What Makes a Bad Book Bad?

A few weeks ago, I saw this post in the Guardian (same title as this post, here, that you’re reading). The Guardian post was a good-humored response to a silly little thing in the American Book Review which contended that such books as The Great Gatsby and All the Pretty Horses (and even Let the Great World Spin) were among the forty worst books of all time. Their chief criterion for the list was that the bad books on it had to be worthy enemies—by which they meant interesting books that people cared about.

As someone who primarily reads contemporary novels, I see a worthy enemy in the suffocating glut of miserable fiction flooding our bookstores and minds every second of every day.

So I’d like to present my own theory of what makes a bad book bad. It’s quite simple: lazy writing makes bad books bad. (The problems I’m about to outline could also come from a simple lack of talent, but I’ll give bad writers the benefit of the doubt.)

Now, I’m not saying that hard work magically creates great fiction—after all, great fiction is much more than the absence of bad writing—but when it comes to genuine garbage, nothing churns it out better than laziness.

What makes laziness so bad? How, specifically, does laziness impact storytelling? Where does laziness intersect with unbelievability and artifice in a half-assed pentagram of unholy awfulness?

I’m so glad you asked. Let’s find out.

Laziness ruins writing in a wonderful variety of ways. This is not a comprehensive list by any means, but these four lazy-writing crimes are the easiest to demonstrate, the most common, and the most easily fixable (which makes them worse). These crimes also address important but often-underestimated or ignored aspects of fiction writing—I’ll get to that at the end.

For examples, I’m going to cite The Girl She Used to Be, by David Cristofano, a novel that I reviewed for this site —somewhat harshly—just before this post. I’m sorry to pick on this novel again, but… well… OK, I’m not sorry because it’s the laziest novel I’ve read in at least a year, possibly the laziest published novel I’ve ever read.

Here’s a quick recap if you missed the review. Girl is a novel about a 26-year-old woman named Melody, who’s been in the Witness Protection Program (or WITSEC) for twenty years. She whines a lot. Because she’s bored or something, she takes off with the son of the mafia don who killed her parents. They fall in love. It’s a bad book. I know you’re itching for more specifics, so brace yourself for lots of them.

Lazy writing crime #1 — Not cutting out your crap

This is one of the most frustrating symptoms of lazy writing because it’s one of the easiest to fix.

Here’s a quick example to warm up with:

Randall Farquar, whose name I intentionally mispronounce toward the more phonetic, will not be happy when I call …

There’s no need for that phrase between the commas. It can come right out, and the sentence would only be less confusing.

At first blush, this first misdemeanor seems a little oxymoronic. After all, he’s writing more, right? How can he be lazy for writing more?

Well, he’s writing more crap. Anybody can write crap. Anybody can clutter up a sentence with a half-cocked joke. When you cut out the crap, you by default make the reading experience more pleasurable.

Here’s another example. During a remembered romantic encounter with a man she calls Nameless Guy, Melody says,

“‘Call me… Melody.’”

It’s not good to give people your real name when you’re in WITSEC. Nameless Guy doesn’t notice, but just replies:

“‘Yeah, babe … call me … Steeeeve.’”

So why is he Nameless Guy and not Steve? Mostly because Cristofano was too lazy to fix the scene. Obviously, either the “Steve” line or the “Nameless Guy” line should’ve been cut, if only because together they lead to the excruciatingly awkward rationale for their mutual existence:

“Now I still consider him nameless because of the way he said Steve, like it was this highly forbidden thing.”

More importantly, we simply don’t need the whole Steve bit. We can skip ahead (cutting seven paragraphs in all) to where he says, “‘You told me your name was Shelley’” and take it from there. You know, where the drama picks up again? Those seven paragraphs are meaningless filler and they are making the novel worse.

Lazy writing crime #2 — Making embarrassingly large errors

This somewhat falls into the category of not cutting, because both are symptoms of incompetent editing, by both writer and editor. But “errors” are distinct from “crap” in that crap is a relatively subjective description, while errors are just bald-faced mistakes. Like this one:

Melody loves math. You can tell because the chapter numbers come in the form of equations (e.g., “3x = 15″ for Chapter 5), and the only thing she’s ever requested from WITSEC is a job as a math teacher. Later on, she reads a book on string theory for fun. When she’s driving with her marshal, she discusses why she loves math so much, saying:

“It’s rigid. It’s firm and unyielding. It never lies.”

All that goes out the window when Melody royally screws up a very simple math problem three pages after she says those words.

She wants to calculate her odds of survival. She finds that there have been 250 witnesses to Bovaro-family crimes (like her). 25 of those witnesses have been killed. Pretty easy, right? Then, astonishingly, she says this:

“That’s one in ten, Sean. The odds of my survival are one in ten. Not too good, huh?”…

I can feel him staring at me, stuck.

For the record, the odds of her being killed are 25 in 250, or one in ten. The odds of her survival are 225 in 250, or nine in ten, quite different. So Melody makes a simple, enormous mistake, and then gets all pouty about her (grossly incorrect) findings.

She’s a math teacher!

(This was the point at which I started questioning why and how this book had been published.)

Lazy writer crime #3 – Flat characters

It’s difficult to create three-dimensional characters. In fact, it’s one of the hardest things about writing fiction. I don’t ask for a full cast of richly nuanced characters, especially not in a mystery, but I do like them to reveal their personalities by their actions, and not by the words the author uses to describe them. Like the old cliché goes, you should show and not tell. The fact is that authors always show their characters’ personalities, whether they want to or not.

For instance, when Melody tells us (over and over and over) that it’s so hard being in WITSEC and that she’s lonely and ugly and nobody likes her—she doesn’t come off as sad, she comes off as whiny, annoying, and entitled. And when sadness is supposed to be her primary character trait, it makes following her a fairly excruciating experience. (Especially because sadness is an emotion and not a character trait, but we’ll stick to the basics for Mr. Cristofano.)

For example this scene. Though she specifically requested a job as a math teacher, these are Melody’s thoughts while she teaches a math class.

… as a pawn in the WITSEC game … you get to live.

The price is an existence of tedium. You have just become irreparably average. You are not special. You are not unique.

… I can’t help thinking that I am experiencing the slowest death known to mankind.

The problem here is that Melody actually is showing us her true personality, and that personality is much different from the one Cristofano wants her to have. He wants Melody to be frustrated, impetuous and eager for adventure, blah blah blah. But when he bashes us over the head with this kind of garbage, Melody instead becomes whiny, entitled, angsty, and immature.

Later on, Cristofano writes an entire scene in which Melody does nothing except hammer home the idea that she’s sad and misses her dead family. So we get this laborious emotional billboard:

this place … has one thing in it I love, a thing present in every mall in every Middleton and Middletown and Middleburg and Centreville across this great land: a Hallmark store. … it is here I get to witness the true essence of family, of love:

The man who clumsily pokes through the cards for a half hour until he finds the one that will touch his wife’s heart, …

The daughter who sifts through the cards until she finds the one for her mother that makes her suppress a giggle, …

This is my nameless family.

Ignoring the fact that it’s quite bad prose, this is a lazy, unconvincing way to establish the idea that Melody is sad. Cristofano seems to think he can prove it to us, like her being sad is the first step in a geometry problem. Then he’ll move on, and not bother to have her act or think in a way that a real sad person would.

Again, the bad writing and juvenile way of expressing emotion transfer those qualities to Melody. In trying to make Melody sad, Cristofano has only made her obvious, self-centered, self-pitying, obnoxious, and melodramatic. Honestly, who—besides an angsty teenager or a lazy writer—would go to a Hallmark store to find the true essence of love?

Let me put it another way. Imagine you’re at a party, and among the crowd you notice two women. The first woman is going up to everybody she doesn’t know, warmly introducing herself, joking with people, asking them about themselves, and generally getting to know them. The second woman is walking up to people, leaning in, and bellowing, “I’M A VERY FRIENDLY PERSON! LOOK HOW FRIENDLY I AM! YOU LIKE ME BECAUSE I’M FRIENDLY!”

Melody is the second woman.

Lazy writing crime #4 — Gross contradictions

When an author doesn’t have a firm grasp on the story he’s telling, it can lead to problems of consistency. Characters or events suddenly, drastically changing does not make a story complex, it just reminds the reader that there’s a man behind the curtain. Here’s an example.

When Melody meets up with her longtime WITSEC contact Randall Farquar, she spends six pages harassing him, and insulting his competence and intelligence. Then he announces that he’s going to retire, and suddenly:

I bristle. The only person who ever understood me was Farquar … I consider saying something but I merely phase out, stare into the distance.

OK, so, fine. Maybe she was projecting her frustration with the program onto Farquar, and now the prospect of losing her only ally has given her some perspective. Wrong. Just as I was giving Cristofano the benefit of the doubt, here comes Melody’s last thought as Farquar leaves her life forever, and uses her new WITSEC alias on the way out the door:

He turns back and smiles and says, “Good-bye … Michelle.”

And as the door closes behind him, I writhe; I don’t want to be a Michelle.

Ha! She didn’t care about him at all! Fooled you! That passage makes it clear that Cristofano doesn’t have any memory of what he’s just written, or the effects it might have had on his characters or his readers.

Every time he sloppily contradicts something he just wrote, we readers paying attention get jerked out of the story. We become acutely aware of the artifice of the writing, rather than staying immersed in a consistent fictional world, and that leads to problems of believability and a general lack of trust in the author.

Here’s another show-stopping contradiction. When Melody gets a new marshal assigned to her, she recounts the events of the crime her family witnessed, the events that put them in WITSEC in the first place.

Six-year-old Melody wanted breakfast at this certain place in Little Italy in New York. 26-year-old Melody describes it like this:

“Anyway, this particular morning, I really wanted to go to Vincent’s. My folks reluctantly agreed, … When we got there, however, the place was closed. … The sign in the window … clearly stated they should be open at seven in the morning.”

Her family is so sure that Vincent’s should be open—again, at seven in the morning—that the father walks around the building and barges into the kitchen, whereupon the family witnesses a brutal murder.

OK. Already stretching believability, but it could happen, I guess. Then, in the present, Melody’s new marshal innocently asks her how many other people might have seen them that morning.

With all the snottiness and angst Melody can muster, she responds:

“What are you joking? How many restaurants do you think were open in Little Italy at seven in the morning on a Sunday? There were no other witnesses.”

Oh. But you just said there was a place open. In fact, your whole story was predicated on the idea that the restaurant was open at seven in the morning. Why is that a stupid question to ask? None of this makes any sense!

Final verdict

I know I can be a harsh critic. I know writing is a hard, exhausting job. And I know that these complaints can sound unimportant and small. And that last one might be true, they might be small complaints. But they’re certainly not unimportant. Each one of these little issues is a thread in the fabric of the novel, and every time a lazy author ignores one of them, that fabric unravels just a little bit.

Every time a lazy writer leaves in a stupid joke, or bashes us over the head with a characterization, or forgets what he was just saying, it’s another reminder that he’s there, controlling everything. Every one of these yanks us out of the experience of the story, back to the real world, where some dude is trying to manipulate our emotions with a thinly veiled teenage-girl fantasy.

To put it another way, these fits of laziness break the bond of trust between writer and reader. If readers can’t trust you to get your math problem right, how can we trust you to know who your characters are? How can we trust that you mean (or even know) what your sentences imply? How we can trust that you have any idea what you’re doing or where you’re taking us?

We can’t.

When you screw up every one of the little things—simply because you couldn’t be bothered to make everything fit together neatly—your characters become hollow, your plots become ridiculous, and your sentences become wastes of time.

And that’s what makes a bad book bad.