He may have been responsible for just as many terrible movies as he has all-time classics – whether that’s directly or indirectly – but as one of the most popular and successful authors there’s ever been, Stephen King knows his way around a line of dialogue.
Having established a reputation as one of the horror genre’s most legendary voices a long time ago, he knows a thing or two about what it takes to put words on the page capable of enticing and engrossing readers. However, for his latest social media experiment, King has decided to head in the complete opposite direction.
As he tends to do, the titan of terror posted a random musing online for his millions of followers to chew on, and he ended up instantly reaping the rewards when they responded in kind by offering a deluge of entirely worthy suggestions.
Trying to quantify what constitutes bad writing can often be in the eye of the beholder, but some of these examples are so egregious that they’ve managed to attain a level of long-lasting infamy, with many having been repurposed countless times over as some of the internet’s most popular memes.
We’re not saying King’s prose is always 100 percent watertight – something he’s no doubt admit to himself – but he did at least get exactly what he wished for after broaching the subject of screenwriting sacrilege that somehow made it all the way from the first draft to the final cut without anybody stopping, taking a breath, and noticing that the words coming out of the character’s mouths were utterly atrocious.