Eight Signs of Bad Writing and One Sign of Dementia

Even if this sounds familiar, keep reading…

Turns out, a lot of famous authors can’t write for shit.

Which doesn’t stop them from becoming famous or making the New York Times Bestseller’s List and getting rich and if you think I sound jealous, that’s only because you’re perceptive.  

I have to read a lot of news stories to get cartoon ideas, but when I read for pleasure I often read thrillers because I don’t want to wade through 400 pages about someone discovering the Meaning of Life or Dealing with Crippling Depression or someone who’s got a Love-Hate Relationship with an Albino Whale.

I just want to be entertained, but I also prefer my entertainment to be well-written.

So it pisses me off that a bunch of other writers who Can’t-Write-For-Shit give glowing reviews to the first Can’t-Write-For-Shit Writer and I’m under the impression those Can’t-Write-For-Shit Writers praise each other so they can all get good reviews whenever they need some, so a bunch of hacks tell each other how great they are and way too many readers read those reviews and believe them:

“It must be a good book; it’s sold in all the best airports.”

Full confession: I’m probably feeling a bit dickish right now because I just read a mediocre book, filled with a wide variety of clichés which is one of the signs of bad writing and ought to be on my list, but isn’t, so we’ve just discovered another Can’t-Write-For-Shit Writer.

Nevertheless, here’s the deal on clichés.

From the moment we’re born, grown-up people who should know better, start filling us up with clichés like:

• Everything happens for a reason.

• True Love comes along once in a Lifetime.

• People are good or bad and never a combination of the two.

And bad writers are too intellectually lazy to sort out what’s bullshit from what’s accurate, so they produce plots and dialogue that never occur in Real Life.

For instance: a few years back I liked a movie so I decided to read the book it was based on and the book’s famous author had his hero fall for a woman and for the rest of the book they called each other “My darling” which made me wonder if the famous author ever actually got laid or had a relationship with a woman who didn’t require inflating.

My latest encounter with shitty writing had a Last-Second Rescue and a Happy Ending and 100-percent Good Guys and 100-Percent Villains which is pretty unlikely because Hitler liked dogs and even the Pope can occasionally be an asshole and I feel like I just gave Popes in General an undeserved break by using the word “occasionally.”

OK, so here are some signs that the writing you’re reading sucks:

1. Refusing to call the cops

In Real Life if you stumble across a dead body you’re going to call the cops right away unless it’s that Brother-In-Law you can’t stand and then you’ll probably wait 24 hours to make 100 percent sure he’s dead and they don’t do that thing where they jump start his heart and bring him back to life so he can once again show up drunk and ruin Thanksgiving dinner with his personal views on Joe Biden.

In bad books the protagonist refuses to call the cops because then the book would be about cops and the author needs it to be about his hero – an archeologist who finds murdered people at least once a year to fulfill his creator’s publishing contract – so the archeologist is going to solve the case himself to avenge the murder of his Fuck-Up Brother-In-Law because:

“Now it’s personal.”

Frankly, in Real Life pretty much every detective story would be about the cops because Angela Lansbury wouldn’t find dead bodies once a week in Cabot Cove, Maine unless she hung around retirement homes 24/7 and not only would all the stories be about cops, but about 49% of the murders they investigate would go unsolved.

Real Life cops will tell you if you don’t arrive and find the murderer standing there holding a smoking gun saying, “I told her I hated her meatloaf” you probably aren’t going to solve the crime.  

Also, stay the fuck out of Cabot Cove, Maine because apparently it’s way more dangerous than the worst parts of Tijuana and I’ve been to the worst parts of Tijuana so I know what I’m talking about.

2. Bad cellphone reception

OK, so a normal rational person would call the cops first chance they get and these days pretty much everybody carries a cellphone, so bad authors have to set their action in valleys or on mountaintops so people with cellphones can’t call for help, although there was that one movie where a guy called his wife from the top of Mt. Everest so he could say goodbye before he froze to death and that really happened and it was supposed be heartbreaking, but when I watched it I was mainly pissed off because my cellphone will drop a call if I walk into the wrong part of my house.

How the hell was this guy making calls from Mt. Everest and I really need to know what cellphone company he was using.

(Full disclosure: the guy was actually using a satellite phone and I have no idea how those work, none of which stopped me from once again complaining about cell phones that can take pictures and make videos and supply a list of “Chinese restaurants near me” but suck at making phone calls.)

3. Never at a loss for words

In City Primeval my all-time favorite author Elmore Leonard had his protagonist – Raymond Cruz – have sex with a female character, but they get in an argument afterwards and as Ray leaves he’s feeling pissy so he asks the female character:

“So how was the fuck?”

She says:

“About what I expected.”

Ray can’t think of a good comeback and spends the ride home thinking about one-liners he should have said, but didn’t think of in time and one of the reasons Leonard is my favorite author is his stuff rings true and right about here ask yourself:

Has James Bond ever been stuck for a good one-liner?

If James Bond ever ended a movie thinking about the things he should have said when the Bad Guy got cut in half with his own laser, I’d find 007 much more believable.  

4. Too much internal dialogue

I tried to read one of those books that are part of a series like “D is for Dithering” because those are popular so I figured there must be a reason, but the author lost me when she had her heroine spend about three pages selecting an outfit and thinking how each ensemble would make her feel.

“If I wear heels and a skirt, what will the kidnappers think that says about me?”

OK, so maybe that’s a thing female authors do, but I haven’t read all female authors so I won’t go out on that very shaky limb. Also because a famous male author lost me when he had his protagonist spend a couple pages thinking about knocking on the door of a woman he found attractive.

Jesus, knock on the door or drive away, but get on with it.

When you have a great plot you keep moving things forward and when you don’t, but still have to turn in a 400-page manuscript, you can pad your book with feelings.

5. A Dumb Hero

It’s easier to write for dumb characters because a smart character would need a really good reason to confront the axe-wielding serial killer in an abandoned amusement park at midnight and not call for backup.

Bad writers give up on logical motivation pretty easily and you can tell when they’ve thrown up their hands and surrendered because they’ll write some sentence that starts out:

“He didn’t know why he (fill-in-the-blank with some really moronic action), but he did.”

Yeah, I can’t think of a really good reason for my protagonist to take on a Mexican Drug Cartel on her own because they mistreated a dog (an actual plot from an actual book) but let’s ignore that dumb-ass decision and get to the part where she’s selecting outfits.

6. A Badass Friend

OK, so you’ve written yourself into a corner and your hero is hanging upside down over a tank full of sharks and you’re trying to figure out how to get him out of the situation and right about here we should take a break and watch Mike Myers make fun of weak plotting when Dr. Evil decides to lower Austin Powers into a tub of ill-tempered sea bass:

If you don’t have a sense of humor and are still trying to write something tense and dramatic, you might want to give your hero a Badass Friend who seems to do nothing but follow the hero around (which strikes me as kinda creepy and the hero might want to get a restraining order) so the Badass Friend can show up whenever needed and untie the hero or shoot the bad guy who definitely needs shooting, but the hero is too morally uptight to kill.

Now here’s a partial list of those highly-convenient, moral-free sidekicks:

Spenser and Hawk

Dave Robicheaux and Clete Purcell

Patrick Kenzie/Angelo Gennaro and Bubba Rogowski

George W. Bush and Dick Cheney

Robert B. Parker was a very good writer (although Spenser never lacked for a wisecrack) and Parker may have invented the Badass Friend and if so, it wasn’t a cliché yet, James Lee Burke is OK, but can get caught up in writing way too much about Dave’s feelings and I like Dennis Lehane and he’s written some great stuff, but let’s face it, when it comes to believable characters the American Voter has an atrocious track record:

“I need to create the Most Powerful Man on the Planet and my hero will be a narcissistic, over-weight, former Reality TV show host who pigs out on Big Macs.”

(OK, now that I write that sentence, it actually sounds like a book I’d like to read as long as the authors realized it was a comedy.) 

7. A half-remembered clue

This is where the author writes a sentence like, “Something was bothering Lance, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.”

Lots of writers use this device and the only reason I can think of for including a half-remembered clue is to give the reader hope that even though the author spent the last two chapters writing about shoe selection or the ingredients involved in making a gourmet lunch, the long-lost plot is in fact moving forward at a glacial pace and the protagonist is about to remember that when he found his dismembered Brother-In-Law’s body, the next door neighbor was holding a bloody chainsaw and saying:

“We had him over to watch Monday Night Football and he was kind of a dick about Biden.”

8. Clockwork Plots

I was reading the introduction to a John Sandford novel (real name John Camp) and he’s one of my favorite writers and he wrote an introduction to one his novels that helps explain why.

Sandford talked about “clockwork novels” in which everything makes sense and is logical, but in his novels he’s more likely to use a “chaos scheme.”

In Sanford’s world, crime is the product of: “misplaced greed, misbegotten love, of sex, of drugs and alcohol, accident and error, the inability to delay gratification, of television, and mostly of blind stupidity, rather than careful, intelligent, insidious scheming.”

Sandford calls it The Big Lebowski or Fargo view of crime: “vicious, terrible things being done for really stupid reasons – like minor thievery covered up with murder” and maybe he has that view of the world because in Real Life he wrote for the Miami Herald and St. Paul Press and probably saw a lot of people do terrible things for really stupid reasons.

Watch any episode of COPS and you realize the world is not chock-full of criminal masterminds.

In one of my all-time favorite Sandford scenes, two cops get in shootout in a bad guy’s living room and one of the cops shoots the bad guy, but when he draw his gun the other cop almost shoots himself in the leg and manages to shoot a hole in the side of the house.

After the smoke clears, the cop who shot the bad guy says that when they write their report maybe they shouldn’t mention shooting the house.

You read that and think, “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

And now, One Sign of Dementia

So I’m almost finished writing this piece, but it starts to sound vaguely familiar so I search for anything I’ve written that sounds similar and find an article cleverly-entitled “Eight Signs of Bad Writing” that I wrote two years ago and I used four of the same examples I did this time, which really pissed me off because I wrote all new jokes for those repeated items and had four new signs of bad writing and – as it turns out – one new sign of dementia.

If you want to read what I wrote two years ago, here you go. It has some pretty good jokes that I’d totally forgotten about or I clearly would have repeated them:

https://leejudge.substack.com/p/eight-signs-of-bad-writing

The only person I worry about plagiarizing is myself because when you churn out so much work over decades it’s hard to remember what you’ve done and what you’ve only thought about doing and I once drew a cartoon I’d drawn the week before and nobody noticed.

Not my editor, not one reader and not me until I shoved the second cartoon into a drawer that also contained the first one.

So I hope you enjoyed this second version of “Eight Signs of Bad Writing” and stick around a couple years for the inevitable third version which I think I’ll call “Nine Signs of Bad Writing” and the ninth sign will be repeating myself.