Every aspiring writer should read terrible books (2022) [video]
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* People who have no business writing and have no idea what they're doing. These are not going to give you much, which is why you want to keep to groups that have some gatekeeping.
* Beginners who are not that talented but can develop skill. These people are good because you can see what it looks like to go from nothing to something, even if that something isn't great
* Untalented people who are workhorses and can do the job: these people are probably the most valuable "bad writers"
* Talented people who suck. These people are also amazing because you can see the power of skill as it develops
* Talented people who are very good. (These won't be in your group)
But really all this about "analyze why the book sucks" is a red herring. What is far more instructive is understanding why something that you don't like is appealing. If you can find what works in something you don't like, it's a lot more likely that you'll be able to understand that technique.
Best selling thrillers with bad dialog and paper characters? Great. That means you can focus on the pacing and plot and understand why the book works despite its obvious flaws. That's harder though because it isn't just stroking your own ego by saying "aw I could do that"
I always tried to study her, thinking that if I could understand the essence of why she was so deeply unfunny, I could understand the secret to being funny.
Sadly I could never figure it out. Her unfunniness was inscrutable.
I realized this after doing stand up comedy for over 12 years.
I don't know what makes good writing but I know that if it gets a laugh then it's a good joke.
No one has figured out the rules of what is good stand up comedy which is probably why studying comedy using "via negativa" or any other logical approach may not work.
Steve Martin touched upon this a little bit in his book "Born Standing Up" and there is a mention of his Philosophy background on his wikipedia page
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Martin#Early_life_and_ed...
Some basic golden rules:
Comedy is about surprise. Don't let them see the punchline coming.
Related to the above, make sure you've done enough setup so the audience can reach the punchline. An obvious connection to you might be not be so obvious to the audience. The punchline will flop if the gap between the setup and the punchline is too large for the audience to connect the dots.
Lie when you're meant to tell the truth. Tell the truth when you're meant to lie.
The funniest word or part of the joke needs to be at the end of the sentence.
Don't change your delivery for the punchline. Tell it straight and commit to it. Changing your delivery for the punchline is equivalent to putting a laugh track on a old style sitcom. If you have to prompt people to laugh, it's not funny.
Utilise the rule of three.[1]
Be as concise as possible.*
If you're telling a story, heighten the details even if that means lying about what actually happened. My friend has a story about a barfight in Thailand. The first time he told it, 5 people ran out of the bar to join him in the fight. The second time he told it 20 people ran out of the bar to join in the fight. The last time I heard it, everyone in the bar ran out and joined in the fight. The last one is inherently funnier because the chaos is heightened. Google Bert Kresicher's advice on telling stories for more info and examples, he's one of the best storytelling comedians around at the minute.
A related rule is, when telling a story based on a real life anecdote, recall the story and not the event. Unless you've got photographic recall, if you try and recall the event as you lived it, you're going to get trapped trying to remember precise details and you'll slow down the joke and people will zone out e.g:
"So there was me, Dave and John at the bar. No not John, Stan. And we were hitting up this bunch of girls and one of them was wearing this leopard print dress, no not leopard print, tiger print."
Never do this. Try and plan out how you're going to tell the story. Cut it down to the essentials and keep iterating on it.
If you've written a monologue, always practice speaking it out loud before performing and revise it accordingly. It needs to sound like you're speaking naturally in the moment and your written voice is normally more formal and stuffy than your spoken voice.
*The exception to this rule is if you're doing a shaggy dog story[2]. These are ramblings deliberately meant to lead the audience down the garden path with a punchline that didn't require about 90% of the surreal setup. The key to pulling these off well is to have mini punchlines or funny occurrences happen whilst you're telling the story and building the tension appropriately, otherwise the audience just zones out. The absolute master of these was Norm MacDonald, who in my opinion told the greatest one of all time, Dirty Johnny[3]. The other great one I've heard is "The Orange Head Joke"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_of_three_(writing)
As to the writing, I feel that you should be a great thinker to be a great joke creator. Maybe not all comics need to actually write jokes. But writing in general is a creative process, which is also thinking. And writing jokes gives you material for remixing. I agree it's mostly performance though. Some comics are all performance and little to no dialogue.
(Thank you for sharing - I'd never heard it before).
Do not remember which stand up I heard it from. Many usually try their new material at 2am. If you can not get the people who are decently drunk to laugh it probably is not a good joke.
Spelling out the one kills me every time.
Error: unknown user `there`For a while she dated one of the more established comedians, who would either feed her jokes, or help her work up her own material.
So the jokes were pretty good. But it didn't matter. She might get half a laugh on the first joke, and then it was dead silence for the rest of the show.
Right at the start there's a scene with a bunch of people in a nightclub, and when describing someone he uses the phrase "with a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle" - a colloquial phrase in Ireland meaning someone looks sour (see https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Face%20like%...)
... but he misplaced a comma, and the sentence he actually wrote was
"Maria, of course, standing close by with a face like a bulldog, licking piss off a nettle."
Terrible book, but almost worth reading just for that image
Editors have read a lot of books. More than most authors will have. They have also read and improved on terrible books. They get everything, literally raw and unedited.
PS: Also, have a plain dust jacket. Never nuclear pink, orange, or yellow.
Jokes aside, though, Moore is probably a top 10 author for me. I don't think I've read anything of his that I haven't enjoyed, and what I have read, I've enjoyed heads & shoulders above – and remember much more in detail, thanks to the book nature of it all – anything else.
* From Hell (Some might be put off by the original comic's black and white art, but there was a recent release that colourised them by the original illustrator)
* Providence
* Jerusalem
* V for Vendetta
But I most appreciate him for Swamp Thing, because that’s where we got our first appearance of John Constantine.
They are on Book 23 or so at the moment, more or less alternating between books by "big" authors like Dan Brown or Sean Penn and super obscure stuff like Harry Potter-Twilight-crossover fan fiction.
Ready Player One is no doubt badly written and Bad Art (full disclosure, I didn't manage to finish it), but it is also one of the more successful and beloved sci-fi books from the last 15 years and shouldn't that in a way make it a Very Good Book.
For awful but readable books:
Most anything by Dan Brown, but for the audience here, Digital Fortress will make you tear your hair out in frustration if you know anything at all about cryptography. The climax of the book seems to be made for a movie and is a completely nonsensical sequence in which people stare at a screen showing attackers breaking through a firewall, as if it were a wall that can be slowly drilled through.
For me that was the book that did it. If Dan Brown couldn't take 10 minutes to research the simplest basics of the subject he based his book around, imagine what the quality of the rest of the work is like.
Ender's Game I rate as a fairly enjoyable but puerile teenage power fantasy. But after that comes Speaker for the Dead, which to me is absolutely awful. Ender turns into this insufferably saintly martyr, who acts as some sort of Gordon Ramsay, only fixing an awful colony instead of a restaurant. Everyone in the book is insufferable and a complete moron, except for Ender of course who knows how to fix all those awful people. Oh, and it justifies domestic abuse.
And maybe Battlefield Earth. I've never read the entire thing, but here's a quote:
“His valet! In the rush of getting him off, his clumsy damned valet had put the wrong boots on him. Oh, when he got home ... when he got home he would have the oaf punctured! Worse. Dragged through the streets and bitten to death by small children.”
Most books are written by sane, intelligent, and educated people. The books you'll read in a high school library are also curated by librarians. There's an expectation of quality you don't notice until suddenly you pick up a book at the local council library authored by someone with some serious untreated mental issues.
After that revelation I started noticing the author of a book instead of just paying attention to the content of the book.
Similarly to L Ron Hubbard, I found The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson impossible to finish. There's something deeply wrong about him that I can't quite put my finger on. (I did finish his Gap Cycle series, but felt dirty in my brain after.)
I picked up The Dragonriders of Pern series based purely on the dragon on the cover and just started reading. A few chapters in, I though to myself: "This is written by a woman, isn't it?", flipped to the cover page and lo-and-behold: "Anne McCaffrey" -- I had guessed correctly!
Wait, what? Do you know how many famous authors suffer from some sort of severe mental illness? Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, and on and on. In fact, most of the great artists in general have a mental illness they can ascribe their creativity to. They can also be quite intelligent and educated at the same time.
I just read that one, bought straight from Amazon. It's so bad that it made me chuckle.
> Which actually turned out to be a big crowd pleaser
Crowds are weird.
I remember enjoying reading it and finding the worldbuilding really interesting and the drama kept me reading. But I am a sucker for Frank Herbert so maybe I missed the flaws.
If I had read it and the Dune without knowing their authors, I could not have told them they were written by the same person. Especially not that it was written after the Dune, where he has proved he can write well.
I think there are two types "bad" writing and I think people have a hard time having nuanced discussion about this.
First category is what I would personally describe "uninspired". These are works created by artists who arguably have either (1) too little exposure to prior art, or (2) too inexperienced with core skills of writing. So, in terms of my field, these artists probably (1) didn't expose themselves to enough music, or read enough music, or (2) didn't practice how to construct and write music enough times that they're comfortable. Examples of "uninspired" works include student works (i.e. practice works written by people to gain skills), works whose only purpose is to make money and there is no other consideration (this is probably very debatable), or works created by people who are unreasonably unexposed to the prior art (e.g. someone who has sufficient writing skills who is writing a novel, but really only read 2 novels before.)
Second "bad" category is what I would describe writing that is too stylish where aesthetic choices aren't appealing. This is when creator (1) is sufficiently exposed to prior art and (2) is experienced enough to produce works similar to prior art. Now, this gets very tricky because the problem with these works -- i.e. what separates them from Category 1 -- is that the work itself needs to convince the observer of these qualities, which can oftentimes be very hard. Unfortunately, I cannot give examples from literature, but to give an example from the history of music writing: oftentimes people listen to works of Schoenberg and they complain it sounds horrific, dissonant, random and ugly etc etc... However, if you look at the work closely, you'll find choices that are only consistent with thorough understanding of the prior art and an experimental desire to create something entirely novel. Now, it is "ugly" (for some, of course) but it is well-informed. In other words, it convinces most that the artist was able to create something "prettier" but for whatever reason decided not to.
Unpacking this is important when consuming "bad art" because each category teaches you something else.
When you consume Category 1 "bad art" you need to pick up (1) in what ways this work is unaware of prior art, and (2) in what ways this creator is inexperienced. This can be crucial to understand points where you struggle. E.g. you look at some student works, and you see consistent patterns that diverge from prior art -- consistent patterns are not explained with creativity. This can be a good reminder to work on these skills.
When it comes to Category 2, it's more complicated. This kind of art can be jarring, but can be the most useful kind of art you can consume to perfect your skills. These can show prior experiments, and how various styles work. You don't have to enjoy it, but it will be useful to see. E.g. slow movies may not be your favorite, but if you're filmmaker you likely want to sit through the entire "2001" movie.
Ultimately, it's up to you, and up to your relationship with your art. I personally consume a lot of art I dislike and think it's important to expand my understanding how things work. An artist is not just the work, but also the entire lifetime spent on observing, and critically thinking about other humans' art. So, the answer ultimately lies in you.
In particular it's interesting that you call the first category "uninspired" rather than "lacking skills". A lot of people equate this "uninspired" category with "lacking in personal expression". Typically a really skillful artist can generally make something absolutely mechanical _feel_ personal, whereas an unskilled artist cannot make anything sound personal. There are also specific genres that skew the perception in one way or the other, that will change the threshold of skill for something to be considered "personal" or not.
The second category is interesting if you can identify how problems introduced by the rule-breaking elements could be solved. Any "art rule" solves a problem, and determining an alternative solution for it can lead to a breakthrough. Keyword is "can", there's a lot of experiment required. But in many cases it at least helps understanding better why the "rule" is useful.
In music, the people with the technical skills often work in support roles as session musicians, producers, and arrangers. They lack individual expression and charisma but have the skills needed to polish someone else's work.
The same applies to books. Dan Brown and Twilight are terrible writing but they give middle-of-the-bell-curve readers experiences that mean something to them. Most art aims higher, but the middle of the bell curve is where the big money is.
True mediocrity comes from having very limited technical skill - probably imitative in a narrow niche - and no ability to connect with an audience.
I think that applies to most academic attempts at serial music. The style is a bit of an oddity because the rules were contrived rather than evolved. And (IMO) that kind of dissonance has a very limited expressive range.
Schoenberg could get away with it, but there was a fad in 50s to 70s where that kind of serialism became academic orthodoxy. The result was hours and hours of music by clever educated people with absolutely no cultural relevance outside of academia.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
[3] https://crisismagazine.com/vault/americas-greatest-living-co...
[4] https://fugueforthought.de/2016/07/13/boulez-piano-sonata-no...
The challenge I see in a lot of software in corporate environments is that, unlike music, the code written due to lack of awareness / experience becomes technical debt as the software keeps growing over time.
And then, the bastard manages to turn his stories around and do something often good, sometimes great of it. Not sure whether it's on purpose or he's just a short-story stretching too much... But if you read most of it, it's very very bad. But add the endings or the small moments of grace and suddenly it's great. Ugh.
Edit: I worry that they won't translate well, no. Edit2: I think he got inspired by Don Delillo a bit, so you might get a taste there (I remember feeling very much similar ending his books).
Focusing on other people faults and trying to avoid them made me super aware of any theoretical imperfection in what I was doing without making me able to do something actually good. I was not improving at all, I was just increasingly scared to do anything, because more and more words/acts whatever resembled something bad someone have done.
It's the longest possible path to learning how to do it right. There are an infinite number of wrong options, but precious few right ones. Just not stepping on the same land mines that someone else did step on doesn't mean you'll avoid the rest of the ones spread throughout the minefield. Much better to follow and learn the path of someone who knows the clear path.
The avoidance of specific bad can also equal bad. Just a different flavour.