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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TheAuldGrump" data-source="post: 1998297" data-attributes="member: 6957">The answer of course is both, contrary to Mr. Dyal's opinion HPL actually had a very good grasp on the English Language, read his letters for a better idea of his abilities in that regard rather than trust to his stories.Part of the difficulty is who he chose to emulate in his writings, Algernon Blackwood, Clark Ashton Smith, Edgar Allen Poe, and  Lord Dunsany in particular. (I would actually cite C. A. Smith as the worse offender in regards to style.)The other problem, and the one that makes me agree with the term 'hack' is that he wrote for the pulp magazines of the 1920s and '30s. Yes, the format that you are writing for does impact whether or not you are a hack, and in fact Charles Dickens referred to himself as a hack! And I would certainly place Dickens as a good writer, with a firm grasp of language. The format enforced certain limitations, one of which was that unless you had some other means of support you rushed the stories out. Otherwise you might well starve to death as a writer. (HPL missed more than one meal as it was.) And finally, whether you like his style or not, the editor of Weird Tales did a very, very poor job of editing, being more concerned that the story fit the number of column inches he required than that it be a well written story.The need to rush things out was not something that Tolkien ever had to worry about, he could and would take a decade to polish things. The books produced after his death suffered because he had not had the time to add that polish.The Auld Grump</blockquote>

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