What do you even do this for?
I mean, I don’t know. Why does anybody do anything? Getting money to pay the rent and having access to healthcare and food are big motivators for people. I don’t make a lot of income from writing, though, some years not any; my primary trade is editing and publication management. I still do this even though it’s not for money.
What does it mean for a piece of media to be bad? Not everybody is going to like every song, album, poem, story, novel, TV show, movie, or video game that they encounter. That’s just life. Everybody’s taste is different and everybody’s goal when they set out to consume some media on any given occasion is also different. Sometimes we stumble upon some media and we just don’t like it. That’s normal. That doesn’t mean the media is bad.
Then you’ve got stuff that people want to tell you is objectively bad. For instance, Twilight (book or movie; you can take your pick). “That’s just objectively bad, right? Like we all know it’s bad, even those of us who like it.” I’ve never been able to get anyone to articulate why they think it’s bad. This is enough of a phenomenon that I’ve been seeing for a long enough time that whenever I encounter someone who says this I try to get to the bottom of their understanding of Twilight as objectively bad media.
“You read it and didn’t like it?”
“I didn’t read it. I just know it’s bad.”
“Someone you know read it, disliked it, and told you they didn’t like it?”
“No, I just kind of heard it’s bad.”
“From where?”
“Everywhere.”
I mean this is a series that’s sold more than 100 million units in 37 languages and spun off a movie series with well over a billion in box office receipts. This has entertained a lot of people.
I don’t care to draw a Venn diagram of the people who, having not read or seen any Twilight media, “know” that it’s just “objectively” bad, compared with the people who, having read The Dresden Files, “know” that while it’s “not great literature,” it’s still “really fun” and that makes it worth reading.
Spoiler alert: That Venn diagram is just a circle. Don’t show this Venn concentric circle to the people it references. They get really upset.
There’s a lot of reasons why media gets flagged as “just universally bad” for no reason that the person who objects to it can articulate. A lot of times the reason is because it was made for the entertainment and enjoyment of women or girls, without any consideration for how men might like or appreciate it. I’m fairly sure this is why my ex spouse considered the music of Britney Spears objectively, universally bad. These folks don’t often understand that “women and girls” are the demographic whose primacy they object to; they will characterize the group as “people with bad taste” or “people who are just stupid and follow whatever’s trendy.”
Other reasons people think stuff is objectively, universally bad can include:
It appeals to any large audience without making an attempt to exclude “undesirable” readership (eg, “the average person has bad taste and is stupid”)
It uses language constructs or a narrative structure that does not match the mainstream understanding of how books “should” be written (eg, “the writer is ignorant or uneducated and their writing is bad”)
It uses “too many tropes and relies on clichés” (eg, “romance novels are trash because the genre is formulaic and every novel has a happy ending”)
In short, those arguments boil down to “it appeals to too many people”; “it doesn’t work hard enough to appeal to the mainstream”; and “it gives readers what they’re looking for and that makes me mad.”
Nobody reads romance novels to be surprised by the ending. Everyone who reads romance novels knows what they’re in for when they start a romance novel. They’re selecting romance novels for their reading because they like romance novels. This reader knows the protagonist will start off unhappy and will end in happy circumstances and their enjoyment stems from how creatively the author creates obstacles in that journey and then solutions to those obstacles.
Then you have other people who derive enjoyment in a book from not knowing what the ending will be—say, a person who enjoys thrillers. A person who enjoys thrillers measures the writer’s skillfulness in how long they keep the reader from figuring out the ending, and this reader enjoys the sense of accomplishment they get from figuring out the solution before the writer hands it to them.
This is how you get a reader of thrillers, who enjoys not knowing the ending till the last possible moment, looking at the romance genre—where the reader always knows before starting what the outcome will be—and saying:
A good book is one in which the ending is hard to figure out and therefore a bad book is one in which the ending is easy to figure out and so this entire genre of books is bad.
No reader is ever wrong in their reading taste (remember, the reader is always right). If a book (or an album or a movie or a video game or anything else) entertains the people who read it, then that book has value. It’s a good book. That’s all there is to it.
That’s not to say “goodness” is measured in how many people are entertained by a book. That’s one measure of its success, that’s all. Like winning an award, or being adapted into a movie, or being translated into many languages for wider distribution, or generating critical acclaim.
The purpose of writing is to effect an information transfer between you and your reader. You have information in your head, you transfer it into verbal language and fix it in a medium (a document, an audio recording), your reader transfers the verbal language into their own brain (via reading with their eyes, ears, fingers, or any other means of reading I didn’t think of here), and finally your reader has the information that came from your brain in their own brain. It’s like being bitten by a zombie but more laborious and with a better survival rate.
The purpose of that information transfer might not be to entertain. Off the top of my head, you might write to educate rather than entertain: For instance, if you wrote a textbook on the political history of Texas, or a book on how to cultivate bonsai trees, or a set of annotated instructions for assembling an IKEA Kallax. I am very interested in the verbalization of IKEA instructions actually.
A person with an assortment of tools: Happiness.
But alone with only a hammer and their IKEA Kallax: Melancholia.
Hark! A friend with a pencil behind their ear. Happiness once more.
IKEA instructions ask the dramatic question, “Is it enough to have a friend or must my friend bring a pencil?”
Sorry, anyway. The best educational and instructional materials—like the best textbooks, the best how-to and self-help books, and the assembly instructions from IKEA—entertain as well as inform. They’re getting information to you for the purpose of increasing your knowledge or your ability to do something, that is their main purpose, but they are more effective if they do that in a way that is entertaining or at least not boring.
There’s textbooks and then there’s textbooks. It’s fair to say I’ve seen more textbooks than most people. I went through the usual amount of schooling as a textbook end user but then I also spent years working in textbook editing and production, where I saw hundreds of textbooks come through my division each year. Not all textbooks are created equal. Some of them are written in a conversational style with an engaging authorial voice and some of them are dry as old bones. Subject matter is irrelevant here. One of the most accessible and interesting textbooks I ever used was in the single math course I took in college. If math can be fun to read about then any subject can be.
There’s an art to every kind of writing I have found yet.
The main purpose of writing, then, is to transfer the information you have (whatever that is) from your brain to the reader’s brain and, to the extent you can, to make that transfer (the reading process) as enjoyable as you can.
What will be “enjoyable” varies from reader to reader. Some people like luscious, detailed prose with abundant imagery, metaphorical language, and so on. Some people like straightforward, concise text that elegantly conveys information while using language sparingly. Some people like knowing the ending before they start, some people don’t want to know how a story will end till the last minute. Different narrative voices will appeal to different readers. People enjoy different narrative paces. Some people prefer character-driven fiction to plot-driven fiction. There’s no right answer.
After consideration, though, there are a few things readers universally like. Things that facilitate an enjoyable information transfer for pretty much everybody.
Remove as many distractions and sources of unintentional reader discomfort as you can. Think about when you are reading a book or watching a movie: If you need to use the bathroom, or you’re really hungry, or your phone keeps buzzing—those things will distract you, which diminishes both your enjoyment and your information absorption. If you want to make a reader uncomfortable (Nabokov we are looking at you) then, by all means do that. It’s the unintentional discomfort sources you want to eradicate.
Make sure you’re following grammar rules and spelling conventions consistently for all languages you’re using, except where you might deliberately deviate. For instance: At the beginning of Flowers for Algernon, before the effects of the intelligence-enhancing experimental surgery take hold, Charlie’s progress reports are laced with spelling and grammatical errors. This is an intentional choice and Charlie’s improving writing skills show the reader how well the surgery works. This is the kind of effective, deliberate choice I mean. What I suggest writers avoid is using dialects or languages they are unfamiliar with and that they may use incorrectly. And I suggest writers make sure, to the best of their ability, that they remove unintentional grammar and spelling mistakes, which can confuse readers (especially when more than one language, accent, or dialect is in use).
Readers like to have their questions answered in a timely fashion. When we read (fiction especially), most of us know that not every question is going to be answered as soon as we think of it. Some questions are not going to be answered till the end, or maybe not even till the sequel. These aren’t the questions I mean; I mean the places where a reader might encounter ambiguity and ask the kinds of questions that are almost never intended by the writer:
There are three women mentioned in this paragraph, which one did the writer mean when he wrote “she”?
A dialogue exchange has gotten long and there aren’t enough dialogue tags; who the heck is talking?
The author described a character as “the red-haired man” instead of using his name but I’ve forgotten who has red hair because the character descriptions were 8 chapters ago. Who is that?
You’ve mentioned this character’s pet, Fluffy, several times, but you never said what kind of animal it is. A cat? A rabbit? An emu?
Make sure you understand what information you’re holding back deliberately, with purpose, and what information the reader is free to know. Give them the information they’re free to know, and if there’s something they can’t know yet, make sure it’s referenced again from time to time so the reader knows the writer (or the narrator) hasn’t forgotten. This is the part in every Harry Potter book when the narrator tells you, “It was all too much for Harry, the fighting with his friends, the schoolwork, the looming threat of death—and then there was the matter of the [big mystery], which he hadn’t had time to think about at all!” And the reader mentally goes, “Oh right, the [big mystery], I was wondering what happened with that.”
Finally, don’t distract your reader with information they don’t need or want. The reader is here to absorb information: A story, an instruction, whatever. If you’re giving them a story, give them the story. Don’t give them a bunch of extraneous stuff that doesn’t support the story. Subplots should support and relate to the main plot—don’t include unconnected side stories that don’t support the main story. They need to link up with the main plot somewhere.
Don’t include a lot of extra worldbuilding for flavor or immersion only. Worldbuilding is important work to writing any setting that isn’t already familiar to the reader, but you don’t put all of your worldbuilding into the text. The plot will require information to make sense; that’s the worldbuilding that goes in. Don’t try to give the reader 100 percent of your worldbuilding—they don’t want it.
And don’t give the reader more detail than they need to bring the story to life. Details that lead nowhere are red herrings and should be used deliberately. Use detail like a ball-peen machinist’s hammer, not like a sledgehammer. A machinist’s hammer hardens surfaces, makes gaskets to connect stuff—I use one for inserting rivets and grommets into things to strengthen clothing structurally and enhance it. A sledgehammer just bludgeons whatever it hits.
At all costs avoid accidentally bludgeoning your reader. That is usually not what you want to do. Take care to only bludgeon the reader on purpose.
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