Excellent point. Some writers are ahead of their time in this regard. Their works only did well years or decades after their deaths because they were too experimental to be appreciated. James Joyce comes to mind. Also, culture is very important. Magical realism dominated Latin American literature for a long time. To them, something like Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury would have seemed very strange. Literary fiction has bad writing as well. And the only reason literary fiction is studied at universities is because academians say so. It's ultimately an arbitrary choice.
I'm writing a romance and I don't care if it dumbs down the world. I just want to entertain. (I'm sure this emoticon isn't the highest caliber of communication, either.)
I agree. And I'm not pretending that I know what is and what isn't good writing. I can barely write myself. But good literary fiction is studied in universities because it is either within a literary tradition or it is brilliant enough to break with tradition. I don't see that as arbitrary. Academics don't flippantly just shove works into the canon(some may, but unsuccessfully) .
A well-written book is like a well made meal. There is technical skill mixed with creativity and ingenuity, understanding the complexity of the ingredients and fusing them together to form a gratifying experience. However, people are often satisfied with simply filling their belly and stopping their hunger, settling for poorly prepared, unimaginative and/or boring food.
No it isn't! You can read a well-written book and when you're done, it's still there! You could read it again! Try doing that with a meal. (I'm overthinking this, right? ) Or maybe they're looking for only one thing. For example, salt. Lots of fast food places oversalt their food because they know people crave it. Likewise, some writers pump their novels full of sex or violence or gee-whiz sci-fi stuff because their readers crave it. They know the writing can be lousy so long as there's enough gore or, uh, semen or something.
Louis l'Amour's shorter novels were great reads but literary crap. Good guy always wins. His longer and also the modern novels were very nice. Like the Sackett series and "Last of the Breed". Excellent morality tales about the rewards of persistence and honor. Great writing? Meh. But well written
No, of course not. But I can dislike a work and still understand why its in the canon. And plenty of deserving works do get excluded. I'm not arguing that the gatekeepers of the canon are infallible.
There are works of genre fiction that have the same cultural and social impact as a piece of literary fiction and that are just as well written, so they should be included in the canon as well. I don't get the logic behind excluding something just because it falls under a particular genre. We should judge each book individually without worrying about classifications.
I'm not seeing the logic here. A murder mystery--for example--isn't required to be inferior to a similar novel that doesn't have a murder and therefore doesn't fit a specific genre. A science fiction novel isn't required to be inferior to a similar novel that doesn't mention speculative scientific creations or ideas. Or are you saying that a good genre book is no longer a genre book because it's good? If a murder mystery is brilliantly written, is it no longer a murder mystery? I'm just not getting your logic.
Perhaps I'm painting too broad of a stroke. There are certainly lots of Science Fiction books that are literary. Same with detective or crime stories. Sherlock Holmes, Raymond Chandler, Graham Greene etc. I guess my definition of genre fiction is much more narrow. To me, it's formula fiction. It's Dean Koontz writing 75 books and Robert Ludlam writing 27 thrillers. Most of genre fiction demands nothing from the reader. It's all just obvious, there's no analysis needed. Most of it follows a structure and formula that is known to the reader. This wasn't always the case with the American reader. If you look at best seller lists throughout the 20th century its mostly literary works. In 1972 Hemingway's "Islands in the Stream" was #1. A decade later and the top 10 is Tom Clancy, Robert Ludlum and genre fiction thrillers and spy novels. What happened? The Cold War had been around since the end of WW2. Well, mass media of course. More specifically, the cinema. I think people wanted to read the same things they were seeing at the movies. They wanted the same narratives. Or, a whole new reader was created that had developed "cinema brain" when it came to reading.
I'll offer a point here. I'm, primarily, a science fiction writer, and I know science fiction has taken a lot of pounding from critics over the decades. I'm here to tell you that, at least in the early years (in the USA, 1920s-1930s), it really earned that abuse. Back in those days, there was really no market for science fiction outside of a few space-bedazzled kids. Hugo Gernsback and a few others started science fiction magazines to satisfy this market. The problem with magazines, as in any other regularly-produced medium, is that they demand that a certain number of pages be filled every month, no exceptions and no missing deadlines. The sci-fi magazines were huge cavernous maws that had to be filled with stories constantly, and they didn't pay much. No self-respecting writer wrote for these markets back in the bad old days. So the stories they published were terrible. The writers they published were terrible - most of the time, the writers were the same pimple-faced kids who were buying the magazines anyway. They were bright and imaginative, but they had no skills as writers. But the pages had to be filled, so their stories were published. It took a long time for science fiction to gain respectability after that. Nowadays, writers like Ray Bradbury, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, and others are considered literary heavyweights. It took well over half a century to get to that point. The stink of the pulp magazines still hangs over the genre. Modern masters are working in science fiction, but so long as there are old critics who remember the bad old days, the genre will have a hard time getting the respect it now deserves. The problem is not rooted in the genre. The problem is rooted in the history of the genre's publications. Science fiction can be glorious literary fiction (or, more to the point, literary fiction can gloriously mine the science fiction genre), but until people realize that the stone is out of the mountain and has been polished and seen to be a valuable jewel, the haters will still hate.
It is all well and quite spiffing for the little people. They have their mortgages, their suburban woes and their briefcases stuffed at the airport: a case stuffed, I recall, by the - the game of thrones, those squashed silky knickers in trilogy on page, a hollywood lord of the dance, celebrity 007? Yes, yes, and yes ... please give them the royal family for free, damn and hang them all, let them wave at helicopters, yes...because we - yes, meanwhile, us the intelligentsia, us, we, the true elite, the vanguard of the proletarian scum, in our berets we must strive, and we must reach even higher, higher than the helicopters, for because without literature there can be no freedom of the mind, we must, and shall not struggle like worms on a fisherman's hook for wherever there is a Nabokov he shall be found. Brothers, shake from your slumber, shake for Shakespeare, dick for Dickens, and three cheers for intellectual enquiry of the mind. Death to low life, death to the monobrow, death to those readers with their drool and comics, eat sweets you bottom-feeders, do not darken my studio with your hairy fists and death, yes death, let us invite death upon children's authors and fantasy shit, dot to dot, colour by numbers go rot, probably sci-fi too. Hasta la Siempra Fiesta Micron
She might be trying prose poetry? It definitely reads like poetry to me. You're right that there're some lovely little phrases in there. But overall - she's just putting random words almost incoherently together. I would personally call this over-indulgence and for the reader an utter waste of time. But then again, like I said, I'm a more story-driven kind of reader. While for me a great book has to have a balance of both beautiful, masterful writing as well as a beautiful, masterful story, I can enjoy a book with mediocre writing but a great story. What I cannot enjoy is great writing with no story. Things have to start making sense, you know? Anyway, that book might be good for dissecting and learning though. @minstrel - haters will always hate. There's no reasoning with them. Their loss. Sometimes I am not convinced that haters really understand what makes good writing. They only know what makes writing they like or dislike. And sometimes they might be right to call something bad writing too. But I dunno - can one be said to truly appreciate writing and know its worth and understand the craft if one cannot step back and appreciate the things that don't necessarily conform to *their* idea of beauty? Or at the very least reserve judgement but give something the benefit of a doubt, always keenly aware of the factor of personal taste as well as the specific purposes of the particular piece of work? If one cannot do these things, then I truly do question - how much can they really know about the craft?
It is definitely more a prose piece. Yes, I'm loving the prose. The beauty of the language. I'm definitely learning from this book. Especially that beauty of language can be sabotaged if clarity of thought/vision hasn't been achieved. The book then becomes not so much a success as a what-could've-been. I think all good writing comes back to clarity of imagery & thought - not so much clarity of reason. Kinda like in a book when a character can give you clear metaphors and symptoms of what he's feeling but he's not sure why he's feeling this way. Bad writing I've noticed in my own work and with some newbies and even with this book ( Mary Stuart ) happens when you use misplaced mystery. Turning things that shouldn't be into a mystery. Convoluting things that should be clear. When not only does the reason become unclear but even the imagery and thought. The reader has nothing to anchor to - he's no longer a ship on a voyage but rather a castaway, adrift in a sea of beautiful words.
Excellent point Peach! One of my professors said there are two kinds of ambiguity in fiction. The good kind creates mystery, usually leaving readers with a hint or ideas about whats going on, but also a clear idea of exactly where we are in the story and what's taking place. Good ambiguity creates intrigue, not confusion, which is a trait that plagues bad ambiguity. Bad ambiguity, as my professor put it, breeds confusion by being deliberately vague, noncommittal even. One example of this, in my opinion, is when writers start their stories talking about an unspecified "it" that happened (e.g. "I remember when it happened. I was fourteen years old and everyone was watching me. It was the worst day of my life, but I wouldn't be who I am if it hadn't happened. etc.). This may not bother some people, but I just don't like it. It feels gimmicky, withholding certain information. I feel the same way about not naming characters right away, even though you have every opportunity and reason. I also can't stand when writers seep into overly poetic descriptions of things, breaking the pre-established voice to flaunt their skills at describing thing. Not always in a purple prose sense, but if it breaks he voice of the speaker, it just seems unnatural, kind of like giving a child character (who's not defined as a genius) perfect grammar and a college vocabulary. None of these are things I'm not guilty of though!
I believe something that is well-written has a resonance to it that is clear. Books that are considered genius or groundbreaking, may not be that way to others. So, I see well-written as a subjective term. I find Finnegans Wake very well-written, but others consider it useless and uninteresting. I also love Catcher in the Rye, and I consider that a very well-written book; but I've met people who say that it is boring and slow.
I've seen Finnegan's Wake mentioned a few times here, now, I think it's time I add it to my reading list... maybe? should I?
My advice with Joyce is to read him in chronological order. Start with Dubliners and then move on to Portrait of an Artist. Ulysses comes next, and that's a very challenging book, though it's certainly doable. This is where I stopped because Finnegan's Wake is pretty much impossible to understand.
It's written in a highly allegorical and idiosyncratic writing style. It really only made 100% sense to Joyce, and that's why I find it counter-intuitive to attempt to understand it. When I read it, I create my own story every time. That ups its re-readability a lot for me. Also, I just enjoy it for how beautiful his word-crafting skills are. It's a giant soup of words, complex and layered references, and excellent use of foreign languages and archaic English.
