A post at Writer Unboxed: How reading bad novels can improve your writing.

I think it’s super obvious that reading flawed novels can improve your writing. The more clear-cut the flaw, the better, and if the novel is great in other ways, that’s better still, especially if you genuinely enjoy the novel, because that way you aren’t wasting your time reading novels you don’t like.

There’s nothing like reading a GREAT novel with some implausible plot element to may you think, (a) wow, this would be better if the author had made this plot element plausible, and (b) but it’s still a great book though. The first draws your attention to something you may need to work on yourself and the second is reassuring: a novel doesn’t have to be perfect in every way to be really good.

Or, suppose you’re reading a novel that actually isn’t very good and that you sort of like anyway. Maybe you’ll find yourself saying, “This could be SO MUCH BETTER if only the author had actually spent time turning his stick figures into real characters with actual depth!” And that’s worth noticing too, especially if you think, So, what do I even mean by “actual depth” here?

But is this the kind of thing the author of the linked post has in mind? Let’s take a look!

Let me count the ways—six of them, anyway, as I’m sure there are more—that you can move a disappointing novel from the “I didn’t like it” column to the “This book was a good teacher” column.

So, yes, this is the same idea: You can learn things from novels that showcase some kind of failure, always noting that “didn’t work for me” isn’t the same thing as “doesn’t work period.”

Why did this story fail to engage me? asks the linked post. Why couldn’t I relate to this protagonist? What prose patterns ground on my nerves? What weighed down story movement to the point that setting the novel aside occurred to me in the first place?

Those are good questions. Now I’m thinking of a literary novel that didn’t really work for me. I read it, or parts of it, a few years ago. It was about racing. Racehorses and the people who own them, jockeys and trainers. I read bits of it and I remember thinking: I don’t care about this character … or this character … or this character … but I do want to know how things work out for this other character, and this one, and especially for this horse.

This novel — I don’t remember the title or author — fine, let me see if I can figure it out. Google, tell me, what are some recent-ish literary novels about racehorses and the world of racing? Oh, look, that wasn’t nearly as hard as I thought it was. The book I’m thinking of is Horse Heaven by Jane Smiley. Okay, Horse Heaven failed for me in a specific way: too many pov characters, too many I didn’t care about or considered unpleasant or both. I wound up skimming lots of chapters, keeping an eye out for the characters I cared about more. So, lots of laudatory quotes listed for this book, but for me it was mostly a failure.

Various other ways a book can fail … this post is another in the category of “incoherent posts that cram disparate things into one list,” because the last item here is The production quality was so poor. That is totally different from failures of the writing craft. It doesn’t belong here at all. That should be a different post.

Even so, sure, it’s not a bad post — overall, anyway! Noting a point of failure is no doubt useful in improving my own blog posts!

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