Once upon a time, I was a child prodigy of bad fiction.
And I mean bad fiction. Awful, wretched, bore-you-to-tears fiction.
My characters were all jaw-droppingly beautiful, with waist-length hair, striking features, and the personality of limp cardboard. They had achingly long conversations about the weather and what they would wear to school that day. They existed in settings that were described in excruciating detail, down to the precise color of the floorboards. They occupied sentences that were regularly 30 words longer than the average American attention span. And nothing ever happened to them. Nothing. They sat contentedly in an abundance of adjectives and adverbs, with nary a plot in sight.
And then, happily, I discovered nonfiction, which was the equivalent of the world’s worst bowler discovering bumpers at their…
