Center Justified -- The choice of professionals

[Wifetheif]

My bad book club is tearing apart Ugly Love by Coleen Hoover. Her male protag is written in first person. He encounters a new girl, Rachel, and then suddenly the text goes center Justified to show that he is falling in love. EXCUSE ME! When, in prose, is center justified EVER a choice that makes sense? It makes the reading experience really really weird and causes you to view the eighteen-year-old boy as a creep and a weirdo and kills any attraction you could have for the guy especially since he drops that this girl he just met "is going to have all my babies." Creep Level Achieved! I ask you all have you EVER used center justified as a prose style?

 

[pink_silk_glove]

My bad book club is tearing apart Ugly Love by Coleen Hoover. Her male protag is written in first person. He encounters a new girl, Rachel, and then suddenly the text goes center Justified to show that he is falling in love. EXCUSE ME! When, in prose, is center justified EVER a choice that makes sense? It makes the reading experience really really weird and causes you to view the eighteen-year-old boy as a creep and a weirdo and kills any attraction you could have for the guy especially since he drops that this girl he just met "is going to have all my babies." Creep Level Achieved! I ask you all have you EVER used center justified as a prose style?

My examples of overwritten prose by one of my former writing partners in the other annoying habits thread was all center justified. Like all of it. I left that out of my quoted bits just to be kind to him.

 

[NotWise]

I centered four lines of text at the beginning of Pixie by the Fireside. It was an invitation for a holiday open house. That's the only thing I've ever centered.

Centering a large body of text seems like abusing the reader.

 

[AllenWoody]

Unconscionable.

 

[Britva415]

The more I hear about this author, the more I don't care for'er.

 

[Britva415]

"More like center unjustified, amirite"

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

I have seen long form quotes center justified, but that’s about it.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Isn't centre justified used in screenplays? I assume to write notes all around the narrative.

 

[TheLobster]

Based on what you said, this male protagonist seems self-centered without any special justification.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Isn't centre justified used in screenplays? I assume to write notes all around the narrative.

I could be wrong but I think only the speaking characters' names above their lines are centered (and all caps).

Besides, screenplays aren't prose, so that's fine.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I could be wrong but I think only the speaking characters' names above their lines are centered (and all caps).

Besides, screenplays aren't prose, so that's fine.

I've got a facsimile of Kubrick's Napoleon screenplay. Dialogue down the centre of the page (typewritten, so a wide left margin, right ragged, also a wide margin). The narrative description is like normal typed text, narrower margins. All typing is standard, upper lower case.

Only the lightest touch for the technical elements - Kubrick being notorious for working that out on set, with the vision in his head. All scenes are numbered, which would have been fundamental to working up a shooting budget, which he would then ignore.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Why is your book club so obsessed with this particular writer? Two threads just for this author yet there are dozens of such cases.

 

[StillStunned]

Why is your book club so obsessed with this particular writer? Two threads just for this author yet there are dozens of such cases.

Also: why dedicate time specifically to reading and discussing bad books?

 

[kitmarlowe]

If my book club picked a Coleen Hoover book I would simply find a new book club

 

[AlinaX]

"Fwoar, she's hot!"​

"Please don't do that."

"Do what?"​

"Centre-justify. I'm straining my neck trying to look at you."

 

[AlinaX]

Centre-justification, n. What neo-libs do before turning right.

 

[pink_silk_glove]

Why is your book club so obsessed with this particular writer? Two threads just for this author yet there are dozens of such cases.

Heaven forbid a couple of threads that actually discuss literature at a constructive level in a writing forum.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

Heaven forbid a couple of threads that actually discuss literature at a constructive level in a writing forum.

That's not what I said.
I am all for discussing literature rather than all the boasting, word games, and MEME threads. I pushed the idea of a forum book club three times already but no one showed much enthusiasm for it. I also created a thread dedicated to books we hated and discussed the ones that had disappointed me, in detail.
What I said in my post was that there were plenty of authors who had achieved commercial success regardless of the quality of their writing. Yet the O.P. seems obsessed with this one author only, so much so that two separate threads were needed, apparently.

I would certainly applaud a thread where we would discuss writers and books, both good and bad ones. There is a lot to be learned from both.

 

[TheWritingGroup]

Using Hoover as an entree to discussing center justification isn't quite devoting a second thread to Hoover, in my opinion.

I've only used center on Lit in a story where it was a way to indicate a "windshield wiper flyer".

-Annie

 

[Wifetheif]

Why is your book club so obsessed with this particular writer? Two threads just for this author yet there are dozens of such cases.

As I said, my bad book club is working on it. Studying badly written books makes you see the flaws in your own writing and makes you a better author. In no other circumstances would I pick up a Coleen Hoover book. She is a woman who cannot write men for example. Her male protags sound like alien robots who have observed earth culture and now trying to blend in and failing miserably.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Stanley Kubrick was known for his own somewhat unique approach to filmmaking. He often required numerous takes and reshoots for scenes, sometimes dozens, to ensure he achieved the desired visual and emotional impact. There were so many reshoots of the same scene that when Slim Pickens was offered a role in The Shining, he suddenly became too busy to take the part because he remembered how much he hated the shooting schedule of Dr. Strangelove.

 

[lovecraft68]

Why is your book club so obsessed with this particular writer? Two threads just for this author yet there are dozens of such cases.

Jealousy.

 

[TheLobster]

I got curious enough to do some five-minute research to see if the hate appears warranted, or at least whether I can tell without actually buying any of her books.

Wikipedia pages for her and It Ends With Us (her only book to have a WP page) don't go beyond simple factoids. There were no quotes from aghast critics decrying the quality of her prose, though there were some excerpts from such titans in the sophisticated literary circles as Romantic Times which praised her writing. All in all, not many clues.

So I did what any average person would do and asked Google "why coleen hoover sucks".

What I found was that the Reddit consensus (from r/books) seemed to be that she glorifies domestic abuse, whatever this means; her son was accused of sexual assault, as if that was some condemnation of her (veracity of passive-voice "accusation" in the post-#MeToo era notwithstanding); and finally, that she is showing signs of "misogyny and crypto-conservatism" (LOL).

So, in other words, it looks like her main crime was not going along with the uber-woke zeitgeist in YA literary circles. Hardly a compelling reason to condemn her, me thinks.

She might still absolutely stink as a writer, of course, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if she does. But this at least hints in the direction of a lot of the hate being unfounded.

 

[SimonDoom]

I've got a facsimile of Kubrick's Napoleon screenplay. Dialogue down the centre of the page (typewritten, so a wide left margin, right ragged, also a wide margin). The narrative description is like normal typed text, narrower margins. All typing is standard, upper lower case.

Only the lightest touch for the technical elements - Kubrick being notorious for working that out on set, with the vision in his head. All scenes are numbered, which would have been fundamental to working up a shooting budget, which he would then ignore.

I have the screenplay software Final Draft. You are correct. Character names and character dialogue are center justified, names all caps and dialogue in upper and lower case. Stage Directions are all caps and left justified, and narrative is upper and lower case, left justified.

 

[Wifetheif]

I got curious enough to do some five-minute research to see if the hate appears warranted, or at least whether I can tell without actually buying any of her books.

Wikipedia pages for her and It Ends With Us (her only book to have a WP page) don't go beyond simple factoids. There were no quotes from aghast critics decrying the quality of her prose, though there were some excerpts from such titans in the sophisticated literary circles as Romantic Times which praised her writing. All in all, not many clues.

So I did what any average person would do and asked Google "why coleen hoover sucks".

What I found was that the Reddit consensus (from r/books) seemed to be that she glorifies domestic abuse, whatever this means; her son was accused of sexual assault, as if that was some condemnation of her (veracity of passive-voice "accusation" in the post-#MeToo era notwithstanding); and finally, that she is showing signs of "misogyny and crypto-conservatism" (LOL).

So, in other words, it looks like her main crime was not going along with the uber-woke zeitgeist in YA literary circles. Hardly a compelling reason to condemn her, me thinks.

She might still absolutely stink as a writer, of course, and I wouldn't be surprised at all if she does. But this at least hints in the direction of a lot of the hate being unfounded.

There is also an over all blandness and lazy plotting. Ugly Love is supposedly set in San Francisco yet not one landmark, not even the Golden Gate Bridge is mentioned! The novel could be set in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Shanghai or Cairo and read exactly the same. There isn't even a street name anywhere either real or fictional. Also the male protags are are younf pilots yet they DRIVE from San Francisco to San Diego for Thanksgiving. First, that is a brutal drive that would take all day even if you started at 3 AM. Since they work for an airline, just fly. Aren't free flights one of the perks that draws people to being pilots in the first place. Finally the pilots in the book are twenty-four and just out of flight school and yet they BOTH get Thanksgiving off, the busiest flying day os the year! Seriously? These guys simply don't have the senority to get T=day off yet. So Hoover does NO research, has no clue about geography or how employment works. Instead we get two horny twenty somethings who can't keep their hand off each other for ... reasons. Bothing about any of them is appealing or interesting.