good writing vs. not-so-good
I dislike that last entry so I’m adding a new one straight away.
I have a friend who writes because it’s a sure way (for her) to make money. She’s made a study of the market, she’s applied herself, and she collects the check. She doesn’t even particularly like to write but she knows she’s good at it so she figured it would be a good way to make money and stay home with her family. (As an aside, she is no longer writing because she’s gotten into another aspect of the industry, which she enjoys more.)
My friend has been a great marketing mentor to me. My platitudes get in the way sometimes and her practical point of view has helped me hop down off my high-horse. I like talking to her about it and I like that she respects my own art vs. cash struggle even though she doesn’t share it.
One of the things we’ve talked about in the past is a particular writer — very successful — who is, in my opinion, not very good. My friend argues that by being successful, this writer has proven that she’s good. After all, people read this writer, she makes a lot of money, and her books are pleasant. (I’m not naming her here because if I were her and I googled myself and happened to find this conversation, it would make me sad. Suffice to say that she’s well and unhappily aware that she is the subject of these kinds of conversations.)
“Who are you to say she isn’t an artist?” my friend said to me. “Do you dislike her just because so many other people like her so much?”
Good question. I am a snob about books. (Ask my mother.) But I’ve been thinking about this a lot. What makes a writer good to me? I need to know this because I struggle all of the time with what little success I’ve had. It’s not just that old Groucho Marx thinking (you know, that anything I am able to do must by definition not be worth doing kinda like the club he would not join because they would have him). Sometimes I look at a thing I’ve written — that people like — and I can’t be proud of it.
This week I read three books right in a row (and sometimes simultaneously — one book in the living room and one at the kitchen table and one in the bedroom). Two were very good. One was fiction lite. What made the fiction lite book fiction lite? What made the other two so much better?
The lite book was an easy read, enjoyable, moved quickly, had lots of nice similes and metaphors. More people are likely to read it because it’s pretty easy to fit into a busy life.
The other two were more dense, more difficult, required more attention and had lots of nice similies and metaphors. Less people are likely to read them — at least nowadays, they may have been popular in their time — because they are more demanding.
But is the lite book a lite book by virtue of its ease? Yes, in part, I think. The lite book was fun but forgettable. The prose moved quickly but slipped away quickly, too. I might vaguely remember the plot but there was nothing in the book that made me stop and stare off into the middle distance to contemplate a thought. There was not one line I re-read for the pure joy of it.
I don’t want to disparage fiction-lite because there’s certainly a place for it. It’s nice to have a quick, easy read and many of those kinds of books can be life-changing or inspiring. And it’s not easy to write like that (although those who can seem to do it with alarming speed and productivity). But for me, most of the time I’d rather be challenged in my reading.
This entry isn’t coming along well either. Damn. It’s just that it scares me to think that I’m only good enough to write lite when I want to write complicated. And then I wonder if giving in and being happy with lite would be selling-out or accepting my limitations?
Well, I’ll finish off by quoting from one of the books I read, At Mrs Lippincote’s by Elizabeth Taylor:
Oliver Davenant did not merely read books. He snuffed them up, took breaths of them into his lungs, filled his eyes with the sight of the print and his head with the sound of words. Some emanation from the book itself poured into his bones, as if he were absorbing steady sunshine. The pages had personality. He was of the kind who cannot have a horrifying book in the room at night. He would, in fine weather, lay it upon an outside sill and close the window. Often Julia would see a book lying on his doormat.
As well as this, his reading led him in and out of love. At first, it was the picture of Alice going up on tiptoe to shake hands with Humpty Dumpty; then the little Fatima in his Arthur Rackham book, her sweet dusky face, the coins hanging on her brow, the billowing trousers and embroidered coat. Her childish face was alive with excitement as she put the key to the lock. “Don’t!” he had once cried to her in loud agony.
In London, he would go every Saturday morning to the Public Library to look at apicture of Lorna Doone. Some Saturdays it was not there, and he would go home again, wondering who had borrowed her, in what kind of house she found herself that week-end. On his last Saturday, he went to say good-bye and the book was not there, so he sat down at a table to await its return. Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two bookw which would lie on either side of his Lorna when she was returned and, having left his message of farewell, made his way home, late for lunch and empty of heart.
If this passion is to be called reading, then the matrons with their circulating libraries and the clergymen with their detective tales are merely flirting and passing time. To discover how Oliver’s life was lived, it was necessary, as in reading The Waste Land, to have an extensive knowledge of literature. With impartiality, he studied comie papers and encyclopaedia, Eleanor’s pamphlets on whatever interested her at the moment, the labels on breakfast cereals and cod liver oil, Conan Doyle and Charlotte Brönte.
By the way, the other book I read that was very fine was Edith Wharton’s The Children. (That link will take you to her bio.) The lite book I read was a review copy of an upcoming novel by a popular author whose name I will not mention for reasons already stated.
now I want to read Mrs. Lippincote! What a passage.
For me, it goes in waves. Sometimes I want to immerse myself in classics and dense, thick, complicated prose. Other times I know I’ve got an hour to read, I’m tired and mentally fatigued, and I want to get through as much of a book as I can. In those instances I reach for Fiction Lite.
I try to think of it as not good writing vs bad writing, but complicated writing versus light writing. Both take skill and both can be done badly (I’ve read just as many BAD novels that thought they were “deep” as bad “fiction lite”) and both can be very enjoyable when done well. They just serve completely different purposes.
I used to think I would write wordy, memorable, challenging fiction. Then I had kids and well…now my brain just doesn’t seem to function that way anymore (at least not for more than fifteen minutes at a time). I feel disconnected from who I thought I was sometimes and what kind of writer I thought I would be.
I wouldn’t think of your writing lite as selling out. I think that writing deep heavy fiction is something that you are certainly “good enough” to do. I just think writing lite and writing complicated take two very different frames of mind and, at least for me, it’s difficult to get in that complicated frame of mind within the everyday grind of caring for kids, doing the dishes, and trying to earn a buck
Or maybe I’m glamourizing it too much. I keep seeing myself in 20 years when the kids are grown, in a spacious, silent home with hardwood floors and sunlight streaming in through the windows, working on a Complicated Novel as the maid silently dusts in the background. I guess that’s probably not how it works for most Complicated Writers, either.
I despise reading a book, and knowing what is going to happen next,(I am going to try to not sound pompass now)especially when I could have written it better. When I read, I like to go places/or see things in a different light. If I wanted the same, I could pick up a Harlequin. I too agree their are some authors out there that sell, but I can’t read their books. I think that the “dumbing down of America” is real when I start some of these books. The names are changed, and so is the scenery, but the story is old.
My husband says I read books that “time happens.”
I like books with characters that are different. That life attacks them and they put effort into fighting back. But I enjoy a fluff book now and again. But good books are becoming rare to me. My all time fav book is Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Having Our Say by the Delaney Sisters.
It would be nice to know how to make money from writing, since I write. I’ve always been afraid of the competition/huslte.
It would be nice to know how to make money from writing, since I write. I’ve always been afraid of the competition/huslte.
Edith Wharton is one of my very favorite authors. Consequently, I often put a book of hers down and think, “There is not a chance in h*ll that I’ll ever be half the writer she is.”
I’m struggling right now to keep trying to write a novel I’ve started, because I’ve been enjoying it, and there are actually parts that I think are good, but good, complicated, enriching fiction is the most daunting prospect to me, and so I’ve daunted myself right into writer’s block.
I think I’ve commented on every single entry you’ve written lately, even the ones you don’t like! can you tell that I’m glad you’re blogging again?!