The man is an absolute treasure. A group of friends and I used to have a terrible book club. We read a lot of crap but it made me better understand what I valued in good writing. It was fun and surprisingly insightful.
You might enjoy the podcast "372 pages we'll never get back". It's basically a bad book club. The title is a reference to the first book they cover which is Ready Player One.
They are on Book 23 or so at the moment, more or less alternating between books by "big" authors like Dan Brown or Sean Penn and super obscure stuff like Harry Potter-Twilight-crossover fan fiction.
The interesting question that often gets overlooked when lumping all these together as 'bad books' is why do some of these 'bad books' turn their authors into multi-millionaires, and not others. For that matter why is it almost only 'bad books' that turn their authors into multi-millionaires.
Ready Player One is no doubt badly written and Bad Art (full disclosure, I didn't manage to finish it), but it is also one of the more successful and beloved sci-fi books from the last 15 years and shouldn't that in a way make it a Very Good Book.
For an intentionally terrible book, there's Atlanta Nights (https://archive.org/details/atlantanights0000teat ). A bunch of authors got together to write the worst book possible. It has pretty much every kind of awful prose in existence, including an early case of AI generation.
For awful but readable books:
Most anything by Dan Brown, but for the audience here, Digital Fortress will make you tear your hair out in frustration if you know anything at all about cryptography. The climax of the book seems to be made for a movie and is a completely nonsensical sequence in which people stare at a screen showing attackers breaking through a firewall, as if it were a wall that can be slowly drilled through.
For me that was the book that did it. If Dan Brown couldn't take 10 minutes to research the simplest basics of the subject he based his book around, imagine what the quality of the rest of the work is like.
Ender's Game I rate as a fairly enjoyable but puerile teenage power fantasy. But after that comes Speaker for the Dead, which to me is absolutely awful. Ender turns into this insufferably saintly martyr, who acts as some sort of Gordon Ramsay, only fixing an awful colony instead of a restaurant. Everyone in the book is insufferable and a complete moron, except for Ender of course who knows how to fix all those awful people. Oh, and it justifies domestic abuse.
And maybe Battlefield Earth. I've never read the entire thing, but here's a quote:
“His valet! In the rush of getting him off, his clumsy damned valet had put the wrong boots on him. Oh, when he got home ... when he got home he would have the oaf punctured! Worse. Dragged through the streets and bitten to death by small children.”
Battlefield Earth brings back a memory: it was the first book I had read where I realised that authors can have serious mental problems.
Most books are written by sane, intelligent, and educated people. The books you'll read in a high school library are also curated by librarians. There's an expectation of quality you don't notice until suddenly you pick up a book at the local council library authored by someone with some serious untreated mental issues.
After that revelation I started noticing the author of a book instead of just paying attention to the content of the book.
Similarly to L Ron Hubbard, I found The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson impossible to finish. There's something deeply wrong about him that I can't quite put my finger on. (I did finish his Gap Cycle series, but felt dirty in my brain after.)
I picked up The Dragonriders of Pern series based purely on the dragon on the cover and just started reading. A few chapters in, I though to myself: "This is written by a woman, isn't it?", flipped to the cover page and lo-and-behold: "Anne McCaffrey" -- I had guessed correctly!
> Most books are written by sane, intelligent, and educated people.
Wait, what? Do you know how many famous authors suffer from some sort of severe mental illness? Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, and on and on. In fact, most of the great artists in general have a mental illness they can ascribe their creativity to. They can also be quite intelligent and educated at the same time.
We never kept a list, but 50 Shades, Flowers in the Attic, the Greg Brady Autobiography and Satanic Panic were some notables. Everyone had their own taste for bad writing and read from books like Heroes Are My Weakness to others like A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay (which actually turned out to be a big crowd pleaser).
See, Dosadi is one of my favorite books. It's not perfect by any means but a concentrate of Herbert tropes with interesting plot lines. Like most Herbert it's very much for a young adult / adolescent public (this not being a negative, it's pretty thin on many axes, focused on delivering the tropes in a enthusiastic way). The other Herbert 'destination, jesus' book cycle is harder to swallow though.
I remember enjoying reading it and finding the worldbuilding really interesting and the drama kept me reading. But I am a sucker for Frank Herbert so maybe I missed the flaws.
As I said: it is/feels like a sketch. The prose (often) reads like notes which should be rewritten, and filled with depth, and life. Also the story is bad, there is too much "deus ex machina". Also no characters one can relate to. Sounds like you read a totally different book than me :P.
If I had read it and the Dune without knowing their authors, I could not have told them they were written by the same person. Especially not that it was written after the Dune, where he has proved he can write well.
Disclaimer: I'm not a writer, but I do write music.
I think there are two types "bad" writing and I think people have a hard time having nuanced discussion about this.
First category is what I would personally describe "uninspired". These are works created by artists who arguably have either (1) too little exposure to prior art, or (2) too inexperienced with core skills of writing. So, in terms of my field, these artists probably (1) didn't expose themselves to enough music, or read enough music, or (2) didn't practice how to construct and write music enough times that they're comfortable. Examples of "uninspired" works include student works (i.e. practice works written by people to gain skills), works whose only purpose is to make money and there is no other consideration (this is probably very debatable), or works created by people who are unreasonably unexposed to the prior art (e.g. someone who has sufficient writing skills who is writing a novel, but really only read 2 novels before.)
Second "bad" category is what I would describe writing that is too stylish where aesthetic choices aren't appealing. This is when creator (1) is sufficiently exposed to prior art and (2) is experienced enough to produce works similar to prior art. Now, this gets very tricky because the problem with these works -- i.e. what separates them from Category 1 -- is that the work itself needs to convince the observer of these qualities, which can oftentimes be very hard. Unfortunately, I cannot give examples from literature, but to give an example from the history of music writing: oftentimes people listen to works of Schoenberg and they complain it sounds horrific, dissonant, random and ugly etc etc... However, if you look at the work closely, you'll find choices that are only consistent with thorough understanding of the prior art and an experimental desire to create something entirely novel. Now, it is "ugly" (for some, of course) but it is well-informed. In other words, it convinces most that the artist was able to create something "prettier" but for whatever reason decided not to.
Unpacking this is important when consuming "bad art" because each category teaches you something else.
When you consume Category 1 "bad art" you need to pick up (1) in what ways this work is unaware of prior art, and (2) in what ways this creator is inexperienced. This can be crucial to understand points where you struggle. E.g. you look at some student works, and you see consistent patterns that diverge from prior art -- consistent patterns are not explained with creativity. This can be a good reminder to work on these skills.
When it comes to Category 2, it's more complicated. This kind of art can be jarring, but can be the most useful kind of art you can consume to perfect your skills. These can show prior experiments, and how various styles work. You don't have to enjoy it, but it will be useful to see. E.g. slow movies may not be your favorite, but if you're filmmaker you likely want to sit through the entire "2001" movie.
Ultimately, it's up to you, and up to your relationship with your art. I personally consume a lot of art I dislike and think it's important to expand my understanding how things work. An artist is not just the work, but also the entire lifetime spent on observing, and critically thinking about other humans' art. So, the answer ultimately lies in you.
Great analysis, that hits a number of very good points!
In particular it's interesting that you call the first category "uninspired" rather than "lacking skills". A lot of people equate this "uninspired" category with "lacking in personal expression". Typically a really skillful artist can generally make something absolutely mechanical _feel_ personal, whereas an unskilled artist cannot make anything sound personal. There are also specific genres that skew the perception in one way or the other, that will change the threshold of skill for something to be considered "personal" or not.
The second category is interesting if you can identify how problems introduced by the rule-breaking elements could be solved. Any "art rule" solves a problem, and determining an alternative solution for it can lead to a breakthrough. Keyword is "can", there's a lot of experiment required. But in many cases it at least helps understanding better why the "rule" is useful.
That's a very useful distinction. A lot of pop used to be - maybe still is. It works because its self-expression connects strongly with an audience.
In music, the people with the technical skills often work in support roles as session musicians, producers, and arrangers. They lack individual expression and charisma but have the skills needed to polish someone else's work.
The same applies to books. Dan Brown and Twilight are terrible writing but they give middle-of-the-bell-curve readers experiences that mean something to them. Most art aims higher, but the middle of the bell curve is where the big money is.
True mediocrity comes from having very limited technical skill - probably imitative in a narrow niche - and no ability to connect with an audience.
I think that applies to most academic attempts at serial music. The style is a bit of an oddity because the rules were contrived rather than evolved. And (IMO) that kind of dissonance has a very limited expressive range.
Schoenberg could get away with it, but there was a fad in 50s to 70s where that kind of serialism became academic orthodoxy. The result was hours and hours of music by clever educated people with absolutely no cultural relevance outside of academia.
I don't fully disagree with you but my personal opinion is that people give too little credit to contemporary movements within Western art music. Their cultural force is significant, but it's clouded so it's not easy to make an accounting of it.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
I found your comment to be very insightful. I realise that a lot of the developers I see fall in the first category, primarily due to a lack of experience.
The challenge I see in a lot of software in corporate environments is that, unlike music, the code written due to lack of awareness / experience becomes technical debt as the software keeps growing over time.
