Bad books: why they’re good

It seemed like a good idea at the time: Pick a book off the shelf not because I’d read the review or had it recommended to me by a friend, but simply because the title caught my eye. This book was a mystery, a genre that goes well with rainy winter afternoons and mugs of tea, and it was set in a country I’m interested in.

I wasn’t expecting anything especially literary but the clumsiness of the prose surprised me. I read on for several chapters, partly because I hoped it would get better, partly because of the setting—and partly because you can learn from bad writers as well as excellent ones. If you want to see why writing teachers tell you to beware of the cliché, be it in description or plot, or of dialogue that does nothing to advance the story, there’s no better way than to see such things in action.

Stephen King puts it this way: “Every book you read has its own lessons, and quite often bad books have more to teach than the good ones.” (He uses The Bridges of Madison County and Valley of the Dolls as examples of bad books, by the way.)

About a week later, I picked up a novel by an author frequently called the Queen of Suspense. By chapter two, my enthusiasm was flagging. Writing instructors will tell you to beware of adverbs but reading lines like, “Our client is innocent, he thought, sarcastically,” really make the point. (People actually think “sarcastically”?)

You can learn a lot about writing dialogue, too. Here’s one cop talking to another outside a mansion in which a murderer is almost certainly advancing on his victims:

“[the bad guy] may be dangerous, and he may be armed. More police officers will be here soon. If you see [the bad guy], try to avoid any contact with him, and alert the other officers as soon as they get here. He may try to drive out. Tell the guard at the gate what is happening and make sure he closes the gates as soon as the other police arrive.”

Do people speak in full sentences in the heat of the moment? I certainly don’t. And, aside from the fact the first cop thinks the second cop is an idiot, would anyone in such a situation speak as if his contraction-hating, high school English teacher was within earshot? (ie., Why not “what’s happening”?)

“Show, don’t tell,” is a well-worn—but worthwhile—cliché of writing manuals. As the above example demonstrates, showing can have more power than telling when it comes to learning about how (not) to write, too.

(On the other hand, when it comes to plotting this Queen knows what she’s doing!)