I'm still in the fiction reading phase of my fiction writing plan. Today I realized the benefit of reading badly written fiction.
I hadn't realized just how respectable the writing has been on all the self-published novels I've been reading the last month. There are pluses and minuses when it comes to plot between them, but in all, characters have been easy enough to distinguish from each other, punctuation and diction have been good enough to go by unnoticed, and in general the writing skill itself has been fine. Only storytelling ability has varied.
When you start reading books written by people who may be fine storytellers, but who simply don't know the craft of writing, you start appreciating the actual craft of writing.
Makes me grateful to all my English and English Composition teachers over the years.
Also makes me appreciative of publishing houses, with their gatekeepers and professional editors. There is sometimes a great benefit to a little centralization. Perhaps if forced to publish in the more traditional manner this same writer would have developed further as a writer. Instead he has all these 4.5 star review averages on books in a series making him lots of money. With such low standards for marketable writing among readers, why work harder at improving one's craft?
Thankfully he's an exception. Among all the self-published novels I've been reading, this is the first that irritated me so much I stopped reading it even though I was intrigued by the story/plot itself. I wish someone else had written a book with these basic ideas, someone who knows how to write.
Impact on My Writing?
Oddly, it makes me feel a bit more encouraged about writing a novel myself. Apparently I don't have to work too hard on craft before I can develop quite a readership if I simply start with an enticing enough story idea and deliver an entertaining plot within a genre with insatiable readers.
No matter how many times people have to re-read a sentence to have any idea what I just wrote, they will without complaint!
No matter how repetitive I am, how indistinguishable one character is from the next, how poor my word choice, how inconsistent my cadence.... whatever.
Alas, I will not allow myself to publish something I would be ashamed to have my high school English teacher read.
When you are reading fiction, do you only care about the story? Does the writing skill (or lack thereof) mean nothing to you so long as the story is interesting?