Leftover Twitter
Way way long ago I didn’t finish responding to some forum comments that I meant to respond to, because I ran out of time/energy/brain/thingummywhatsit logic. Since then there have been a lot more comments I have meant to respond to and I haven’t managed to do that either. But here’s a start on the end of the thread that followed ‘A few days ago this happened on Twitter’:
hedgehog wrote in response to my:
| Alternatively I can snicker and say, this is why I write *cheap genre,* and not LIT’RATURE. |
You can say it, but I won’t agree. “Lit’rature” isn’t what the Critic says it is; it’s what people of good taste choose to read, across generations and epochs. Real people will be reading Robin McKinley’s books with intense pleasure a century from now — and perhaps a millenium, or three! — and the self-proclaimed Critics of that future Day will be pretending that her works are “Lit’rature” because they study it. The truth is: it’s Literature because we read it, not because the Critic blesses it . . .
. . . I do know why I haven’t managed to make those thoughtful, considered responses; because thoughtful and considered take too much time and energy (and thingummywhatsit) and I’m always writing the blog at the end of the day when I’m running downhill fast and the 1,000,000 things I haven’t done yet that I was absolutely going to get done today are bleating in my ear and when I’m at the mews, and I usually am at the mews in the evenings, the piano is right behind me as I sit at the kitchen table and she doesn’t have to bleat or murmur. Or sing. She just sits there and looms.* It’s a lot easier to write blog entries about bell ringing and hellhound hurtling and then maybe get back to the piano before I totally crash for the night/morning. And the question of ‘lit’rature’ or the worth of one story or another or one sort of story or another is important.
I have an aggrieved relationship with ‘lit’rature’. In the first place, I got my BA in it. And there’s nothing like a few semesters in a rarefied intellectual atmosphere—especially a tweedy, masculine rarefied intellectual atmosphere—to bring out the not-very-hidden hellgoddess in me. I can feel my blood pressure rising just remembering my two and a half years in the Bowdoin College English Department. Bad language. Well, that was a long time ago, and I hope that as the memory of the first years of women undergraduates** fades to that neutral history colour the whole patriarchal thing at Bowdoin has died a painful, richly deserved death.***
But one of the things that struck me then, even then, in my more-intimidated-than-I-was-going-to-admit, flimsy, emotional, female way, is that there were at least two kinds of literature: pretentious and silly. And dead. Sometimes the dead stuff was pretentious and silly too, but a lot of the ‘stood the test of time’ stuff is just rip-snorting good story telling, if you’re a fluent enough reader to get past some (mostly) minor language and social strangeness.† Charles Dickens and George Eliot, for example, were the rock stars of their day—Dickens even toured like one.†† They wrote populist crap! They wrote cheap genre! They just happened to write extremely good cheap genre, which is to say . . . literature.
Pollyanna forbids me to mention any names of current ‘literary’ authors I think write cheap pretentious-and-silly genre. And I’m sufficiently aware of myself as an evil-cow reader to accept that some of my loathings are just me being an evil cow and the work’s good. Some of it, however, isn’t, and in a hundred years nobody will be bothering with it.††† When I talk about writing cheap genre I’m saying this half sardonically and half proudly. If you’re right that people will be reading Robin McKinley in a hundred years, I’ll have become literature too, because I write good populist crap.
Maren also responding to:
| Alternatively I can snicker and say, this is why I write *cheap genre,* and not LIT’RATURE |
I think I’ve mentioned before that my beloved 17th-century conteuses deliberately chose the very frivolous fairy tale genre because they knew most critics would not take them seriously enough to suspect them of anything subversive (political allegory, Girls Who Do Things, jokes at the expense of males–all of which did feature prominently in their stories, of course), so they were relatively free to explore the issues that interested them without interference.*
But still they apparently couldn’t resist a dig at critics when the opportunity presented itself. I can’t find which story or even which author this was right now, but one of them said in an aside that some critic was surely going to protest a huntsman in her story having a musket, since it was set many centuries before her time. She preemptively responded to this unseen critic that there were talking animals in the story, so there could certainly be anachronistic muskets as well.
*Which is not to say some critics didn’t still hate them (notably Boileau who mentioned fairy tales in his tenth satire, Against Women), but that was more disdain than criticism of the actual works.
I am proud to be a fellow fairy tale reteller in this company.
emljones:
There are even books that don’t suck dead bears, but DO have technical flaws that keep them from reaching their potential… i.e., book I read recently in which the name of a minor but significant character CHANGED partway through! I finished the book puzzled as to whether the publisher had fired all the editors, or what.
Oh dear. I think you’re being a bit harsh if you’re going to declare a book hasn’t reached its potential because there was a small but glaring editorial failure. I try different names for characters sometimes when I feel prickly-itchy about someone, when it seems to me I’m failing to ‘hear’ their real name and am still trying to get the mumble in my ear to turn into nice sharp consistent letters on the page. I occasionally don’t get them all changed to the final result—the same final result—especially when I never do manage to assuage the prickle-itch—and then I have to hope that someone questions the renegades. But the mortality of writers, editors and proofreaders is a source of continuing permanent dismay to all of us on both sides of the Great Publishing Divide. And it keeps most of us on this side of the divide awake nights.
But criticism is a tricky thing. I’m an academic and my writing is for academic journals, and . . . I’ve discovered that when I find myself saying any version of “this person just doesn’t understand” I’m usually resisting some well-founded criticism. But . . . academic work (mine, anyway) is almost always work in process so criticism can be used for the next article. It’s writing as learning process, rather than creation of a story.
It’s something I’ve always wondered – are reviews useful for fiction authors, at all?? I’m getting the sense from everyone here that a useful (for the author, that is) fiction review is at best exceedingly rare!
I don’t know about everyone here. And perhaps it depends on what you mean by ‘review’; a lot of writers like to work by workshopping, when they send work-in-progress out for criticism, and then use that collected criticism as a basis for rewrites. And I know writers who read every published review of every published book with close attention because they expect to learn something from it that they can use writing their next book.
I’m not like that. I am a solitary clunch, and a ratbag with it. First, last and most of the middle . . . I listen to the story. And I only listen to the story. Other voices are an infuriating distraction. This is why I don’t send early drafts out for reader responses. Reader responses will only confuse the issue. The story will tell me what it wants and needs. The more closely I listen to it the better I will write it. Go away and leave me alone and let me get on with it.
I have a fairly similar response to reviews of the published work. It is vanishingly rare that a reviewer—back in the days when I still read negative reviews—told me something that I could use. They may be right that this, that or the other thing fails for this, that or the other reason. I am not saying that I write flawless, unimpeachable prose limning‡ lapidary plots and breathtakingly exquisite and agonisingly resonant characters.‡‡ I am saying that I’m my stories’ best and, effectively, only, arbiter. This isn’t arrogance‡‡‡; it’s the way my story-telling faculty is built.
librarykat
I don’t know if reviews are useful for the authors; I know that many libraries depend on them for collection development purposes. A library’s collection development policy may say that it will only purchase books and other materials that have at least two positive reviews in certain qualified journals (usually library professional journals, Publishers Weekly, etc). . . .
Yes. Bingo. And this is precisely why snarky, subjective, axe-grinding, soap-box, having-a-bad-day, don’t-like-this-genre, this-isn’t-the-book-I-wanted-to-read, this-isn’t-the-book-this-author-should-have-written, the-world-should-be-a-different-shape-because-I-say-so reviews make me incandescent. As I say, I don’t read my own reviews any more unless Merrilee clears them first—why should I make myself miserable (because I will make myself miserable) over a bad review when it won’t do anything but make me miserable?—but I read other people’s, and there are a lot of reviewers I have seriously wanted to whap up longside the head. Of course there are a lot of writers I want to whap up longside the head. I’m generous with my whapping impulse. But this is the real world where people have to earn a living as well as the artistic world where we’re trying to hang a few more stars in the interdimensional firmament, and every snarky review loses that author sales§ that he/she probably needs to pay the mortgage and feed the hellhounds. I’m not talking about either deserved trashings or genuine uncertainty or puzzlement or even flat dislike. These happen, like hailstones and headaches (speaking from the recipient’s point of view). I’m talking about blind prejudice and sheer bleeding snark, for which there is no excuse.
Ah, life on earth with people. What a snakepit. I’m one of those overdone crusty types with a mushy centre however: I still believe most people are good at heart, do their best, and mean well. But it’s like Other Dogs: it only needs one or two that try and take your or your sweet hellhounds’ faces off to give you a somewhat twitchy attitude toward the sight of a few more of them streaking toward you across the greensward. Or the whitesward, lately.
* * *
* And speaking of 1,000,000 undone things, I’ve been trying to remember for weeks to ring the piano tuner.
** I’m pretty sure I’ve told you this: I was a transfer student, but I graduated in the first class of women who’d been there all four years.
*** What, me still pissed off, thirty years later? Little benign, forebearing me?
† Crinolines are rarely seen these days, and chaperones are pretty thin on the ground. I find that at this stage of my life the thing I find most troubling in reading my beloved Victorians is the racism. I’m somehow better able to say oh, go sit on a pitchfork, about all that melting femininity.
†† And while I don’t think cocaine had anything to do with it, he effectively died of it.
††† They’ll be producing their own silly and pretentious pseudo-lit, of course. It’s not like this ever goes away.
‡ ‘to limn’: one of my most-hated verbs. Right up there with ‘to craft’. Craft is a noun.
‡‡ Ick, actually
‡‡‡ Well, it may be arrogance too
§ A topic for another evening is whether All Attention Is Good Attention. The short answer is no. All notoriety may be good notoriety. I don’t know; I don’t have paparazzi leaping out of my shrubbery. But at the level of needing to make library sales to make ends meet, yes, negative reviews cost.
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