Sledgehammer literature is a phenomenon in modern publications of over-the-top manipulation of emotions or actions in the text to elicit a reciprocal visceral response from the reader. While sledgehammer writing is the preferred style of political opinion writers and advocacy pundits, the same “all faucets on full” writing appears to have migrated to fiction and not political non-fiction writing as well. Authors assume that wringing every last drop of emotional pain from an event is good writing or good for sales, perhaps. Good for one or the other, the prescription of pain, wrenching emotions, brutal self-evisceration and physical manifestations of such pepper the populist lit and literary lit with gut-twisting passages.
This is not bad writing. In fact sledgehammer literature is excellent writing that produces powerful reactions in readers, leaving them shifting uncomfortably in their chairs and on their couches. Typically the purpose of walking a person through a wrenching experience is conclusion of catharsis once the resolution is complete, like the ancient Greek plays that excelled first at presenting wrenching emotional circumstances. The unique characteristic of sledgehammer literature is that there is no catharsis at the end, only relief that the passage is done or disbelief that one stuck with the text and read through it. This type of literature beats up the reader for the sake of demonstrating that the writer can beat up the reader.
Sledgehammer literature is the epitome of technique by an author. Indeed, the mark of such literature is pure technique; missing is many of the other elements of the art of writing. While an excellent novel may have a particularly painful scene, the elements of plot, pacing, character development, and description will also be well pronounced. A novel of the sledgehammer variety relies on the visceral reaction to mask the deficiencies of the other ingredients.
Sledgehammer literature is best identified by its weak appeal to suspend disbelief. When elements are missing, when characters have no more depth to them than the pain they evince in the reader, the reader is left with little else but the pain. And who wants that much suffering really?
Glenn Jacob 