100 Actual Worst Writers Of All Time

1) Adam Thirlwell

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jan/24/adam-thirlwell-author-author

"...had taken the pseudonym of Daniel Kharms (a name derived from English, with its charm, its harm)"

2) Laura Barton obvs ffs

3. Kate Harding

4. Jerry Jenkins

5. Dan Fucking Brown

(for the dismal quality of his actual writing, for the baneful trends he begat upon popular American fiction, and for the dumptruck o' cash he gained from the whole grim enterprise)

6. James Patterson (or the army of hacks that writes his books for him)

yeah, I recently found myself in a situation in which I had a fair amount of hours to kill & nothing to involve myself with, save for a copy of Kiss the Girls. I finished the thing in a matter of hours (not boasting of my speed-reading ability - I'm actually average at best in that regard - I'm just underlining how vapid his writing style is) & immediately forgot what I had read, like I had just seen a Bruckheimer film or eaten a large quantity of bland junk food: there was enough there to propel me through the experience & nothing overtly offensive to the senses or anything - it was just perfectly empty. In terms of crime/detective fiction, then, I guess it was sort of the anti-James Ellroy.

7. Tim LaHaye and/or Jerry Jenkins

I thought you were saying Daniel Kharms was a bad writer and I was FLABBERGASTED!

Jeff Archer is surely a rolled-gold certainty in this category.

'As The Crow Flies', all 700+ pages of lazy, bombastic self-indulgence, is the most egregious example of his trademark turgid prose, shallow characterisation and ludicrous coincidence-driven plot-progression. He never misses an opportunity to pat himself on the back for his own clever research, and his habit of pointlessly obscuring details (that you realise don't matter much wnen they are finally revealed 300 pages later) was nearly enough to make me throw the book out of the train window somewhere between Perth and Adelaide.

anne rice. (i actually liked interview with a vampire when i was 17, but i couldn't make it past about page 50 of lestat, and then a few years later i tried one of her witch books and it was just godawful.)

(with pop novelists especially, you can tell that once they reach a certain level of success they're able to just ignore their editors, and their writing gets predictably worse and worse.)

Archer's books allegedly have to be extensively rewritten from the manuscripts he turns in, so christ alone knows what his actual writing's like.

9. It's gonna be easy to fill this list up with hacks and pop fiction so I might as well start the "how dare you diss my favourite author?" bunfight by citing D.H. Lawrence as probably the worst critically admired writer I've ever read.

You bastard. I'd save him for his travel writing and lit crit stuff alone.

Yeah his criticism is worthy, the novels not so much.

I can live with his poems, to be fair. But fuck me his novels have got some bad bad sentences happening.

is your username from a dh lawrence novel?

11. Michael Bracewell!!

well...not really, this is just based on me picking up England is Mine again the other day and being shocked at the quality of the writing. haven't bothered with any of his other stuff.

xpost haha no? which one?

12. Thomas Friedman

13. a baby

14. Ayn Rand

James 'Celestine Prophecy' Redfield.

erm sorry, that's #15.

16. Daniel Handler

okay, maybe it's not fair to put a writer on the list when i've only read one of his many books, but that one book (adverbs) inspired a feeling of revulsion and hatred toward the writer that i had never experienced before. also, there's the accordion playing, the multiple pseudonyms, etc. etc.

thank you, noodle vague.

Don't know that he's one of the absolute worst, in that he can write, but Iain Sinclair is annoying to anger-inducing levels.

#12 otm

also thank you for DH Lawrence. I cannot for the life of me get into any of his novels.

18. V.C. Andrews

bbbbut Flowers in the Attic... you know, for kids (I remember liking that story at age 9 or so).

19. J.R.R. Tolkein

20. Will Self

21. Carol Ann Duffy

22. Philip K Dick

This thread could get ugly.

was about to suggest Phillip k Dick, what a bloody mess.

23. Me

24 Paolo Coelho

25. J.M. Coetzee - sorry, but it's true :( :( :(

26. Jeff Noon

27. Michael Crichton

28. Stephen King after Misery

29. hegel

30. E.E. "Doc" Smith, although you have to love him too really.

31. Henry James

32. Bram Stoker

33. C.S Lewis

Primarily for the God-bothering bilge, but why not let's chuck Narnia in there too.

Matt DC out of his mind.

yeah i think he's one of those writers where there's a huge gap between the different kinds of stuff. like his three collections of his short fiction are awesome, great, etc. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil was awful awful awful and his non fiction stuff was just ok. but his short fiction is so good, who cares.

that GWBush novella

i take it you mean the Phil book, right?

Has anyone here actually read "Dracula"? It is out of control.

I really loved how postmodern it was, actually.

n addition to the narrowness, there's an overreliance on cutie-pie, wide-eyed childishness in the tone, a sort of half-mocking "child's voice" style that isn't actually tied to the voice of any particular child. it helps get across an ordinary-guy-thinkin-bout-stuff vibe, and allows saunders to slip easily back and forth between irony and sincerity, horror and comedy (a big part of his stock-in-trade), but it seems cheap, somehow. it feels like "internet writing" to me: infantilized, approval-seeking, compulsively self-mocking, and yeah -- often funny and brilliant, too.

applies to the guy i put first on this list. the faux-naif thing.

er, mr que, who reckons that 'american psycho' or 'glamorama' is, like, good writing? it's a minutely realized terrible prose style belonging to a terrible person. for 500 pages. each to their own, of course, but it's a big demand, however well he pulls it off.

i thought you meant BEE was deliberately writing badly

donna tartt maybe? pompous, over-dramatic.

I recently saw the theatrical adaptation of George Saunders's short story "Jon," and Saunders was there for a Q&A afterward. People kept saying things like, "What are you trying to say about American culture?" and "You obviously think advertising is harmful," but he cautioned them not to read too much into that aspect of it, noting that the dystopian elements were a weird and interesting jumping-off point for a love story rather than the basis for some kind of sneaky satirical commentary.

xpost I haven't read The Little Friend, but The Secret History is great, shut your mouth.

fwiw i am not a big fan of his nonfiction

― max

^ this. in the nightmarish, pop surrealist sci-fi short fiction stuff, saunders' stylistic quirks don't bother me in the least. the cute/horrific balace is a big part of what makes those stories work. it's only when he tries to write essays, observations and "mainstream fiction" that the tone becomes cloying (see above).

like how j lethem's style is great for oddball genre pastiche, but maybe not so much for epic coming of age novels about race and culture in america (i'm more on the fence about that one, though).

edit: que OTM. i started with phil and braindead megaphone, more of less by accident, which turns out to have been the worst possible approach. has colored my impression, perhaps unfairly.

how wuz the adaptation jaymc???

haha secret history is the only one i've read. i probably wouldn't have been so critical if the book hadn't been praised to the skies to me.

how wuz the adaptation jaymc???

Pretty awesome. It was done by a small theater company in Chicago where someone just happened to really like Saunders's work, and he contacted him out of the blue, and they collaborated on the adaptation. I hope it gets produced elsewhere.

the worst novel that was recommended to me & i actually expected to be good & i actually read all to the end was that alain de botton joint where dude oh-so-preciously dissects some b.s. relationship and decides hes right about everything - realized the first time i ever saw xkcd this is what it reminded me of

Contenderizer, I think if you read far enough back through Saunders you might (might) start to look on that tone not as some cartwheeling cutie-pie simplification, but as something that can be a whole lot richer than that. In a lot of spaces that tone's deployed as the way various mid-level authority figures talk and think, and it has this way of getting at character that I'd never really seen before Saunders -- he uses forms of that tone to peg people's types far beyond what they're actually saying.

Banville! I tried The Book of Evidence once and just ... never have I felt quite so disconnected from the older Brit lit establishment that gives awards to such stuff.

P.S. If you asked me if I thought Saunders's recent quasi-political bent was an interestingly ambitious thing to be trying to do, I would say yes; if you asked me if I thought it was anywhere near as good as what he was doing before, I would say no; if you asked me if I liked anything in In Persuasion Nation as much as the simple story about the roofers, I would say no, except "Bohemians" was pretty great

I think Samuel Richardson, author of Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded and Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady is the worst writer in the history of fiction and the history of the English language. Both books (the only two I've read, he has a third that I haven't) have a few notably wtf moments that at least brighten things up, but for the most part, reading them is like being forced to eat a boiled orca in one sitting: a grim, wrong chore.

A sample opening to a chapter of Pamela, which reads like the opening to every chapter of volume I:

O MY DEAREST FATHER AND MOTHER!

Let me write, and bewail my miserable hard fate, though I have no hope
how what I write can be conveyed to your hands!--I have now nothing to
do, but write and weep, and fear and pray! But yet what can I hope for,
when I seem to be devoted, as a victim to the will of a wicked violator
of all the laws of God and man!--But, gracious Heaven, forgive me my
rashness and despondency! O let me not sin against thee; for thou best
knowest what is fittest for thy poor handmaid!--And as thou sufferest not
thy poor creatures to be tempted above what they can bear, I will resign
myself to thy good pleasure: And still, I hope, desperate as my condition
seems, that as these trials are not of my own seeking, nor the effects of
my presumption and vanity, I shall be enabled to overcome them, and, in
God's own good time, be delivered from them.

Thus do I pray imperfectly, as I am forced by my distracting fears and
apprehensions; and O join with me, my dear parents!--But, alas! how can
you know, how can I reveal to you, the dreadful situation of your poor
daughter! The unhappy Pamela may be undone (which God forbid, and sooner
deprive me of life!) before you can know her hard lot!

O the unparalleled wickedness, stratagems, and devices, of those who call
themselves gentlemen, yet pervert the design of Providence, in giving
them ample means to do good, to their own everlasting perdition, and the
ruin of poor oppressed innocence!

But now I will tell you what has befallen me; and yet, how shall you
receive it? Here is no honest John to carry my letters to you! And,
besides, I am watched in all my steps; and no doubt shall be, till my
hard fate may ripen his wicked projects for my ruin. I will every day,
however, write my sad state; and some way, perhaps, may be opened to send
the melancholy scribble to you. But, alas! when you know it, what will
it do but aggravate your troubles? For, O! what can the abject poor do
against the mighty rich, when they are determined to oppress?

Well, but I must proceed to write what I had hoped to tell you in a few
hours, when I believed I should receive your grateful blessings, on my
return to you from so many hardships.

aw they hadn't figured out how to write fiction yet in the eighteenth century

Which is why I LOVE 18th century fiction! Srsly all of it I love except Richardson which is *96 tears.*

i sort of want to defend richardson but i never read clarissa and i never will and i don't really know what i'm talking about. pamela is a supercreepy book, for sure.

I mean I read a book like Castle of Otranto and I'm like 'DAMN why does no one write like this anymore?' (Okay I'm not too crazy abt Frances Burney's stuff either but she's not a bad writer.)

re abbot's richardson excerpt
that's brilliant. there is so much sly ambiguity and moral questioning in the way he uses language. he calls forth so many ideas within each sentence, delineating pamela's character and implicitly criticising the social law of her time.

reading Tristram Shandy has really helped me realize how wtf/awesome the 18th century was

i like burney. this is getting into stuff i am a stan of but am embarrassed about being a stan of territory.

(xpost 19th century pretty much sux tho)

If you asked me if I thought Saunders's recent quasi-political bent was an interestingly ambitious thing to be trying to do, I would say yes; if you asked me if I thought it was anywhere near as good as what he was doing before, I would say no; if you asked me if I liked anything in In Persuasion Nation as much as the simple story about the roofers, I would say no, except "Bohemians" was pretty great

Are we making headway in Iraq? Yes. Am I satisfied with every aspect of our operation? No. Do we have a long way to go? You're darn tootin. I hope that answers your question.

but, i can see how it could get wearying.

Clarissa is like 1,200 pages of a woman slowly dying after being raped.

that is crazy talk about the nineteenth century

xposts haha yeah that's what english lit is all about.

yeah...i am not putting myself forward to read clarissa anytime soon, but pamela i will.

Man Henry I wish we could've like sat under a tree and read Pamela together bcz maybe it is something more to you than what it was to me, which was primarily a burden.

Actually I am watching season 1 of Dynasty and Krystal kind of reminds me of Pamela after Pamela got married.

Shamela by Fielding, I am so glad it exists, and it's like he invented Mad Magazine. "How about Everybody HATES Raymond? It took us all night, but it was worth it."

hahaha are you for real?

I think McGonagall's 'The Famous Tay Whale' is even worse than the more celebrated 'The Tay Bridge Disaster': http://www.taynet.co.uk/users/mcgon/taywhale.htm

Some favourite verses:

Then the water did descend on the men in the boats,
Which wet their trousers and also their coats;
But it only made them the more determined to catch the whale,
But the whale shook at them his tail.

I am bad with poetry and often have trouble finding the right meter, but here I'm confident that's not my fault.

And was first seen by the crew of a Gourdon fishing boat,
Which they thought was a big cobble upturned afloat;
But when they drew near they saw it was a whale,
So they resolved to tow it ashore without fail.

two of the next four verses also have a not-really-sensical use of the phrase "without fail".

well, im only going by your excerpt, which i think is compelling. the experience of reading the book is something i can't predict.

In a lot of spaces that tone's deployed as the way various mid-level authority figures talk and think, and it has this way of getting at character that I'd never really seen before Saunders -- he uses forms of that tone to peg people's types far beyond what they're actually saying.

― nabisco

is this kind of comic reductivism unique to saunders? i dunno. i want to say "no", but am not sure where else to look. i pointed at chris ware's jimmy corrigan upthread, though that's not an entirely apt comparison (ware doesn't know when enough is enough, but then again, he justifies the character's childishness by connecting past with present).

plus i think we're just fated to disagree on this, cuz the story about the roofers doesn't stand out as the head-and-shoulders best thing about IPN, though i did quite like it. i probably most liked the long story about the revolt of the advertising mascots.

Oh I thought you'd read the book and had some insight into what the hell its deal was.

Bernard I am about 43% serious.

xp to Henry

i love the 18th century, so rad, its sort of like the 21st century i think, but with more landowners

james fennimore cooper is a true bag of crap writer.

that is a good one, yes

the real answer to this is probably a bunch of supermarket checkout line historical fiction authors none of us can put a name to tho.

Read "Al Rooster" -- don't think it's as good as similar stuff from around Pastoralia, but I really don't think of the tone or the character as particularly cartoonish! I mean, that kind of character works best for Saunders when he's got a person who could seem cartoonish and he invests them a level of dignity, so they're constantly teetering around the possibilities of being noble and being pathetic, and he winds up with lines and turns that are either incredibly hilarious or incredibly sad and usually both at once. Not at lot of that in this one -- it's definitely not his best -- but there are plenty of bits that don't strike me as cartoonish at all, if you're accepting the character as someone extant a dignified.

(Out of curiosity, does something like this strike you as cartoonish?)

The sickness of a kid was—the children were the future. He’d do anything to help that kid. If one of the boys had a bent foot, he’d move heaven and earth to get it fixed. He’d rob a bank. And if the boy was a girl, even worse. Who’d ask a clubfoot or bentfoot or whatever to dance? There your daughter sat, with her crutch, all dressed up, not dancing.

it is cartoonish -- we see immediatly that the POV character is self-deluding, narcissistic and perhaps a bit simple-minded: telling himself nice though untrue things in order to sustain his ego. and it's cartoonish in that this simplification is meant to be funny (on that level it works: this is one of the story's best, funniest passages).

there's something sentimental in the approach, something indie-schmindie. i mean, saunders seems to view sentimentality, hopefulness, and delusional comfort-lying as essential to the human experience, and i guess i agree with him there. but on the other hand, the baby-talk feels like device designed to short-circuit accusations of simplicity/sentimentality in the writing by declaratively foregrounding these qualities, making them the character attributes he's observing? (or something less cynical than that, but similar in effect...)

Yeah okay contenderizer I just disagree with you entirely on that point, and possibly in larger view-of-the-universe stuff. I find that quoted paragraph to be ... well, kinda flatly true, in exactly the terms many average people would think about it. And weighty and complex, really, if you allow the thought the dignity that's inherent in the thought! There's often a lot of funniness in the tone he uses to boil those things down, it's true, but for me it tends to be the funniness of recognition, the funniness of these things seeming shared.

i get that, and agree that he accords "ordinary thought" a kind of awkward dignity, while not denying its ordinariness (in fact he plays up the ordinariness for laffs/bathos, which is a fine strategy, but it can get precious/cloying).

i mean, the paragraph IS true, and lovely, and funny, and human in a smudgy kid-fingerprints on the fridge door sense. but you have to admit that he's also boxing his "al roosten" character into a neat little moral cubbyhole: "If one of the boys had a bent foot, he’d move heaven and earth to get it fixed. He’d rob a bank." al constructs an imaginary problem that he can imagine himself heroically solving -- but even his "heroic" solution is pathetically unrelated to reality. he's not gonna rob a bank. he wouldn't know how. he wouldn't even try. and i would find this charming if, by the end of the story, saunder's condemnation of roosten were not so crushingly complete.

it's an example of what i meant at first when i said i was bothered by the cuteness in combination with the intimations of profundity. gentle cuteness on its own doesn't bother me at all, so long as it's well-executed. in "the secret life of walter mitty" (published almost exactly 70 years ago in the new yorker, weird), thurber presents us with no less cartoonish a character. but thurber's fondness for mitty and his lack of interest in moral judgement makes the cartoonishness inoffensive, even pleasant. plus, you know, the snappy writing.

i get why one might want to turn that idea on its head, to show how cruelly thoughtless escapist self-involvement can be, the horrible character flaws it can paper over, but i didn't get anything out of the experience. it felt more sneery than edifying or entertaining. like a lite comedy version of one of those bug-crushing michael haneke movies.

maybe you're right that we're just too far from seeing eye-to-eye on this...

Shamela by Fielding, I am so glad it exists, and it's like he invented Mad Magazine. "How about Everybody HATES Raymond? It took us all night, but it was worth it."

So so OTM, Abbott

ctrl-f nabisco

ice cold, bro

see, and i thought you was in my corner, deej

6. James Patterson (or the army of hacks that writes his books for him)

Best-selling crime author James Patterson will release a new kind of novel next month - one that's been collaboratively written with the crowd. Called AirBorne, the upcoming novel will feature 30 chapters, each written by a different author except the first and last - those will be written by Patterson himself. With the release of this book, it appears the Web 2.0 movement of collaborative writing is about to hit the mainstream.

About the Novel
Earlier, Borders Australia and Random House held a contest to find twenty-eight writers who would be able to write the bulk of the book. The chapters they produce will need to be less than 750 words so, obviously, this book will be a little lighter than Patterson's other novels.

Once complete, Airborne will be released electronically, one chapter at a time, starting on March 20th. Later, a print edition will be published, but only as a prize of sorts for the participants in the competition - it will not be mass produced.

Collaborative Writing is So Very Web 2.0
The roots of the collaborative writing movement can be found in many web startups, including those like Novlet, Potrayl, Ficlets, Unblokt, Protagonize, and others we profiled here. A popular activity for creative writers, these communities offer various takes on how a co-written story should be developed, some focused more on "choose your own adventure"-style stories while others focus more on linear narratives.

Although the James Patterson novel is more of a marketing campaign than anything else - and, in this case, the "crowd" is actually a hand-picked selection of aspiring writers - it's still interesting to see such a widely-read writer embracing the co-writing trend. While those passionate about the subject may say this particular effort doesn't qualify since it isn't truly written by "the crowd," it's events like this that take the general idea behind the trend and cross it over to where it can make a mark on the minds of the mainstream.

What remains to be seen at this point is whether a crowdsourced, co-written novel can actually be any good.

Those interested in following the progress of AirBorne can do so on Facebook, Twitter, and via RSS.

i love the 18th century, so rad, its sort of like the 21st century i think, but with more landowners

― max, Thursday, February 5, 2009 7:00 PM

max, u r a treat.

Stephen King obv

mitch albom

gregg easterbrook

wasn't lots of authors writing a chapter each a fairly common gimmick for novels in the 19th century (at least)? Although Henry James probably didn't ever invite a bunch of randoms on his Facebook to write with him.