From the show The Worst Of All Possible Worlds.
Use all the help you can get
Dear readers,
I use Grammarly for proofreading because it's far more than just a spool chucker - it uses cone text to deter mine when miss takes have bean maid and helps you two imp roof you're righting. As an ex perry meant, I havnt used it hear and Im a frayed its all gone too he'll.
[CLICK]
Ah, there we go. I hope you'll excuse me returning from my unannounced hiatus with that brief plug, but I'm sure you'll agree that all of us need all the help we can get in this business. Aside from cleaning up quite a large amount of spam in the comments, that's all for now. More Grob is on its way soon...
All the best,
Joel
The History of Grob BONUS EPISODE
If you can’t use the embedded player above, you can listen at Soundcloud or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the xml feed.
The History of Grob #04
If you can’t use the embedded player above, you can listen at Soundcloud or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the xml feed.
The History of Grob #03
If you can’t use the embedded player above, you can listen at Soundcloud or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the xml feed.
The History of Grob #02
If you can’t use the embedded player above, you can listen at Soundcloud or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the xml feed.
The History of Grob #01
If you can’t use the embedded player above, you can listen at Soundcloud or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the xml feed.
Go beyond your remit
Dear readers,
With 100 Ways To Write Badly Well safely published and available to buy, I’m trying my hand at something new. For the most part, this blog has focused on the bad writing of fiction – implausible plot twists, awkward turns of phrase, unconvincing characters and so on. Meanwhile, non-fiction has got off all too lightly. It’s time to do something about that.
My new podcast, The History of Grob, is an attempt to tell the story of a fictional nation from the bronze age to the modern day and beyond. It will feature people, places and historical events which are entirely false, or at least significantly misrepresented.
I will post each episode on this blog as it is released, but you can also listen to it at Soundcloud or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via the xml feed.
I hope you enjoy the podcast and feel that it does justice to this blog’s tradition of ridiculous and flippant self-indulgence.
All the best,
Joel
Get published
Dear readers,
I am delighted to announce the publication of the book 100 Ways To Write Badly Well in both paperback and ebook. It’s a collection of some of the best bits of this blog along with a bunch of new pieces and it would make an excellent gift for any aspiring writer (even if that aspiring writer is yourself – go on, gift-wrap it and surprise yourself).
You can buy the paperback at nastylittlepress.org and the ebook at momentumbooks.com.au. The paperback is beautifully designed, has a great cover and would make a fine addition to any bookshelf, whereas the ebook is fantastic value and you can have it in your hands instantly. Personally, I think you should buy one copy of each, but I understand that I may be biased.
The book wouldn’t have been possible without the support and feedback that I’ve had from all of you since I started this blog, so I’d like to take this opportunity to offer my sincere and exhaustive thanks. With your help, what started out as a pointless, frustrated satire gradually became a genuine celebration of the art of bad writing. Still pointless, of course, but joyously so.
All the best,
Joel
Use illustrations to distract from your writing
Dear readers,
Springfields Horticultural Society, who originally commissioned by poem “Daffodils II: The Revenge” have further commissioned the wonderful MusaGrafica to illustrate the poem. Here it is...
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All the best,
Joel
Judge a book by its cover
Dear readers,
Sometimes, terrible prose alone is not enough. Here are some invaluable resources for those of you wishing to get your writing the attention it deserves with a badly well designed cover:
and
All the best,
Joel
Emulate your heroes
Dear readers,
Apologies for my absence. On the upside, the How To Write Badly Well book is out in the next few weeks – details to follow. In the meantime, here is an article on one of the greatest practitioners of writing badly well that the world has ever known:
(via Metafilter)
All the best,
Joel
Dangle your modifiers
Caked in dung and warm to the touch, Susie cleaned her horse's hooves with a careful precision. She stared out across the plains and wondered where Lorenzo was now. Long and hard, he had set out on a journey which could only lead to death. Wondering whose death it would be, an eagle wheeled across her vision as she sat, lost in thought. She stood up and patted her horse's flank, tail flicking away a cloud of flies. Four newly-cleaned hooves planted firmly on the ground, Susie hoisted herself up onto the animal's back and prepared to face the journey ahead, unpredictable and full of danger. She dug in her heels and the horse responded. With an enthusiastic whinny, she felt him find a comfortable rhythm and then, tired but determined, the miles flew away under her.
Dead or alive, she would find Lorenzo before he found her, cowering in some bar, most likely, like the worm he was - paint flaking, full of cheap beer and cheaper girls. Desperate and amoral, she would recruit whatever lowlifes she could find and, following her blindly, guide them to him. Smashed off their hinges, she would lead her hired guns through the saloon doors and, playing cards like a man with years left to live, she would see Lorenzo sitting there. Spitting hot metal, he would see her gun barrels flare for a moment and then, falling to the ground in a bullet-riddled heap, she would know that he was finally gone.
Add [additional] detail by using [square] brackets
[Mysterious outlaw] Susie Navajo saddled up her horse, making sure every [leather] strap was [sufficiently] tightened before swinging herself [athletically] into the saddle. The dew on the [sedimentary] rocks around her glinted [with a strange and brittle magic] in the morning sun. She sniffed the air. This [she thought to herself] would be as good a day to die as any.
Moments later, Susie [Navajo] was urging her horse on, the two of them thundering [towards death or glory, though neither knew which [she, because the future was chaotic [and upredictable], he, because he was a horse [and so incapable of [that level of] abstract thought]]] across the [red] plains. One way or another, they would find [her arch-nemesis] Lorenzo and this thing - this nightmare [although not a literal nightmare] that had haunted her [although not literally haunted her] for her whole adult life - would be over [although not literally over, but more of that later].
Over-use hyphens
Susie squinted un-easily into the sun-set. She had a feeling that some-where out there, Lorenzo was coming for her.
‘God-damn you,’ she murmured to her-self. Almost un-consciously, her hand drifted to her gun-belt and rested there, wait-ing. It had been nearly four-teen years now. May-be four-teen-and-a-half. Hadn’t she earned her-self some res-pite? How long could a man be drive-n by that kind of hat-red? How long be-fore it bur-ned a-way, leaving only ash-es be-hind? There was no-thing - ab-sol-ute-ly no-thing - she would-n't do to be able to a-band-on her past and be-gin a-fresh some-where el-se.
‘F---,’ s-he mut-te-red.
Continue to sell books from a box in your garage
Dear readers,
Okay, that’s it for the book extracts – I still have some copies left, so drop me an email at writebadlywell@gmail.com if you’re interested.
All the best,
Joel
Rely on your back catalogue #9
(if this doesn’t make sense to you, see the previous post)
Empty Glass
A New Approach to Self-Help
Introduction
Hello. My name is Dr Naïan Fedler. You don’t know me yet, but over the next two hundred and thirty-nine pages, you and I are going to go on a journey together. Along the way, we’ll encounter many obstacles. Together, we’re going to overcome those obstacles and end our journey exactly where we began, but wiser and with cold air in our lungs.
If this sounds familiar, it’s because what I’ve just described isn’t just the way this book works; it’s the way life works for each and every one of us. The story I’ve just outlined is one that you’re bound to recognise because it’s the very story you’re living right now – the story in which you are the main character. Also, I mentioned something similar in the introduction to my last book, Think Yourself Lucky, so you might remember it from there.
When you set out on the journey of life, you don’t know what to expect. Partly this is because you’re very young at the time, but partly it’s because life is unpredictable. In fact, I’d go one step further and say that life isn’t just unpredictable: it’s random. That’s a very hard word to fully understand, but it’s one that we’ll keep coming back to again and again in the course of this book. When you say the word “random”, a lot of people think of something like a game of dice or a lottery, but the truth is that the world we live in is far more complicated than we can possibly understand. Imagine a lottery where, instead of choosing numbers, you have to draw a doodle on a piece of paper and if your doodle matches precisely, millimetre for millimetre, the winning one, you get a prize that could be anything from eternal life to instant death. Except that you never get to see the winning doodle, or find out if you’ve won, until it’s far, far too late. And the rules change with every passing second. And no one’s quite sure if they’re actually playing or not. Or whether the game even exists.
If this sounds daunting, that’s because it is. The universe is infinitely complex and you can never hope to understand any part of it, let alone change any aspect of it in any meaningful way. Understanding this is the key to my approach, and the subject of this book’s first chapter, You Are Nothing.
In order to form a sense of self-worth, you must first recognise that there is not really, in any appreciable sense, such a thing as “self”. Far from being an autonomous and self-aware agent of physical action, you are little more than a ragged bundle of chemicals lost in the infinite chaos of an unintelligible universe. Seen from a perspective of unbiased objectivity, you are no more significant than the chair in which you are sitting, the air you breathe or the rotting orange peel you throw in your compost bin. In fact, one day you will become compost right along with that orange peel – your physical body will decay and become indistinguishable from the mulch under your feet. This is the subject of chapter two, You Are Dying.
In my professional capacity as a counsellor, a lot of people come to me looking for guidance. Often it’s because they feel lost, because they feel scared or because they’re worried that they lack direction in life. Over the years, I’ve thought about these problems and come up with a few answers. In a very simplified form, they go like this:
- You are lost.
- You should be scared.
- There is no “direction” you can have other than the slow, inevitable march towards death and, thereafter, oblivion.
Sometimes, people are resistant to my approach. They say, “Naïan, surely there must be some kind of purpose to life? Or if not a purpose, then at least a way for me to stay afloat in this vast, bewildering sea of meaninglessness? Or, if nothing else, a way for me to get out of paying for this session?” But to them I say, “You, my friend,” (this is merely a turn of phrase – I am fully aware that the people I counsel are clients rather than friends and I would never transgress the boundaries of that professional relationship for both clinical and legal reasons) “are like a clumsy Egyptian boatman.” I then leave a gap of precisely two seconds before revealing the punchline: “You’re in denial!” This little joke helps to relieve the tension, but also serves to illustrate a valid psychological point. To deny the fundamental lack of meaning at the heart of all things is to deny a universal truth, and anyone trying to lead their life with that kind of contradiction in the back of their mind is going to end up, like our maladroit African friend, in some pretty deep water.
Some people try to solve the problem of meaninglessness by relying on the idea of a higher power. For some it’s a god or gods, for some it’s a commitment to furthering human understanding, for some it’s a devotion to altruistic works. Whatever form this delusion takes, my diagnosis is the same. I call these people “head-in-the-sand-birds” (the term “ostriches”, which I used in my previous books, has since been registered as a trademark by Dr Fenton McWheely, the author of How Not To Grieve). By denying the pointlessness of every aspect of existence, these people are setting up a destructive dichotomy, or destrotomy, at the centre of their spiritual lives. If they came to me for advice, I would tell them this: it is only by accepting the fundamental emptiness of all things that you can learn to give your life the value it deserves, which is none. We’ll discuss this in greater depth in chapter seven, Nothing To Live For.
As you read this book, you will come across ideas that challenge you and exercises you may find difficult. My approach to self-help is, I will be the first to admit, radically different from anything that has come before, but this is what makes it so powerful. Whether you’ve picked up this book as a result of bereavement, unemployment, marital breakdown or simply a lingering sense of dissatisfaction with life, I guarantee that by the time you finish reading it, you’ll be seeing things in a whole new way. Next to the dark emptiness of a soulless and chaotic world, your problems will simply fall away into the background. When you and I reach the end of our journey together and turn the last page of chapter thirteen, Nothing Means Anything, So Don’t Worry, I promise you that you’ll be a new person: a clear-sighted, rational and, above all, fundamentally empty person.
Thanks for reading.
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