Bad Writing, Good Lessons

When you’re an aspiring writer, you try to justify everything you write and put into your book. Every little thing needs its own reason to exist in the text. You try to think of everything.

Let’s take the 100-word writing challenge I participated in, for example. I didn’t get through to the second round, sadly, but it was a fun experience, and I’ll be able to publish my little story later this month. Stay tuned.

The feedback from the judges is strict. They judge every word, and you need to be able to answer for each one you put in your submission.

Then you sit down to watch some TV with your wife, and one of the main protagonists of a well-known TV show, in its fifth and final season, suddenly becomes an IT technician who understands CCTV wiring and can loop cameras by simply switching a cable — all to get inside a military base slash laboratory. This trope is well-worn, yet it is so strange to watch.

But I guess you can see such lazy writing from two angles. On the one hand, it’s quite upsetting to see this in one of the most watched TV shows right now. On the other hand, if this kind of writing is good enough for the big guys who made it, it means you can do it too.

It’s inspiring, really — in its own bad-writing, oddly reassuring, impostor-syndrome-relieving kind of way.