That is pertinently not true - the most popular things tend to be standard, not substandard. Popular means loved by the majority. Like Lemex' example, there are popular items that tend to be high quality at the same time, but that is mostly because they tend to unite both highbrow and lowbrow interests. Like Eliot's The Wasteland, or Miles Davis' Kind of Blue, the masses like it because they think it's good, and the critics love it because they know it's good.
Yeah...popularity is based on a social standard. If everyone is reading on a 3rd grade level then that would be unfortunate, but we could potentially see Dr. Suess short stories as bestsellers (ok bad example). The best writers and story tellers will be one to write at the standard level and then push the boundaries, like a book that is good for a Young Adult, but also for an adult - with both being able to appreciate and learn the sophistication of the book and its story.
There is no objective test for whether a book is well written. There are only fashions in writing. By far one of the best books I read last year. Possibly because Jasper Fforde is a skilled enough writer to know the reasons for the supposed rule about showing not telling, and knows when it doesn't apply. Maybe you missed the fact that it's first person narration, and the narrator is telling us his own feelings. If you think that "well written" means "following a set of arbitrary and transient rules" then that's up to you, but it's a purely subjective notion of "well written" that I and many others don't subscribe to.
Ah, I was expecting a "Shades of Gray" fan to come and comment on this. Well, I'm not going to bash Shades of Gray or anything(after all, I only read the sample), but here's the rub. Many of you are like "Pft. I can't understand why you were even looking for quality in a bestseller list." That is what is worrying to me. The very fact that you are saying that is worrying. It implies that the average reader is so stupid it's futile to look for quality in books they like.
No, I think it's simply that if you go back far enough then time has had the opportunity to filter out the dross. If you go back to the time of Dickens then sure, he was hugely popular -- but probably not as popular overall as the "penny dreadfuls". The best seller lists have always been a mix of that which will stand the test of time and that which won't (as I say, there's no objective test of "quality" of writing, so that's the best I can offer). When we look at the present that filtering hasn't happened so it looks worse than the past -- but it always has and probably always will, and is nothing to do with declining standards overall.
This is very true. Already nostalgia fog is allowing us to forget most bad films from the 80s and 90s, leaving only the ones worth remembering remembered.
Again, we have to be careful in confusing our personal slant with a global generalization. Most popular stuff is crap. It always was. But c'mon, we have a few paragraphs on any forum to contribute to the discussion. For example, many of us think those little plastic ricer cars are Tinker Toys. They are small foreign econo-boxes with engines fed by superchargers, which are drown out by 97 bass speakers. That is a generalization. But even the stock cars are junk. We forget that "muscle cars" of the late 1960s were just the lower trim models with huge V-8 engines. They had poor handling, lousy drum brakes, stripped interiors, few seatbelts and rock solid dashboards--no airbags. Kids don't have a lot of money, per se. They buy lower quality items, as a rule, or used stuff on the 'net. Besides, discerning taste is learned over time. Kids haven't spent much time doing anything, even living.
Ah, nostalgia fog. That hits videogames hard. When Demon's Souls (a game) released, people complained about various things, like the game being too easy, and the different zone worlds being to separate. People wanted them connected. They also wanted peer-to-peer multiplayer, so servers would never go offline. They also wanted better graphics. So then the sequel, Dark Souls, released. People complained that it was too hard, and that they disliked the open world, and wanted the suddenly "amazing" separate world zones back. They also said the peer to peer multiplayer had way too much lag, even though it has no more the Demon's Souls. The graphics are way better in Dark Souls than Demon's Souls, and most people don't deny that- but now they're angry that the framerate gets low on occasion. And some still insist that Demon's Souls has better graphics. Fans of anything are always crippled by nostalgia. So if you're a fan of two decades ago, everything this decade seems worse, even when it is better or mostly the same. That's why every aging generation typically thinks their day was better, and the young people are ruining the world. But the truth is, if the world really did get worse every generation, we wouldn't have cars right now. Or a country left. Technology changes, but tastes and people stay pretty much the same. The masses have always had a taste for low quality for a bargain, and they always will. Nothing new to see here.
When I was a kid I read Dostoyevsky and Kafka and Russeau, but now I read Tess Gerritsen. It is just plain ignorant to look at someone's reading choices at any given moment in time and judge their intelligence by it. Life changes all of us. When we are sheltered and comfortable and safe we often seek to live through horror and sadness vicariously. Just look at American teenager's obsession with slasher movies. When we experience real life horrors, or tragedies, however, we shy away from the "heavy" themes when we are relaxing. Obviously, what feels "heavy" will depend on each individual reader and their life experiences. I think this is why most people have a predilection for "easy" literature. There's nothing wrong with writing a narrative which will be understandable and interesting to a wide variety of readers. It's an art and aspiring writers should use bestsellers to figure out the current trends rather than sit in their own unpublished world where anyone who sold a million copies is a sellout with nothing valuable to offer. Sour grapes, it's all it is.
We should also remember that no matter how bad we might think a best-seller is, writers can still learn from it. For example, I thought the two Dan Brown novels I read were flawed in many ways, but somehow he still managed to keep me turning pages right to the end, which is a skill I'd like to learn. Or Night of the Crabs, which was a best-seller in its genre in its time. It's an awful book, but it's compellingly awful. And, you know, plenty of best-sellers are actually good books in their own right.
Whereas I would say that it has its flaws (a couple of gaping plot holes and some issues with the writing in earlier books) but overall if was significantly on the better side of average. A lot of technical stuff that folks criticise in the writing (such as showing and telling the same thing) I reckon was shrewd writing to bring in those who wouldn't normally read substantial books, who therefore needed to be taught interpretative skills that most of us learned at an earlier age. And of course a lot of critics treat it as if it were supposed to be adult literary fiction, whereas in fact it was written as YA genre fiction which has different "rules".
I'd wager that a major chunk of books sold today are bought by people either for their holidays, or their commute, so the bestselling books are going to be compelling stories that are easy to read. I see little need to worry about people for wanting to unwind at the end of a hard day at work with a tale of shagging vampires, magical schoolboys, or whatever it is that Dan Brown writes about, and little merit in criticising authors for daring to write these stories. Write what you want, read what you want, and everyone else will do the same
You're talking 'global' but referring to non-American as 'foreign'. Like Americans call their national sport event the 'World Series'. America is not the world, it's just a continent. Americans also do not make up the majority of the world's population. Apart from that, you 'set the standard' and deem popular items, which make up the majority, to be sub-standard. If, however, popular items are crap, then 'crap' is the standard. Just like the average IQ is 100. Having an IQ of 100, while not exactly something to be proud of, is the standard IQ. Same goes for other things - the most used computer keyboard, QWERTY, doesn't have the best lay-out. When used with both hands, most of the work goes to the left hand. However, it is not sub-standard, it's the standard. Standard is what is used most, not what is the best or the most efficient. Something that sells well, doesn't have to be quality, it just needs to fill needs of the majority. That most of the things that sell well turn out to be crap, well, that can be blamed on the masses, who don't want to pay more for quality. That's why, if you want to sell books, you don't need to be an excellent writer. A mediocre writer who knows how to tap the interests of the masses will succeed just as well. In fact, being an excellent writer may be a hindrance, since striving for excellence means taking more time and investing more in learning how to acquire a skill. So excellent writers often have a lower productivity than mediocre writers who churn out stuff that can please the palate of the masses.
Everything from books, films, computer games to news reporting and investigative journalism is being dumbed-down these days, quite deliberately, because the companies that sell/publish these "content products" (horrible word, I know...) have discovered that it is much easier to make bucketloads of profit from targeting the large pool of "not-too-bright-ordinary-people" out there, than it is to make profit from trying to target and please the much-harder-to-impress minority of 130 - 180 IQ people with 2 - 3 university degrees under their belt. Its a very simple equation, actually... If you are of average or below-average intellect, not terribly well educated, easy to please/hook with common product marketing tricks, and not all that discerning in your content intake, you are exactly what the big corporations want. A smart-customer, as far as these corporations are concerned, is nothing but trouble. Smart people are much harder to hook/target with advertising tricks or manufactured fashion trends. It costs more and takes far longer to create the level of content quality smart people demand. And smart people tend to be critical of even pretty-decent quality content, so the kind of "fanboyism" and "buzz" and "word-of-mouth" less smart people tend to create around popular products simply doesn't happen. This is pretty much what is happening in the world of commerce. The best consumer, for companies who want to make big bucks easily, is a not-too-sharp, undiscerning, easy-to-dupe consumer. Not Mr. Dual-PhD. To avoid making this "unsophisticated" crowd feel "unsophisticated", the big companies go as far as to rigg product reviews in various ways. So things that should get a "Meh...this is very average" review can suddenly get labelled "Good" or even "Very Good". This happens with computer games a lot, for example. Games that should rate 5/10 at most, wind up getting 8/10 reviews all of sudden.. There is only one effective way to fight this dumbing-down trend as a writer: To try to achieve a much, much higher level of writing in your own work than is present in say Potter or Twilight or The Hunger Games. Achieving a high-level of writing doesn't have to mean that a work becomes completely inaccessible to people who are less educated. It'll be somewhat harder to read and understand, but that's how you grow as a reader, isn't it? Just as you grow as a writer by attempting to write ever more difficult books & stories..
Riiight... and the publishers of the 19th century "penny dreadfuls" hadn't realised that? I think you need to take a more careful historical perspective.
I concur with Dryriver. It actually is like that, there are some smart publishers who do care about quality but they are smaller then the big ones and less prominent, plus they don't try to scam people with their faulty advertisements and whatnot. For example I visit GameSpot every day, to keep up with gaming world. The ratings for some particular games there are... way too high. From there I also found a reference to an article about the harsh reality of these BIG game publishers, it was a good read. From there I got more proof that big companies (some are okay but the most prominent ones...) treat consumers as total idiots, all they care about is money. Unfortunately I don't remember the address to that article. I occasionally visit IMDB, mostly to get some more information on a movie I intend to watch and again some are far too highly rated, for example a 7 if instead there is no way it could have gone past 5. Plus I've read some reviews there, so many are clearly paid for. Then there is a book-review site I occasionally visited, even ordered a book based on the review and scoring there, turned out to be a very bad idea. I have yet to get rid of the book, will probably drop it off at a library. (Luckily there is another site which is very good and so far objective.) People don't become smarter and more educated by reading low-quality products that are constantly shoveled in their face. Pointless and brainless greed... wish it would end already.
There are also cases of 'dumbing down' which I don't like. Even with things that are not actually that bad. Take Bioshock for example. It's a very good game, and the story is excellent, while also being a philosophical discussion. It's games like this that we need to prove that games are not just stupid time-sinks, but are a new and interesting artistic medium; but even this is a dumbed down version of System Shock 2.
Here's, pretty much, what happened with computer games in the last 10 years: 1) As game graphics improved, the production cost of games increased to XX million dollars per major title. 2) As the production cost increased, publishers wanted to "take less financial risks". In particular, "new game ideas" were seen as "risky investments". 3) So publishers decided to make XX number of sequels of games that were successful in the past. To make and publish the same game all over basically, and re-use the existing codebase, just with some new 3D levels/environments and enemies thrown in. 4) As if this wasn't bad enough, someone came up with the disasterous idea that the "big profit" in games was to be made from "casual gamers" from now on. Casual gamers, per definition, do not like games that require any in-depth understanding or mastery of complex game mechanics, complex controls, puzzles et cetera that need to be solved. The games have to be simple to play (or "seriously dumbed-down"), with lots of funky graphical effects & action. Games should also be short (4 - 8 hours of gameplay max), as "Casual Gamers" game only an hour or two after work, or on weekends anyway. 5) As if all that wasn't bad enough, game publishers somehow convinced themselves that all PC gamers do is "pirate games off the internet for free", so game development now shifted focus to Game Consoles. This made for even simpler/more dumbed-down games, because Consoles have only a very simple game controller (no mouse & keyboard), and because Consoles gamers are much less technically-minded than PC users. 6) Result? Computer gaming has pretty much gone down the Dumb-Drain, with PC gaming in particular suffering horribly from releases that are almost all poorly ported Console-Game ports. 7) From a business standpoint, dumbing-down virtually all computer games that are made has been terrifically profitable. The industry makes such fat profits from dumbed-down "Casual Games" that it doesn't even care about the quality of individual games it publishes anymore. 8) If you are an old gamer with experience of the old 8bit/16bit days, and early PC Gaming (e.g. 1990s), you have witnessed first-hand how the big game publishers have ripped the soul out of complex, intelligent gaming and are producing only dumbed-down sequels of themselves dumbed-down sequels any more.
That may all be true for the production costs of games, but the production costs of books haven't risen all that much in comparison to previous decades. In fact, I can imagine they have gone down, especially since the coming of the e-book and the apparent ignorance by the masses of the production values of books.
I am one of the many that read a book due to a gripping plot. A plot makes a book and furthermore, writers have to remember that not everyone is as skilled in literature, as themselves, and that people just want to be entertained. Reading a book can be like watching a film - it needs to be the right length with a good plot. The bestseller these days are rightly there due to a strong plot and with a right overall balance; of description, speech, chapters etc. People say books are boring. Wrong, only some are - those that lack mystery or drama - characteristics to take us away from everyday life. The plot is the main orchestra of that. In my opinion, the best sellers in these times deserve their titles as they fulfil the criteria readers look for - to entertain. Most readers dont care about the wonderful use of literature, especially since they'll need a dictionary to navigate through every few lines.
And FROM software. FROM software has released Demon's Souls and Dark Souls as of late- both games take many hours to even survive in, and have oodles (yes, oodles) of hidden secrets, even locations that the average player will never see. The online modes, both co-op and competitive, also blend seemlessly to single player, and are very fun and innovative. There's so much hidden content in Dark Souls that the game was at first estimated at about 1/2 the size of Skyrim. Now, vets of the game know it to be bigger than Skyrim, with more places, more unique (less recycled) things, more enemies, more gear, etc. Dark Souls is also brutally difficult and deep. The action based gameplay is better than Cod's, the rpg aspects of Dark Souls are far better than Skyrim's. The graphics are even pretty amazing for a console game- it's releasing on the pc in August, though. Dark Souls may be my favorite game EVAR.
Hey! Offense taking. I like playing on a console and many hard core gamers do because A) I don't have to replace parts of my console every six months to play the darn things. And yet I still don't like to dumbed down content coming out. I will accept that a keyboard and mouse always broke me. But then again, that just may be because most of the ones I've tried have had horrible, horrible set up. ... I only remember Lemmings from that time period.
Screw it! Who remembers titles like Dark Seed and I Have No Mouth But I Must Scream? God I am a child of the 90s.
