What was your harshest reaction to bad writing?

I burned a romance novel once.

I read it as research – I figured there were so many of them that it was probably easy to get published as a romance author. I decided to read just one to see what the writing style was like, to determine whether I could replicate it.

I did my damnedest to give it 50 pages (I’ll give anything 100 pages or five chapters) then set it on fire in the back yard.

It was a scorcher! The romance burned up the pages! etc.

My worst reaction mirrors your own. There are always instances when the stuff is SO bad that I’m compelled to continue, if only to determine whether it can get any worse.

I laughed out loud at this story.
I don’t have any fun stories, but I have many, many unfinished books that I never intend to pick up again. Why bother? There are thousands of books worth my time, I will never read everything that I want to read in a lifetime. So, I won’t waste it on stuff that I don’t enjoy reading.

So many bad books, so little time. Trying to remember. I was pretty bowled over by how bad and obvious I thought The Da Vinci Code was but I did read it through.

^^Someone close to me loves Dan Brown. sigh

Seek. LOL.

When I come across someone like Danielle Steele, I usually know of whom she is fictionalizing. I quite understand why she does what she does. That sort of pap doesn’t bother me. I just don’t read it.

The real stories that actually happened—and she makes a good living fictionalizing—are much more fascinating. But I must admit, somebody likes that woman’s work. She has made a huge amount of money on sales and movie deals, which should give any budding writer faith that if they’d maybe dumb their own writing down a bit and throw in some gratuitous soft-core sex, they might be able to pay the rent someday. 80% of fiction is read by women and their tastes have changed radically in just the past decade.

Christ, look at 50 Shades of Grey, which is soft porn. You want porn, baby, I’ll give you porn, and it won’t soft. But that’s not what women want right now. They are moving toward that, but it’s too early to go mainstream.

Jesus, 50 Shades—three book contracts and three movie deals right out of the gate. And it’s crap. I mean, even the people who’ve read the whole book and enjoyed it, admit it’s crap. But it must be awfully good crap. Light reading on the beach, maybe? Something to do while waiting for a plane? I dunno.

But this stuff certainly sells and being able to pay the rent with only a keyboard and what goes on in your head sounds like a great way to make a living to me. It may not be art, but it beats working the floor at Circuit City, or selling time shares out of a cubicle, or trying to teach a roomful of uncontrollable juvenile delnquents every day.

I shut off the movie and deleted it. That was the Michael Bay Ninja Turtles movie. What a piece of shit.

^^You’re a tough critic.

I put the book down, calmly picked up a pencil, and drew pictures of parodies and atrocious (mis)interpretation of the stories all over the book.

I have done that so many times I lost count, on textbooks whenever those absurd stories about foolish people doing inhumanly foolish things and becoming world heros showed up.

@Espiritus_Corvus you don’t know how that abomination was marketed in my country. They boldly screamed on the cover “The greatest story of all time that will shed answers to the most sarced inner fear of all women around Eastern Asia”. That was just so insulting given how it was actually about. It was equal to saying “You want to be a slut? Read this book and follow it!” I bet lots of people were fooled by that tagline then later regreted having ever saw it.

@Seek A friend of mine writes them and publishes on Amazon. I don’t even know her pen name. I don’t read many books, I’m not going to bother with a romance novel when I do read a book, but she makes great money from those romance novels.

After reading The Eye of Argon, which I totally loved, nothing is bad anymore. I mean, I read tons of crap horror paperbacks that have been abandoned in basements since the early seventies, and while the stories include walking skeletons or dog killing bees, they’re coherently writ.
Argon though, describes the most disgusting dinner ever, plus the protagonist fucks a whore right by his horse, which in turn is drinking his wine.

You make love well, wench.

They use this story in literature courses to show you how to not write a story…and I may be biased as Argon is heavily influenced by Robert Howard’s work…but I disagree. The author of Argon hath wrought genius. AND it has walking skeletons. Probably.

I buried a book once, but I was pretty bad to a book I liked too.
I don’t remember which one it was. I was reading three or four each week back then.
A friend wanted to read a book when I was done with it. When I finished, I used a box cutter andremoved the final few pages. I got an angry call from my friend in the middle of the night. Big cliff hanger, and I had the last pages.

Throw it in my Goodwill box.

I didn’t understand the phrasing, ”......I saw that I’m scared of the dentist.”

@Dutchess_III Sorry typo. Said should be the word. Irony that I had a typo too. : )

A sign in a local dentist was misspelled. I brought it up to them and they never corrected it. I keep telling them that it isn’t professional. When they ask me to get my teeth fixed I said that I’m scared of the dentist.

Ah. Thank you!

A friend of mine read the first Twilight book, then proceeded to rip the entire book up. She had it in a box for a while, but probably threw it out a long time ago.

I, myself, have never been able to bring myself to damage a book intentionally. And of all the books I have read in my life, I have only purposefully not finished three that I can remember, and somehow that is an insult to the book in my eyes.
You have to know that I’ve read a LOT of YA, and the three unfinished books were the second Twilight book (I read a chapter and couldn’t bear to put myself through that hell hole again), a book called “The Jewel”, because, despite a semi-interesting plot idea, I knew exactly what was going to happen, who the bad guys were, who the love interest was, and yada yada by around the 4–5th chapter. Similarly to “The Jewel”, “Matched” was the third book that I can remember intentionally not finishing. I think I started reading it because I saw someone else reading it… It drove me insane, there wasn’t any character description, the plot was overused and predictable, and as soon at the second dude was introduced I knew exactly what was going to happen, so I felt no need to continue reading. I was bored.

But honestly, YA isn’t that bad, there are some super books out there, sadly there are more shitty ones

@Dutchess III See?

Vaggies for sale. Scrawled on a piece of plywood in front of a vegetable stand on on Hwy 361 just north of Perry, Florida. Damn near wrecked the car, I was laughing so hard.

I was just fixing up my bookcase and remembered what I consider to be insulting to a book and its writer…. don’t laugh at me…..
I turn the book so the spine faces the wall, flip it upside down, and the put it behind other books…..
I’m sad, I know

Si, @stanleybmanly. ;)