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Does bad writing make us feel good?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Why are we attracted to bad writing? I don’t think anyone likes to read it at length, but excerpted, it can be quite entertaining. That seems to be the idea behind those awards for the worst sex scene of the year, or the Bulwer-Lytton contest, where people deliberately try to write the worst possible opening sentence to a novel.
Now we have something called the Delete Key Awards, run by an author named Janice Harayda. She has nominated 10 recent books, many of them best-sellers by big-name authors, for the past year’s worst writing in books.
Boy, does she have a good time ripping into some of these books.
On Eckhart Tolle’s “A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose,” which was chosen by Oprah for her book club and has been No. 1 on Amazon.com ever since: “Goodbye, Love in the Time of Cholera. Hello, Psychobabble in the Time of Ratings Wars.”
She quotes Alice Sebold’s “The Almost Moon,” which got pretty widespread pans: “And there it was, the hole that had given birth to me.… This was not the first time I’d been face-to-face with my mother’s genitalia.” Adds Harayda: Face-to-face” doesn’t seem quite the right phrase for those body parts, does it?”
This whole list brings the funny. Nice job.
But back to my original question: Why do we like bad writing?
Permalink | Comments (5) | Categories: Books
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By Lily Toad
March 5, 2008 10:26 AM | Link to this
I don’t know, but when I read The Mummy by Anne Rice, I thought I’d scream every time she wrote “and she knew in her heart of hearts.” One heart of heart is tolerable, but all the way through the book?
By Thomas
March 5, 2008 10:55 AM | Link to this
Does bad writing make us feel better? I don’t think so. If anything, it frustrates so many of us who entertain the conceit that if we had a little more free time, then we’d be writing our own books and those books would be so much better than this!
(Actually, I don’t have this kind of violent reaction all the time. Usually, it’s only when I see that Cory Doctorow has published yet another book of hipster sci-fi.)
By Janice Harayda
March 5, 2008 1:28 PM | Link to this
Hi, Phil, Thanks for noticing the Delete Key Awards (for authors who aren’t using their delete keys enough).
Here’s one possible explanation for why we like bad writing. Many forms of humor rely on exaggeration. And all three of the awards you mentioned recognize writing that’s so bad, it in effect exaggerates writing flaws that, if they existed in a lesser degree, we might not mind. So the awards have at least one element in common with a lot of humor writing.
But there could be many other explanations. It will be fun to see which ones your visitors come up with … Jan Harayda
By Kat
March 5, 2008 3:26 PM | Link to this
That was hilarious. I read On Chesil Beach, and wondered if I was the only one who thought it was just dismal! Apparently not.
Part of the reason we like to see bad writing exposed is an “emperor’s new clothes” kind of reaction. The critics loved it, Oprah loved it, it won awards, but we mere mortals can see how awful it is. That makes us feel smarter than the ivory tower crowd.
I agree with Thomas, though. I may never get around to writing a book, but I’m sure (in my heart of hearts, Lily) that if I did I could do better than some of those!
By Jeff
March 6, 2008 8:37 AM | Link to this
How could a ‘bad books award’ leave out Cormac McCarthy’s The Road????
Single WORST book I’ve ever read!!