Title: What makes bad writing bad? | Books | The Guardian
Headings: What makes bad writing bad?
Books
What makes bad writing bad?
The biggest mistake most writers make is thinking they have nothing left to learn
Toby Litt
When Updike began writing Rabbit, Run it was either going to be a great technical feat or a humiliating misjudgment
Any attempt to write fiction in order to make the world a better, fairer place is almost certain to fail

Content: But it is still an agony to force oneself to keep going. It is still telling you nothing you didn’t already know. Bad writers continue to write badly because they have many reasons – in their view very good reasons – for writing in the way they do. Writers are bad because they cleave to the causes of writing badly. Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself. When Updike began writing Rabbit, Run it was either going to be a great technical feat or a humiliating misjudgment
While bad writers may read a great many diverse works of fiction, they are unable or unwilling to perceive the things these works do which their own writing fails to do. So the most dangerous kind of writers for bad writers to read are what I call excuse writers – writers of the sort who seem to grant permission to others to borrow or imitate their failings. I’ll give you some examples: Jack Kerouac, John Updike, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Margaret Atwood, Maya Angelou.