100 Ways to Write Badly Well ...

Looking for a creative writing guide out there that will tell you how to write better? A book to tell you how to structure a perfect plot, create great characters, use language in a powerful and poetic way? This is not that book.

100 Ways to Write Badly Well is an adventure in drivel. It will teach you how to botch a plot, how to create characters that no one in their right mind would identify with and how to reduce the beauty of the English language to an incoherent mush.

Using one hundred practical examples, each awful in its own unique way, blogger and creative writing tutor Joel Stickley will lead you methodically up the creek and carefully remove your paddle before running off and leaving you stranded. The route is lined with mixed metaphors, terrible plot twists, piles of adjectives and characters staring at themselves in mirrors for no apparent reason.

Based on the popular blog and live comedy show 'How To Write Badly Well', this book is an invaluable guide to the art of awful writing that no would-be author should be without. Remember – if a thing’s worth doing badly, it’s worth doing badly well.

Joel Stickley is the author of the hit blog How To Write Badly Well, which has dispensed bad advice to over half a million visitors since its launch. (See Joel's page on our website for further info.) With long-time collaborator Luke Wright, he wrote the book 'Who Writes This Crap?' which The Guardian called “an inspired piece of parody,” and the animated film 'Crash Bang Wallow', which won the NFBC Short Film Award at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. He is Poet Laureate for the UK county of Lincolnshire and teaches creative writing at the Open University.

 You can purchase '100 Ways to Write Badly Well' in softback format from Nasty Little Press
Or you can purchase the ebook from Momentum Books. 

You can find more out about Joel and his work by visiting www.bookapoet.co.uk www.bookapoet.co.uk

Featured Poem for June 2012 - 'Daffodils II: The Revenge' by Joel Stickley

I wandered lonely as a clown,

all bulbous feet and scary laugh,
when all at once I slowed right down
as something florid blocked my path.

They stood together, stem by stem,
and barred my way with sharpened shoots.
Transfixed by fear, I stared at them –
their bobbing heads, their grasping roots.

'You again,' I grimly muttered,
shuddering and stepping back.
Above my head, the gas lamp guttered,
spluttered out and fell to black.

As darkness gripped me, so did panic.
I heard a hundred petals rustle.
I turned and sprinted, letting manic
energy fill every muscle.

But with each pounding step I took,
that yellow mob was still behind.
I stumbled on, afraid to look,
as thoughts of stamens filled my mind.

At last I saw a source of shelter,
dived inside and held my breath.
The door clicked closed behind. I felt a
fearful calm descend like death.

Then crashing through the window pane
they came, relentless as the tide.
Through shattered glass that fell like rain,
they cast their grasping tendrils wide.

Daffodils! O, daffodils!
Those foul narcissi haunt my dreams –
I wake at dead of night with chills
and see a perianth that gleams.

In vacant or in pensive mood,
they flash upon my inward eye
and all the bliss of solitude
is gone as helplessly I lie

and wait in fear for them to strike
and waft their high and sickly stench.
They dumbly nod their heads just like
the Liberal Democrat front bench.

Useless yellow bastards, them –
they're poisonous and do no good.
They dance before me, stem by stem,
and mock the dreams of childhood.

So take me now, O daffodils,
and prove old Mr Byron right.
You're puerile and your presence kills
all poetry with cant and trite.

© Joel Stickley 2012. All rights reserved.  Please do not use without the poet's permission.

Verse 2012 - a few photos we took

John Hegley, Joel Stickley, all the Stamford Laureate finalists with the mayor of Stamford (Cllr John Binder) and Joel Stickley plus a few photos of the amazing concrete poems the pupils from schools in and around Stamford created for the festival.