The Road Less Read: What Terrible Books Teach Us
As a writer, you are generally also an avid reader. Many prominent authors advocate reading extensively, and they’re not shy about it. Instinctively, we always try to seek out the best books and stories that we can. However, there is another point of view from Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen. While not a writer as we typically view them, Watchmen does hold the distinction of being the only graphic novel on Time’s “All Time 100 Novels” list.
What Moore said in a clip from his BBC Maestro series is “As a prospective writer, I would urge you to not only read good books. Read terrible books as well, because they can be more inspiring than the good books”. Moore elaborates that it can be liberating to see that someone worse than you was published and allows you to dissect it to find what is wrong to learn from it. It also begs a different question. Surely not everyone can think a book is terrible or else it wouldn’t have been published?
That very question highlights the issues we see within the publishing industry. Someone, somewhere either felt that that terrible book might catch on, or (more likely) it followed in the vein of something popular at the time. If you’re old enough, you probably remember the young adult series suddenly appearing all over the place after the popularity of Harry Potter or the abundance of vampire or werewolf romance novels that were everywhere after Twilight hit its peak. Publishers are always trying to figure out what’s popular at that moment and what they think will sell. For them, it’s all about what they think is going to make money, not whether your story deserves to be told.
At StoryForge, we only look for one story in particular: the one you want to write. The story that you've had at the front of your mind and just haven't put down on digital paper yet. We know you have what it takes to be the next literary phenomenon, but you won't get there until you get it out of your head and onto paper. So let's get writing.
