A Funny Idea I had Recently

So I have read a fair few hundred books in my time, thousands, millions, every book written so I think I am the most valuable source of information on good and terrible books. No, I’m just kidding. But I do love to sit and read a book with a cup of coffee every now and then. So I have read loads of books and I have furtherly enjoyed some more than others. But that is how it goes for the general reader, you have your favourite genres, writers and tropes. For me…personally… It's a dystopian future book that has my heart, or a fantasy world where you need to go on a dangerous adventure to save the world, anything with magic that makes me so absorbed in the book I feel like the main character and if I’m feeling frisky you can’t go wrong with a spicy enemies to lovers romance trope.

But genuinely I have read some awful books and spent every single waking moment during the reading process and after thinking, “How did that get published?”

So this got me thinking.

I could sit down for a month, write this terrible book that has all the tropes I hate but are somehow popular on TikTok under a random pen name and post about it on TikTok. Would it get sales? Probably, there’s always a buyer for everything and if I promoted it well I could probably get some sales.

But would I feel good about it?

Would I want to have my name, however fake and made up it may be, on a book that I myself do not like in the slightest? Would I be proud of it regardless? What about you, how would you answer these questions if it was you doing this?

But I think it could be fun, even if I don’t publish the book in the end just to challenge myself to write a book that is not my cup of tea. Just to see if I could maybe relate to the writers of those genres a bit more. Maybe I could find a certain respect for the people who write the books I am slating.

I might try it in November for NaNoWriMo. Pick a random genre and trope out of a hat and see what I can come up with. Actually cap the book at 50,000 words and make it readable. It could do many things for me, if you think about it.

Widen my knowledge of the other topics, being a good point for research so I can learn other writing techniques and even get me to explore writing from the perspective of characters that I despise but try to make likeable to a different audience than me.

Who knows, maybe I might even like the final product after living through the process of writing it? Maybe I will write something that I do want published and would be proud to put my real name on. I do want to dip my toe in the romance genre at some point but I want all my characters to be mentally healthy, not manipulative, abusive or controlling like I see in a lot of the books I read and hate.

Only time will tell anyway, maybe one day I will find a book recommended to me on TikTok that isn’t awful and a complete chore to read. Maybe if my friend didn’t give me the worst recommendations then my For You page wouldn’t be full of them and instead I would get recommendations from TikTok that are actually FOR ME and not her. I love her but she doesn’t read enough books these days. You should see her to-be-read list, it’s longer than mine.