What leads you to believe a book is poorly written?

Question

What leads you to believe a book is poorly written?

Answer 1

Details are over the top or rare.

Plot is muddled, vague, inconsistent, too complex to follow, or nonexistence.

Characters are cliche, undeveloped, or exactly the same as the other.

Sentences are short and choppy or overly long and boring.

Too much "filler", as if the author ran into too much empty pages at the end of the story, so he or she just fills it all up with nonsense that seems to go in circles.

Ends to quickly, like the author was in a hurry to get the story over with.

Too long like it's many stories jam-packed into a single novel when it should have become a series, split up.

Story line is cliche and can be found in thousands of other books.

I'm kind of picky. :)

But even if a story is poorly written, I'll still read AND enjoy it. I just wouldn't give it a 5 star rating or anything.

Answer 2

When it is just a poor variation of "it was a dark and stormy night" or "and they lived happily ever after".

Answer 3

Phrases are repeated, cliched, or inane.

Speech and characters are unbelievable, and serve no purpose to contribute to the story other than to be there.

The grammar is bad.

Plot is unoriginal, full of holes, lacking, or doesn't show up until page 500.

When an author breaks their own rules within their universes.

Characters lack flaws, or are overrun with flaws just so they won't be the typical 'marysue'. Or they are completely unrelatable.

Info dumps are also very bad.

There are many more, but those are just the basics. My suggestion is read Twilight, and use that as a guide for What Not To Do When Creating a Novel.

Answer 4

When I just don't care.

I want to care one way or the other about the main character(s). Hate them or love them, just something!

If he bores me to tears with too much description or overly purple prose.

If there's no action, just endless navel-gazing and philosophizing.

If his actions lead me to believe that his self-absorption is going to be the main point of the novel.

Then I think the book is poorly written.

Answer 5

Sentences that don't fit together well - you can write a surprisingly good book using awkward grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure (The Road by Cormac McCarthy for one), but you've got to use it to give your book a sort of 'voice', otherwise it just comes across as poor writing.

Too much filler - Twilight in particular is guilty of this one, with over 300 pages and almost no plot. Do we really need several hundred descriptions of Edward's beauty and perfection?

Too much repetition - this is a sort of subcategory of the 'too much filler' category. Yes, Edward looks like a marble statue. However, this detail can be mentioned only once or twice, not 38 times in the same book.

No details. Setting is an important part of the story - in Lord of the Rings, we're given a lot of detail (although it's almost too much detail at some parts) and descriptions of how places looked. How many of you have heard someone say a particularly beautiful part of a forest 'looks like Middle-Earth' before the movies came out? Maybe it was just the kind of people I hang out with, but the point is, we were able to say that something real 'looked like' something that had only been described to us in books.

Lame or cliche ending or 'plot twist'. I can't think of any books in particular, but the vast majority of YA fiction contains one or more examples of this. Also, this includes the 'fanfiction rip-off ending' like Breaking Dawn has, or 'plot device grab bag' like the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie had.

Answer 6

LiviaAnn pretty much sums it all up.  For me a book is poorly written if an author becomes sooo involved in the details that it distracts from the storyline.  I read a book recently where the author endlessly spewed off detail after detail, that it really distracted from what the storyline was about.