Write On, Wednesday Thursday: What you can learn by reading a bad book
My critique partner and I love to, well…critique. It’s part of the job. Occupational hazard. We critique our own work, we critique each other’s. We gripe about good authors who write bad books and bad authors who write good books. We compare ourselves to other debut authors–what have they got that we don’t? What made an agent sign them, but not us? We love to find fault with characters and plot, and dumb sentences. We aren’t perfect. Therefore, we can’t possibly write a perfect book. No one can. In this business, we find that there’s a buzzword: subjective. What I like, she may not. What she likes, I am may find garbage. And then there’s the whole literary agent rejection letter, “We wish you all the best, and please keep in mind that this is just one opinion and another agent my feel differently.” [hint: subjective]. So, what can be gained by reading a so-called ‘bad’ book? A lot. For one, we learn what we don’t like. Be it too many f-bombs, or too …