Bad Writing
Have we become so good at judging art that we're forgetting how to make it ourselves?
This week my husband read a Bad Book. You know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s one of those books that reads like it was written by a precocious middle schooler and yet, somehow, has outsold the Bible for the last two fiscal years.
Todd, my husband, (at what point in this newsletter writer-reader relationship can I just start calling him Todd without introducing him as “my husband”? Now? Too soon? Maybe it’s just something I get to decide? Hm. I’m gonna just go for it. Watch this space.) could not stop talking about it. He would read passages aloud to me and we would laugh. Then I’d greedily ask for another and he’d dutifully oblige. Ha-ha-ha.
The writing in this book seems to have fallen victim to those common writing traps. Its descriptions were overwrought. The exposition was clunky and constant. The characters were more tropes than they were actual human beings. The word “boobalicious” (boobalicious!) was used to describe a character’s physique.
And yet, he couldn’t put the book down.
The day he finished it we went to dinner with our friend Karen. She and I giddily goaded him into walking us through the entire plot, spoilers be damned. Then, for the entire fifteen-minute play-by-play, our jaws lowered closer and closer to the floor as he narrated every twist and turn. When he finished, we involuntarily clapped. The story was thrilling, even in secondhand narration.
So was it a bad book? Or was it a fucking amazing book? And was it poorly written? Or was it just not written to our tastes?
I think about bad writing all the time.
Specifically, how do I avoid doing it?
The quick answer is: I don’t.
There is currently a very bad manuscript burning a hole in my top desk drawer. It’s the first draft of a YA novel that’s been kicking around in my head for a while and I finally decided to see it through last year.
As with all creative projects, when it existed only in my mind it was glorious and perfect. A stunningly composed masterstroke of genius. Then, as I began to actually write the thing, it developed that unmistakable stench of reality. All the plot holes I couldn’t see in my imagination were right there on the page in the light of day. Those breathtaking sentences? Turns out those were just illusions in my brain that I never decided to inspect too closely. On paper they became real and clunky. There are about three chapters toward the end of the book that are identical to each other. One note I got back from an early reader was “what does your protagonist even want?”
I’ve long embraced Anne Lamott’s notion of the shitty first draft—the acceptance that our first attempts should and must be bad, and only through edits and further drafting can they get better—but I sometimes imagine her looking at my first drafts and saying “oh, sweetie, I didn’t mean that shitty.”
I finished this draft in December and haven’t looked at it since January. I guess I’m worried that it will never get better. That it should have just stayed as a perfect, Pulitzer Prize-winning idea in my head.
That Bad Book that Todd read at least exists. Someone was like “this? This is ready for public consumption.” And you know what? They were right! It’s wildly popular! In the few days I spent smugly laughing at its sentence structure it probably sold more copies than my first book sold in the entire three years since it came out. And, as I noted before, the story absolutely slaps.
I worry often about what sites like Goodreads and Letterboxd are doing to our artistic souls. Sure, they’re helpful tools to log the books we’ve read and movies we’ve watched, but are works of art really meant to be judged on a 5-star scale? Are our takedowns of creative projects meant to be upvoted and downvoted? Why are we treating our subjective opinions as objective truths?
Have we become so good at judging art that we’re forgetting how to make it ourselves?
I don’t know.
What I do know is that Bad Books can be good and books that only exist in your head are perfect masterpieces that no one gets to read.
Now I’m gonna go revisit my shitty awful budding manuscript with more loving eyes.