#I do recall it being jarring to translate Praeludium after VG Wiegenlied

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What do you think about Mothy’s writing? I’ve been recently reading some reviews of Mothy’s first novel, both in English and in Japanese. All of them were saying the same thing: his writing is bad.

What do you think about it? Do you think his writing improved? If so, how well did it improve?

Just up front, I would be cautious about English reviews of his first novel (that is, the original Cloture of Yellow, not the VG version that I translated) because the only translation available for it is a steaming pile of garbage (and this translation was the only one available for Cloture at all for many years before I came along). I would take the word of the Japanese reviews alone on that.

(also worth noting that my translations of Cloture and Wiegenlied were my first completed book translations, so even my "good" translation is clumsier than it should be)

I will say though, yes--his writing at the beginning is very amateurish. But in my opinion there is noticeable improvement as the series goes on. I'll put a disclaimer in here though that it's pretty much impossible for me to look at this with an objective lens, being in the position I am. And that it's hard for me to judge Japanese writing standards overall--I haven't read a huge body of work actually in Japanese.

Mothy has a very brown prose, blunt style to his writing. This is what makes the initial novels in the series feel so clunky. He has a lot of exposition to deliver, but it's not always given in a very interesting manner, and it sometimes feels jarring. Actions are simply put and at times can feel silly. Emotions and thoughts are conveyed in a manner that's straightforward and without much wordcraft. And there are some times (both then and now, albeit) where he will just skip over an action sequence to get to its conclusion.

I think he's someone who envisions scenes largely in terms of visuals and dialogue, rather than words on a page (or maybe I just think so because I write that way). It's clear he has a solid picture of what's going on both action-wise and in the mind of each character, but not always the best way to convey the emotional and tonal impact of it to the reader.

I think a lot of what makes mothy's writing better in later books isn't that he's become more creative with his prose (although he has), or that his writing style has changed (it hasn't), but rather that he gets better at knowing when to provide detail, how much, and how to be more emotionally provocative with what he provides. The simpler the writing style, the more crucial it is to be able to encourage a reader to project onto a scene, and I think he just gets better at doing that.

...Eh, I don't know if I'm making sense here. Been a while since I read all of them and it's hard to compare. --The short answer is yes, I think his work improves in quality over time. It's definitely still genre fiction aimed at teens, he's not writing the Next Great Novel, but it no longer detracts from the actual thing I'm reading for, which is the characters and worldbuilding.

(I guess to give an example of what I'm talking about with being provocative, maybe...Cloture features a scene where Allen screams for an entire paragraph. This is extremely funny, and the scene is meant to be very sad. This is the kind of thing where encouraging the audience to imagine Allen's breakdown would have been more effective than just writing out the scream itself.)