Can a popular novel be badly written?

[bobavey]

Yes, a book or novel can be badly written and still achieve popularity. If the book contains content that is popular at the time (vampires and romance) it has the potential to do well.

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by Redcard

The issue here, I imagine , is one of technical prowess vs ability to tell a story.

I'm not sure such a dichotomy exists. It's true, I suppose, that a good story can be told without having high technical merits, but the technical rules (and I'm using "rules" in a loose sense, obviously) exist because these are the ways to tell your story better. A well-written story (again, from a technical standpoint) is always going to be more enjoyable to read than an interesting story written poorly, if for no other reason than technical problems with the writing can take the reader out of the story, whereas god writing draws the reader in.

[OtterBooks]

As an example of how craft can be viewed independently: I feel that the Harry Potter books have uninspired themes, lack originality even when you consider all stories are derivative to some extent, and are shallow in character and concept.

But I think Rowling is skilled writer and storyteller so far as craft goes, to the point where the above shortcomings can be forgiven to some extent. I don't, however, think her work deserves mention anywhere near a conversation that includes substantial childrens authors such as Madeleine L'Engle or Frances Hodges Burnett, or even contemporaries like Philip Pullman. Maybe I'm just narrow-sighted and someday people will see it otherwise. My appreciation of literature is far from perfect.

I actually read a bit of Twilight just to satisfy my curiosity. I didn't think it was as badly written as some people say (just regarding the prose itself). It seemed about as well written as an average pulp romance novel, which is still far better than anything I could do, but that isn't saying much.

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by bhartman36

I'm not sure such a dichotomy exists. ... A well-written story (again, from a technical standpoint) is always going to be more enjoyable to read than an interesting story written poorly, if for no other reason than technical problems with the writing can take the reader out of the story, whereas good writing draws the reader in.

I'm not sure that's true. Among the technical skills that might not be part of a very popular story are "ability to make it relevant to readers 20 years from now, who don't know today's pop culture."

A good author can make a current-events story still read as current in half a century; a poor author may only be able to entertain people who already share a huge body of knowledge with that author.

While basic spelling/punctuation/grammar issues can drive anyone out of an otherwise-good story, technical skills in other areas (plot/ characterization/ fact accuracy/ descriptions/ pacing/ consistency of tone) might be horribly lacking (well, probably not *all* of them), and the story still be very popular because the readers are all capable of "filling in the blanks" themselves.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by gmw

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

[

I have to disagree with you on this. One does not have to like a book to recognize it as well written. Nor does a good book necessarily have to be well written. And a bad book can be well written, at least in theory.

But there are devices and standards for writing that are objective and can be pointed out and recognized once they are. Parallel construction. Alliteration. Nuance, and connotation.

For example, the Harry Potter books have a limited vocabulary and repetitive descriptions. That's bad writing. The story itself is pretty good. And interestingly, the audio books transcend the writing - it might be that the talent of the reader makes up for the poor writing. But the writing is poor.

OTOH, Jane Austen's books are, at least on the surface, trivial (personally, I consider her a moralist almost on the level of Dr. Johnson, but a great moralist can seize on the trivial and elevate it.) Nevertheless, Austen uses words as well as anyone short of Shakespeare and outside of poetry. She could elevate the back of a cereal box with her writing.

The Potter books are good books despite their being poorly written. Actually, I wonder if they would be good books if they were well written - they are a kind of White Castle burger of bookdom. If you try to make them better, you just make them worse.

The purpose of writing is communication, but so is the purpose of speech. One can speak in grunts, and communicate well enough. I read a short story recently in which the female protagonist spent some time in interpreting male grunts - she called it "Martian." But there is speech, and there is the Gettysburg Address. There is writing, and there is Jane Austen.

There are times when I read something so well written that I stop and read it again, just for the sheer joy of a well written sentence or paragraph or page. The first chapter of Bleak House is a marvel. Anything Lincoln wrote after 1855 is damn good and sometimes transcendent. But any chapter of any Harry Potter book could have been written by an intelligent 13 year old, once he had the idea.

Raymond Chandler is better than Dashiell Hammett mainly because he writes better, not because his stories are better. Hammett is great because he had a new idea, not because he could write worth a damn.

Good writing is like good music. For most people, it takes a buildup of intellectual capital to recognize and enjoy it. But the Beatles fall far short of Beethoven, though they have more fans. And Bob Dylan is great not because of his music (it's all good) but because on occasion he uses words like Joyce or, indeed, Shakespeare.

Foie gras is not just liver.

[Harmon]

Originally Posted by OtterBooks

But I think Rowling is skilled writer and storyteller so far as craft goes, to the point where the above shortcomings can be forgiven to some extent. I don't, however, think her work deserves mention anywhere near a conversation that includes substantial childrens authors such as Madeleine L'Engle or Frances Hodges Burnett, or even contemporaries like Philip Pullman. Maybe I'm just narrow-sighted and someday people will see it otherwise. My appreciation of literature is far from perfect.

I agree on the storyteller part. That might be why the audiobooks are so superior to the pbooks. The audiobooks put the story into the hands of a storyteller, which seems to make quite a difference, not merely for the Potter books, but for a lot of books, even well written ones. Angela's Ashes, for example, is simply superb when read by McCourt, who wrote the book.

As for the writing in the Potter books, it's just not very good. I think you could make an argument for her ability to construct a narrative flow, which is no small thing, but her vocabulary is small (a good thesaurus would have helped her a bit,) and her range is narrow. She repeats herself a lot when she describes things. I think the books suffer from being written down to her intended audience - early teens. Too bad she didn't have more respect for their ability to rise to a challenge. But OTOH, perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing - hard to argue with her overall success.

She's about on the level of Edgar Rice Burroughs - ERB wrote great stories, as long as you suspend your critical faculties and go with the flow. At least, for boys, and those of us who remain boys. But the writing? Pah!

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by Elfwreck

I'm not sure that's true. Among the technical skills that might not be part of a very popular story are "ability to make it relevant to readers 20 years from now, who don't know today's pop culture."

A good author can make a current-events story still read as current in half a century; a poor author may only be able to entertain people who already share a huge body of knowledge with that author.

While basic spelling/punctuation/grammar issues can drive anyone out of an otherwise-good story, technical skills in other areas (plot/ characterization/ fact accuracy/ descriptions/ pacing/ consistency of tone) might be horribly lacking (well, probably not *all* of them), and the story still be very popular because the readers are all capable of "filling in the blanks" themselves.

I think that's true to a certain extent, but that act of filling in the blanks (at least, to my mind) is only seamless if the gaps are small. The worse the writing is from a technical standpoint, the harder it will be for someone paying attention to be able to fill in the blanks.

One can read War of the Worlds and still buy it as a story, even though it's a hundred years old and most of the science in it (at least, about Mars) doesn't hold up. You can do that, though (at least, I think) because nothing jumps out at you and says, "Hey, wait a minute. That shouldn't be there...". Wells didn't find a way to make it current so much as he made us not care that it's dated. People who don't care about vampires recognize Dracula as a good book because it's engaging writing. In 10 years, no one's going to remember the Twilight books because the writing's disposable. Even teenage girls won't be reading it. At a minimum, they'll be reading some other vampire novels about pale, James Dean-wannabe-looking guys and shy, awkward teenage girls.

To put it as succinctly as I can: I think the difference between popular writing and good writing is telling a good story vs. telling a story well. You can tell a good story badly and still make boatloads of cash on it, which I think is the answer I'd give to the topic question.

[GA Russell]

Originally Posted by Fastolfe

Popular things, be it movies, music, products, choices of holiday places or anything else, have a very high likelihood of being crap.

We're up to post #113, and nobody has mentioned Mickey Spillane!

[rkomar]

Originally Posted by GA Russell

We're up to post #113, and nobody has mentioned Mickey Spillane!

Now you're all just making me mad! Mickey Spillane, Edgar Rice Burroughs,... bad! At least they made an effort to keep their writing spare. You guys have clearly not done much slumming in the literary world. Go into the supermarkets and pick up some of the fat books with embossed covers you see there. Slog your way through them. I guarantee you that "I the Jury" and "Tarzan and the Jewels of Opar" will feel like a breath of fresh air after that. You guys don't know bad!

I read "Minnow Trap" by Brian Horeck recently, so I feel I'm better calibrated than some of you. And some Leo Kessler "Panzer Battalion" books, and "The Sword of Shannara", and... I'm saving the Mike Hammer books for when I need a special treat.

[gmw]

Originally Posted by Harmon

I have to disagree with you on this. ...

You're not the first. It is interesting to read what other people consider to be good writing. I like Jane Austen very much (have been rereading some of her work just recently), but that doesn't mean I think anything/everything would have been better for being written in such a style. I believe it is just another style to be enjoyed, a style suitable to its time, content and audience just as more modern writers write for their time, content and audience.

[doreenjoy]

I'm not convinced that writing can always be judged objectively.

To use a very coarse example, there are some who think all adverbs are bad, for example, and others who think only adverbs used to modify weak verbs are bad.

All of my writer friends disagree with me.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by doreenjoy

I'm not convinced that writing can always be judged objectively.

To use a very coarse example, there are some who think all adverbs are bad, for example, and others who think only adverbs used to modify weak verbs are bad.

All of my writer friends disagree with me.

In my experience, the thing with adverbs are that they are very easy to use badly; so much so that most adverbs one runs across in fiction, especially fiction by new writers, are used badly. The other thing about adverbs, related to the first, is that they are usually a sign that the writer used the wrong verb, and then added an adverb rather than looking for the right verb.

It's not always true, but it's true often enough that every adverb should be flagged on an editing pass to see if it's really necessary; usually it isn't.

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by Harmon

As for the writing in the Potter books, it's just not very good. I think you could make an argument for her ability to construct a narrative flow, which is no small thing, but her vocabulary is small (a good thesaurus would have helped her a bit,) and her range is narrow. She repeats herself a lot when she describes things. I think the books suffer from being written down to her intended audience - early teens. Too bad she didn't have more respect for their ability to rise to a challenge. But OTOH, perhaps she knew exactly what she was doing - hard to argue with her overall success.

While I can see your point that cutting down on the repetition in her description and increasing the vocabulary she used might have improved the Harry Potter books on one level; it would also have rendered them less suitable for their intended audience, and that wouldn't have been a good thing from JKR's perspective. Even though I'm sure some of her readership could have risen to the challenge, I'm equally sure that others either couldn't or wouldn't have risen, and those were the ones she needed to keep. It's relatively easy to sell books to people who already read a lot, not so much to those who don't. Her success came from selling books to people and families who didn't normally buy books or read much.

Writing to your audience is not a sign of lack of skill.

[MrsJoseph]

Originally Posted by Lemurion

Writing to your audience is not a sign of lack of skill.

Very true and very important! I think - as we all sit in judgment of other's reading habits and choices - we tend to forget that this is a community of hardcore readers. Most of the population simply doesn't read - at all. I used to deal with this in despair almost daily at my last job.

Reading Austen and Shakespeare is great - but she is not on everyone's educational level. So, what we have basically been discussing is intelligence. The more intelligent you are, the more appreciation you have for language as a written art.

I have a love/hate relationship with Faulkner (I get so SICK of his run-on sentences!) but I never look down on people who don't want to wrestle with his language. Dan Brown might be reviled as a writer on this forum, but he's a great story-teller and there are thousands for whom "The Da Vinci Code" was the first full-length novel that they completed.

Harry Potter is a good children's book series. Is it on par with A Wrinkle in Time/The Time Quartet? Of course not! It didn’t win a Newberry Award, either. The Harry Potter series was made to appeal to a wide audience in a time when most people don’t read - which meant that the JKR had to dummy down her language. Anyone who has had to write copy for local newspapers/news shows (does not include the NY Times) learned early that almost all information is disseminated on a 5th grade comprehension level.

--All this has made me want to go buy the Time Quartet. I wonder if I can find it DRM free anywhere…

[bhartman36]

Originally Posted by MrsJoseph

Very true and very important! I think - as we all sit in judgment of other's reading habits and choices - we tend to forget that this is a community of hardcore readers. Most of the population simply doesn't read - at all. I used to deal with this in despair almost daily at my last job.

Reading Austen and Shakespeare is great - but she is not on everyone's educational level. So, what we have basically been discussing is intelligence. The more intelligent you are, the more appreciation you have for language as a written art.

I have a love/hate relationship with Faulkner (I get so SICK of his run-on sentences!) but I never look down on people who don't want to wrestle with his language. Dan Brown might be reviled as a writer on this forum, but he's a great story-teller and there are thousands for whom "The Da Vinci Code" was the first full-length novel that they completed.

Harry Potter is a good children's book series. Is it on par with A Wrinkle in Time/The Time Quartet? Of course not! It didn’t win a Newberry Award, either. The Harry Potter series was made to appeal to a wide audience in a time when most people don’t read - which meant that the JKR had to dummy down her language. Anyone who has had to write copy for local newspapers/news shows (does not include the NY Times) learned early that almost all information is disseminated on a 5th grade comprehension level.

--All this has made me want to go buy the Time Quartet. I wonder if I can find it DRM free anywhere…

You might be right about this, but really, it makes me just about want to roll off a cliff. Writing for people who don't like to read is almost as pointless as composing a symphony for the deaf. Hopefully civilization will collapse quickly and we won't have long to worry about it.