The best way to read terrible fiction is to join a critique group and read other amateurs. This is good because you can run across different levels of writers:
* People who have no business writing and have no idea what they're doing. These are not going to give you much, which is why you want to keep to groups that have some gatekeeping.
* Beginners who are not that talented but can develop skill. These people are good because you can see what it looks like to go from nothing to something, even if that something isn't great
* Untalented people who are workhorses and can do the job: these people are probably the most valuable "bad writers"
* Talented people who suck. These people are also amazing because you can see the power of skill as it develops
* Talented people who are very good. (These won't be in your group)
But really all this about "analyze why the book sucks" is a red herring. What is far more instructive is understanding why something that you don't like is appealing. If you can find what works in something you don't like, it's a lot more likely that you'll be able to understand that technique.
Best selling thrillers with bad dialog and paper characters? Great. That means you can focus on the pacing and plot and understand why the book works despite its obvious flaws. That's harder though because it isn't just stroking your own ego by saying "aw I could do that"
I used to do standup comedy at the mostly amateur level. One woman who was always at the same shows was so unfunny, she could suck the life out of any room.
I always tried to study her, thinking that if I could understand the essence of why she was so deeply unfunny, I could understand the secret to being funny.
Sadly I could never figure it out. Her unfunniness was inscrutable.
The OP is about writing. Stand Up Comedy != Writing, stand up comedy is mostly a performance (art) with a little bit of writing.
I realized this after doing stand up comedy for over 12 years.
I don't know what makes good writing but I know that if it gets a laugh then it's a good joke.
No one has figured out the rules of what is good stand up comedy which is probably why studying comedy using "via negativa" or any other logical approach may not work.
Steve Martin touched upon this a little bit in his book "Born Standing Up" and there is a mention of his Philosophy background on his wikipedia page
Some of the best stand-up comedy I enjoy isn's some guy cracking jokes, it's someone telling a story. The story is as common as can be, just something that happened in their childhood or on the way to the shops, something banale. But then it's the presentation and the absurdity of something relatable that makes it funny.
I've read quite a few books on writing comedy and stand up comedy and far and away the best for understanding the mechanics of it was What Are You Laughing At? A Comprehensive Guide to the Comedic Event by Dan O'Shannon.
Some basic golden rules:
Comedy is about surprise. Don't let them see the punchline coming.
Related to the above, make sure you've done enough setup so the audience can reach the punchline. An obvious connection to you might be not be so obvious to the audience. The punchline will flop if the gap between the setup and the punchline is too large for the audience to connect the dots.
Lie when you're meant to tell the truth. Tell the truth when you're meant to lie.
The funniest word or part of the joke needs to be at the end of the sentence.
Don't change your delivery for the punchline. Tell it straight and commit to it. Changing your delivery for the punchline is equivalent to putting a laugh track on a old style sitcom. If you have to prompt people to laugh, it's not funny.
Utilise the rule of three.[1]
Be as concise as possible.*
If you're telling a story, heighten the details even if that means lying about what actually happened. My friend has a story about a barfight in Thailand. The first time he told it, 5 people ran out of the bar to join him in the fight. The second time he told it 20 people ran out of the bar to join in the fight. The last time I heard it, everyone in the bar ran out and joined in the fight. The last one is inherently funnier because the chaos is heightened. Google Bert Kresicher's advice on telling stories for more info and examples, he's one of the best storytelling comedians around at the minute.
A related rule is, when telling a story based on a real life anecdote, recall the story and not the event. Unless you've got photographic recall, if you try and recall the event as you lived it, you're going to get trapped trying to remember precise details and you'll slow down the joke and people will zone out e.g:
"So there was me, Dave and John at the bar. No not John, Stan. And we were hitting up this bunch of girls and one of them was wearing this leopard print dress, no not leopard print, tiger print."
Never do this. Try and plan out how you're going to tell the story. Cut it down to the essentials and keep iterating on it.
If you've written a monologue, always practice speaking it out loud before performing and revise it accordingly. It needs to sound like you're speaking naturally in the moment and your written voice is normally more formal and stuffy than your spoken voice.
*The exception to this rule is if you're doing a shaggy dog story[2]. These are ramblings deliberately meant to lead the audience down the garden path with a punchline that didn't require about 90% of the surreal setup. The key to pulling these off well is to have mini punchlines or funny occurrences happen whilst you're telling the story and building the tension appropriately, otherwise the audience just zones out. The absolute master of these was Norm MacDonald, who in my opinion told the greatest one of all time, Dirty Johnny[3]. The other great one I've heard is "The Orange Head Joke"
I would argue that it's about bringing out the rediculous of normal social things and then amplify that on the punchline. You take a social thing, deconstruct it, and then reconstruct it in such a way that the result is hilarious. The building process itself should get laughs, and then the biggest laugh on completing the picture (punchline.) A skilled performer can keep you smiling just in anticipation (as you might be smiling as your friend is telling you a joke, knowing the punchline is coming.) Norm might be one of the greatest joke tellers I have ever observed.
As to the writing, I feel that you should be a great thinker to be a great joke creator. Maybe not all comics need to actually write jokes. But writing in general is a creative process, which is also thinking. And writing jokes gives you material for remixing. I agree it's mostly performance though. Some comics are all performance and little to no dialogue.
I've never done standup but am a big fan and want to try at some point. I'm glad you mentioned your experience, this thread made me think of the show "Kill Tony" (a podcast where randomly selected comedians do 60 seconds). The quality of comedians ranges from terrible to excellent, but I feel watching those terrible performances has taught me more about the art form than I could have learned only watching headliners who've perfected the craft. The line between weirding everyone out and making them laugh is a fine one, and it helps to see many examples of people failing to fall on the right side.
Scott Adams has tried to describe it. He says that a good recipe for a joke is something that almost makes sense, but not quite. In other words, it has to be slightly absurd, but also slightly sensible, at the same time. A lot of Seinfeld jokes are along those lines.
There is a decent series by Rowan Atkinson on how to build something humorous. For many standup's they basically slowly show after show 'write' their stories. By testing what is good or bad in them and discarding what does not work and keeping what does. I have been watching Josh Wolf on youtube. Not sure he meant to do it. But he tells one joke a few times in successive videos. But each time the story is more funny the newer the video it is. You can tell he is revising the joke and finding where to spice it up.
Do not remember which stand up I heard it from. Many usually try their new material at 2am. If you can not get the people who are decently drunk to laugh it probably is not a good joke.
It wasn't as much the jokes as it was her delivery, her aura, etc.
For a while she dated one of the more established comedians, who would either feed her jokes, or help her work up her own material.
So the jokes were pretty good. But it didn't matter. She might get half a laugh on the first joke, and then it was dead silence for the rest of the show.
I guy I know self-published a book, and it was obvious more or less from the first page that he'd never actually read more than a handful of books in his life
Right at the start there's a scene with a bunch of people in a nightclub, and when describing someone he uses the phrase "with a face like a bulldog licking piss off a nettle" - a colloquial phrase in Ireland meaning someone looks sour (see https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Face%20like%...)
... but he misplaced a comma, and the sentence he actually wrote was
"Maria, of course, standing close by with a face like a bulldog, licking piss off a nettle."
Terrible book, but almost worth reading just for that image
One other issue is that a lot of people don't proofread or have someone proofread their self-published book / story, and that's still at the amateur level; anything beyond that, you need an editor.
Editors have read a lot of books. More than most authors will have. They have also read and improved on terrible books. They get everything, literally raw and unedited.
It was a dark and stormy night. The characters were one-dimensional clichés who died just as quickly as they arrived. There was no continuity at all, no foreshadowing, and a snap ending. Even more impressively, suspension of disbelief was impossible because it jumped around like a fucking ping-pong-ball without any purpose, detail, or depth; saying "fuck you" to the entire genre of magical realism. In addition, it was marketed as a sci-fi western romance novel mystery adventure detective novel. Also, they had a terrible editor. But thankfully, they also had a terrible literary agent, so no one but a retired grandmother of 5 read it after purchasing it without thinking for 50 cents at the library's book sale. The end.
PS: Also, have a plain dust jacket. Never nuclear pink, orange, or yellow.
Also I recommend reading mediocre books. Especially first time authors. They're the best way to be on the other side of someone reading your first book. It's easy for anyone with a college education to avoid being truly terrible, but the middling eternity of mediocrity is a far harder to navigate out of.
I recently stopped reading such a book. It wasn't terrible and had no blatant flaws, but it also had nothing good either. It was all just meh. Music can also like this -- there is a big gap between being able to make something that isn't bad and making something that is actually good.
Salieri vs Mozart phenomenon. Listening to Salieri's music, there's nothing ostensibly bad about it. People use labels like "forgettable", "bland", or anything else that seems more like labeling a symptom without analyzing the cause. The cause being, why do two pieces, both without any notable faults and in a music theory sense well-made, have two significantly different reactions and impact in the general musical consciousness over centuries? What defines the genius that keeps people playing Mozart's pieces over and over, and only play Salieri's when they're trying to make a contrived point about him not being that bad?
One of my favorite fantasy series is The Dresden Files. The first two novels are awful. Jim Butcher is clearly a new author at the time and making new author mistakes. But in the third book he starts finding his voice and the characters hit their stride. Each subsequent novel he's getting better and better. You're watching his growth as an author at the same time as his characters are growing throughout the story. It starts as a serial noir wizard detective story and ends up being an epic fantasy. I thoroughly enjoyed the ride despite the very rough start.
Jokes aside, though, Moore is probably a top 10 author for me. I don't think I've read anything of his that I haven't enjoyed, and what I have read, I've enjoyed heads & shoulders above – and remember much more in detail, thanks to the book nature of it all – anything else.
Not who you were asking, but I'm a big Moore fan as well:
* From Hell (Some might be put off by the original comic's black and white art, but there was a recent release that colourised them by the original illustrator)
There are the obvious ones: From Hell, V for Vendetta, and The Killing Joke, but I especially enjoyed his interpretation of Superman in For the Man Who has Everything and Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?, which are 2 of my favorite Superman stories.
But I most appreciate him for Swamp Thing, because that’s where we got our first appearance of John Constantine.
The man is an absolute treasure. A group of friends and I used to have a terrible book club. We read a lot of crap but it made me better understand what I valued in good writing. It was fun and surprisingly insightful.
You might enjoy the podcast "372 pages we'll never get back". It's basically a bad book club. The title is a reference to the first book they cover which is Ready Player One.
They are on Book 23 or so at the moment, more or less alternating between books by "big" authors like Dan Brown or Sean Penn and super obscure stuff like Harry Potter-Twilight-crossover fan fiction.
The interesting question that often gets overlooked when lumping all these together as 'bad books' is why do some of these 'bad books' turn their authors into multi-millionaires, and not others. For that matter why is it almost only 'bad books' that turn their authors into multi-millionaires.
Ready Player One is no doubt badly written and Bad Art (full disclosure, I didn't manage to finish it), but it is also one of the more successful and beloved sci-fi books from the last 15 years and shouldn't that in a way make it a Very Good Book.
For an intentionally terrible book, there's Atlanta Nights (https://archive.org/details/atlantanights0000teat ). A bunch of authors got together to write the worst book possible. It has pretty much every kind of awful prose in existence, including an early case of AI generation.
For awful but readable books:
Most anything by Dan Brown, but for the audience here, Digital Fortress will make you tear your hair out in frustration if you know anything at all about cryptography. The climax of the book seems to be made for a movie and is a completely nonsensical sequence in which people stare at a screen showing attackers breaking through a firewall, as if it were a wall that can be slowly drilled through.
For me that was the book that did it. If Dan Brown couldn't take 10 minutes to research the simplest basics of the subject he based his book around, imagine what the quality of the rest of the work is like.
Ender's Game I rate as a fairly enjoyable but puerile teenage power fantasy. But after that comes Speaker for the Dead, which to me is absolutely awful. Ender turns into this insufferably saintly martyr, who acts as some sort of Gordon Ramsay, only fixing an awful colony instead of a restaurant. Everyone in the book is insufferable and a complete moron, except for Ender of course who knows how to fix all those awful people. Oh, and it justifies domestic abuse.
And maybe Battlefield Earth. I've never read the entire thing, but here's a quote:
“His valet! In the rush of getting him off, his clumsy damned valet had put the wrong boots on him. Oh, when he got home ... when he got home he would have the oaf punctured! Worse. Dragged through the streets and bitten to death by small children.”
Battlefield Earth brings back a memory: it was the first book I had read where I realised that authors can have serious mental problems.
Most books are written by sane, intelligent, and educated people. The books you'll read in a high school library are also curated by librarians. There's an expectation of quality you don't notice until suddenly you pick up a book at the local council library authored by someone with some serious untreated mental issues.
After that revelation I started noticing the author of a book instead of just paying attention to the content of the book.
Similarly to L Ron Hubbard, I found The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant by Stephen R. Donaldson impossible to finish. There's something deeply wrong about him that I can't quite put my finger on. (I did finish his Gap Cycle series, but felt dirty in my brain after.)
I picked up The Dragonriders of Pern series based purely on the dragon on the cover and just started reading. A few chapters in, I though to myself: "This is written by a woman, isn't it?", flipped to the cover page and lo-and-behold: "Anne McCaffrey" -- I had guessed correctly!
> Most books are written by sane, intelligent, and educated people.
Wait, what? Do you know how many famous authors suffer from some sort of severe mental illness? Ernest Hemingway, Edgar Allen Poe, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, and on and on. In fact, most of the great artists in general have a mental illness they can ascribe their creativity to. They can also be quite intelligent and educated at the same time.
We never kept a list, but 50 Shades, Flowers in the Attic, the Greg Brady Autobiography and Satanic Panic were some notables. Everyone had their own taste for bad writing and read from books like Heroes Are My Weakness to others like A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay (which actually turned out to be a big crowd pleaser).
See, Dosadi is one of my favorite books. It's not perfect by any means but a concentrate of Herbert tropes with interesting plot lines. Like most Herbert it's very much for a young adult / adolescent public (this not being a negative, it's pretty thin on many axes, focused on delivering the tropes in a enthusiastic way). The other Herbert 'destination, jesus' book cycle is harder to swallow though.
I remember enjoying reading it and finding the worldbuilding really interesting and the drama kept me reading. But I am a sucker for Frank Herbert so maybe I missed the flaws.
As I said: it is/feels like a sketch. The prose (often) reads like notes which should be rewritten, and filled with depth, and life. Also the story is bad, there is too much "deus ex machina". Also no characters one can relate to. Sounds like you read a totally different book than me :P.
If I had read it and the Dune without knowing their authors, I could not have told them they were written by the same person. Especially not that it was written after the Dune, where he has proved he can write well.
Disclaimer: I'm not a writer, but I do write music.
I think there are two types "bad" writing and I think people have a hard time having nuanced discussion about this.
First category is what I would personally describe "uninspired". These are works created by artists who arguably have either (1) too little exposure to prior art, or (2) too inexperienced with core skills of writing. So, in terms of my field, these artists probably (1) didn't expose themselves to enough music, or read enough music, or (2) didn't practice how to construct and write music enough times that they're comfortable. Examples of "uninspired" works include student works (i.e. practice works written by people to gain skills), works whose only purpose is to make money and there is no other consideration (this is probably very debatable), or works created by people who are unreasonably unexposed to the prior art (e.g. someone who has sufficient writing skills who is writing a novel, but really only read 2 novels before.)
Second "bad" category is what I would describe writing that is too stylish where aesthetic choices aren't appealing. This is when creator (1) is sufficiently exposed to prior art and (2) is experienced enough to produce works similar to prior art. Now, this gets very tricky because the problem with these works -- i.e. what separates them from Category 1 -- is that the work itself needs to convince the observer of these qualities, which can oftentimes be very hard. Unfortunately, I cannot give examples from literature, but to give an example from the history of music writing: oftentimes people listen to works of Schoenberg and they complain it sounds horrific, dissonant, random and ugly etc etc... However, if you look at the work closely, you'll find choices that are only consistent with thorough understanding of the prior art and an experimental desire to create something entirely novel. Now, it is "ugly" (for some, of course) but it is well-informed. In other words, it convinces most that the artist was able to create something "prettier" but for whatever reason decided not to.
Unpacking this is important when consuming "bad art" because each category teaches you something else.
When you consume Category 1 "bad art" you need to pick up (1) in what ways this work is unaware of prior art, and (2) in what ways this creator is inexperienced. This can be crucial to understand points where you struggle. E.g. you look at some student works, and you see consistent patterns that diverge from prior art -- consistent patterns are not explained with creativity. This can be a good reminder to work on these skills.
When it comes to Category 2, it's more complicated. This kind of art can be jarring, but can be the most useful kind of art you can consume to perfect your skills. These can show prior experiments, and how various styles work. You don't have to enjoy it, but it will be useful to see. E.g. slow movies may not be your favorite, but if you're filmmaker you likely want to sit through the entire "2001" movie.
Ultimately, it's up to you, and up to your relationship with your art. I personally consume a lot of art I dislike and think it's important to expand my understanding how things work. An artist is not just the work, but also the entire lifetime spent on observing, and critically thinking about other humans' art. So, the answer ultimately lies in you.
Great analysis, that hits a number of very good points!
In particular it's interesting that you call the first category "uninspired" rather than "lacking skills". A lot of people equate this "uninspired" category with "lacking in personal expression". Typically a really skillful artist can generally make something absolutely mechanical _feel_ personal, whereas an unskilled artist cannot make anything sound personal. There are also specific genres that skew the perception in one way or the other, that will change the threshold of skill for something to be considered "personal" or not.
The second category is interesting if you can identify how problems introduced by the rule-breaking elements could be solved. Any "art rule" solves a problem, and determining an alternative solution for it can lead to a breakthrough. Keyword is "can", there's a lot of experiment required. But in many cases it at least helps understanding better why the "rule" is useful.
That's a very useful distinction. A lot of pop used to be - maybe still is. It works because its self-expression connects strongly with an audience.
In music, the people with the technical skills often work in support roles as session musicians, producers, and arrangers. They lack individual expression and charisma but have the skills needed to polish someone else's work.
The same applies to books. Dan Brown and Twilight are terrible writing but they give middle-of-the-bell-curve readers experiences that mean something to them. Most art aims higher, but the middle of the bell curve is where the big money is.
True mediocrity comes from having very limited technical skill - probably imitative in a narrow niche - and no ability to connect with an audience.
I think that applies to most academic attempts at serial music. The style is a bit of an oddity because the rules were contrived rather than evolved. And (IMO) that kind of dissonance has a very limited expressive range.
Schoenberg could get away with it, but there was a fad in 50s to 70s where that kind of serialism became academic orthodoxy. The result was hours and hours of music by clever educated people with absolutely no cultural relevance outside of academia.
I don't fully disagree with you but my personal opinion is that people give too little credit to contemporary movements within Western art music. Their cultural force is significant, but it's clouded so it's not easy to make an accounting of it.
- First, I need to note that although serialism proper isn't so relevant today, when it comes to film music dominant styles in the last couple decades or so have been minimalism and neo-romanticism. Neo-romanticism is obviously self-explanatory and well-understood, but minimalism [1] is harder to deal with only because it's a contemporary and peculiar style, and it's also rather controversial within Western art music community (especially since the kind of minimalism I hear in film music is closer to the style of Glass and Richter, and not Reich, Adams; or not even Ligeti et al's similar works such as "Selbstportrait mit Reich und Riley" (1976)). We can debate endlessly about the history of Western classical music, and I'm no art historian, but my personal opinion is that minimalism is a direct and clear response to serialism [2] which makes it a cultural heir. In art, we do see that things swing pretty far like a pendulum. What drives an artistic force in one direction can often be a previous force in the opposite. So, when you hear the soundtrack of something like Amelie (2001), in a way you do hear serialism, except in negative.
- Second, although the music of "the Second Viennese School" and later serialists (Boulez, Stockhausen) found no mass appeal, they did find sufficient amount of appeal within the music community. Serialism was practically the dominant style in early 20th century. Neo-romanticist composer David Diamond talks about his frustrations about this in this interview [3]. Given this, it's not true to state serialism has no cultural power, what's true is that most music produced today is one way or another post-serialist, in the sense that it's aware of its failed experiments and its merits. For example, music (film music/art music/whatever) today is not particularly contrapuntal, but composers are regularly, formally taught how to deal with counterpoint and it's considered a core skill for all composers. This makes composers skilled in this regard, but they consciously decide not to apply the full length of the skill. The same way painters are taught to draw like the old masters, but that kind of photographic realism doesn't have the same cultural relevance today in art. This still makes Bach (or old masters) culturally relevant today, albeit rather indirectly.
- You call that the rules were contrived but that is one particular interpretation of serialism, which is fair only because it's similar to how Schoenberg thought of it. However, if you look at other serialists such as Berg, Webern, Boulez and especially Carter, you'll see that the kind of "use each pitch once before using all others" silly rules are not taken any more seriously than you take counterpoint rules seriously while writing music (which was the source of disagreement between Boulez and his teacher Leibowitz [4]). Those rules are for practice. It's debatable, of course, what is "serialistic" about serialism (especially for later figures like Carter), but I think the core of the idea is for musical language to be comprehensive, and have a presentation of all possible forms of a given set of structures. Given this understanding, I don't think your statement "the rules were contrived rather than evolved" holds up. Within the tradition, there was the understanding that the way tonality evolves is that each composer comes and creates their own spin on the diatonic scale, all the way from Froberger to Bach to Chopin to Debussy we keep seeing this pattern again and again. Serialism has a will to go one step further and present all such possibilities in music. Again, I don't shy away from calling this, in many ways, a "failed experiment" but calling it "contrived" is not true.
[1] Example movies are countless, from Amelie (2001), The Shape of Water (2017), Blindness (2008) to Ladybird (2017) etc...
[2] Philip Glass talks about how his music is a response to Boulez scene (who is a late serialist composer) in this interview from 1976: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elAtF6UdefI
I found your comment to be very insightful. I realise that a lot of the developers I see fall in the first category, primarily due to a lack of experience.
The challenge I see in a lot of software in corporate environments is that, unlike music, the code written due to lack of awareness / experience becomes technical debt as the software keeps growing over time.
One of the worst, and best reading experiences I get is anything long-form Frédéric Beigbeder. It's all over the place, always too much, showing off (both in style, dialogues, plots...), inconsistent, I find myself shaking my head or sighing most of the book, every damn time.
And then, the bastard manages to turn his stories around and do something often good, sometimes great of it. Not sure whether it's on purpose or he's just a short-story stretching too much... But if you read most of it, it's very very bad. But add the endings or the small moments of grace and suddenly it's great. Ugh.
No idea. I should look one day. I really hated most José Saramago for a long time until I leveled up in Portuguese and went to read in the original and... I would add shitty translations to the hefty list of crap horrible terrible books. Most Bulgakov translations, I guess, too. I hear I'm supposed to enjoy and understand some of it, one day, with a good translation...
Edit: I worry that they won't translate well, no.
Edit2: I think he got inspired by Don Delillo a bit, so you might get a taste there (I remember feeling very much similar ending his books).
A problem that should not be underestimated is that many aspiring writers do not know how to recognize a bad book, which is why they write many of them themselves.
Don't most aspiring writers already do so, for some value of terrible? S.J. Perelman wrote a series of pieces, "Cloudland Revisited" about the books and movies that thrilled him when he was young but didn't stand up to later reading or viewing. Mark Twain's essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses" is a classic, though on the other hand you might want to have a look at D.H. Lawrence and Yvor Winters on Cooper before giving up entirely.
I kinda tried that with speaking and it blew back immensely and honestly only harmed me.
Focusing on other people faults and trying to avoid them made me super aware of any theoretical imperfection in what I was doing without making me able to do something actually good. I was not improving at all, I was just increasingly scared to do anything, because more and more words/acts whatever resembled something bad someone have done.
I've had a similar thing trying to learn 'what not to do' from various management types I've had the displeasure to report to.
It's the longest possible path to learning how to do it right. There are an infinite number of wrong options, but precious few right ones. Just not stepping on the same land mines that someone else did step on doesn't mean you'll avoid the rest of the ones spread throughout the minefield. Much better to follow and learn the path of someone who knows the clear path.
The avoidance of specific bad can also equal bad. Just a different flavour.
There is probably an audience for most things. I’ve read around 200 Warhammer books, I had to just say duck it and rate then on their own scale otherwise they’d all be 1-2/5 on my goodreads account, but I was there when Horus slew the emperor and I gave the experience 5/5.
I think there might be also a point with decent enough books that go horribly horribly wrong at some point. Forever Free is great example... It really shows how multiple Deus Ex Machina can ruin the whole thing...
Yes actually! Knuth says he got into computer science because he could see that the example programs in the IBM 650 manual were not very good, and he thought "if I, a college student just getting started with computers, can do better than the professionals, then maybe I have some talent for it". Years later, he learned that the programs in the manual were just bad; almost anyone could do better.
There's always someone to defend some of the bad APIs in, say, PHP, so that might be indicative that we could face the issue that being able to tell when some code's bad is already a gated skill, compared to being able to tell that a book is written badly
Definitely interacting with a bad API design is a good way to avoid some pitfalls. Sadly the only way to fully learn all of them is to make an API and then coach people on using it for 10 years.
* People who have no business writing and have no idea what they're doing. These are not going to give you much, which is why you want to keep to groups that have some gatekeeping.
* Beginners who are not that talented but can develop skill. These people are good because you can see what it looks like to go from nothing to something, even if that something isn't great
* Untalented people who are workhorses and can do the job: these people are probably the most valuable "bad writers"
* Talented people who suck. These people are also amazing because you can see the power of skill as it develops
* Talented people who are very good. (These won't be in your group)
But really all this about "analyze why the book sucks" is a red herring. What is far more instructive is understanding why something that you don't like is appealing. If you can find what works in something you don't like, it's a lot more likely that you'll be able to understand that technique.
Best selling thrillers with bad dialog and paper characters? Great. That means you can focus on the pacing and plot and understand why the book works despite its obvious flaws. That's harder though because it isn't just stroking your own ego by saying "aw I could do that"