Are you willing to deal with it long enough to get through a fiction or non-fiction work in hopes that the story/subject will be worthwhile, or do you give up because you can’t cope with the pain?
I just quit on a novel after a page and a half (a new record for me) because I found the writing to be distractingly, excruciatingly awful and I couldn’t see suffering through 385 more pages of it, even if a cover blurb compared the author to Stephen King. Sample dreadfulness:
“It was your darkness that made me fall in love with you, Allison. Darkness of depth, I mean. The way we can peer down a narrow little hole and have our vision robbed by the mesmeric distance of it all. The never-ending-ness of it.”
Gawd.
There was more, as bad or worse, as the narrator bared his soul with no sign of getting to the story. The never-ending-ness of it, if you will.
*if the style appeals to you, a Google search will turn up the title and author.
In theory yes. But I got snookered into a book that left me with a WTF feeling.
3001 a Space Odyssey. The book starts out with some cool world building. But then it just keeps on with the world building and doesn’t stop. It never gets to the actual story until like the last four chapters. Total disappointment. I should have put that book down but I never did.
Depends. I read and enjoyed The Da Vinci Code. The writing was terrible and the plot was stupid but it kept my interest and I rather enjoyed the weird puzzle stuff.
On the other hand, there have been 100 word posts on this board on topics that interested me that I couldn’t be bothered to read.
I’m just hypersensitive to language. It’s one reason that illiterates on social media bother me so much. Conversely, it’s why I so much enjoy the pure silliness of P.G. Wodehouse, who was a master of the English language. Also why I enjoy reading Steven Pinker, even though I often disagree with him. As a linguist and a brilliant academic, he is so skilled at writing that some of his ordinary expository prose reads almost like poetry.
The older I get the less patience I have for books that aren’t working for me. “Not working” can take a thousand meanings. “So many books so little time” is more than a meme: it’s a curse.
Yeah, it depends: both on in what way it’s bad (and there are many different ways that writing can be bad), and on whether there’s enough that the writer does well to make up for the badness.
It depends. I’ve put up with amateurish writing for an interesting story. I’m less forgiving of poor spelling, punctuation and so on. Nostalgia can go a long way as well, which is why I like Ready Player One despite the writing.
If I encountered the same passage quoted in the OP, I too would stop reading that book. There are lots of well written books out there. Life is too short to waste it reading garbage like that.
I will never buy a book without scanning a page or two and that’s enough to decide if I like the style.
Even then I have given up after a chapter or two. My most frequent criticism is “too many adjectives”. There is a balance between drawing a picture and giving too much detail. A book I recently gave up on had a visit to a hospital and a description of a nurse: blue eyes, shapely figure, sympathetic etc etc. She was entirely peripheral to the story.
Another gave detailed descriptions of every room the MC went into: carpets, curtains, furniture placement and so on.
There are different kinds, or perhaps levels, of bad writing.
Writing so poor I have to work hard to even understand what you’re trying to say, and may still be unable to make sense of it. I’ll need a good reason to make that effort, and your story is not likely to be worth it.
Writing that contains spelling and/or grammatical errors that don’t interfere with comprehension but detract from the flow. If your story is interesting, I’ll try to deal, but I’ll probably be judging you.
Writing that’s technically proficient but unsophisticated–rambling with irrelevant detail, relying on cliches, overusing modifiers, etc. I’m more forgiving of this, but I do find it distracting.
I can get turned off before finishing the first page. It has to be really bad and I’ll probably take a peek at page 2, but if it looks like I’ll be slogging my way through much more I’ll just put it down. A book has to grab me pretty quickly if I’m going to invest the time in it. If I’m on a flight or stuck in a hotel room my standards loosen up a bit.
Very good example. Crap writing - EXCEPT, one of the best examples of fast moving with short chapters and continual cliffhangers. It was easy and fun enough to breeze through just to see where the plot was going, and the bad writing did not overly get in the way.
Also, there was the fact that it was so widely read. There was some incentive to stick with it, just t see what everyone else was reading. I’d be less tempted to stick with something I just picked up at the library.
But I pretty much consider those exceptions. Vacation books. A break in between the reading I consider more enjoyable. There are plenty of fast moving books that ARE well-written, that there is little need to put up with the bad. I largely read by author. If I find an author who writes well IMO, I’ll read just abut everything I can find by them. I’ll read good writing about just about any topic. Whereas it takes a lot for me to put up with bad writing - even on a topic I enjoy.
I’m surprised at how much bad writing will take me out of a book. I just read The Ensemble, by Aja Gable. Overall, not horribly bad writing, and subject matter that engaged me. But every once in a while there would be a clunker - where you could SEE the writer’s effort, and something would just see contrived. Just a few examples like that can really detract from an entire book.
I won’t put up with poor writing for any reason and refuse to contribute to the coffers of bad writers. I have no respect for writers who don’t respect the language and find it depressing that so many readers will put up with crappy writing for a cliffhanger plot or steamy scenes. This is why the number of five-star reviews on Amazon don’t impress me.
I slogged through the first two pages of the book, @Jackmannii. Ugh. The author seems to think he’s being deep. One clue that a paperback is bad is when all the blurbs on the jacket are from other writers.
Reading truly bad writing is like sticking bamboo skewers into your ears. And with all sorts of writing guides, online workshops and advice, and feedback from forums there is no reason for it. Read Chandler’s The Simple Art of Murder, Ursula Le Guin’s No Time To Spare, or Stephen King’s On Writing to learn how to write well or at least competently.
I won’t give a book with poor craft the time of day anymore, and haven’t since I wasted scores of hours reading Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, which aside from just being transparent propaganda for her sophomoric philosophy is such a terribly written novel that no one should suffer having to read it except as punishment for truly heinous crimes like rape, murder, and being an Elon Musk idolator.
I’m partway through a detective book series that has a mix of very bad writing, reasonably good writing, interesting characters, some interesting storylines and an unfortunate very very obvious trend in whodunnit.
The good parts are the main reason I’ve continued, and they have got better as the series has gone on. And I admit that the other reason is that they’re very cheap books. I can’t really use the library, so have to buy books, plus I read a lot, and I just can’t afford to keep buying the books I think are really good all the time.
The writer often decides to add local colour by telling us the local history of a place the characters are visiting. That’s fine, but the descriptions are clearly very slightly adapted from the Wikipedia entry on those areas (or similar real ones), and they have nothing to do with the story - an area has a ghost of a young woman, does that mean there will be a young woman killed, or someone will remember a young woman being killed, or… Nup. It’s random.
The writer is also an evangelist for AA, to the extent that there are maybe twenty pages per book I skip because they’re just stories from other AA members that, again, have no bearing on the story, they’re just evangelising.
There are some books that I’ve given up on, or only managed one of, because the characterisation is so ludicrously unrealistic (but not intended as comedy), or the writer hates punctuation and paragraphs. Some of those are reasonably well-regarded writers, too. I used to read a fair bit of fanfic, and some of that is better written than some published books.
Yeah, there’s a lot of mutual back-patting from fellow authors that goes into book blurbs.* What I find unforgiveable is when there’s a rave review of crap, coming from a best-selling author whose stuff is actually good.
At least I didn’t spend money on the example in the OP (it was a library book).
*it’s less reliable a tell, but still suspicious when rave reviews on the book cover are from Publishers Weekly or the Tiny Town Press-Bugle, rather than major newspapers or similar media outlets.
There was one book – I think I ordered it from Scholastic Book Services as an eighth grader – by a revered mid-19th century author which may very well have been well written, but I could never get past the middle of the first page. Must have tried three or four times, never managed. It must have been readable, because I believe Kidnapped has been made into a movie. It just told me flat out not to read it.
On the other hand, my cousin told me he had the same experience with A Clockwork Orange, so I picked it up and immediately recognized some of the oddball words that he had struggled with, so it was a breeze to read (admittedly, “horrorshow” took me a while to connect).
The only writing I cannot tolerate is when an author smugly passes off something as fact when it’s not.
I shut a book halfway through when one author claimed that when Taiwan bought some aircraft, it meant there was a risk of midair collisions because Taiwan was so small.
There are very few books I’ve started and didn’t finish, and right now I can’t remember any of them …
Fortunately most of them are in my “did-not-finish” category on Goodreads, so I can say that none of them were due to bad writing.
My approach to picking books to read mainly avoid bad writing, and when I pick one despite knowing it’s bad writing I tend to stick to it.
I got a Clive Cussler book as a gift once, and considered putting it down several times, but each time I thought “It can’t possibly get worse than this” and then it did. Apparently I decided not to record it at Goodreads, so I can’t recall the title.
I read The Blazing World, even though the somewhat amateurish writing of a 17th century British aristocrat was hard going.
I read The DaVinci-code only so I could enjoy the excellent Norwegian parody. I’m not sure I’d call Dan Brown’s writing bad though, it’s just anywhere worthy of the hype.
I read 50 shades of grey because I was curious after seeing the strong bimodal distribution of Goodreads reviews. Absolutely no desire to read anything else the author has ever or will ever write.
And I read Twilight because it was hip to diss it and I wanted to do so with the authority of having read it. And then I read the rest of the saga because I’d run out of other available books while “babysitting” my grandmother for a week.
There are more books I would have abandoned if I didn’t get a strong satisfaction from finishing even bad books. But this I think is a representative sample showing my ability to just deal with it and push through.
I’m the same way. If an author gets some sort of technology wrong in a way that shows they didn’t bother doing any research or bases a story on a historic event that never happened (assuming the story isn’t specifically about what if it did happen) I will very quickly lose interest in continuing. It’s right up there with characters making decisions that go against their characterization or what any rational person would do for the sake of the plot.
