As a young man, Vernon Lott thought he could very well be the next great American poet. But then he got out of the habit of writing, stumbled years later upon on a box of his old poetry in his mom’s basement, and realized: This stuff is horrible. Instead of shoving the poems back into the box, however, and fleeing the basement in shame, he decided to show his work to a bunch of famous writers, among them George Saunders, David Sedaris, Margaret Atwood, and Nick Flynn, and ask their opinions. Their reactions to his poetry, and their thoughts on what differentiates good writing from bad, is the subject of Lott's documentary, "Bad Writing," which is currently on the festival circuit and seeking distribution. Here's the trailer:

Bad Writing - Official Trailer from Morris Hill Pictures on Vimeo.

Lott's project got me thinking: what's so scary about bad writing, anyway? Part of the answer is that it seems like it can happen to anyone, anytime. As Margaret Atwood says in the trailer, “There’s no rule that says you get steadily better.” Another part of the answer is that most people—even a writer's friends, and especially a writer's peers—have no qualms about mocking bad writing. In a recent article in Salon, Laura Miller explores the history of literary mocking:

In the early 20th century, dinner party guests would entertain each other by reciting passages from the alliteration-heavy works of one Amanda McKittrick Ros (1860-1939), regarded by experts as the greatest bad novelist of all time. In Oxford, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their friends competed to see who could read aloud from Ros' books the longest before cracking up.

She also writes about Steve Almond’s Bad Poetry Corner, on The Rumpus, where Almond posts unfortunate poems written in his youth. Some favorite lines of mine include: “Hell is you, Sartre, and whatever sour beaujelais the sommelier brought” and “Behind these lay the landscape after passion / hidden by the buttery fog of hope.”

Maybe Almond's on to something: maybe the only way for a writer to avoid bad writing in the future is to revisit writing from the past and analyze where it goes wrong. This, at least, seems to have worked for George Saunders, who says in Lott's documentary: