Tuesday, May 27, 2014

A Little Note on Bad Writing

There's a lot of crap out there. The YA genre is notorious for its uniformity and generally bad writing, and that's part of the reason I started this blog. There are good writers and there are good books in this category, but it took me a while to be able to pick them out. The trouble is, a lot of the bad writing sells because people want fast and easy reads - and there's nothing wrong with that, but it can be hard to find books in this genre if you want to be challenged. And that's a lovely definition: good writing should challenge you, it should make you think about the characters and their decisions and their relationships. The function of all literature is to communicate some kind of truth, and when it doesn't accomplish this, writing suffers.

“Bad writing is more than a matter of shit syntax and faulty observation; bad writing usually arises from a stubborn refusal to tell stories about what people actually do― to face the fact, let us say, that murderers sometimes help old ladies cross the street.” -Stephen King