Writers need to read other writers. As writing advice goes, this is as close to a mandatory rule as one can get. We should read great books, read outside our genre, and in various forms. We should read books we love and books that challenge us. In a post on Lit Reactor, Richard Thomas says we can also learn a lot from reading bad writing.
“Bad” encompasses a range of ideas. There are stories that don’t interest us or make strike us the wrong way at a certain time. Those aren’t bad, but merely a bad fit for our tastes. And there are stories that aren’t well written, because the writing is weak or hackneyed. When you read one of those stories, Thomas suggests breaking it down to find out why you didn’t like it, in the same way you examine great stories to figure out how they work.
What can you learn from a story that is too reliant on tropes and clichés? “That most of the time we want to push hard to be original, different, unique, weird, and unexpected,” Thomas notes. “Tread new ground. Add what only you can add. Cliched stories will push you to do more with your own work.”
Bad dialogue – boring conversations, vague attribution, or unbroken swaths of talking – can teach us the importance of using every sentence to its best advantage. Dialogue should do double duty to convey subtext, plot, character, setting, or mood. Thomas suggest reading your dialogue aloud to find the weak spots.
A weak or confusing opening can inspire us to ensure that we begin our stories with intention and set a powerful scene for our readers. A weak ending can remind us to examine our own work to see if we’ve resolved all our plot threads, delivered on promises, and met or subverted the expectations we set at the beginning.
Thomas concludes by sharing a checklist he used as an editor at Gamut, with nearly 40 reasons a story didn’t work for the editors.
