On Bad Writing

What does it mean to be a bad writer? I hear so often, so surprisingly these days, words spoken with too much authority on what is and isn’t good writing. At this stage, every possible thing that can be done with words has been pulled off successfully. So who is anyone to tell anyone anything?

I’m a believer that if a style requires anything—adverbs, passive sentences, reams of unattributed dialogue, weird punctuation, split infinitives, sentences ending in prepositions or starting in gerunds or conjunctions, use of the past continuous tense (which even clever writers who’ve been doing it for a long time don’t understand isn’t the same as passive voice), Oxford commas or independent clauses separated by commas—go for it, man. Even Robert McKee, with his rather rigid form (and not formula) for scripts admits that all he does is give writers something to think about. Even Mary Karr, with her Art of Memoir, admits, after lists of well-researched rules, that a writer’s voice may require them to break any or all of them. When I was reading works by some favourite writers, before I even knew that much about writing—David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakami spring to mind first—I thought, ‘Dude, you’re not really supposed to do that. He solves the puzzle in a dream? You’re just going to tell me how the character felt about that situation? You’re not really supposed to dwell on that description. How come this guy has in-depth knowledge of astrophysics but uses the word “irregardless”? Nothing’s happened for pages! But why am I still reading? Why does this work?’

All a writer really needs to do is remain compelling to themselves somehow for the full length of whatever they’re writing. When writers come at me with too much formality, with strict adherence to rules that aren’t rules, I feel like they’d rather I place a gold star on their book than connect with me emotionally. You’re allowed to make a bit of a mess. You can’t wage a war on drugs, terror, adverbs, cliché, you know… anything like that.

Here’s the worst one I heard recently: ‘Text is meant to be invisible for the sake of the story. It’s not supposed to stand out.’ Well I mean that’s one stance, but, like, cool man, let’s use language but have absolutely no fun doing so. Wouldn’t you love me to sound the same as you and all the other unanimously agreed-upon good writers who use the same five hundred words and no more to write about everything? Who think good writing is personifying emotions—“Anger tore through her”; “Fear rushed into him”—rather than, I don’t know, not fucking including them at all, because, stop telling me what your characters feel? And when they feel a literary flourish come on, they use a ten-word sentence (what a stretch) in which something “tangs”? I ate Tangfastics like fifteen years ago. They were tangy. Nothing has tanged since. Things just don’t really tang. Especially as an adult. Tang tang tang tang. And now you can’t unsee it either. Oh look! So many short sentences.

I feel a pacing coming on!

Now they each get their own paragraph.

Because I don’t respect my reader’s attention span.

At all. (A sentence fragment to boot? Oh dear.)

It’s difficult not to get riled up about what is and isn’t good writing! It’s good practice to have an open mind though, because my favourite writers and I will likely commit these annoying practices where we inevitably find them necessary. I’m just giving us things to think about ;)

No matter how much prestige anyone has, no human has much authority on what is and isn’t good art. So many famous works of art, after all, were set up with that exact message in mind. Art and life itself are far too big. Writers just need to be knowledgeable and have convictions. (That being said, if someone reads thousands of short stories a year and doesn’t like yours, they might, uh, know something.)

Because there are principles that should be adhered to if there is not a good reason to deviate from them, but they are just that: principles, not rules.

Original prose, by definition, is unconventional.