I don’t know how to explain exactly what I mean, but very often when reading reviews for a popular book, I’ll see opinions like “it’s a good book but it’s not well written”, and it leaves me kind of baffled.
Just because a book doesn’t use advanced and/or poetic language, surely doesn’t mean it’s not well written?
If it’s a matter of preference, fine, but I think it’s short sighted to call a book “badly written” just because it uses “simpler” literary prose. I think a good example are the Harry Potter books. JK Rowling might not be a literary genius, but the books are easily digestible and the “simplistic” language works well with the fast-moving plot.
What do you think?
by lovise466
34 Comments
Don’t think that’s completely what people mean. It’s usually when the writing isn’t sufficient in some way to convey the full range of emotion or nuance, in addition to the lack of sophistication in their command of the language.
Personally!
I think a good book is basically forcing me to continue to read, wanting me to have a Part 2, 3, 4 and 5 after it ends.
A ‘not so well written’ book may have a good story that’s fun to read, but doesn’t make me want more. I can put it to the side, continue with my day without craving it.
I used to have a boss who would review my reports and write in the margins things like “needs more” or “needs work.” Drove me crazy.
I get the same feeling with “not well written.”
Earlier this year, I read a horror novel titled Phantasmagoria. It had a pretty fun story, but there were so many grammatical errors and spelling errors that I was constantly taken out of it.
That’s one book I would say was not well written, though the real problem may have been a lack of an editor.
People don’t generally fault Ishiguro or Hemingway for writing badly even though they write simple vocabulary and sentence structures. in fact they are sort of the opposite. When people say “badly written” they (often, but not always) mean the prose is bad, boring, bland, etc., which is completely separate from how “advanced” the vocabulary might be.
It’s not “short-sighted” to call out bad prose, it simply means some people value different things. Maybe you value plot above all, for instance, but Johnny Goodreads wants prose and characters instead. They’ll review according to their tastes and you’ll review according to your tastes. When someone says that the plot of Ulysess lacks action, people don’t generally get offended, so why would you get offended when people rightly point out JKR has middling prose?
“Bad writing” doesn’t mean “simple writing”. There are many books that have simple prose that are well-written. Literature in some cultures actually purposefully leans towards that (see: Japan).
Good or bad writing is a question of prose, vocabulary, characterisation, storytelling, realism / achieving its goal, conveyed emotion, research, and a long etcetera. The idea of “good writing” often refers to either its literary qualities, especially if literary fiction, or how entertaining it is, if genre fiction.
There are simple books that are well-written. Very catchy books that are badly written. Books with wonderful prose that are only average.
I think that, as with anything, to know what’s good or bad you have to have some knowledge of it. If I want to know what makes a dress, a photograph, a piece of music good or bad, I have to have seen, heard or studied enough to know what’s good and what’s bad. I think in the book reviews I read, people often use “good” or “bad” when they just mean that they liked it or didn’t like it, – as you say, personal preference – and quality is not always the same as personal taste. Hemmingway’s prose is simple, and though I am not his biggest fan, I’ve read enough to know that his works are well written, just not to my taste.
I don’t think conflating “simple” and “bad” has been a thing for quite some time now. Plenty of respected modern authors have (had) scaled back writing styles. On the contrary using overly flowery writing is a typical rookie mistake in my experience.
A well written book doesn’t just involves good use of literacy techniques and a nice writing style, it also includes fleshed out and well-written elements like world building, atomsphere, character design and development, plot points, consistency, etc.
Like Harry Potter is objectively pretty poorly written, not because they way JK writes is simple, its more due to the lack of world building and the many many plot holes/inconsistencies in her work.
This isn’t saying you can’t enjoy the books or that it’s bad, just that it isn’t written the best or to its fullest potential.
I might say a non is poorly written if the author uses devices like using the same distinctive phrase too often (I’m going to sound like I haye S J Maas but I’m actually just using examples as I enjoy her books so these things are fresh in my mind). If fear is always express as the MC saying “my bowels turned to water” it strikes of a lack of imagination in how this is expressed. It might be that they rely on telling and not showing – we are explicitly told the male character is very wise and kind but see him repeatedly so dumb stuff that gets people hurt, this strikes me as they can’t really characterise well. It could also be that the author struggles with things like pacing or how to reveal the world building naturally – this can lead to very stilted conversations (like a character saying “come on Rosie you’re my roomate and we’ve been best friends since you were adopted by my family after your parents died in that car craah, of course you can borrow my jeans!) or dull dull dull walls of text just describing political structures or whatever that lose your interest. It might set up rules within the story and then break them or forget what character motivation or personality was like later on.
So essentially if I’m being told a story, but in a bad way. I agree that simple vocabulary can be used very effectively but I mean more than vocabulary when I discuss writing overall.
>and it leaves me kind of baffled.
Just because a book doesn’t use advanced and/or poetic language, surely doesn’t mean it’s not well written?
If I say something doesn’t feel well written it has nothing to do with advanced language.
You could keep an adult level book to total 6th grade reading level [for complexity, not size of book] and still have a well written narrative.
One pet peeve of mine in books that may bring me to the conclusion that something isn’t well written is if “said” is used over and over and over and over again within the same conversation, and there’s no clear purposeful repetition.
That’s not actually a good example. Harry Potter is aimed at children and teens. It’s suppose to be easily digestible and have a fast moving plot.
There are many books in which I enjoyed the plot, or the idea that the author was playing with or the characters, but the writing was just…off. Too flowery, too juvenile for the subject, pacing was weird, etc. in all those cases, I would say the book was good, but not well written. A lot of first or second novels suffer from this problem. Priory of the Orange Tree comes to mind as a recent example.
Piranesi is another. Loved the concept and most aspects, but all the random capitalization of words…could have lived without.
It’s not just about simpler writing styles. I would argue JK Rowling writes very well for her audience (children and teens). On the other hand, I just read Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros. I would call this book badly written.
First, she uses a lot of “telling” instead of “showing.” When you read a book, you need to find out certain things about the world in which the story takes place. Good writers make this feel organic. They show you pieces of information about this world through the actions of characters, conversations, or events unfolding. It shouldn’t feel like an info dump. JK Rowling does this incredibly well in Harry Potter. She builds a word that the reader feels immersed in. In Fourth Wing, Yarros had her main character reciting fact after fact about the world she lives in. She also staged awkward conversations between characters just to give the reader info. These conversations didn’t feel real, but were awkwardly placed just for the benefit of the reader.
Next, the pacing was off. Huge gaps of time would eclipse without the author accounting for it. Good writers are able to jump forward in time without leaving a huge gap.
Good writers use a variety of adjectives to describe characters, events and places. Yarros continued to use the same words and phrases over and over.
I could go on, but bad writing is more than just simple writing. JKR isn’t a bad writer. She isn’t a complex writer, but does a fantastic job writing for her audience.
More often than not, people simply do not know how to articulate their thoughts.
They will call anything poorly written if it doesn’t conform to what expectation they have of how a story can be told.
A good example of this is people calling Dune “poorly written”. Imagine that. They just don’t understand the author chose to have a omniscient third-person narrator, not a limited third person or first person, like many modern books are.
Bad writing is not just simple vs. advanced language. Bad writing can be things like using stereotypes, purple prose, spending too much time on irrelevant details. In one of the Sookie Stackhouse-books (if you want examples of bad writing, look no further) there’s a 4-5 page long description of the main character brushing her hair and putting it up in a pony tail.
I think the HP books are well-written. My only gripe with them are the long descriptions of food and sports, and that she relies too much on deux ex machina
For me, a book that is not “well written” is when it feels like the author wrote it as if finishing a term paper with a day to go for the deadline. It’s not just the prose but things such how to plot develops, how the book ends, whether the characters were fleshed out etc. It’s all about the tiny little details.
Harry Potter by JK Rowling is a great example of an extremely “well written book”. She took 2-3 years between each of the latter books and it shows. An example of a book that not so “well written” imho is Babel by RF Kuang. Great premise but she has written 5 novels in 4 years while doing a PhD degree and it shows.
It’s not about simple words for me. It’s about how the words are put together, the variety of words, and whether they convey ideas/ emotions fluently. An example of a book where I couldn’t get through it because of the writing is Adrian McKinty’s The Island (a best-seller). I enjoy thrillers and mysteries but the sentences and language in that book are so stilted and trite to me that I would characterize it as badly written. I haven’t read it but a lot of people cite “50 Shades of Grey” as badly written.
In contrast, for example, I loved Miracle Creek by Angie Kim or Nina Revoyr’s Southland. A book which seems difficult to read on first glance but is very good is Zora Neale Hurston’s “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” It appears odd at first because of the dialect (is that the right word?) she writes in but just sound out the words in your head and it makes sense. Other examples are Cry the Beloved Country by Alan Paton, Horse by Geraldine Brooks and All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr. And one of my favorite American writers is Steinbeck.
For non-fiction, it’s when the author does one or all of the following:
a) No central thesis – the chapters are all over the place and don’t come together
b) Too long/ repetitious – takes too many pages to make a simple point or makes the same point over and over again
c) Makes assumptions or draws conclusions with nothing to back it up – Example: When McKinsey Comes to Town
Two well-known books I don’t like that do this are Thinking: Fast and Slow (Kahneman; too long and boring to me) and The Shallows (Carr; starts out promising but then fizzles). In contrast, I like many of Daniel Pink’s books (Drive, To Err is Human), David Grann (The Wager, Killers of the Flower Moon) and The Body Keeps the Score (van der Kolk). A really good writer can make a seemingly dry subject exciting: see A Fine Mess about international taxation systems by T R Reid. I am not in finance and I kid you not when I say that book is a page-turner (4.5 stars on Amazon).
I’m one of those people. I think you can just read the difference between someone phoning it in and someone who treats words as art. I find the writing in Harry Potter pretty leaden;
Potter:
“”Yeh’ll get yer firs’ sight o’ Hogwarts in a sec,” Hagrid called over his shoulder, “Jus’ round this bend here.”
There was a loud “Ooooooh!”
The narrow path had opened suddenly onto the edge of a great black lake. Perched atop a high mountain on the other side, its windows sparkling in the starry sky, was a vast castle with many turrets and towers.
“No more ‘n four to a boat!” Hagrid called, pointing to a fleet of little boats sitting in the water by the shore. Harry and Ron were followed into their boat by Nevlille and Hermione.
“Everyone in?” shouted Hagrid, who had a boat to himself, “Right then— FORWARD!”
And the fleet of little boats moved off all at once, gliding across the lake, which was as smooth as glass. Everyone was silent, staring up at the great castle overhead. It towered over them as they sailed nearer and nearer to the cliff on which it stood.”
—
Here’s the similar plot beat in Earthsea:
“I have thought, perhaps I may come to work with the Master in the Tower, to be one of those who seek among the books and the stars for lost names, and so… so do no more harm, if not much good…”
“Maybe,” said Vetch. “I am no seer, but I see before you, not rooms and books, but far seas, and the fire of dragons, and the towers of cities, and all such things a hawk sees when he flies far and high.”
—
I just care about one of these things, and not the other. I feel awe during one, and not the other. I hear magic in the voices, see craft and economy in the writing, like the stylistic choices better re SHOUTING and rendered accents, etc etc.
To the point of your post, words themselves are equally simple, it’s just that one feels nicer to me to read. That’s what I mean when I say Harry Potter isn’t well written.
It’s all subjective.
Personally, I’ll take simple writing if the result is clear and compelling. Convoluted sentences full of obvious thesaurus work can be difficult to follow and understand. It’s especially noticeable in dialogue, as overwritten speech sounds unnatural and unconvincing.
‘Bad writing’ may have nothing or very little to do with the actual writing of a book. It may just have a trash plot, dumb characters or poorly executed themes.
You’re too presumptuous.
Just because someone criticizes an author’s prose, and thinks it’s “bad,” doesn’t mean they’re claiming it’s not “poetic” enough. It could even be the opposite, in fact, as some people may dislike an author’s prose for being too flowery.
Like any review, it’s just the person’s opinion. If they think it’s bad writing and you disagree, then that’s just your opinion. No need to complain about it.
Some examples of what I consider “not well written”:
1 – The writing was fragmented, and not in an intentional way. More like, after building a story line comprising of several chapters, “Sam was disturbed about his last conversation with Alice, there was a quality to her tone that made him uneasy about what she was planning. He couldn’t breathe without her. He turned back towards her door to check on her and a squirrel ran by carrying an acorn.” … and Alice isn’t mentioned again for rest of the book.
2 – Repetition. Sometimes there’s a point to it, especially if it somehow reinforces a theme. However, when an author keeps repeating the same inane details, over and over, to meet a word count, I stop reading the book.
3 – Inconsistency. The author changes details, no matter how small or pivotal, in the story. Done with the book and the author. That’s just sloppy.
Because reading a book with bad prose is torturous. Even if the ideas are there. It is their execution that is pivotal. The whole point of reading a book is that you *read* it and you savour the prose, and you don’t just extrapolate world-building and other bullshit that fantasy writers indulge in, in the same way that a film is not just about the plot but is about relishing the direction, the music, etc. And what kind of motivation for reading a book is plot? Plot is the most worthless of elements, it simply serves the purpose of creating a tone or an environment or realising characters or presenting themes. The very best books every written (Blood Meridian, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) are next to devoid of plot.
People are entitled to their opinions. If that makes you uncomfortable, that’s your problem.
People will give you all kinds of explanations, but the truth is that “good writing” is not objective, and different people will have different opinions on what’s well or badly written. Different people seek and value different things, and even when they agree on what they seek, they still will not be pleased by the same books. For me, twilight is drivel, for some people, on the other hand, that books is insightful, it “gets” them and it speaks to them.
You can have an interesting premise and plot but writing that’s so bland or clumsy that it doesn’t evoke much of anything emotionally or constantly undercuts scenes that would be tense if competently written out, like Ready Player One.
I’ve seen this complaint used online to critique shows and movies as well. It appears to have become a blanket complaint when people don’t like the story or grow impatient when they don’t have the full scope of how the pieces of the story will come together over time. I’m not saying that the complaint isn’t ever correct, but I’ve also seen many instances where the complaints are lacking in objective criteria. If it’s truly “bad” writing, what rubric are these critics referencing to compare it to “good” writing other than their own opinion? Is it conducive to the medium, to the genre, etc.?
One thing to note is that simple writing is generally hailed as the “right” way to write. Don’t Use Adverbs; Remove Unneccesary words; Show, Don’t Tell. It’s all about avoiding the feminine and frivilous “purple prose”, letting the author stoicly step back and only deliver the raw facts to the reader, like that manly Hemingway guy.
But the more you boil something down to its essence, the more it has to be just right; if a single word have to express what could have been a whole sentence, using a not-exactly-right word can cause havoc.
Also, if an author sees himself as being above frivilous purple prose, he is unlikely to study how to compose a sentence, or how metaphors, similis or the various literal devices goes about. But those things aren’t just ornamentation. Rather, they are the basic building blocks of language. So by not understanding them, his language suffers.
All this to say, I think it’s possible to write simple prose badly.
They probably don’t like the way it was written
It’s not a question of simplicity vs. extravagance.
Maybe what you want to say is,
“The cat jumped onto the counter, startling us both.”
If you write, “Suddenly the cat was on the counter,” that’s bad writing because it doesn’t properly describe how the cat got there (teleportation? magic?) or the emotional response.
But if you write, “At that moment, the cat took it upon itself to launch into the air, leg muscles taut, whiskers quivering, and land with implausible softness on the mottled, glossy surface of the counter. The surprise that I’m sure showed on my face was bookended by my friend’s look of dismay, as our conversation had been nearing its apex,” that’s also bad, because it spends far too long describing something minor and takes the reader out of the moment. It also completely misses the point of the cat’s jump within the narrative, which was probably to break the tension, not introduce a new source of it.
“Good writing” should convey everything it needs to while feeling almost invisible, meaning it should match the way the reader’s internal monologue might sound. Everybody’s inner thoughts are slightly different, so some people are going to prefer something simple and accessible, and some people are going to want something artistic or cerebral. However, there are authors who routinely take things too far at both ends of the spectrum, and they usually just annoy people.
I know a few authors who purposefully have Orwellian prose, which some view at “bad” mainly because it’s not meant to be noticed. The ultimate judge isn’t a gatekeeping literary community though, but ultimately the audience is reaches at more than a surface level, which is impossible to quantify.
Bad writing has nothing to do with how flowery or advanced the language in the book is, but more to do with how the story is constructed and presented. If it’s disorganized, confusing, or boring, or if important details are missing, or if characters are underdeveloped, or if character relationships don’t make sense, or the themes are inconsistent or unclear, then the way the writer has tried to convey these things is bad and the book is therefore badly written. I am confused as to why someone would say something is a good book but badly written, because if a book is badly written I wouldn’t think it was good, but it doesn’t have to do with what the prose itself is like. In fact, some people try to hide bad writing with flowery prose, and unfortunately sometimes it works.
I think it’s means they like the story and even the characters but not the way the author writes —