bad writing

Wait a minute—where do I get off, wagging a finger at “bad writing”? Doesn’t everyone have a right to express herself however she sees fit? Isn’t that creativity?

In a word, no. But creativity is a wider subject than a single blogpost can take on. Examples of bad writing, on the other hand, are narrow and specific. They doesn’t necessarily imply a bad writer, much less a bad person. I plead guilty to plenty of bad writing, and not just in my earliest attempts. (I could show you plenty of examples from my first unpublished novel except that I trashed it years ago out of embarrassment.) Self-expression is one purpose of writing, but if your work doesn’t communicate to readers, you’ve only expressed yourself to yourself.

If you want to communicate to readers, there are better and worse ways to do it. One effective means of learning those better ways is to analyze bad writing and consider how to fix it.

So here’s an example of descriptive writing from a self-published novel:

It had hat shelves and coat racks along both sides. There were double doors leading into the sanctuary, which was plain but neat. There was a carpeted main aisle that ran from the doors to the altar. There were neat rows of oak pews on both sides of the aisle. Secondary aisles ran along both sides of the church between the pews and the windows. On the raised platform in front, there was an altar, a lectern, and behind that were two rows of chairs for the choir. There was a fairly new piano on the left side of the platform . . .

And so on. Do you find this description tedious, or even tiresome? Could it move a little faster? Do we need so much of it? Unless something significant is going to happen within those aisles or between those pews (and soon!), the picture could be sketched out much more efficiently with careful attention to word choice and sentence structure.

This writer would have benefitted from a short course in Wordsmith! I’m not bragging—Part Two tackles head-on the “it has” and “there was” trap, and suggests a helpful formula for avoiding such lazy sentence openers. Without going into the formula (read the book!) let’s energize the two very weak sentences at the beginning:

It had hat shelves and coat racks along both sides.

“It has” makes grammatical sense, but does not pull a reader into the scene. The two words just lie there at the beginning of the paragraph (You can come in. If you want to. Or stay outside. Whatevs.). Also, “It had hat . . .” presents us with two very similar words that sound almost alike when read out loud. A listener would be confused and a reader has to work at visualizing a hat shelf instead of a typo. To make this sentence stand up and briskly beckon us into the scene, let’s do some reshuffling:

Hat shelves and coat racks lined the walls of the vestibule.

Not necessarily exciting, but swift and positive. This brief sentence ushers the reader not just into a four-walled space, but a particular kind of space: a vestibule, or, for an especially churchy feel, a narthex. Moving on:

There were double doors leading into the sanctuary, which was plain but neat.

(Yawn.) Come on, description! A really easy fix is staring you right in the face, so hop to it.

Double doors led into the sanctuary . . .

“Plain but neat” is okay; I kinda get the picture, but could we be a little more specific? From the beginning:

Hat shelves and coat racks lined the walls of the vestibule. Double doors led into the sanctuary, where light streaming from the unadorned windows fell upon orderly rows of oak pews.

And just like that, we’re in. Skip the secondary aisles, go straight to the pulpit, dwell on other details—which are common to most churches—only as they pertain to the plot. A single sentence will encompass everything else that matters, for example:

The red-carpeted center aisle ended in three steps rising to the marble-topped altar, framed by a gleaming grand piano on the right, a lectern on the left, and a choir loft behind.

I might work on that a little more: is the sentence too long? Do I want two hyphenated adjectives so close together? But at least I have something to work with, rather than a pale recital of a picture that most churchgoers already know.

And the adventure continues . . . .