Every reader has a book, or book series, that they hold dear to their hearts. Often, they’re books we read as children. Some are masterpieces we only appreciated once we became adults. Both of my favorite series, “Percy Jackson” and “Fruits Basket,” were found as a friendless child, haunting the aisles of the public and school library every day of the week.
Regardless, we can all admit that our favorite books have some moments in them that make us close the book and screech in secondhand embarrassment. In YA fiction, it’s usually due to a teen saying or doing something stupid, in typical teen fashion. In adult fiction, the problem is adults who pay taxes want to act like children again. Either that, or they think putting the f-word into every sentence is cool.
Anyway, the first edition of this story was about how BookTok ruins both reading and writing by marketing books with the same plots and characters with different names. In this edition, rather than just telling you that BookTok dialogue sucks, I’ll show you, using both firsthand examples and quotes I found while stalking Goodreads, a popular site for finding and rating books.
First, the OG cringe dialogue, written by Stephanie Meyer, author of “Twilight” herself:
“Aro started to laugh. ‘Ha ha ha,’ he chuckled.”
This quote is from “New Moon,” and redundancy aside, this was just a bad line in a sea of bad writing (I say as I dust my “Twilight” movie set and complete book series off).
The rest of the examples are more recent; one of the books I talked about in the first edition was “Lights Out,” by Navessa Allen, which I didn’t even finish because it was so bad.
“I didn’t want him morally grey. I wanted someone with a soul as black as night.”
By the rest of these quotes’ standards, this one isn’t too bad. But the book had too many real-world references for my liking, and too much self-labeling that becomes pathetic after a while. Nobody in books should understand or even know the term “morally grey,” or refer to themselves as a “golden retriever-like boyfriend.”
Of course, the most infamous dialogue of all comes from TikTok’s beloved Colleen Hoover. Just kidding, TikTok hates her and her work, but especially this conversation in her book “On Ugly Love” that somehow, someway got reviewed, edited, and published with this exchange in it.
“I laugh. ‘You’re responsible for the beautiful part, Rachel. The only thing he got from me was his balls.’ She laughs. She laughs hard. ‘Oh, my God, I know,’ she says. ‘They’re so big.’ We both laughed at our son’s big balls.”
My hatred for it should be self-explanatory.
Now the absolute worst, cringiest line I have ever read in my entire life, and I’ve read some super cringy things, is from “Haunting Adeline” by H.D. Carlton. Listen, the first book was written like fanfiction anyway, but Jesus Christ, the fact that the line was published and I was expected to take it seriously?
“I don’t have the godd— time to deal with small fish when I have Great Whites floating around in my ocean. Too bad for them, I’m a f—— Megalodon.”
Terrible. Awful. Typing out that dialogue disgusted me to no end. If you have to tell your readers how big and bad you are, maybe you aren’t hot stuff after all.
I believe the rise of terrible dialogue boils down to, again, the marketing of mediocre books. People want to make quick money, so they spit out whatever comes to their minds first, including dialogue that sounds like they’ve never heard a person speak before.
