Best-selling doesn’t mean best writing
(this is more of a rant than a cohesive post. Also not a cohesive post: an ionic neutral road sign…oh, I went there, sirs and mams)
When I say that best-selling doesn’t mean best writing I understand the hipster ditch I dig. It sounds whiny and pretentious, all the more so when one realizes that nothing of mine is even close to best-selling. I’m not sure the word “best” could be put in front of any word and used to describe my work. Best tinder, maybe. Best use of paper bound by a cover bearing the name Caleb J Ross, perhaps. But someone could write my name on a phone book and it would be more “best” than my work. This ditch, though, it’s easy to dig, yet difficult to fill. But I will try.
When I say that best-selling doesn’t mean best writing, I’m really attacking the concept that commercial success defines artistic success. The Hitler example here would be Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code (“Hitler example” is a term I use to connote the extreme example; when someone wants to conceptualize something bad, Hitler is the go-to reference. Instead of explaining all of this, I should have just used a different term, maybe).
Many writers commonly denounce Dan Brown. While this may come off as petty jealously (we all want his money and readership), envy shouldn’t diminish the fact that his books are not well-written. Yes, they are great stories (those that I’ve read, I can vouch for), but they are not great writing. This is the divide between commercial and artistic success. Craig Clevenger, in an article for the Santa Barbara Independent (reproduced here at The Velvet) has much to say on Brown’s quality, even making the point that his prose is nearly indistinguishable from that of erotica, a genre accepted even by many of its authors as one meant for quantity over quality.
My point being, I suppose (see, even I don’t know if this thing has a point. I warned you), that it’s okay to voice your hate for a commercially successful book on terms of art. I think the key is to be able to back that opinion with a wide frame of reference. I would guess that the people who regularly and primarily read blockbuster novels (those by James Patterson, Stephenie Meyer, and Dan Brown for example) don’t often read other types, or many other, books. Therefore, they do not have a large enough frame of reference for measuring the quality of a book. So, those that may cite jealously as the source of any Brown-bashing, may be doing so without ever having experienced a truly well-written book.
Transformers might make tons at the box office, but film geeks know that The Machinist is a much better movie of humans vs. machine.
KC Masterpiece barbeque sauce sells truckloads around the county, but fat guys know that Cowtown is way better.
Or, shit, maybe people don’t care about writing and instead just want a story. That’s cool. As long as people are reading, I guess.
photo credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/yorkjason/
It’s funny (read: awful) that artists are constantly forced to defend themselves against their better-selling counterparts. You make a good point about the frame of reference. People are very tribal about everything– movies, books, soft drinks, clothes; even public opinion is tribal. There exists little niches of safety, where there are, like, 5 books to read, 5 movies to watch, 5 opinions to have. I don’t begrudge Dan Brown his success; it does bother me that the readership does not value diversity, but perhaps they are not truly interested in reading and experiencing literature– only in staying current with the latest topic of discussion.
I think it is possible that, for many novels, a good story allows poor writing to be forgiven, while the converse of that is not always true. Ideally, there is a good combination of the two.
Not to be overlooked on this scale, is subject matter.