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. Stickly 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.
- And Then What?: Lord Plunderfall hasn't really thought out what he'll do if he wins, it seems.
- Artistic License – Religion: Played for Laughs with Grobian Orthodox Heresy. They conclude not that god or the gods either don't exist or don't care after their prayers go unanswered, but that he/she/they are so impressed by humanity that they don't want to spoil the show by intervening. The enforcement of morals stems not from fear of eternal punishment, but from not wanting to disappoint their fan/s.
- Ass Pull:
- 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 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".
- Author Vocabulary Calendar: "If you find a phrase you like, keep repeating it."
- 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."
- Black Comedy: "Make light of tragedy."
- "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."
- Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": "Replace real-life items with fictional alternatives."
- Can't Take Criticism: "Regard editorial input as a personal attack." Penny Scriber's reply to their editor starts with "Dear Dream-Crusher" and only goes downhill from there.
- 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.
- Character Derailment: Invoked in "Suddenly change characters' motivations."
- The Chris Carter Effect: Invoked in "Refuse to resolve mysteries."
- 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."
- 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! Raping a maid? He's just a romantic at heart!
- Designated Villain: Invoked in "Emphasise your villian'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.
- Deus ex Machina: "Write yourself out of a corner."
- 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."
- Generic Doomsday Villain: Lord Plunder 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"?).
- Hobbes Was Right: Averted. Hobbes is the cameo in "Cater for Cameos". The characters think he's a tool.
- Historical Domain Character: "Cater for cameos."
- Idiot Ball: "Sacrifice motivation for the sake of plotting."
- Info Dump: "Explain everything."
- Law of Conservation of Detail: Inverted in "Describe the Wrong Things."
- 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."
- Meaningless Meaningful Words: "Select words for their impressiveness rather than their relevance."
- Mills and Boon Prose: "Replace concrete nouns with abstract ones."
- Mixed Metaphor: "Mix metaphors."
- 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: "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."
- 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."
- Parody: The
Homage WeekNon-Contiguous Homage Fortnight, which includes stylistic parodies of: - Painful Rhyme: Invoked in "Change sentence structure for the benefit of your rhyme scheme."
- Planet of Hats: Ripped a new one in "Assume all Aliens are the Same."
- Plot Detour: "Delay the ending."
- 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.
- Ripped from the Headlines: "Be topical."
- Rouge Angles of Satin / Malaproper:
- 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".
- "Use rich, evocative dialogue tags."
- 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."
- She Is the King: "King Suzan I "The Woman" of Grob."
- Shown Their Work: "Include passing references to major historical events."
- Sophisticated as Hell: "Don't be put off by wildly conflicting registers of language."
- 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 from the previous installments/blog posts has apparently been retconned into a sexy human Love Interest. In their dialogue, the two of them 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."
- 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: "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."
- 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."
