Blog / How to Write Badly Well

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How To Write Badly Well is a blog of writing snippets written by Joel Stickley. Each snippet is an attempt to exemplify some particular form of writing pitfall.

The blog started in 2009 and was last updated in 2014. Stickley also wrote a spin-off book, 100 Ways to Write Badly Well, which contained "both the best bits of [the] blog and all-new material." It was published in 2012.

Tropes used or criticized include:

• Accidental Innuendo: Invoked in "Blunder into double entendres.". It starts with a butcher named Richard (a.k.a. Dick) displaying his sausage, and goes on from there.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: "Abuse alliteration" is an entire paragraph where every single word begins with the letters "CH". And they're not even all pronounced the same, which just makes it worse.
• Ambiguous Syntax: "Dangle your modifiers". Most of the sentences have clauses that seem to modify one word, but only make sense if they're targeting a different word.
  Caked in dung and warm to the touch, Susie cleaned her horse's hooves with a careful precision.
• And Then What?: Lord Plunderfall hasn't really thought out what he'll do if he succeeds in destroying the world. Basic questions like "where will you live?" and "what will you eat?" leave him floundering.
• Artistic License – Religion: Played for Laughs with Grobian Orthodox Heresy, the state religion of Grob. When praising and sacrificing to their god seemed ineffective, the Grobians concluded that "they must have [had] the relationship the wrong way round", and that their god in fact worshipped them. The enforcement of morals in G.O.H. stems not from fear of eternal punishment, but from not wanting to disappoint their divine fan.
• Ass Pull: invoked
  • "Write yourself out of a corner." After explicitly thinking that he was facing his end in the previous entry, Dash Gallant abruptly pulls out some previously-unmentioned mystic "Space-Zen" techniques to avoid breathing the poison gas and Shatterpoint Tap the cell wall. At the same time, he contacts his Robot Buddy via an also-previously-unmentioned communication device implanted directly in his brain. The buddy arrives with Dash's ship an improbably short amount of time later and blows a hole in the alien vessel, through which Dash makes his escape.
  • "Introduce Plot Elements In An Off-Hand Manner" and "End with a twist no reader could have reasonably foreseen" both introduce new out-of-the-left-field plot elements in almost every sentence.
• Author Avatar: "Write thinly-veiled, self-aggrandising autobiographical fiction." Our protagonist, "Joe Stockley", is a wealthy, brilliant, and widely-admired writer with an adoring wife.
• Author Catchphrase:
  • "If you find a phrase you like, keep repeating it." The author repeats the phrase "needless to say" five or six times per paragraph.
  • "Alienate your existing readership" uses the phrase "(his/her) velvety voice as smooth as silk" four times in five paragraphs.
• Author Tract: "Subtly weave your own opinions into the narrative." The protagonist of the story comes home one evening to find a bloody corpse in her front hall. Meanwhile, the hypothetical bad author is busy pointing out insignificant details that obviously map onto minor inconveniences in their own life (the streetlights come on too late these days, you can't find an effective carpet shampoo anymore, etc.), which they blame on "environmental pressure groups".
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Mocked in "Base your plot on unsupported assertions". When the protagonist asks what's actually wrong with having all good and no evil, his mentor can't come up with an answer.
• Beauty Equals Goodness: "Equate physical beauty with virtue", which exaggerates the trope to the point of discomfort. The accused double-agent has a bad moustache, pimples, a cleft lip, a "malformed hand", and a "withered leg". And then the contrastingly-handsome hero explicitly says that he "should have known never to trust someone so ugly". Yeesh.
• Because Destiny Says So: "Use 'fate' as a plot device." Two normal office workers agree that David was objectively the worst candidate to interview for the marketing job. But they decide to hire him anyway, because "it's his destiny" and they don't want to derail his "personal plot arc".
• Big Red Devil: Hitler-1 in the "Take the mad scientist archetype to its logical conclusion" video, is described as being "20-foot tall, wreathed in flame with wings made of Midnight, with a funny little moustache because some things never change."
• Beige Prose: "Narrate every scene in a matter-of-fact tone, no matter how exciting."
  [The dragon] burned several people quite badly, although the knight who is the subject of our story remained largely unharmed.
  Naturally, this incident caused a reaction of fear and surprise amongst the local population.
• Black Comedy: "Make light of tragedy." A wisecracking Jewish family trades quips and banter with the German soldiers who are shipping them off to a concentration camp. Everything except the subject matter reads like a corny old sitcom.
• "Burly Detective" Syndrome: Parodied in 'Refuse to Give Names to Characters'.
  "Well make them quickly," interrupted a tall man with shining eyes. This was not the same tall man with glinting eyes who had so far been conducting the conversation, but a new, even taller man with eyes that shone rather than glinted, who had just disembarked behind the two figures already standing on the dock.
• Butt-Monkey: Exaggerated in "Choose one character to bully." Dingleton is the odd one out in his fantasy questing party. He literally gets caught with his pants down, falls down a hill, loses the party's horses, loses a holy amulet, falls down again, and gets bird poop in his mouth. None of his companions like him, he's short, and he has a stupid name.
  ‘Why is he here again?’ hissed Pheos.
  ‘I don’t know,’ Dingleton moaned quietly to himself. ‘I really don’t know. I’m not equipped for this. It seems cruel even to have brought me. When you think about it...’
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": "Replace real-life items with fictional alternatives." E.g. a character thinks his meal needs more "NaCl-based SupaFlav flavour enhancer", as opposed to "salt".
• Can't Take Criticism: "Regard editorial input as a personal attack." Penny Scriber's reply to an editor starts with "Dear Dream-Crusher" and only goes downhill from there. What makes it worse is that the editor was actually pretty positive; while they did point out some problems with Penny's manuscript, they also expressed real interest in seeing another draft.
• Captain Space, Defender of Earth!: Captain Dash Gallant, who appears in several posts. He's incredibly handsome, an ace starfighter pilot, a master of Space-Zen, and he knows his way around a bottle of Hoertellian Spurg. He and his adorable robot sidekick spend most of their time fighting a race of Always Chaotic Evil aliens called the Mhal-Evol’Unt.
• The Chris Carter Effect: Invoked in "Refuse to resolve mysteries." As his train arrives at an unknown destination, the narrator deals with unreadable messages, sourceless voices, and unexpected changes to his wardrobe, appearance, and gender, none of which have any apparent explanation. He(?) ends by telling the readers that he can't tell us what happened next in the story, for reasons that he also can't tell us.
• Cliché Storm: Invoked in "Treat genre as a replacement for ideas."
• Contemplate Our Navels: "Take yourself far too seriously." and "Ask the difficult questions."
• Creator Breakdown: Invoked in "Write as therapy."
• Cure for Cancer: Shows up, as a part of another trope (where the Designated Villain is working on one just to put a charity out of business), but not discussed itself.
• Department of Redundancy Department: "Include unnecessary linguistic redundancies of language."
  Kevin entered his PIN number into the ATM machine at a rapid rate of speed. He had a preplanned date arrangement with a female woman and didn’t want to be delayed by lateness.
• Designated Hero: Invoked in "Emphasise your hero's good qualities." Each of the king's flaws or evil deeds gets a positive spin. Overtaxing his subjects? He needs that money to make his kingdom the best! Drinking too much? He's returning some of that tax money to the winemakers! Executing innocent people on trumped-up charges? He's keeping the kingdom safe! Groping (and possibly more) a servant girl? He's just a romantic at heart!
• Designated Villain: Invoked in "Emphasise your villain's bad qualities." Admittedly, Doctor Slithingly has many of the mannerisms of a Mad Scientist; he alternately giggles and "bwahaha"s while rubbing his hands together and gloating over his imminent victory. But mannerisms are not actions, and the narrator's attempt to frame a cure for leukaemia as evil (because it puts charities out of business, hurts doctors' incomes, etc.) falls rather flat.
• Dysfunction Junction: Parodied, and perhaps subverted, in "Give every character a tragic backstory". The four characters have quite an assortment of Dark And Troubled Pasts (rape, crippling injuries, suicidal depression, dead family, cult abuse...), but they don't seem particularly angsty about it in the moment, aside from their word choices in Scrabble.
• Empathic Environment: "Begin the novel with your protagonist getting out of bed and seeing that it is raining outside, which perfectly mirrors his life."
• Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue: Parodied in "Do not contextualise dialogue." It's nearly impossible for the reader to figure out who said what, or even how many characters there are, but it rises to an absurd level when the characters themselves lose track (despite all being in the same room).
• Filler Strip: "Rely on unsolicited submissions."
• First-Person Peripheral Narrator: "Choose a narrator who is peripheral to the story." Parodied in that the narrator doesn't actually know the story: he's only acquainted with one of the two key characters, he has no idea what their relationship with each other is like, and he's not entirely sure what they argued about.
• Foregone Conclusion: "Risk the narrator's life." The Framing Device makes the Conclusion even more Foregone than usual: the narrator is explicitly recounting the tale of his "absolutely certain death" to a friend in the comfort of his own home, long after the fact.
• Funetik Aksent:
  • "Give your characters distinctive idioms." The words of Hamish the Scot and Bronco the cowboy exhibit the trope; Archibald, a Quintessential British Gentleman, is spared (even though his dialogue tag is "lisped").
  • Exaggerated beyond belief in "Write in impenetrable dialect."
  ‘Gisae tha’ fun’dut?’ hir giffled.
  ‘Asai ha’ tooter!’ Ai tankled.
• Generic Doomsday Villain: Lord Plunderfall in "Make your villain genuinely evil". He tells the heroes that he wants to destroy the world and all humanity simply because he is "pure evil" and "a force of pure malignancy". The heroes reply that this sounds "a bit improbable" and "not all that convincing as a motive", which troubles him greatly because he can't find a counterargument.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: "Censor your characters." The post would be a Cluster F-Bomb but for the substitutions. Some of the replacement words are more or less conventional ("flipping", "forget", and "fudge"), but they get stranger as the passage continues ("flaking"? "flouncing"?).
• Hero Ball: Invoked in both "Sacrifice motivation for the sake of plotting" and "Suddenly change characters' motivations." In both cases, the lead character decides to keep snooping around the enemy base even after finding the critical information they came for. Their respective companions point out that staying has no benefit, unless you think getting caught and having to make a thrilling escape is a benefit.
• Historical Domain Character: "Cater for cameos" features the characters having a brief meeting with Thomas Hobbes, with several allusions to his work (he describes a fire as "a Leviathan of a blaze", and some of the other dialogue contains quotes from the book.)
• Infodump: "Explain everything." A man on a starship hears an alarm and starts running towards the bridge, swearing as he goes. This description is stuffed to the brim with unnecessary details about the starship itself, including the design decisions behind its internal layout, the way it generates its artificial gravity, and the molecular composition of the air inside it.
• The Law of Conservation of Detail: Inverted in "Describe the Wrong Things": the narrator focuses more on Carol's wardrobe and the details of the forested landscape than on the bear attacking Carol.
• Mad Scientist: The "Designated Villain" example is one trying to cure cancer, specifically in order to render cancer charities and certain doctors out of a job, and stop cancer patient survival biographies/memoirs/whathaveyou from being written.
• Meaningful Name: "Give your characters evocative names." The piece contrasts the bold Braverly Daringman with his anxious subordinate, Nervosa Trepidala, before they receive a call from Dash Gallant.
• Meaningless Meaningful Words: "Select words for their impressiveness rather than their relevance."
• Midword Rhyme: "Abuse enjambement."
  ... the height of its ascent
  and that tableaux became cement-
  ed in my mind and in my mem-
  ory that day in late Septem-
  ber. ...
• Mills and Boon Prose: "Replace concrete nouns with abstract ones."
• Mixed Metaphor: "Mix metaphors."
  In the hollow blankness of the auditorium, my creaking cough thundered like a volcano going off, a single pistol-shot in the echoing cavern of expectation before me.
• Mockumentary: History of Grob
  "...I’m trying my hand at something new. For the most part, this blog has focused on the bad writing of fiction – implausible plot twists, awkward turns of phrase, unconvincing characters and so on. Meanwhile, non-fiction has got off all too lightly. It’s time to do something about that."
• Most Writers Are Writers: Invoked in "Write to prove a point", where the protagonist has just slaughtered all the employees of the literary agency that kept rejecting his manuscripts.
• Narm:invoked "Fail to see the funny side" warns you against making your drama unintentionally funny. The sample passage tries to be a drama about the main character learning that he has a Dream-Crushing Handicap, but it's hard to take seriously when it's in the form of a disorder with symptoms like uncontrollable farting. It doesn't help that his name sounds like "bum gale" (an Unusual Euphemism for farts) or that he reacts to the news with "I could feel the bottom falling out of my world" and excuses himself (which just makes you wonder if he has to run to the toilet).
• Narrating the Obvious: "When writing radio drama, use dialogue to set the scene."
  ALBERT: My God, Meredith! It’s Peter, your husband!
  MEREDITH: Peter! What are you doing bursting suddenly into the room with a gun in your hand and a look of fury on your face?
• Not Using the "Z" Word: "Beat around the bush." The doctor and patient discuss most of the usual symptoms and characteristics (hair growth, aggression, and aversion to silver, all linked to the full moon) without ever using the word "werewolf".
• No Name Given: "Refuse to give names to characters."
• Obviously Evil: A video on Mad Scientists purports that, perhaps Hitler's been killed so many times that the "psychotic failed artist" Hitler was only a "pale shadow" of a Big Red Devil with a toothbrush moustache, and he'll eventually degenerate to a harmless old man painting shitty watercolors.
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Dr. Billingsworth of "Write outside your comfort zone" is highly accomplished in physics, geology, biology, mathematics, and even literature. His feats in these fields have absolutely no relation to reality.
• Only the Author Can Save Them Now: Invoked in "Write yourself into a corner." Captain Dash Gallant is about to be gassed to death in an impenetrable cell aboard an enemy spaceship. The aliens have no interest in negotiating, his allies are nowhere nearby and have no clue he's in trouble, and the rest of the ship would be just as deadly as the cell even if he could get out. He even thinks to himself that "[h]is luck had finally run out". The next post was, naturally, "Write yourself out of a corner."
• Parody: The Homage WeekNon-Contiguous Homage Fortnight, which includes stylistic parodies of:
  • The Bible: here.
  • Raymond Chandler: here.
  • Charles Dickens: here.
  • Ernest Hemingway: here.
  • James Joyce: here.
  • H. P. Lovecraft: here.
  • Vladimir Nabokov: here.
  • J. R. R. Tolkien: here.
  • P. G. Wodehouse: here.
• Painful Rhyme:
  • Invoked in "Change sentence structure for the benefit of your rhyme scheme."
    ‘So short is life,’ you made the valid point,
    Although the statement’s structure you disjoint(ed).
  • See also Midword Rhyme, above.
• Planet of Hats: Ripped a new one in the "Assume all Aliens are the Same" video.
  Joel: We're going to struggle if we ever meet real aliens. If the first alien that we meet says that they come in peace, we're probably going to believe him. That first guy could just be a bit of a hippie. [...] Why should they all be the same? It's kind of racist of us to assume that they would be, in a way. There's probably a whole other tribe of Ewoks round the other side of Endor who sip lattes and wear suits and read in glossy magazines about deforestation threatening the indigenous tribes on the side of the planet they don't visit.
• Plot Detour: "Delay the ending." "Minkowski", who is some kind of government or military official, receives an envelope. He knows that the envelope contains the names of the double agents who are actively sabotaging his department and have already killed some of his people. He decides to have lunch before opening it.
• Politically Correct History: "Allow your characters to be centuries ahead of their time." Edward is firmly convinced that women should be allowed to vote and to work as firefighters...despite the fact that neither professional firefighters nor "the vote" even exist in his time period.
• Previously on…: "Recap the previous book". The given passage is the opening of the second book in a fantasy series, which clumsily summarizes the plot of the first book. The sentences are too long and it throws way too much information at the reader all at once.
  Daniel Peridue, newly appointed Captain of the Guard as a result of his heroics at the battle of Langtathon where he had single-handedly held the main keep of Castle Langtathon against a determined strike force of magically strengthened ape-men called Grathraks, felt uneasy.
• Ripped from the Headlines: "Be topical." Apparently the author wrote a generic framework first, and then filled in the blanks right before the story went to press.
  ‘Any news yet?’ he asked.
  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The negotiations have finished and there’s a coalition government.’
  ‘So, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats finally did a deal, did they?’ He sat down on the sofa beside her. ‘That’s predictable news.’
• Rouge Angles of Satin / Malaproper:
  • "Find the bone mote."
  • "Truss your spool-chucker."
• Said Bookism:
  • "Use rich, evocative dialogue tags." In place of "said", the passage uses all of the following: "exploded", "gushed", "impinged", "shrank", "recapitulated", "temporised", "tergiversated", "burgeoned", and "subsumed".
  • "Banish "said" from your vocabulary." The substitutes for "said" this time: "unveiled", "proclaimed", "conversed", "vocalised", "epitaphed", "stated", "recapitulated" (again), "philosophised", "gushed" (again), "questioned", "dialogued", "began", "continued", "concluded", and "ejaculated".
• Schedule Slip: Invoked in "Miss deadlines."
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: "Explain how clever you are." Why say "walking down the street" when you can say "perambulating unassumingly along the boulevard"? And that's only 5% of the first sentence.
• Shaped Like Itself: "Make your similes very accurate." Packs a half-dozen or so examples into eight sentences, starting with:
  His smile was like a row of teeth between his fleshy lips.
• She Is the King: "King Suzan I "The Woman" of Grob."
• Shown Their Work: "Include passing references to major historical events."
  • Expospeak: "Present your research in the form of dialogue."
• Sophisticated as Hell: "Don't be put off by wildly conflicting registers of language."
  I shall simply tell you what I told the jury, gentle reader – I was indeed present when the shizzle went dizzle.
• Space Whale Aesop: "Punish your characters indirectly." Underage drinking causes laser wasps to attack!
• Take That, Audience!: "Alienate your existing readership." Dash Gallant's adorable Robot Buddy, Fumblebot, has apparently been retconned or rebooted into Samantha Fumblebot, a sexy human Love Interest. In their dialogue, Dash and Samantha mock the whole idea of becoming emotionally attached to a robot as childish and idiotic.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: "Let your characters explain themselves." The suspect and the police officer explicitly state their emotions: embarrassment and fear on her side, sympathy and an ill-concealed sexual attraction on his. This is embedded in a broader inversion of Show, Don't Tell, as the characters also tell each other their perceptions, their goals, their strategies, and even their role in the story.
• Toilet Humour: Not intended by the hypothetical bad author, but definitely intended by Joel Stickley, in "Fail to see the funny side". The protagonist is suffering from "chronic, uncontrollable flatulence" and "diarrheic hyperactivity" that threatens to derail his promising career. His ski-jumping career.
• Too Dumb to Live: "Make your characters incapable of learning anything." Gretta doesn't understand that she can't simply "make friends" with a Killer Robot sent to assassinate her, even after the robot itself has explained this in unmistakable terms.
• Trapped by Mountain Lions: Invoked in "Create subplots which bear no relation to the main story."
• Unintentional Period Piece:invoked "Write in a way which will not age well" is written in a way that places it very firmly in the late 1990's. The protagonist worries about Y2K and if the future will be like The Matrix, while simultaneously playing with his Tamagotchi and rollerblading.
• Viewers Are Morons: "Underestimate your audience." The author overexplains everything. Apparently they don't trust the audience to know that a divan is a kind of chair, or that "the board" is a group of people who make decisions, or that getting fired means losing your job and the associated pay.
• Villain Decay: In-Universe. Due to Hitler's Time Travel Exemption Act and Timey-Wimey Ball, Hitler Prime is a Big Red Devil; History-books Hitler is him after 300 assassinations. Hitler-301 is a harmless old man painting watercolors on a riverbank in Austria, and there's no Hitler-302 because the timeline's so warped by then his parents decide to get a home office instead of children.
• Wanton Cruelty to the Common Comma: Invoked in "Use semicolons because you think they look good, not because you know how they work."
  Then; as if by magic; the curtain fell and the entire theatre erupted into applause. [...] Turning to the director; I said
  ’They love; me they really love; me!’