The whole point is that even if the writing was bad, the books were effective at doing what they were designed to do. And for the sake of argument, go ahead and name a few of these respected novels which raked in the kind of cash in a relatively similar timeframe as Twilight or 50 Shades.
Were Twilight and 50 Shades actually designed to appeal to those fan bases, or were they written one with one hand on the keyboard, and then edited and marketed to appeal to those fan bases?
This argument was gone over a page or two back. They were designed to entertain. They entertained. Don't get pedantic about how far the scope of the intended design extended. That's conjecture on either side.
- A Song of Ice and Fire (Game of Thrones), while not to my taste, they are well written... and will have far more staying power than either Twilight or 50 Shades. - His Dark Materials trilogy, by Philip Pullman, again, extremely well written, very popular, and a movie... which sucked. - Neverwhere, by Neil Gaiman. The book that turned Urban Fantasy into a genre. - Though published in 1973, The Princess Bride, by William Goldman. Beautifully written, and a classic movie that will be watched long after the old women that read 50 Shades are dead and buried. Both Twilight and 50 Shades were designed to sell. They were expertly marketed for a target audience, stupid girls and lonely women, who have a boundless craving for bad literature. I strongly suspect the publishers of these books were as shocked as the rest of us when they hit big. Because if they had, they would have edited the books! But if you want to champion the cause of trashy literature, go right on ahead.
I guess you either didn't understand my request or chose to ignore it. Refer to the bolded portion below. ASoIaF is far from a respected piece of literature. George RR gets about as much flack as the rest (Rowling, Meyer, Collins, James). So, this one failed on the first of the stipulations. No where near the kind of money and speed at which Twilight or 50 Shades happened/earned. I'll just pretend you didn't use this as a counter to "raking in the kind of cash" as the two series in question. This is your best argument, though weak because it didn't meet the criteria I asked you to provide. My argument has never been about staying power. It's about how silly you sound when you bash these novels. It's almost like you're personally offended by their existence. Why is that? I'm genuinely curious. And what have these women done to make you despise them so vehemently?
You're not actually curious about anything we're discussing. Try less personal attacks, and sticking to an argument, and you'll fare better against me.
My argument is perfectly clear, you just forgot to quote it when you derailed the discussion. My personal attacks? You've misunderstood. I am genuinely curious why you seem offended by the existence of these novels. And judging by the way you've directed this conversation, I'd say I'm doing just fine. I'll wait while you get back to the argument you've abandoned to inform me how to fare better in an argument against you.
On the other hand, it almost seems like you (and others) get personally offended when people point out that some novels are objectively trash. We get it. Trash can make you rich. People love trash. That doesn't make it not trash. Is Trump not trash? He won the presidency. What about McDonalds? Or pick your favorite pop-star from top-forty. Being popular doesn't make you good. I'm not sure what it is that people who want to defend popular garbage are looking for. We get it. The Twilight writer got rich. That's a fact. She's popular. Also a fact. That doesn't say anything about the literary value of the piece. If you personally recognized literary talent in the piece, go ahead and tell us what you think it is, don't point to the few million strangers that none of us know and try to use that as some sort of validation, because we're just going to point out that garbage can be popular.
Have you not read this thread? The whole idea of my argument and other's is that these are not "objectively trash." They're subjectively trash. I've said it a few other times, but I'll say it again: I do not care for either of the works in question. I'm not defending poor writing. I'm saying that millions of readers obviously don't think these books are trash. So, I'll pose this question to a third person because the other two didn't answer. What makes your opinion better? And of course I can use the MASSIVE amount of money these books made as validation for some kind of merit, be it entertainment or otherwise. And let's leave Trump in the debate room. I don't think anyone is discussing him, nor is he a parallel to this discussion. I think these novels are trash. You think these novels are trash. Millions of people don't. That does not make anyone right or wrong. It makes these valid pieces of successful entertainment.
As an ex(briefly) English teacher, I think you are totally right. I wouldn't want to teach kids using books that are awkwardly written or filled with grammatical mistakes, but using ones with popular subjects and characters would be a big improvement over 'classics' that are difficult for modern young people to read and to identify with. If a kid grows up in a home that doesn't value reading, and they are forced to read books at school which they find difficult and irrelevant, these kids go away believing that books are boring and they hate to read. That's sad. I love to get kids get excited about reading. I didn't particularly enjoy Harry Potter books myself, but I was delighted that they got so many kids reading. I hope these kids have continued to read as they entered adulthood, and have branched out in terms of what they enjoy reading. I've always maintained there is a book out there for everybody, and it would be fun if English teachers had the freedom to help kids find theirs. It's the love of reading, the ability to think about what they've read and draw conclusions from it, and competence with language skills that I would love kids to learn. The ability to discover universal themes in timeless literature comes later. Unfortunately, English teachers are given a specific curriculum and are expected to adhere to it. I guess the best way to instill love of reading in a child is in the home, at a very young age, by parents who also love to read. That way the reading material can be tailored to the interests of each child.
Yep. That's what I picked up as well. It wasn't so much about writing trash/not trash as it was about uniformity. She seems to feel that uniformity of style (voice) is what happens when authors slavishly adhere to current writing conventions and do/do not rules.
Nope. The Sneeches. That's gold. The star-bellied Sneeches had bellies with stars, but the plain-bellied Sneeches had none upon THARS.
This conversation comes up every once and a while. My answer is always the same. Let's get out the electrodes and measure our brain activities while reading (and not reading) the books. Let's administer IQ and literature tests on a random population, make them read these books in question, and then find out how much they enjoyed them, or more importantly, what their opinion of the book was regarding literary quality. I don't have to bring up any specifics in history but there are a plethora of examples that show mass appeal does not equal quality or good judgement. Until we can take some objective tests, it comes down to opinion. Right now, it's my opinion, the opinion of others I respect, the opinions of literary authorities vs the opinions of some strangers. I think, based on the last sentence, it's pretty safe for me to conclude books like Twilight are not very high quality.
When did I ever say they are high quality? I'm prettt sure I've said the opposite. I share your opinion. That doesn't make these books worthless, but since you have it on high authority that these books aren't worth anything, I'll give up.
They're worth a lot of money. That's clear. If you suspected I jumped into this conversation not having fully read everything, you'd be right...
Back to the original article, where the argument is that books all sound the same now... yesterday, a friend recommended five books to me in the same genre (contemporary romance). I downloaded samples of all of them, and last night I read them with this thread in mind. They did not sound like the same person had written them. There were contractions in the narrative, the sentences were of varying lengths, there were conjunctions. Each of them had their own voice, but none of them sounded like 'serious writer voice'. Since the article's author wrote this after accepting sci-fi short submissions, perhaps a sci-fi reader can give their view? I do read sci-fi, although it's not my go-to genre, and I don't recognise this phenomenon. The last three sci-fi novels I read were completely different in voice and style: 1. Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels, which I re-read a few weeks ago. Plenty of 'rules' broken: people adverbing all over the place, huge (and very entertaining) info dumps, lots of telling where it could have been showing, head hopping. Massively successful book and very, very distinctive in voice. 2. The Martian. Also breaks rules and, I believe, has had quite a bit of criticism over the writing. Humorous, but in a different way to Hitchhiker's - more sarcastic and cynical than absurd. There's no way you could think this was written by Douglas Adams. 3. Infected (Scott Sigler). Some moments of dark humour, but much more serious overall - includes violent murders and children dying horribly. The voice certainly wouldn't fit in either of the previous two novels. I read this last year so I'm hazier on the rule-yness of it, but it didn't have uniform sentence length and it did have contractions. Even on this forum, I've beta read two sci novels (from @Sack-a-Doo! and @mrieder79) and each was very different in content, tone, and voice. I really don't see what the article writer is talking about.
Again, critical and commercial success are two different things, and conflating the two is very dangerous. In fact doing so would be the death knell of high culture and meaningful art.
Chiming in to firmly disagree with the idea that these are well written. The writing is merely competent.
I'm pretty sure I've read every single Agatha Christie. If you want to start, I'd recommend The Mirror Crack'd. I like her books, and as I learn more about writing I appreciate them more. Only the very last couple (in terms of publication writing dates, rather than chronology; the "last" Miss Marple was written well before Christie's death) start to come apart. Josephine Tey? (Brat Farrar, etc.) Edited to add: I'd put Tey above Agatha Christie, though I feel guilty saying it. And that reminds me of Robert Barnard, also a mystery writer, much more modern than either of those--reminds me because he wrote an introduction for the republication of Tey's novels. I like Robert Barnard very much. He has two, maybe three, maybe four quite distinct styles--some of his books are very dry and sarcastic and distant (example: Death of a Perfect Mother), others (example: The Skeleton in the Grass) are much closer and deeper into the characters. I prefer the closer/deeper ones, though there are a few in the middle (example: Death of a Mystery Writer) that I also quite like.
Did this shift to requiring the books to be modern? People seem to be saying so, but I can't find where it happened. Anyway, if not: To Kill a Mockingbird? When I first read it, I didn't know that it was supposed to be admirable, I just enjoyed it.
It wasn't a formal shift, it was just a recognition that we were hitting a lot of books from a very similar time period/writing style. I enjoyed Mockingbird too! I wouldn't veto it.
Well, she IS a working editor, who works for several publishing houses, and who has current projects on the go. She's reacting to what she sees (or thinks she sees) happening with submissions, and her observations are as valid as any other person's who works in the industry. I'm a lot more subjective in the way I look at books, but I get what she's saying. I read a lot of books—I have several on the go at the moment—but haven't found much recent fiction that excites me much. I go to book festivals and bookstores (when I can get to one), pick up books that either look good or are recommended, and for the most part I read them and discard them. Not because there is anything bad about them, but simply because I can forget them very easily once I've finished with them. They are 'correct', but somehow more predictible and less emotionally engaging than I'd like. For example, I read Girl on a Train a couple of months ago, and it left me feeling very meh. Not only did I see the tabloid-y 'twist' coming a mile off, but I thought the ending was unrealistic. The writer's studiously serious, but somehow chick-litty tone really put me off. And this is considered literary fiction in some circles? Okay, it's a best-seller, and I bought it because the premise looked interesting and it got some good reviews. But while I would never give it a bad review, I certainly can't recommend it either. The tone felt as if it were intellectually mapped-out from a single, rather unchallenging premise, and bulked up with contrived red-herrings and stunningly obvious 'clever' twists. I will not be interested in reading more from this author. If this is the type of MS the writer of the article receives, I can certainly understand her lack of enthusiasm. (BTW, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was written in 1979, so I don't think that represents the current era the article is referring to.) I can't explain it. But when I run across a new book that isn't predictible or tonally bland, I get really excited. Four of the last five times that has happened, the authors were either so-far-unpublished (2) or self-pubbed (2). These folk all wrote whatever they pleased and did it very well. Some of them were slightly rough around the edges, but that didn't detract, somehow. I got sucked in to each one, and was sorry to see each one come to an end. That's what I like in a book. I want to be left wanting another from that author.
I wonder if part of it is that she was looking at short stories? I feel like there is a style of writing that I see a lot in short stories, especially those that are aspiring to be literary, that is more common than I'd like.
