Reading A Terrible Book (Or Not)

Sometimes, when you’re reading a terrible book, you should put it down and never pick it back up again. This is especially important if you’re a writer. It’s possible to learn how to write, and it’s possible to learn how to be creative… but you can also unlearn both of these critical traits.

How can you unlearn these two critical traits?

By reading books you believe, yourself, are terribly written, plotted, and thought of.

Now, crappy reading you need to do for school aside, you don’t need required reading when you’re an adult, and nobody has ever said you must finish a book or else die. The only books you need to finish are those you enjoy. These are the books you can’t put down, and the ones where you must know the ending. If whatever your reading is has a plot you don’t need to know the ending to, then why are you reading that book? Its narrative isn’t a necessity.

Books, at all costs, must be necessities.

Books that are begging to be read are ones that are begging to be finished.

If whatever you’re reading is not begging to be finished, then it’s one that doesn’t have to be read. There is absolutely no shame in putting down a story, whether softcover or hardcover, and never picking it back up again. You might be shamed by people you know, friends or family, but if a novel isn’t that good, do you really have to force yourself through it?

Is all of the pain, boredom, and waste of time unimportant enough to push yourself through?

No, it isn’t.

Again, there is no shame in putting down a crappy novel.

The only shame comes when you want to finish it for the sake of finishing it — waste of time or not. Whatever you’re reading must never be a waste of time, why else read it? Because other people are? Because it’s the next biggest thing? A book must match what you love. It’s not about anyone else. It’s your escape — not theirs.

Continuing to read something when it’s a waste of time never ends well.

Not only is this ticking on a dead end clock, but you cannot learn from a terrible novel. You might learn how to write terribly from a terrible novel, but you will never learn how to write well from one. 

Every single lesson you’ll learn from a terrible bit of reading will be echoed in your own work because you’ve accepted how the writer had written as ‘acceptable’, simply by finishing it. Putting it down would have clicked in your mind as, ‘I will never write like this,’ and you would have moved on to the next part of your reading list without accepting terrible writing as good writing. 

Not finishing a book implants it as, ‘no good’.

Finishing a book implants it as, ‘good’.

No matter what other people believe, as a writer, we must choose what we put into our brains very carefully, or else face the fact that we have either unlearned how to write, or have learned to write how shitty writers write by accepting them into the fold of books you’ve finished.

An act of disregarding a bit of writing will always be putting it down and leaving it.

Allowing yourself to do so will shape how you read into how you write.

Being able to shape your style, your characters, and each and every other tool us writers use to create will always be learned from what we read. Accepting every novel, rather than rejecting the crap, will hinder our creative processes by allowing every lesson to be a right, or correct, learning experience.

But, there are good learning experiences and there are bad ones.

How is your brain to differentiate the two if you don’t disregard the bad ones by putting the book, or books, down?

Writing a review doesn’t always work because you still swallowed the lesson as a lesson to learn and have been learned. You still swallowed crap medicine. You still swallowed a crap experience. If you decide not to swallow a lesson, as it can’t exactly be spat back up, putting down a shit read for good is the best way to do so.

How else is your brain to differentiate a lesson from good or bad?

The only way is by cutting yourself off from what you don’t want to learn.

As a writer, choosing and unchoosing what to read must be the biggest gift you give yourself and your creativity.

Your work will thank you.