1. Teladan

    Teladan Contributor Contributor

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    The Difficulty With Judging Writing

    Discussion in 'General Writing' started by Teladan, Apr 26, 2021.

    I had an interesting discussion with someone recently regarding the difficulty of knowing what "good writing" actually is. This person said they once spent a few days on an anonymous board pasting excerpts from Hesse, Woolf and Tolstoy. This took place in a thread dedicated to writing critiques. What do you think happened? People said these works were atrocious and assumed the writer was clearly new. This hit home for me as I've seen it quite often myself.

    Now, one could argue that since this was anonymous the people doing the critiques will be less inclined to be nice. I think there's some weight to that argument. But why they would take their time to respond on an anonymous board if they didn't feel strongly about the text in some way?

    I'll be honest, this depresses me to no end, it really does. It tells me there's something flawed about writing as a medium of art. Do you know what I mean by that? Surely Tolstoy and Hesse should be instantly recognizable. Reading their prose should be like looking at a Rembrandt. The fact that that's not the case suggests writing has no real intrinsic quality to it unless in a specific context. Deep down--and this is deeply troubling to me at times--I've always suspected that a name is more important than the work itself.

    Anonymous person reading Hesse not knowing it's Hesse: "This is rubbish."
    Anonymous person reading Hesse knowing it's Hesse: "This is a masterwork"

    I suppose this isn't just a problem with writing. I've seen people disparage a work of art until they know who its creator is. Good art is good art because it follows concrete fundamentals, same as animation or music. Writing, I find, is harder to judge. It takes a lot more processing power and discernment. It's extremely easy to look at Woolf and think it's pretentious nonsense until you realise who it's by and then it's a beautiful bit of fiction...

    Very much interested to hear your thoughts on this.
     
  2. Madman

    Madman Life is Sacred Contributor

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    I think fame is sadly more important to a lot of people, rather than the quality of the art. I may be wrong on this, but I think I remember something about how famous painters used apprentices to paint some of their art, and then the painter took the credit for it.

    So maybe we should all write under the psuedonyms of famous dead writers? Then again... and I repeat/rephrase what I have said once before, to truly establish what is good writing/art/etc, we only need to ask several billion different people.
     
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  3. Teladan

    Teladan Contributor Contributor

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    I think that's probably true, but even without the posturing and the desire to be seen to be clued-up when it comes to literature and whatnot--shouldn't the work impress just by being itself? These people had no idea that the work by Hesse was by Hesse. If the writing is good--and it probably was since it's Herman Hesse--shouldn't all of them have said it's good? Obviously we have to account for personal preference in this little experiment, but there were three quite different authors used here and all of them are thought of as being the best of the best in some way. On the anonymous board there was no incentive to appear intelligent or informed. Someone saw good writing and assumed it was bad. Maybe all of these people just didn't understand the text and thought it was poor because of that. That then leads on to my frustration with literature being highly dependant on the reader's own faculties. Anyone can look at a Rembrandt and appreciate its mastery of form and colour, but not everyone can appreciate Virginia Woolf. It's unfortunate to say the least.
     
  4. Bruce Johnson

    Bruce Johnson Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    I can't comment on Hesse, or probably not even Tolstoy, as I've never read either, but couldn't you argue that since they wrote in non-English languages, posting an excerpt from a translation might not get an immediate 'Wow' if the forum was visited by mostly English speakers?

    Some of Tolstoy's works are mammoth and stand up in any language because of the themes, characters, and plot and probably not so much due to the translated prose and an excerpt won't do the story justice. At least that would be my answer.

    As for Woolf, I doubt there is any author or any classic piece of literature that a good percentage of readers would still say is trash if you have them an excerpt.
     
  5. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    I've noticed when I read older classics etc, that often there are many of what would today be called mistakes and errors.

    I think for one thing the standards of judging what constitutes a 'classic' are very different from the current standards of what publishers are accepting. Not only that, but reading tastes have changed due to several factors, such as the rise of movies and television, which made people want to read more showing rather than telling, since movies etc are so powerfully visual. But of course this applies more to genre writing and not so much to literary.

    But also it's very hard to judge the power or quality of a piece from just an excerpt. You need to read the whole thing and let it seep in gradually, see if you're still thinking about it a week later or a year later. You can't tell any of that from a brief excerpt, especially since you're writing up your report immediately after reading it the first time.

    Of course there's also the fact that the majority of people have no idea how to judge a piece of writing. Especially classic writing. If they've been taught at all how to evaluate writing, it's by today's standards.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2021
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  6. peachalulu

    peachalulu Member Reviewer Contributor

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    Readers have gotten a lot lazier they're used to genre patterns, movie cues, flashy action, loads of dialogue that explains the action. Paperback fiction. They're not used to a book that doesn't reveal where it's headed on the first page. And a lot of classics wanted their characters to have an underlying question about bigger questions - God, the universe, their place in it. All of that seems to be a wash - and it's a given that most characters now are only interested in the moment, with momentary gains. Depth had been traded for mostly shallow entertainment.
     
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  7. NigeTheHat

    NigeTheHat Contributor Contributor

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    I don't know that there is an objective standard of 'good' - people want different things from books. And knowing who the author is will affect how we see the work, peoples' opinions are always affected by context. There was a study (which I'll try and dig out the link for, because it was fascinating) showing a strong correlation between how much someone enjoyed a bottle of wine with how expensive they were told it was; wine often isn't expensive because it's good, it's good because it's expensive. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a similar thing happened with authors, and painters, and music, and everything else.

    Equally, 'good' is going to mean different things to everyone. It's hard to argue Fifty Shades is 'good' writing, the way I define it... except it sold millions and a lot of people really liked it, so it kinda was. 'Good' for them didn't mean a nicely turned sentence, it meant a chapter they thought was sexy as hell, and they weren't going to get that from Hesse. Me saying Fifty Shades isn't good is much like someone saying the dishwasher is rubbish because it doesn't take pictures.
     
  8. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Don't conflate popular with good. It's always been a fact that the general public has rubbish taste (did I just become British for a second there?) Good taste is acquired, it comes with education and exposure to quality. And of course it can easily shade over into snobbery.

    Sturgeon's Law: 90% of everything is crap. But actually that works because 90% of the population loves crap and can't tell it from quality.
     
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  9. NigeTheHat

    NigeTheHat Contributor Contributor

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    Why not?

    'Good' has a lot of different dimensions. I don't think it's helpful to think in terms of 'good' so much as 'good at'. Fifty Shades isn't good at, say, drawing a character, but it is apparently very good at giving the hand which isn't holding the book something to do.

    For millions of people who bought it, 'good' meant one of these things rather more than it meant the other.
     
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  10. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Yeah, but those are people with no taste, buying into to the popular. It's a complete subjectivization of the idea of quality. If we allow that popularity equates with quality, then what name do we now use for actual quality?

    When I talk about books or movies that I like, I differentiate between ones that I think are good (objectively) and ones I like. There are a lot of things I would agree are good in many regards, but that I don't care for—but that's just my own personal and subjective viewpoint. It's important not to mix the subjective up with the objective (or the nearly objective if we're talking art, which is hard to discuss in strictly objective terms).

    Edit—People have a tendency to confuse the popular with the good, the true, or the smart. It isn't. In fact, more often than not, it's the diametric opposite.
     
    Last edited: Apr 26, 2021
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  11. hyacinthe

    hyacinthe Banned

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    I've had some interesting moments on other online critique spaces where I've put something up for feedback and people responded by criticizing what I wrote pretty heavily and even going so far as rewriting my sentences for me. I have received terribly cutting critiques that ended with "Sorry if this seems harsh but if you're going to make it in publishing you have to be really good. Keep trying and you will get there."
     
  12. B.E. Nugent

    B.E. Nugent Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    Interesting thread and interesting experiment outlined by @Teladan up further. I'm not entirely sure there is an objective measure of artistic merit, but absolutely agree that what is popular is frequently different to what is good in an artistic sense. People who purport to know the difference sometimes rely on an accepted conformity before recognizing the quality of what they are reading. What can we conclude? Literary circles can be dishonest? Hypocritical? Inflated with own importance and dedicated followers of fashion? No shit, Sherlock. Same as every other human enterprise. Thing is, many of those works we uphold as mastery now were unrecognised, if not reviled, when first composed. The reaction in the experiment possibly reflects the original reception for those works when the penniless author went looking for a publisher. And the small number of people who insisted their work be valued.

    I'm not sure that everyone can recognise quality in visual arts and that is where I'm inclined to mumble "I know what I like" . Having said that, my wife and I visited Rome a few years ago, somewhere I always wanted to go as a living museum. Every corner and every church. We happened into one by chance, passing and figured we'd have a look. There was artwork displayed throughout the church, very fine to my eye. At the further corner, there were two pieces of art that blew everything else away. They were alive in a way I'm not sure I'd ever witnessed in other paintings before so we checked the brochure and, of course, they were by Caravaggio. Just hanging there, all casual and stunning. Made me think of the cost to the artist when so much life is transplanted into the work. Has to be taken from somewhere?

    Back to the original thought on the thread, it is possible to recognise mastery in writing without loving it and to find more resonance in something less skilled but more personally moving. It is also possible that critical acclaim says as much about the critic as it does about the art, maintaining an aloof expertise that can become its own purpose.
     
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  13. Malum

    Malum Offline

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    Just my sentiments about 'commercial' appeal in this era. 'Good writing' could mean widespread appeal without longevity, or it could mean a niche, dedicated following - and everything in between...Art is in the eyes of the beholder and the world could be seen as less literate, but more populated. I don't know. Rambling.
     
  14. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Lol yeah, ever since writing that it's been bugging me—I was a little too sure of myself being able to tell quality from crap. And @B.E. Nugent I appreciate the way you approached it. I just get fed up with the idea that since it's impossible to be purely objective, that therefore everything is totally subjective.

    There are certain measures by which we can make some determinations though. If we've read enough and studied enough and developed our own skills, most of us can tell the scribblings of a complete noob from anything of better quality I think.

    But once you step from the world of measurable standards it gets a lot more difficult. In writing that means stepping away from standard Narrative form, as used in genre fiction, into the literary realm. In visual arts it means moving from the Classical into the Modern and beyond. In those less formalized realms it gets much more subjective, and there really are no objective standards to judge by. That's when we only have 'I know what I like' to fall back on. Though even there I think most of us can recognize the hand of a master compared to a completely untrained pretender. I don't know, it's more complex than that, isn't it? If it's a master writing in a style you don't care for, there are no familiar markers to judge by.

    This relates closely to what I keep discussing on my blog, that the craft (narrative form for instance) can be taught and learned, but the art can't. However, I still hold that, unless you're one of those people who's able to just absorb it through a lot of reading with no need for any kind of formal education, then you'll need to learn narrative form before you can set sail across those uncharted seas of unstructured literary form. As I keep saying, most of the really good modern artists actually were well trained in Classical form before they decided to break from it and launch into the unknown.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2021
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  15. Selbbin

    Selbbin The Moderating Cat Staff Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    McDonalds is popular but that does not make it 'good' food. 'Good' implies quality, and quality implies craft. Good food can come from small cheap places, but you know the difference between that and McDonalds almost immediately. The taste, the experience, the craft.

    People consume crap because it's easy and immediately satisfying. Just because it 'does the job' does not make it good. Good is the next level.
     
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  16. B.E. Nugent

    B.E. Nugent Contributor Contributor Contest Winner 2023

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    Not a fan of McDonald's but don't ever feel like smacking the kid behind the counter as much as the self-important irritants on Masterchef.
     
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  17. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Lol... you're talking about the problem at the other end—snobbery. I think I mentioned it above. Some people who have developed their taste fall into it. It's the Scylla on the other side of the river from the Charibdys of complete lack of skills. You need to be able to navigate your way between these 2 extremes.
     
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  18. petra4

    petra4 Active Member

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    I've not read Hesse, Woolf or Tolstoy BUT knowing music, I can speak of. It's simple . . . you either appreciate the Author for his/her art (craft/writing) or your don't. The other consideration is if you understand what the Author is trying to deliver (grammar correct or not). Each has their own writing style.

    Reading books from earlier publishers such as 1800 or 1900's is very different to reading a book of today. As one member has already mentioned, reading these books and you'd say it's most incorrect.
     
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  19. Teladan

    Teladan Contributor Contributor

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    I've read all the responses here. I just want to reiterate that I wasn't the one using books from the 19th and 20th centuries in this experiment. I understand there are preferences and that reading has changed a lot in the past hundred years. Regarding the idea of subjectivity and objectivity in art, that's one of the things I'm really struggling to pin down myself. I'm liable to ruffle a few feathers here... I used to believe in complete subjectivity, but then I learned about Modern art and was exposed to some incredibly snobbish and nonsensical views on why Jackson Pollock is better than any Rembrandt, Ishkin, Caravaggio, Rubens, etc. I've seriously struggled with this. On the one hand, I'm all for subjectivity but the thought I keep coming back to is that there are layers involved in discernment. What I mean is, I think I can appreciate certain Modern art pieces but utterly despise others. For me it comes down to skill and talent. The painting has to make an effort to impress me. I sincerely despise works of art which are nothing more than chaotic scribblings on a canvas. Same goes for a canvas of nothing but four coloured squares. Same goes for glasses of water standing on a shelf with a seriously pretentious poem next to it attesting that the glass of water is an oak tree. Yes, that last one is real. I love the early impressionists and I'm all for fantastical, weird imagery. But I also love tradition and Classical stuff. I love Beksinski but I also have some sympathy for the aesthetic philosophy of Scruton. It's tricky! All I know is that I'm fine with things being decadent and rule-breaking, but it has to have some semblance of artistry to it...

    Okay, that was a bit of a tangent. As for whether something is good or not, I'm afraid I'll have to admit I'm more inclined to think of good as synonymous with well-made/serious/intellectual. I'm on Selbbin's side. I fundamentally do not believe that Fifty Shades of Grey is good because it attracts millions of readers. In fact, I struggle to even understand that idea. Just because something is popular doesn't make it good. Right? Those books are the equivalent of putting a nice juicy worm (fattened by some unholy substance) on the end of a hook and throwing it into an overstocked pond. Now, there are so many different factors and layers to take into consideration. When I said I love things that are intellectual and serious, I don't mean they all have to be dark, sombre and joyless. Simply put, I love things that are well-made. I think Calvin and Hobbes comics are masterful. Those aren't serious or dark. But they do have something to say...

    Edit: Lastly, I have no sympathy whatsoever for people who don't indulge in old classics just because they're old classics. Yes, reading has changed a lot, but that doesn't mean one shouldn't absorb these works.
     
    Last edited: Apr 27, 2021
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  20. cosmic lights

    cosmic lights Contributor Contributor

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    I'm surprised is they posted those things on writing forums, the threads weren't closed and the culprits banned. That's can be considered plagiarism especially if they didn't cite their source and explained why they were asking for critique. If they simply posted these excerpts that could have been regarded as their own since it was a critique forum. Shocked they didn't even recognise the work. I'm not a fan of them, I find them hard work but as someone who likes to write I have read a few over the years. I understand everyone can't have read every single book but I do think it's important to see where your art form came from and how it developed.

    I think good writing will vary as time goes on. I think there are even some classics that wouldn't get published today as reading tastes have changed. Number one for me, the author has to be versed in the language they are writing in and use correct punctuation. (this is my biggest weakness). If English is your chosen language for your book you have to be good at it without relying too much on an editor, especially for your first novel. You need to be good at the technical side.
    The rest is down to content and that will always vary.
     
  21. Cave Troll

    Cave Troll It's Coffee O'clock everywhere. Contributor

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    For me, good is when all of it comes together and works.
    So, if it's simplistic, too telly, or boring then I don't think
    it's worth a lick of anything.

    Sadly, it seems that being bland and simple seems to be
    the flavor of the 'modern' author. Mastery of anything
    beyond a few basic beats to hit, is severely lacking in
    terms of subtlety and creativity. Though they are creative
    in ways that show off how uniquely bad they all are, so
    there are no two authors who write terribly the same way.
    Points for style in being uniquely bad? o_O
    (Not that I will ever be making anything noteworthy) :p

    Basically it comes down to who have you heard of. Take
    Steve King, and how bat crap crazy and off the wall his
    stories can be, and people buy his books because of his
    name alone. Does that mean they are good cause everybody
    under the sun has heard of him? No, but people like safe
    bets, and things that are popular. Makes it hard to break out
    when you have to compete with the heavy hitters, and every
    person with a documents file full of their stories they wrote
    before it was cool to push them into the public ether for profit.
     
  22. hyacinthe

    hyacinthe Banned

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    It's super amazing to me how much energy some writers will put into disdaining writing, sometimes.
     
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  23. Teladan

    Teladan Contributor Contributor

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    Isn't this just passion?
     
  24. Le Panda Du Mal

    Le Panda Du Mal Contributor Contributor

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    Some "writers" have full-on contempt for language. Any departure from the most direct sentences, the most ordinary diction, tries their patience. "Florid," "archaic", etc aren't stylistic choices that may or may not work in a given piece, but always, always bad things.
     
  25. Teladan

    Teladan Contributor Contributor

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    Are you referring to the Hemingway advocates? I can say I definitely don't agree with that school at all.
     
  26. Le Panda Du Mal

    Le Panda Du Mal Contributor Contributor

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    Sure, or those people who think all poetry needs to sound like HD or William Carlos Williams. I don't think it's really a school anymore, it's so pervasive that it's just become the unquestioned norm in a lot of places.
     

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