Even the most abjectly pitiful crappy novel is made up from the basic building block of bad sentences. If you cannot write a bad sentence, you may write an overlong novel, a pretentious novel, a lifeless novel, or even a nasty, slick, meaningless novel; but if the individual sentences themselves do not reek of mildew and gush slime onto the very eyeballs of the hapless reader, then your work will never descend into the infernal pantheon of the truly Bad.
But fear not! Through painstaking (and painful) research, aided inestimably by the Bulwer-Lytton Contest archives, I have determined five simple methods which even the most inexperienced Bad writer can use to make his or her sentences suppurate like yellow-green pustules on the face of the Muse.
Almost any sentence can be rendered infinitely less pleasing by including in it two words which rhyme, or nearly do, or otherwise give the sentence or a phrase within it the effect of unintended doggerel.
Take, for instance, this harmless if workmanlike sentence:
"Taking her by the hand, he helped her along the beach as the tide rolled in."
With one simple word change it can be rendered quite annoying; enough so that the more sensitive reader may be forced to close the book entirely:
"Taking her by the hand, he helped her along the sand as the tide rolled in."
This bad version will stick in the reader's head like the hook from a Britney Spears song, driving out all larger considerations, such as plot and character.
The best way to spot opportunities for badness of this type is to read your work aloud, or at least 'pronounce' each word in your head as you look it over. Doing so is also the best way to work in variations on the same word repeatedly in the sentence or in adjacent sentences, and to wreak the kind of subtle havoc with sentence rhythm that is a highly advanced Bad Writing technique. To learn more about abusing sentence rhythms, see the section entitled 'The Sentence' in chapter 6 of John Gardner's The Art of Fiction.
This technique is most effective when used in combination with others, such as the Dramatic Tone Change or the Interminable Run-on. However, metaphor alone can raise substantial bile against a sentence, especially when it is a blatant cliche or when over-use creates a comical pseudo-theme, as here:
"Her pansy cheeks blushed a deeper shade of rose as I spoke to her, and she cast down her violet eyes and covered her soft, petal-pink lips with a slender, lily-like hand - she was a natural wallflower, after all, and green at the art of flirtation."
Change your metaphors to similes and cope with four or five repetitions of the words 'like' and 'as' in a single sentence for more syntax-twisting fun. Or just chuck a metaphor or simile into every single sentence of a short story and watch your readers cringe in delight! The otherwise esteemed Michael Gira is a master of this technique.
There are two varieties of this error: the Dramatic Up-Turn and the Dramatic Down-Turn. The latter is the more common; it is, in fact, the basis of many common jokes. It occurs when you start with lofty, Latinate language or poetical imagery and abruptly switch to the slangy or the scatological, creating ironic tension:
"The wine was lovely, richly evocative of the vineyards of France sparkling in the sunlight under a shawl of dewdrops, of lovers picnicking with a loaf and a bottle, of pastoral yet still intellectual, or at least artistic, lives lived in the fin-de-siecle; unfortunately I had drunk far too much of it and now I needed to piss like a racehorse."
Note how the effect is heightened by a simile that is also a cliche.
To create the Dramatic Up-Turn merely reverse this pattern. You can also produce an infinitely grating wave-like effect by combining pairs of Up-Turns and Down-Turns one after the other.
Some people consider this a subset of the Grammatical Error Proper, and it is taught as such in the schools, but in truth it is possible to write incredibly long sentences that break no specific rule of grammar. Indeed, in limited circumstances, they may be Good sentences, even the best sentences for the job at hand; but they are strong medicine and like all strong medicine may be poisonous if used at the wrong time and place.
In creating a truly effective Bad Long Sentence, you must eschew the simple technique of merely stringing together a bunch of inoffensive short sentences with commas and semicolons; your editor will spot this and correct it. Instead use lots of elaborate metaphors and similes, load each noun with as many adjectives as it will carry (ditto with adverbs on verbs), and add as many parenthetical asides on irrelevant topics as come to mind. Thus will you create a Bad Long Sentence that cannot be conveniently divided without changing its meaning, creating despair and terror in the hearts of those around you.
The use of excessively short sentences which are not Grammatical Errors Proper by dint of being fragments is curiously ineffective as a Bad Sentence technique. Several suck strung together in a paragraph or on a page can be irritating, to be sure, but then again they may just as easily get you hailed as the next Hemingway. The individual short complete sentence is almost never truly Bad merely by virtue of its length.
Many Bad Writers scorn to consider the Grammatical Error Proper as a technique, thinking that it will only irritate copy-editors and English teachers. This may be true if all you know is how to dangle the occasional participle or use an inappropriate whom. But the carefully applied G.E.P. can raise any reader's frustrations readily, by keeping the true elucidation of meaning ever-so-tantilizingly out of reach.
Consider: couldn't even your worst sentences be made a little worse by changing tenses in the middle of the stream? By referring to singular characters with plurals, creating the expectation of a mob scene which will never occur, or by the reverse, forcing the reader to wonder where everyone has gone? By simply loading on pronouns so that the reader is forced to scan back several paragraphs - or pages - attempting to figure out just who or what s/he is reading of? Surely the well-educated Bad Writer can think of dozens of ways to massacre meaning with apparently schoolboyish mistakes.
Now, we have considered the methods of Bad Writing on the sentence level. No discussion of the topic would be complete, of course, without also taking into account meta-Bad books, or books that, while they may or may not be adequate on the sentence level, fail spectacularly when taken as a whole. There are three levels, which I will discuss separately although in truth they fall on a continuum:
* In actualy point of fact, No One Noticed the Cat is _almost_ good enough to be a Semi-Bad book. A better example of Trash would be anything ever by Danielle Steele, but I can't physically bring myself to read any of her work as I rather suspect that my head would explode.