Do you want to write a novel? Most people try to write a good novel and fail. Dare to be different. Try writing a bad novel instead. If you finish, you will have either succeeded in writing a bad novel or failed and written a good novel. It’s a win/win situation. Here’s a guide to writing an absolutely terrible novel. The path is clear. All you have to do is follow it.
- Remember that real writers use a typewriter. They don’t like these newfangled computers. A manual typewriter and a bucket of Wite-Outâ„¢ are the tools of a serious writer.
- Never pick an average name that a regular person would have. Go with something that explains the character. If your character is a cop on the edge, then try a manly nickname coupled with the name of a gun — something like Rip Magnum.
- If your book is about a real person, just alter their name and location slightly — Jorge M. Bushe, Presidente of the Federated Territories.
- Make sure you’ve got a lot of similar names too. Donald, Donna, Dina, Dana and Danny just feel right together.
- Make sure that the good guys are clearly good and the bad guys are overwhelming evil. Don’t confuse your readers by having all the characters have good qualities and bad ones.
- Explain everything. When your character is angry, just say that she’s angry. There’s no point in trying to show that through her actions when you can just tell that to your reader.
- Don’t explain anything. Why did your villain spend the whole book clutching a blanket? Leave it up to the readers. They’ll fill in the blanks.
- Pile on the adjectives and adverbs. Why have a woman speak when you can have her whisper breathlessly in her lustful, wind-swept voice?
- Fill your book with coincidences, especially towards the end. Nothing beats having the exciting climax occur because the hero bumped into the villain in a small-town cafe when they both had a craving for peach-filled semi-sweet chocolate pie. Did you mention that both characters love the exact same pie? Now would be a good time.
- Don’t let your character’s established traits get in the way of a good plot twist. Just because your hero is a priest who preaches non-violence (We’ll call him Father Angeltoe) doesn’t mean he can’t be an expert marksman with an itchy trigger finger.
- Use lots of technical jargon. Don’t worry about whether your reader will understand it, or whether you understand it. Just stick it in. It will make your characters sound smarter.
- If you are writing a historical novel, don’t sweat accuracy. The reader won’t care. Go ahead and have Napoleon invent the automatic rifle. Who could say he didn’t?
- If you are writing fantasy literature, make sure your magical animals have never been thought of before. Try a talking armadillo. No, forget the talking armadillo. I want that one for myself.
- Make sure to add …A Novel to the end of your title. You don’t want people to forget what they are reading.
- Don’t feel as if anything has to happen. Plots are optional. Two people sitting in a room staring at each other is great material, as long as it is handled with plenty of adjectives and adverbs (see tip five).
- Exclamation points! Exclamation points! Exclamation points!
- Ellipses too…
- Don’t sweat the order of the action. If the big football game needs to occur just after the prom, then that is when it should be.
- Nothing beats a catch phrase! I call Snoogity Bottom.
- Brothers are always very different and they always argue about everything. Never portray brothers who are similar and get along unless they are twins (except if one is an evil twin). If they are twins they must finish each other’s sentences and no one should be able to tell them apart.
- Sisters must always steal each other’s boyfriends. Additionally, one sister must be outgoing and the other must be quiet and serious. This makes no difference to the boyfriend though, he’ll gladly dump either for the other.
- Don’t start your novel with an interesting event. Take a few dozen pages to explain everything that would lead up to that interesting event. The reader will gladly hang around until you get to the point.
- Don’t make your secondary characters interesting. It will just detract from the main characters. Lesser characters don’t need reasons for their actions. They are just there to keep the plot moving.
- If the plot seems to slow down, give someone a gun or a knife and kill off one of those secondary characters you don’t care about anyway.
- Writing a book about vampires? You probably don’t need any help making it bad, but you should definitely make sure you show how cool it is to be a vampire and make up your own rules for the way vampires can die or have sex.
- If you are writing about sports, make it clear that sports always provide important life lessons. Make sure the novel has one obsessive and one downtrodden coach.
- If you want to write a serious novel, make sure the main character is jaded and has lost interest in life. This anti-hero must view all other people as phonies, fakes or idiots. The character should experiment with drugs and sex. At some point the character should watch someone die or at least be assaulted. At no point should the anti-hero feel any real pleasure. Happy endings are strictly prohibited.
- Writing a mystery? Make sure the clues are really obvious or really obscure. Either way, your hero will be the only person who can piece these things together. At some point they must accuse the wrong person and be ridiculed for it. In the end though, they should deliver a speech that explains exactly how everything happened.
- Character conversations should always be used to explain what is happening and how people are feeling. It is perfectly natural to have a character explain to his office mate (whose brother is a bank president) that he used to be a safe cracker, but now he just wants to go straight.
- Don’t forget to use italics when you want to emphasize something.
- At the end of the book, you must have the main character reach an important and life-changing epiphany. Make that epiphany really obvious. Don’t worry about why they had one, just make sure they had it so the reader knows the book is ending.
- Editing is just a waste of time. Spell check it and move on.
For more information:
- Writing Your Way Out of a Wet Paper Sack
- 10 Ways to Make Editors Hate You Before They Even Know You
- 40 Fabulous Faults of Freelance Failures
- Top 12 Signs that the Fantasy Novel You’re Working on has Gone Horribly Awry
@#27: I love Bret Easton Ellis!
this is very funny but it makes me want to delete all my stuff…
bletes last blog post..FINAL_2
Oh, and make sure you never ever research biology, maladies, or diseases; and–this is really important–do NOT wonder if there might be serious consequences when somebody gets bashed unconscious. It happens in movies all the time, so it must be plausible. In fact, if you find that you must reasearch, just watch movies about your chosen topic. I reccommend James Bond especially–only not Casino Royale, that one was way unrealistic. (Seriously now, bloody knuckles after punching people? How droll.)
Also, if any of your fans do anything to piss you off, take ball and go home. Serves them right. Only continue work if they beg for at least a year. (Not just any begging, mind you, but really piteous grovelling.)
Allyson Wonderland, Eddie Izzard? Anything that relates to him is awesome, so I donno about your advice!
Don’t forget that your hero needs to make a choice between saving a busload of people and the one he (or she) loves. Of course, he can save both in the end. If he doesn’t, then he mourns for the loss, but gets over it in the end with something corny like, “We all have to make hard decisions, but we can’t change them, so we have to just get over it.” Or perhaps something miraculous happens. The person/people live, for example.
Make tons of comparisons: “Hannah looked like a rose and felt like a baby’s bottom in her dress that looked like J-Lo’s. Her boyfriend Mark looked just like early-days, scruffy Brad Pitt and spoke in the same sexy voice as Mel Gibson in Disney’s Pocahontas. They looked into each others eyes, like magnets drawn to one another and then fucked like corn and multiplied like bunnies.”
Use lots of clichés.
Mess up your tenses.
Say “you” all of a sudden. Ex.: “Then she went up to her room. She decided to do some stretches. You should stretch because they’re good for you. After that…”
All villains should be Nazis or Muslims. Better yet, a Nazi Muslim.
Enjoyed the list. I found another similar one (not by me) called How to Write Suckitudinous Fiction. It even has a funny made-up word.
“Writing a book about vampires? You probably don’t need any help making it bad, but you should definitely make sure you show how cool it is to be a vampire and make up your own rules for the way vampires can die or have sex.”
Wow. That’s a bit harsh. You could’ve talked about any creature – werewolves, for example – and making up the rules is a good thing. Why focus on this when there are so many worse things to do in a novel?
[...] a link that is too good to pass up. PoeWar has a wonderfully humorous article on writing poorly. Want to Write a Novel Badly? Here’s How! is very funny. Number 15 in the list reminds me of Seinfeld, which would probably make for a really [...]
sadly, most of the best selling books around obey all of this nonsense – Yes, you Dan, and you J.K.
on another note……I found a book in a secondhand shop- a guide for authors to the range of projectile weapons available, and the typical wounds that they produce at different ranges- this thing was as thick as a telephone directory, and probably the most depressing volume I have ever handled…still- it has saved me reading any “SAS” or “Mercenary” rubbish, Kalashnokov at 50 meters, aimed for the skull anyone?
Lmao dude best thing about writing ever. I’m gonna go give this to my english teacher. She’ll love it °¬° Oh and what’s really funny about this is that a lot of the books I’ve read that have been “wildly popular” and “raved about by critics” contain at least 5 of those traits.
Exactly right, the stepping stones of novel failure.
# Writing a book about vampires? You probably don’t need any help making it bad, but you should definitely make sure you show how cool it is to be a vampire and make up your own rules for the way vampires can die or have sex.
Aww, poor vampire novels. Is this to say that simply because it is a vampire novel it is gauranteed to be bad? Because Fledgling by Octavia Butler was a good vampire novel although this comment seems to be more geared towards True Blood or that hack Stephanie Meyers.
Rip Magnum
Yes, very good, but like Sibelius said,
“A statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!”
No, you’ve just got to do it. I just finished my first novel. I’ve read so many of these type of things that I have no idea if it is any good. I don’t really care. I’m going to submit it to appropriate agents anyway and start writing my second. It’s better than spending my evenings watching tv.
I am hoping they give Ebert a statue.
[...] http://www.poewar.com/want-to-write-a-bad-novel-heres-how/ [...]
[...] Of course, for a change of pace, maybe you just want to write a bad novel. Well, here’s how to do it. [...]
If your writing a mystery novel, be sure to give them a huge hint about the truth, or show them what happens in the preface. People shouldnt have to deal with suspence.
If your writing a nonfiction book, feel free to change the events to make it more interesting for your readers. They’ll never expect the twist.
When choosing a title, pick something common like Fire, or The great mystery, or The presidential assassination. It will allready be in your readers heads, so you dont have to worry about them thinking you book it talking about random crap.
If you’ve allready written a book, talk about how good your book was in the characters perspectives, or talk about yourself.
[...] because we all wonder this every day we write: How to Write a Bad Novel. A tongue in cheek look at mistakes to avoid while writing. It’s worth a [...]
Hi,
This is probably the first time I have ever come across an entry on writing something bad… on purpose. I have been attempting to write a novel but the furthest I got to writing was just a couple of chapters and that was that. I have this tendency to come up with ideas for novels but more often than not, I fail to develop them. I’m curious though as to why anyone would try to write a bad novel. Is that some kind of way to accomplish the opposite? Humour me.
Perhaps for now, I’d give the I-would-like-to-write-a-novel thought a rest and concentrate more on my blog.
Have a nice day… Cheers!
.-= SHZ´s last blog ..I survived the night at Scream Park! =-.
Of course, for a change of pace, maybe you just want to write a bad novel. Well, here’s how to do it
Probably the best guide on how to write a good book.
Hey! I stumbled on your page during a late-night novel-writing session, and I have to say thank you! I’ve always wanted to write a horrible novel, with cliches, technical jargon, and stock characters!
No, in all seriousness, I’ve been working on this book for several years now, and I want to make it the best I possibly can. Your “anti-novel” tips have been extremely helpful (although I was already following a few of them – I mean…well you get the idea). I hope to catch more of your blog entries.
Found this page from reading a blog on novel writing and thoroughly enjoyed reading your list…very funny and yet soberingly real.
My first novel just got signed – glad I didn’t follow your steps here to the letter LOL
Just use TvTropes as your Bible, and go for the Dead Horse Tropes and Narms.
[...] particularly enjoyed Want to Write a Novel Badly? Here’s How! and 10 Ways to Annoy the Hell out of your Writers’ Group, two articles which probably say more [...]
[...] Mode Immonde e l’immancabile Evil Overlord List. Per gli angolofoni, aggiungo un po’ di Bad Novel Writing e un po’ di Writing Advice da parte di Caro [...]