Figuring Out What Works: Bad Writing

I’m sure you’ve come across more than a couple hugely popular movies, books, and games with piss-poor writing in your lifetime. And like me, I’m sure you’re often left scratching your head. Why is this so popular? Is it because it’s being heavily advertised? Or maybe it’s because it was handed impressive sounding awards by the very same industry that’s trying to sell it? Are people really so easy to manipulate? (Yes. Yes they are.)

I don’t know about you, but I feel frustration when bad writing is rewarded. It happens all the time, such as how Amazon’s algorithm tends to reward quantity over quality.

But there’s a silver lining. Bad writing gets my writer mind working, thinking about how to fix it. How it could best be improved.

It also makes me feel more confident about releasing my own stories. I’m not naive enough to think I’ll win awards, but if so many people go out on a limb defending bad corporate products, the way I figure, so long as I at least write something better, I should have nothing to be ashamed of.

Sometimes a real stinker gets immeasurable success, which can even make me a little angry. Angry enough to sit down and write.

Fortunately for us indie authors, Hollywood and the like have set the bar lower than its ever been over the past decade. It gives us an edge because we represent an alternative market. There’s a large subset of people like me who are fed up with consuming heartless corporate-approved product x and all its sequels, pretending we’re happy no matter how watered down it gets. Less competent competition is good, right? And it amounts to less distractions as well. With fewer high quality productions to consume out there, it frees up quite a bit of time for people like us to create.

The more bad writing I experience and the more it gets rewarded, the more passionate I get about my own passion projects, the more I learn what NOT to do, the more free time I find myself with, and the more confident I get as a writer. It’s an uncomfortable symbiotic relationship, but a relationship all the same. A “something” that works.