[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by gmw

I would contend that a popular novel, by definition, cannot be considered to be badly written.

Of course it can. There's a reason literary awards aren't automatically handed to whatever title sold the most copies: because popularity is influenced by several forces, only one of which is literary quality.

I'll grant that a book that's very popular can't be entirely without literary merit (and for those who think it can, wow, have I got some smashwords links for you!) but "not entirely lacking basic story structure, characterization, and grammar" is not the same as "not badly written."

Why? Because the purpose of writing is communication. If a novel is written well enough to reach and be enjoyed by many thousands of the intended audience, then describing such as badly written seems to be a contradiction in terms. The writing achieved its goal - in some cases much better than other apparently well written (and dare I say it, Literate) works.

It's only achieved "communication" if the message sent matches the one received. Selling ten million copies says that a whole lot of people got something from the book--it doesn't say they got the author's intended message.

This problem is shown, over and over, in author interviews where the author obviously believes she is writing fantastic, life-shattering literature that shakes the foundations of western culture, and discovers that her readers were enjoying a week's worth of snappy dialogue and descriptions of angsty skulkers in black trenchcoats (or robes, as the case may be).

Oh sure, marketing etc. all come into it. I am not trying to claim that the converse is necessarily true: that being popular makes the work well written, it may merely be adequate.

It can be worse than adequate. It can be badly-written, and have either a commercially-viable hook (was written by famous author, matches a currently trendy topic, is promoted by a celebrity) or a single bright point that outshines the overall poor quality--great dialogue, steamy sex, a fascinating plot twist, gruesome murders, etc.--and people buy & read it for access to that, while ignoring the fact that the rest of the book is just barely tolerable.

but if thousands upon thousands enjoyed reading the book, just who are you to judge the writing as bad? (Not liking something does not necessarily make it bad, merely bad for you.)

I have enjoyed books that were badly-written (although these days, my standards are higher than they used to be). "Literary quality" isn't the only thing that makes a book worth reading to me, but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist, or that it can't be identified even if we don't have absolute measurements for it.

"Badly-written" doesn't mean "not worth reading." Badly-written can mean the plot is full of loopholes and contradictions and please don't even think about the timeline, but the dialogue is hilarious. Can mean the events and pacing are formulaic and predictable, but the sex scenes are so hot I don't care. Can mean the characters are wooden and the dialogue stilted and descriptions almost nonexistent, but there's a science-fiction/philosophy twist that made it worth slogging through 250 pages of pedantry.

I prefer it when all of the good parts are combined in the same book, but when they're not, I don't think that "I liked it anyway" means "it was well-written."