I’ve read a lot of bad writing lately.

I’m not talking about writing that’s so bad I toss it after the first sentence or two. To my mind, writing that is that unpalatable doesn’t qualify as writing. It’s just words on a page.

The bad writing I’m talking about—the sort of writing that I pick up with the hope it will be good and put down with a hazy sense of dissatisfaction when it isn’t—is harder to define. It’s writing that’s almost good. It’s writing that keeps me thumbing the pages with half-hearted concern, perhaps scanning ahead, skipping a section here or there, vaguely interested in what will happen in the next few paragraphs but not so invested that I don’t pick up my phone and scroll through my messages half a dozen times, not so enthralled that I don’t wander into the kitchen and look for something to eat, hoping to find whatever I didn’t see when I checked the cupboards ten minutes ago.

(Note to self: reading bad writing is bad for good eating habits.)

In these moments, some will probably say, it’s not necessarily the writing that is bad. Instead, the problem is the reader, who lacks tenacity and focus. After all, good writing needs good reading, and good reading requires dedicated time and energy, and the elimination of outside distractions.

I don’t disagree. Good reading demands all of these things.

But as someone who generally strives to be a good reader, I understand the reading exchange to be a contract: the reader agrees to invest time and energy and imagination in reading a story. In return, the writer presents a story worthy of the reader’s investment.

On a given day, there are many demands on my time and energy and imagination, and there is little left for good reading. I have no time or energy or imagination to waste on bad writing. And no amount of bad writing will lead to good reading.

Yet I find it increasingly difficult to navigate the murky swamp that contemporary publishing has become. The familiar signposts, which in the past would have pointed me in the direction of good writing in which to invest my limited capital, are failing me.

It used to be that if I picked up a book self-published by the author, I could be fairly certain the writing would be bad. Once upon a time, I was an intern with a traditional book publishing house in Toronto—I know the amount and sort of writing that arrives, unbidden and relentless, on the intern’s slush pile every day. I suspect that many of the self-published authors of the nineties and early noughts resorted to self-publishing after their manuscripts languished for months, even years, on a publisher’s slush pile.

I felt a certain confidence that if writing was good, it would get published. Either it would come through the front doors on the breathless praise of a literary agent (I saw several of those manuscripts get contracts) or it would be found, against all odds, in the slush pile by a savvy employee with an eye for unpolished greatness (Guy Vanderhaeghe’s first collection, Man Descending, was famously discovered in the slush pile in the early 1980s by one of the house’s secretaries).

By the same logic, writing that wasn’t good would rightly atrophy in the corner of the intern’s office until the end of time, or until the writer shrugged off disappointment and set out on a self-publishing path. Because I had faith that most good writing would get published in the traditional way (not a blind faith, but a faith reasonably proven by my experience at McClelland & Stewart), I also believed that if a writer had to resort to self-publishing, then the writing was likely not very good in the first place. This belief was also reasonably borne out by my early review of first-generation self-published projects.

For a long time after I left the traditional book-publishing world, I knew that if I picked up a book produced by a publisher I trusted, whether that publisher was large or small, genre or literary, I could be fairly certain I would find good writing—perhaps not a story I fell in love with, but a narrative that invited me in, spoke to me in language chosen for its precision and clarity, gave me characters who weren’t contrived and a storyline that didn’t feel lamely pedestrian, as if every paragraph was just one more poorly laid flagstone along an unevenly plotted path.

In other words, in any book published by a traditional publisher, I could expect to find a narrative worthy of my investment of time and energy and imagination.

Yet in the past few years, these touch stones, too, have been overturned. I have read so much bad writing published by storied traditional houses that I no longer trust publishers to be the arbiters of literary discernment. In some cases, when the writing is very bad, I can only conclude that the publisher thought there was money to be made. But if that’s the case—and worse, if the publisher was right—then we have a reading public that is willing to spend a lot of money on very bad writing.

This discouraging trend in traditional publishing and the concurrent rise in popularity and accessibility of self- and independent publishing methods and formats means that the market is saturated—probably oversaturated—with reading options.

On balance there are probably more good books produced by self- and independently published authors than there used to be. I sense there’s a wider appreciation for the value of good book design and the role of the editor than there was thirty years ago, and there are definitely more workshops on writing plot and character. But the market is exponentially larger and louder than it was, with self-promotion platforms enabling canny self-marketers to promote and sell even bad writing to readers who are willing to pay for it. There are few trustworthy advisors to point me in the right direction, and there’s still a lot of bad writing out there to spend my money on.

It doesn’t help that when I am encouraged to “provide a review” of a book proudly self-published and self-marketed by a writing colleague, I know that lurking below the surface of such a cheerily innocuous request is a pointed subtext: “provide a positive review”.

Yet the cacophony of the book-selling market is already amplified by those who provide such banal “critical” commentary, and I can’t bring myself to write another—What a ride! Or Leaves me at a loss for words! Or So-and-so has done it again!—"reviews” that are bad writing in and of themselves, adding only noise to the room and words to the page.  

So I say nothing at all.

But in saying nothing at all, I realize that I am the problem—or, at the very least, I contribute to the problem. I have not stood up and declared myself, loudly and with conviction, to be a good reader. A reader who, reasonably, expects to be presented with good writing as part of the writer-reader contract. A reader who shouldn’t have to ferret out good writing as if she is scrounging for food. A reader who, despite the fact that she does not always want to wade valiantly through the Giller long list, still wants to read writing that gives her goosebumps, that entices her to imagine a world just beyond the limits of her own, that gives her a satisfying return on her investment.

So I’m saying it now: give me good writing, and I will be your goodest reader.