5 Famous Writers With Flaws Everyone Tries to Ignore

5 Charles Dickens -- Coincidences

Most readers are generally tolerant of a single unlikely event or sequence to start a story off. "What if someone from the 21st century arrived in the future and met the characters from Star Trek and they all started fucking each other?" is a good example. But as the story progresses, coincidences are much less tolerated. They reek of artifice, of an author who can't resolve a plot any other way, and in general take the reader out of the story.

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.

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.

4 Orwell -- Ham-Fisted Satire

George Orwell did not like the Soviet Union. That's a pretty reasonable position to take, but what differentiated Orwell from everyone else in the First World was that he was hating the Soviet Union during the depths of World War II, back when they were ostensibly our allies. Orwell was basically the hipster of hating the Soviet Union.

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.

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."

3 Melville -- Long-Winded Diversions

Moby-Dick is a classic story of whale madness, which is underselling it a bit, but serves for our purposes here. Even if you haven't read it, you're probably familiar with at least the basic outline of the story. It's about a mad whaling captain, a mischievous white whale, and a love that can never be.

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.

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.

2 Tolkien -- Long-Winded Diversions in Elvish

The Lord of the Rings is a giant of a book in at least a few ways. Its girth, obviously, but also the way it looms over nearly every other work in the fantasy genre that came after it. Consider the number of books and video games and movies that feature orcs, or elves that are good with bows, or surly subterranean dwarfs, and you realize the extent of J.R.R. Tolkien's influence.

More than that, though, Tolkien helped establish perhaps the most important hallmark of the fantasy genre, namely the richly detailed world building. Along with unique maps and history, Tolkien created entirely new languages for his imaginary little dudes to speak. And speak it they did. During lulls in the exciting adventures and orc murders and Thou Shall Not Passes, the Fellowship of the Ring liked to set up camp and sing songs to each other. A whole fucking bunch of times.

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.

1 Shakespeare -- Creaky Plot Devices and Outright Propaganda

Cracked has talked about how messed up the Bard is before. For every display of genius on the order of Hamlet or Macbeth, there's at least one work that looks like it was written for little more than a paycheck. Lazy plotting and coincidences abound in many of Shakespeare's plays; his earlier plays in particular are pretty rough. For example, The Winter's Tale features a character who reappears at a very convenient time 16 years after she disappeared, emerging from her disguise as a statue (it's also not clear whether she's actually a magic statue this whole time). The same play also features a character who gets eaten, more or less out of nowhere, by a bear.

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.

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.

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.