZcamsrs I like being a fan of one of my favorite bands
honestly i liked the story, very YA vibes not super deep but i didnt mind, liked the school arc and supporting cast i rlly wish there would be the following books tho since the first book is a lot of setup which was ok with me considering the promise of more to come
May the algorithm god bless this channel
Look at that guy go. you have my full support for the green screen
Woooo🙌🏽 I wanted someone to review this book❤️❤️❤️
i really felt urged for some reason to buy his book after watching “marketing and promotion”
for some weird reason, it felt like the video was telling me to buy the book, even though it wasn’t mentioned once in the video.
Points for Beast in Black!
Hey James Tullos will you review my Sci-fi novel when it releases this year?
Honestly you should do a series where you read every popular Authortuber's books,their most recent book,of course,their first book probably has flaws
well the idea sounds pretty interesting anyway
Weirdly enough, I actually found it easier to focus on what you were saying with you also dancing in the background. But I want more of it, so I'm gonna pretend to hate it and demand you never ever do it again 😠 (also, sick shirt!)
As for the book itself, it sounds interesting enough and I'm in need of a comfortably mid palate-cleanser. Maybe a playlist of montage songs while I read it will add to the enjoyability 😅
Sounds like the first enrty in a superhero series (in a good way)
Kudos for the Beast in Black shirt :)
A youtuber book not being utter trash is still a good achievement.