I started rereading The Godfather by Mario Puzo last night. I read it once about a decade ago. I remembered it wasn't exactly well-written – even Puzo himself said he wrote below his talents because he was trying to bang the novel out for money to pay back his gambling debts – but I didn't care, because I was looking for a breezy read after having recently finished several non-fiction books.
But… damn is the writing poor. Like, shockingly. Constant telling instead of showing. Terrible dialogue, particularly for the character of Kay. Describing who the characters are instead of showing us who they are through their actions.
I'll still finish it because the story makes up for the writing. I felt the same way about the Crazy Rich Asians books. I actually really enjoyed those, because the story didn't exactly demand Cormac McCarthy's talents, even though the quality of the writing did surprise me. But, reading a book written so poorly feels sometimes like watching a movie with very amateur cinematography.
Anyone else have any similar experiences? I also experienced this with The Alchemist. The difference between that and The Godfather or Crazy Rich Asians was that, along with remarkably weak writing, it also had such a basic "live laugh love" story that I couldn't even finish it.
Any other examples of books you started because they were popular, only to find the writing would have earned the author a B- (at best) in a creative writing course?
by somepeoplewait
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Have you read anything by the renowned author Dan Brown?
I mean it’s not surprising but 50 shades is awful, Twilight is only slightly better. Don’t get me wrong, I love the stories but far out! Also now that I’m older and have read a lot more, Harry Potter is not as well written as I remember.
Ready player one
Apparently Andy Weir can’t write human relations and women, that’s why The Martian and Project Hail Mary protagonists are stranded men, i loved those books though
In recent years LitRPGs and Progression Fantasy are more and more popular. The best works have good prose, but the majority of books aren’t well written. Often it seems that the authors invented a magic system and then made a book around it. Often the books look like a description of the events.
I don’t care what anyone says… The Notebook was written for third graders.
The Godfather is the one example I always cite where the movie adaptation really is better than the novel.
“The President Is Missing” by James Patterson and Bill Clinton reads like it was written by people who were unsure about which end of a pencil they should use to write with.
Just awful.
I like Anne Rice’s earlier books, but the excessive descriptions are maddening. I tried one of the latter ones, called The Wolves of Midwinter, and I just had to put it down. I could not bear her overindulgent style and poor story.
Colleen hoover it ends with us. This book is so popular and the writing, overall character development is soo soo poor.
Divergent somehow got popular. Couldn’t tell you why, but that was the worst thing I’ve ever read. The prose is awful, the plot is a gigantic mess, the sequels don’t make any sense.
I hate read the sequels make sure the first one wasn’t suffering from “debut novel”/young writer issues. They got worse. Divergent was the worst book I’d ever read. Then I read Insurgent. Then Allegiant. They all got added to the top of the list in order as soon as they were finished.
Absolute trash. No wonder the second movie went straight to dvd and the third was cancelled.
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The tattooist of Auschwitz, absolutely dreadful. I feel bad saying this because I know it’s somewhat based on a real story (a lot of which was debunked by the Auschwitz museum) but the writing, the characters and the whole book is such a pain to read. There’s no personality to any of the characters, the story is very romanticised and the Holocaust has been reduced to a really poor love story. Really don’t get the fascination and adoration people have for this book
Colleen Hoover fr
Not only a poor writing style, but poor plotlines as well
Colleen Hoover, definitely. If she was a romance author I would have been ok with her cheezy writing and absurd names. But in It Ends With Us she was trying to write a serious story about domestic abuse and her writing just didn’t cut it. It was so simplistic and lacked any nuance. Everyone is rich, gorgeous, and amazingly successful. Also, I am still salty that her book was marketed as a romance when it very clearly wasn’t. I have no idea how she has sold so many copies.
Surprisingly the writing worked for me in The Godfather. I thought it nicely mirrored the way the characters think and their worldview. I can see how it can be offputting though.
Iron widow is a massively popular young adult novel that won a lot of readers choice awards and it’s prose is very close to “my immortal” the famous bad fanfiction. For example, here’s a line- it’s completely serious:
“You’re the baddest of bad boys. The ultimate alpha male.”
Every single line is cringe as hell and it’s never talked about.
I found the Alchemist to be poorly written. Like some writing student trying to submit an assignment last moment and the brief was to “make it sound meta”.
* Dan Brown
* Stephenie Meyer
First two that came to my mind.
Edit: correct misspelling
Where The Crawdads Sing. So many passive sentences. Single passive. Double passive. At one point even a triple passive. Also, the purple prose. Nothing is ever a simple description. Instead of “her hair was golden” it’s “her hair shown gold like a wheat field that has been kissed by the sun’s rays filtered by clouds that had been thinned by the southern air blown off the coast where her youth had been spent collecting shells.” Blech.
The House of Night series. With each book I hated more and more about it, especially the main character. There were times where I had put it down because it was so irritating
The worst example I have ever seen was fifty shades of grey, it was at the level of poorly translated web novel, but still somehow popular on a large scale, I know smut stuff tends to be worse, but it was downright atrocious
Colleen Hoover 😬 her writing style makes me cringe
Colleen Hoover books make me feel better about my own work
The Help
the movie was pretty good and the actors really elevated the YA writing of the book
anything by Anne Rice
her prose is embarrassingly overwritten and melodramatic. she writes the way a goth high schooler envisions writing a novel.
The new show was excellent, however
Someone left a copy of *50 Shades of Gray* in the breakroom at work. I knew it was wildly popular (but of no interest to me.)
Out of curiosity I read a couple pages. It read like a 40 year incel and a 14 year old girl collaboration. I honestly don’t know how anyone got through it.
Somewhat off-topic, but this makes me think of one of my all-time favorite *Onion* articles: [Frustrated Novelist No Good At Describing Hands](https://www.theonion.com/frustrated-novelist-no-good-at-describing-hands-1819575314).
>“I’m fine with most details, but for some reason hands completely and utterly elude me,” said Milligan, who recently described a character’s hands as “dangling around like big, meaty spiders.” “I’ll often create an entirely fleshed-out character, and write easily at length about their face, their personality, their voice, their hopes, dreams, and desires, but then I try to describe their damn hands and it ruins the whole story.”
>Milligan, whose novella Grand Rapids was reportedly rejected by publishers due partly to a passage in which the protagonist’s hand “trundled and shimmered on the top section of his wrist,” revealed that while he is able to portray realistic trees, emotions, and most body parts, hands consistently give him trouble.
>Calling the way he represented the proportions of his characters’ hands “way off,” Milligan said he is especially bad at delineating human fingers, which the writer once portrayed as “flabby pink-tan logs, but a bendy kind of log.”