100 Ways to Write Badly Well

Introduction

The phrase ‘toilet book’ gets bandied around a lot as a derogatory term, but I can think of no human activity better complemented by reading than what happens on toilets. As you allow your body to do its vital work, a book can ensure that your mind is just as stimulated as your lower intestine after the rigours of a hard day. Or, to put it another way: out with one kind of crap, in with another.

In my time as a writer and creative writing tutor, I’ve noticed something counterintuitive – really bad writing is more fun than really good writing. If I’m given a choice between sitting down with À la recherche du temps perdu or a poem that rhymes ‘dinosaur’ with ‘lino floor,’ the T. rex in the kitchen is going to win every time. It’s in that spirit that I started writing deliberately awful pieces of short fiction. Mixed metaphors, unbelievable plot twists, piles of conflicting adjectives – anything to escape the tedium of perfectly honed prose. And it was fun – far more fun than agonising over commas for hours at a time. I got carried away. Soon, I found that I’d written hundreds of these things. I had them on a blog. Strangers were sending me their own deliberately bad writing. I was even doing readings of some of the best (by which I of course mean worst) examples. It became obvious that bad writing had an inexplicable momentum of its own and needed to be showcased. Hence this book.

This isn’t a how-to guide, although I suppose you could use it as one. Neither is it a serious literary experiment like Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (although if there are any competition judges or broadsheet reviewers reading, yes it is). Rather, it’s a celebration of terrible writing, a chance to luxuriate in the worst excesses of purple prose. It’s designed to be dipped into and enjoyed in idle moments. A good example of this might be when you are taking care of important business on the toilet – which I think brings us back to where we started.

Joel Stickley