I promise this is a post about writing, but first I have to start here:

In the martial arts in general, and more particularly in the martial art that I practice, TaeKwonDo (TKD), there are a lot of principles students are required to learn about and encouraged to follow.  Some of these are like the student oath (e.g., ‘I shall never misuse TaeKwonDo’) or the tenets (e.g., Integrity).  Others are frameworks for learning and conceptualizing the core values and lessons of the martial discipline.  Of these later, one is a list called ‘The 9 Reasons for Practicing Courtesy’ (Courtesy is another one of the tenets).  And one of those reasons listed is:

‘To be aware of one’s vices, contempting those of others.’

My instructor loves to bring up this Reason, because it is endlessly instructive in all sorts of ways and scenarios.  And I rather have to agree with him.  Because I find that the basic principles it employs can be applied to all sorts of things, many of them unrelated to the study of TKD, but very often quite useful.

So, lets break this down a little bit.  ‘To be aware of one’s vices’ is an extremely important step toward learning anything.  In the direct case, as part of reasons for practicing courtesy, we’re referring to learning and adopting moral character, a lifelong pursuit.  All of our life, we need to have some tools that help us become aware of our failings, so that we can begin to correct them, and the practice of courtesy is one of those important tools.

But of course, you can substitute other practices that help you to become aware of other sorts of failings.  This is why every online author that I have ever seen offering writing advice will at some point or another emphasize the importance of reading.  Having a good taste (one’s own good taste) in the written word is an essential tool to help us to become better writers.  It provides a gauge that we can hold up to see how we’re doing right now, or how a particular project is doing right now.  Cultivating good taste is to writing what practicing courtesy is to moral character.  I think we can all agree that they are each insufficient by themselves, but nevertheless essential for growth.

(And in case you’re wondering, TKD philosophy does distinguish between true courtesy and ‘mere’ etiquette, just as kindness and niceness are two separate things, so we’ll have no gotcha’s there—‘To behave according to etiquette’ is one of the other eight reasons for practicing courtesy.)

Next half of the Reason: ‘contempting those of others’.  This one always sounds tricky, because how can contempt be a component of developing good moral character.  But this is actually very specific, because this is not advocating contempt of people, but rather contempt of vices. …it’s just that vices tend to be most noticeable when they’re being displayed by other people.  In fact, they’re a lot easier to spot in other people than they are in ourselves.  Which means, if you are a student of moral character, spotting a vice in someone else is really an opportunity to self-reflect, and to hold up a different sort of gauge to our own selves.  If true courtesy is the high bar toward which we aspire, the vices we encounter are the low bar we definitely want to make sure that we clear.

Shifting our lesson back over to the writing sphere, of course, this means that if tasteful writing (or tasty, as one prefers) is the high bar we hope to meet, bad writing can offer us a lot of nice, clear low bars that we should work on learning to avoid.  I.e., the bad-writing examples of others can be wonderful learning tools to helping us all learn to write better ourselves.

Below I’ve got a couple of examples that I’ve used over the years, but before I dive into those, I’d just like to say that getting good use out of bad writing usually works one of two ways for me.

One way is less to do with writing specifically and more to do with communication in general.  When I was in grad-school, we had to attend a lot of seminars, many of which were very tedious, but tedious for multiple different reasons.  The common, simple reason, of course, was usually lack of interest in the particular topic.  But watch enough seminars and you’ll eventually find out that any topic can be made fascinating by a good speaker (and vice versa).  And then keep watching lots of seminars, and you can eventually find out that the principles the good speakers are following can often be easier to spot via comparison with all the things the bad (or at least, less accomplished) speakers are failing to do.  You can apply this same learning technique to emails, to telling jokes or stories among friends, to instruction manuals, etc., etc.  Writing is fundamentally about communication, which means that lots of things, lots of failures in communication, that seem mundane can actually be great resources to becoming a better writer, if we’re paying attention.  (‘A good student can learn anytime, anywhere’ is another listed principle in the manual of TKD education, just FYI.)

The second way I get use out of bad writing examples is the obvious way, of course: I read a book that just does not work for me and then see if I can pick apart why.  Sometimes the why is kind of glaring, and you might be tempted to simply write down ‘Don’t do this awful thing!’ in your writing notebook.  But! try to remember that bad writing is rarely simple.  Unless you’re a savant, I bet there was plenty of paragraph-level stuff that was hard for you to master (transitions still terrify me).  So that’s no different for large-scale problems too.  Figure out why the writing or the story was bad, what was nudging the writer to make those choices?  It’s the causes you need to look out for, just as much, if not more than, the effects.

Sometimes the reason for the bad isn’t glaring, though, and then sometimes I’ll actually end up re-reading a book I didn’t (quite?) like so I can dig into it at a closer level and see if I can figure out what the heck.  (You know you’re probably a writer when you find yourself re-reading something you don’t like so that it can teach you things.)

So, a couple examples.

(Note: I don’t want to name names, a) because there’s no reason to, and b) because bad-mouthing a book is no way to show gratitude to a good teacher, so sorry if that’s what you were looking for, it won’t be here.)

Example 1. The book that was actually the backstory.

I’ve come across this a couple of times and the causes definitely seem to be related, but the effect can be sneaky enough it’s probably easy for a writer miss that it’s happening (and that it’s a problem).

So, I was reading this fantasy novel, and the world-building was really interesting and lovely (I love me a good setting and, if I recall correctly, this one was a bit swampy, which I have a soft-spot for, for whatever reason).  It seemed to be mostly a love story and something about a family curse.  The heroine was very high spirited in that way that I think is supposed to come across as really compelling and passionate, but I personally wonder why the other characters put up with as much stuff from her as they do.  And the hero was really determined to break the curse.  But he just couldn’t.  And he couldn’t.  And it wasn’t totally clear why he couldn’t.  And they both died, leaving behind a baby daughter.

And there, right at the end, it became clear that this was supposed to be a series of books about the daughter, and this was the tragic, romantic story of her parents to start things off.  Except that’s not the story I’d signed up for reading this book.  I’d signed up for reading about her parents, and the reasons her dad couldn’t complete his quest, or whatever, hadn’t made any sense, unless you knew ahead of time that he was supposed to be doomed, that he was supposed to die, so that his baby could have her tragic-orphan backstory.

And that right there is the red flag.  If the ending of your story is based on meeting the expectations of some totally other story, you might end up writing something so twisted to fit into the prescribed shape that it doesn’t totally make sense.  And then you have to ask, why are you telling this story, if it’s the other story you actually care about?  And how are your readers going to feel when they get to the end and realize you didn’t actually care about this story?

But note, this could actually be a very easy trap to fall into.  I mentioned that I thought the world-building in this book was great, and probably the author had put a lot of effort into it, and, as part of that, into all the backstories.  Building crazy, dramatic, poignant backstories can be a lot of fun, and this author might have had so much fun with it, that it seemed like it really ought to be its own story in its own right.  But, not everything we work on as writers is actually that important, if it’s not actually The Story, or if it can’t stand on its own.

The other thing that might have happened, is that the backstory building became intricate enough, the author lost sight of where would actually be the best place to start the story.  When a story is really big, finding the right place to start it is hard.

Which leads us to Example 2. The book that didn’t start until the end.

Again it happened, I was reading this fantasy novel.  It had lovely, super-atmospheric world-building that was super cool, and I really wanted to love it.  In this book there were these characters who were meeting sort of clandestinely to explore sneaky new magic, kind of right under the nose of the big villain, who, if I remember correctly, was the father of one of the main characters.

But, seriously, he really was a villain, and that one MC freaking lived with him, and, family or no, as the book went on, I really started to question why this MC with close access to this scary villain wasn’t trying to do anything to stop him?  Like, he could have done something and he just didn’t…?  Instead he explored this sneaky new magic behind his dad’s back, and otherwise kind of went along with the villainishness, which he knew was happening and agreed was bad.

Finally, at the end of this book, first in the series, there’s a betrayal!—the dad betraying the son, having known about the sneaky magic all along and planning to twist it around to his own advantage.  And so now the son for the next books, presumably, was going to be in this really emotionally tortured position, and it would be this whole big character arc.

But what the heck!  Why hadn’t the son taken his dad out earlier when he had the chance?!  He’d wanted to.  He just didn’t do it…because…then he wouldn’t have wound up in that interesting, tortured character-arc position.

Once again, the plot had gotten twisted to feed into this foregone conclusion of the author.  And it wasn’t really necessary.  The whole story could have started with the dad betraying the son, and then the reader would have had no idea about all of those prior opportunities the son had failed to take that would have fixed the bigger picture.  Blissfully, we could have gone forward.  But, as it was, I could not go forward, and did not read any more of those (beautifully atmospheric) books.

Before I end this set of examples, I will note that my declaration that these are ‘bad writing’ examples is partly to do with my specific taste.  My specific taste does not relish in soap-opera, swoony, stormy drama.  I don’t find that sort of thing delicious, and I only tolerate it when it definitely fits the logic of the story being told.  If the two examples listed above were written as they were for a love of swoony or stormy drama then, rather than ‘bad writing’, I would probably have to label them ‘lazy writing.’  Please, make sure that the actions of your characters make sense, even if you are heading them toward Drama.  Otherwise, you will definitely lose readers like me.

But otherwise, consider, have you started the story where you did because it really is part of the story, and is not just backstory?  Even if it’s super-duper important backstory, does it really need to be told stand-alone, or would it be better if you spooned it slowly into the rest of the Main story, like, you know, backstory?

(I’m asking for a friend, and obviously don’t worry about this in my own writing At All.  Nope.  Not at all.)

I have a few more examples I’d like to discuss of bad writing that offers good lessons, but this post is starting to run a little long.  So, I’m going to be a bit of a twerp and save the others for another time.

Happy writing.