On books and evaluating them
Tonight, my mother, who is a university writing professor, was talking about a student who, asked to analyze the effectiveness of an article, read the first sentence of the article and then went and wrote a paper based on the topic of the first sentence. Sadly for her, the topic of the whole article was not that of the first sentence. Confronted with this, she said disingenuously, "But it was effective! It made me want to go find out more about (the topic of the first sentence)!"
This story made me think about the fact that some books are effective for me in that they effectively make me want to take up the shot-put. The only thing stopping me is the idea of large library fines for damaged materials.
I recently began to read a book, whose author and title shall herein go unnamed, which was so totally bad, so thoroughly unprofessional, so stupid, so plain old dyed-in-the-wool crappy, that I really do have suspicions that it only got published because the author is known in the publishing world. It was that bad.
In my opinion. And that's the sticking point. Is it all just opinion? Or is there some way to actually evaluate fiction, to move beyond "works for me" or "didn't grab me"?
I don't think a method of evaluating fiction that devalues "commercial" or genre writing, or that elevates sophisticated, convoluted sentence-level writing above the clear and concise (or vice versa) would work. You could create a computer program that would track adjectives, modifiers, subordinate clauses, and so on and thus quantify "sophistication", or at least complexity, but that's not the same as quality. You can look at how much time -- literally how many words -- an author spends, say, building setting or character. But then you're still left with the problem of 5000 words of cliche-ridden tripe being worse than 100 words of eloquence.
There are books that I don't care for because their subject matter doesn't interest me, but I don't consider them bad books. There are other books I consider to be bad. I know the difference when I see it.
One element of badness would surely be spelling and grammatical errors. But in a published work, you can't tell what's the writer's fault and what's a typesetting error.
Factual errors -- when the facts ought to be right. This is a grey area, though it seems as if it should be black and white. In Tribulation's War, I did everything I could to recreate the Civil War battlefield experience accurately. Weapons, tactics, the taste of black powder and dust on a dry-parched tongue. I would have considered it immoral to do anything less.
Except that the 27th Virginia did not have a full complement of companies, and Tribulation's company is thus imaginary (something I did because I wanted a range of imaginary characters to work with). But the 27th could have had more companies. So that's OK. Or is it?
Then, of course, there's the folk magic in the second half of the book. Some of it represents real belief, but much of it is purely my invention. Of course, I never claim that Old Woodman's magical system is anyone's but his own. And practitioners of magic always have secret words, symbols, gestures; don't they? And, well, there probably wasn't really magic going on in the Alleghenies in the 1870's, but it's a literary convention; readers understand the use of fantasy; readers will not be fooled into thinking that the fictional world's truth is that of the real world. So that's OK. Isn't it?
I'm trying to sell the novel, so I guess I've decided it's OK, but suffice to say I don't think factuality is as clear-cut a basis for evaluation as it may seem at first.
Continuity errors seem pretty obvious. I recently read a fantasy novel in which a character has something semi-important stolen from her -- and has it back, with no explanation, a few pages later. Oops. But errors like this don't happen very often, and they seem like an ungenerous little niggle upon which to base a verdict on quality, anyway.
Some people judge fiction, particularly science fiction, on whether it contains new and shiny ideas. But I don't care very much about new and shiny ideas. I'd rather be emotionally moved, myself.
So, in conclusion, I don't have a clear answer as to what makes a book bad or good. I don't think "it works for me" is enough. But I'm not sure, just now, what else there is.
This story made me think about the fact that some books are effective for me in that they effectively make me want to take up the shot-put. The only thing stopping me is the idea of large library fines for damaged materials.
I recently began to read a book, whose author and title shall herein go unnamed, which was so totally bad, so thoroughly unprofessional, so stupid, so plain old dyed-in-the-wool crappy, that I really do have suspicions that it only got published because the author is known in the publishing world. It was that bad.
In my opinion. And that's the sticking point. Is it all just opinion? Or is there some way to actually evaluate fiction, to move beyond "works for me" or "didn't grab me"?
I don't think a method of evaluating fiction that devalues "commercial" or genre writing, or that elevates sophisticated, convoluted sentence-level writing above the clear and concise (or vice versa) would work. You could create a computer program that would track adjectives, modifiers, subordinate clauses, and so on and thus quantify "sophistication", or at least complexity, but that's not the same as quality. You can look at how much time -- literally how many words -- an author spends, say, building setting or character. But then you're still left with the problem of 5000 words of cliche-ridden tripe being worse than 100 words of eloquence.
There are books that I don't care for because their subject matter doesn't interest me, but I don't consider them bad books. There are other books I consider to be bad. I know the difference when I see it.
One element of badness would surely be spelling and grammatical errors. But in a published work, you can't tell what's the writer's fault and what's a typesetting error.
Factual errors -- when the facts ought to be right. This is a grey area, though it seems as if it should be black and white. In Tribulation's War, I did everything I could to recreate the Civil War battlefield experience accurately. Weapons, tactics, the taste of black powder and dust on a dry-parched tongue. I would have considered it immoral to do anything less.
Except that the 27th Virginia did not have a full complement of companies, and Tribulation's company is thus imaginary (something I did because I wanted a range of imaginary characters to work with). But the 27th could have had more companies. So that's OK. Or is it?
Then, of course, there's the folk magic in the second half of the book. Some of it represents real belief, but much of it is purely my invention. Of course, I never claim that Old Woodman's magical system is anyone's but his own. And practitioners of magic always have secret words, symbols, gestures; don't they? And, well, there probably wasn't really magic going on in the Alleghenies in the 1870's, but it's a literary convention; readers understand the use of fantasy; readers will not be fooled into thinking that the fictional world's truth is that of the real world. So that's OK. Isn't it?
I'm trying to sell the novel, so I guess I've decided it's OK, but suffice to say I don't think factuality is as clear-cut a basis for evaluation as it may seem at first.
Continuity errors seem pretty obvious. I recently read a fantasy novel in which a character has something semi-important stolen from her -- and has it back, with no explanation, a few pages later. Oops. But errors like this don't happen very often, and they seem like an ungenerous little niggle upon which to base a verdict on quality, anyway.
Some people judge fiction, particularly science fiction, on whether it contains new and shiny ideas. But I don't care very much about new and shiny ideas. I'd rather be emotionally moved, myself.
So, in conclusion, I don't have a clear answer as to what makes a book bad or good. I don't think "it works for me" is enough. But I'm not sure, just now, what else there is.
posted by Kyri at 7:16 PM
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