Can bad writing add realism to a story?

So my story is told in the first person past tense, with my protagonist telling the audience about something that happened. We're introduced to a new character and the narrator goes one a tangent, where they give a detailed explanation of this character's life story. The narrator justifies this because this character will play a bigger role in later in the story. I know that doing this would be very blatant foreshadowing and a clumsy way to deal with exposition. However, doesn't this add some realism to the story? If someone is re-telling a story about something that happened to them, they're not going to care about story conventions. What are your thoughts?

Such expositional tangents are avoided because they tend to be boring. Your protagonist is speaking to a crowd. Unless it's someone testifying in court, they are basically a storyteller trying to entertain people. Imagine if someone was telling you a super interesting tale, and then stopped for 15 minutes to describe someone's life story. Most people would demand the protagonist either get to the point or at least clarify why that history is important and we should care.

That said, it's not like this exposition has to be long and boring. If you don't include unnecessary details that are irrelevant to their role to the story, it can be done efficiently and painlessly. (Heist movies and such come to mind. Often, several characters are introduced and a brief history of them is given in a very quick pace.)

Well the exposition is going to be about three-four paragraphs at the most. Would that be too long?

Depends on the length of the paragraphs, but generally I would say no.

Sometimes real life is very bad for story telling: imagine a man enduring years as a POW in hellish camps, finding Jesus, and then immediately getting hit by a truck. Like Un Broken, but with an ending that renders the whole thing moot. Of course, in real life it didn't happen, but if it did happen, than a movie wouldn't be made of it, because no one would be inspired to make it, and no one would want to read it. Sorta like a chicktract where the protagonist dies, but even then that's a good ending because at least it means that they'll go to Heaven. Or imagine a film about the Rape of Nanking, that establishes how horrible and terrible everything is, and just depresses you. In real life, the horror and hopelessness caused depression and suicide, but part of the reason why we have films is to have points in them. City of Life and Death still portrays it as the horrible even that it was, but manages to avoid Darkness Induced Apathy. Sometimes you really do have to choose between realism and storytelling ability and quality.

edited 27th Feb '18 8:52:06 AM by frnmmma25

No.

Once, Scott Westerfeld wrote a YA book with half of it being in his good book writing style and half being as if he were a debut author out of highschool writing a bland paranormal romance. Only half this book was good. You know which half it was.

In general, bad writing sucks to read, so I rather not read it.

It sounds to me like there are two questions in the OP, one being 'can a story be written in a style that is non-standard from a narrative point of view - told by an inexperienced raconteur "in their own words"?' the other being 'is it OK to shove in a bit of exposition/foreshadowing in a clumsy manner?'

From the acknowledgements in the OP, I'd say that it answers the second question in the negative all by itself. If it's clunky and blatant, it is going to come off as clunky and blatant, no matter how you dress it up.

As to the first, I'm going to go with "depends". If it's not overdone or too "bad", it might work and lend an air of authenticity and personal colour to the narrative, if overdone to the point that it's difficult to follow/comprehend and gets confusing because narrative structure goes out the window, then it's going to put people off, fast.

As an example, an entire book written as the narrative of a character (say a conversation in a pub as a framing device) with Funetik Aksent such as I use for the speech of my NZ characters or Teri (Cockney) would be extremely hard to read quickly and smoothly and if it were compounded with bad narrative technique, it would rapidly tire the readers:

Ah, yeah, well, anyway, as I was sayin', these blokes came down th'road 'n' saw th'car lyin' on its side in th'ditch 'n' Fred - he was th'big guy who was goin' out with Dave's sister. Dave was th'best friend-a the short guy, Bill.

Anyhow, Fred stops th'truck - I forgot t'mention these blokes were in Fred's truck - 'n' gets out 'n' looks at this fucked car on its side 'n' decides that the only thing t'do...

It's going to get old really fast, especially if the narrator keeps running off on tangents or forgetting to provide salient information in the right place and having to digress to put it in later. Not saying it's impossible to pull off but if the character is too bad a story-teller, then it's going to be a badly-told story.

Generally the best thing to do, if you want to convey something like that is to do a switch to reported speech part way through after the initial introduction to the mode of speech: Jim (assuming the would-be raconteur's name is Jim) went on to describe how Fred and his friends got the car out of the ditch. It took some digging around the front end of the car, but they eventually managed to gain access to the reinforced towing loop...

That way you go from something that's difficult to read and badly presented to something that's more conventional and legible/intelligible without sacrificing "realism" - the reader knows that the narrator speaks/tells stories badly but ultimately gets the information in a digestible form.

That takes care of the "bad writing" aspect.

The "shoe-horn in a clunky bit of exposition and crude foreshadowing" bit: just don't. Find some way to work the exposition and foreshadowing into the story in a more subtle way.