This is something that has bugged me for years. All the way back to high school english class when a student wanted to read Stephen King but wasn’t allowed because he wasn’t a ‘real author’. Why is it that many of the so-called intellectual elite, and not a few members here, consider writers who are constantly and consistently on the best sellers list ‘hacks’? Isn’t writing meant to be read? If it isn’t read, to me, it seems somewhat pointless. Particularly when its a fiction book.
In this thread , many of you call Dan Brown a hack. Others include Stephen King in the hack category. The only reasoning I saw was because somebody didn’t like the fact that the head of security of the vatican didn’t know what anti-matter was, and that a woman was wearing a short skirt in the vatican. To me, these aren’t good enough reasons to call someone a hack, or compare Brown to romace books.
Books are meant to read. Whatever accomplishes that is a good thing, IMO. A critically acclaimed book written by a literary genius that is read by a thousand people is a much less important and effective book then a book read by millions and millions. Each time someone read a book their minds are engaged. They are forced to imagine the scenery, the characters, everything that is happening in the book. It is not spelled out for them, like a movie or a TV show, they have to spell it themselves. Every book read improves your vocabulary, your grammar, your spelling, and most importantly your imagination.
In the Da Vinci Code, Dan Brown has written a book millions of people want to read. I bought my copy, and before I was even done it the line of my friends wanting to borrow it was long. Some of these friends never read anything beyond a blog, or the sports pages. I was happy, ecstatic in fact that they wanted to read this book. It could open them up to a new world, one filled with art, history, and yes some fun conspiracy theories. I know for a fact one or 2 of them went online to look at what the book said, to see the art for themselves, to think the book through for themselves.
This is kind of like arguing that food is meant to be eaten, and anything that accomplishes that is a good thing, therefore McDonald’s food isn’t crap.
I have no opinion on Dan Brown, as I haven’t read him. I don’t think Stephen King is a hack, though I understand the argument. But obviously, in general, some authors are not going to be very good, and some of those authors who aren’t very good are going to sell a lot of books anyway.
Popular success is its own reward – and it’s a mighty lucrative reward. Critical success is something else again, and has to be earned in a different way, or why bother distinguishing the two?
I agree that this is the same argument that there are no standards of quality except for popularity. Therefore McDonalds is the best food, Wal-Mart has the best merchandise and General Motors makes the best cars.
If you don’t believe this - and I certainly don’t - then you won’t go along with the argument that since Dan Brown sells he must be a good writer. I’ve never read Dan Brown so I don’t have any opinion on him. But I have read other popular writers who are, there is no other way to say this, terrible writers. They can’t compose a good English sentence; they can’t write dialog that sounds like it comes out of the mouths of real people; they can’t do three-dimensional characters; they load up the prose with dumps of exposition; they can’t plot and have no idea of how to put scenes together.
Yet they sell. So what? Why pretend that all writing is equal when we don’t pretend that all of anything else in the world is equal? Some food really is better than others. Some cars really are. Some merchandise is. And some writers are as well. Different things sell at different rates for different reasons.
Bestseller writers do tend to be hacks. They sell for reasons other than the quality of their writing. That’s all there is to it.
Yeah, he’s a hack. I’m sorry, but “he sells books” is not a defense against this particular comment. He’s a bad writer. I agree with you that reading is a good thing, but that doesn’t make everybody who writes a good writer. Brown is klutzy and unpoetic with language, and has no ability to characterize. The people in his novels exist almost solely to voice his ideas and move the plot forward. They have no human traits and are not interesting in any way.
Allow me to offer some sentences from The Da Vinci Code as evidence that he can’t write for shit.
“As he moved toward the mist of the fountains, Langdon had the uneasy sense he was crossing an imaginary threshold into another world.” [page 19]
“His artwork seemed bursting to tell a secret, and yet whatever it was remained hidden, perhaps beneath a layer of paint, perhaps enciphered in plain view, or perhaps nowhere at all. Maybe Da Vinci’s plethora of tantalizing clues was nothing but an empty promise left behind to frustrate the curious and bring a smirk to the face of his knowing Mona Lisa.” [170]
“Finally, Langdon offered some of his own research- a series of symbologic connections that strongly supported the seemingly controversial claims.” [217]
I could go either way on Stephen King. I read about a dozen of his books as a kid, and I’ve realized that he’s an influence of mine. Sometimes he gets slagged - because he’s prolific, for example, and his fame makes him a target. Other times the criticisms are just: for example, the man does not know how to end a story.
I’m with Marley23. Plenty of people went through Stephen King phases which they probably regret. I hope the same is true of Dan Brown and mid-life crises!
Stephen King is actually a half-way decent writer when he wants to be, but he can be pretty lazy. He recycles plots and images and sometimes–it seems-- whole chunks of prose. His characters are pretty flat, stock types: The average guy, the tortured writer, the wise professor, the dour yankee, the long suffering wife. However, he can put a noun and a verb together and no one writes gore as well as he does. At his best he can be very scary, as in Pet Semetary.
It’s hard for me to critique Dan Brown honestly because I’ve only skimmed him, but his writing just seems lifeless and frequently bad. That is, bad in a way that would be unacceptable in a tenth-graders prose. His people don’t ever talk like real people his metaphors are trite and his ideas are stupid.
If you like something, that’s your right. But writing is a craft. You can look for originality and insight and fresh ideas and clever expression. From what I can tell Brown lacks these things. King can be inspired on occaision but is often content just to repeat himself.
In fairness, that thread wasn’t about why Dan Brown is a hack, so you aren’t going to get a very good analysis of the deficencies in his writing from it. Here’s an older pit thread on the topic, with some greater detail. There have been other threads, I’m sure, if you’re inclined to search for them.
Pardon me if I’m reading too much into this sentence, but it sounds like you’re a bit down on romance novels. If you’re going to become the Defender of Populist Literature, you’re going to have to either re-evaluate your stance on that genre, or find a concrete way to differentiate Dan Brown from Danielle Steel. I, for one, do not envy you in either task.
Depends on what you mean by “important.” I once read a quote about the band Velvet Underground, that went something like, “Only a thousand people bought their first album. But every single person who bought that album started their own band.” One of the reasons authors like Brown, King, Clancy, and the rest are called hacks is because they tend to go over ground that’s already been well covered by other authors, and do so with less skill and insight. Dan Brown may be read by more people than Umberto Eco, but there’s a good chance that without Foucault’s Pendulum, there never would have been a Da Vinci Code. Critically acclaimed artists may not always affect the public directly, but they do affect other artists, who rework (or less charitably, dumb down) the same ideas until they are palatable for mass consumption.
I agree with this in principle, but what you’ve left out is that one other important thing improves: discrimination. Popular authors are a good way to get people into the habit of reading, but it’s also important for readers to challenge themselves, to push their boundaries. Eventually, most people will realize that the books they cut their teeth on don’t really hold up when compared to the more obscure books that predated them. You used the example of not allowing a high school kid to read Stephen King for an English class. When I was in high school, most of my teachers didn’t have a problem with me reading King, or Tom Clancy, just so long as I was sufficiently rigorous in my approach to them. I think this was an excellent approach, because it made me interested in the process of thinking critically about reading, and laid a groundwork for me to build on with truly challenging works when I entered college. Stephen King was a big part of my development as a reader, and I respect him for that, but at the same time, I’ve also outgrown him, and am no longer particularly interested in reading his books. Going back to him would be like riding a bike with training wheels again.
Now, to hopefully undercut the snobbishness of that last paragraph, I do still read a lot of potboilers. I just prefer cheesy space epics to cheesy supernatural horror. I can plow through a David Weber book in an afternoon. A lot of people with excellent taste in literature still like King plenty well, and there’s nothing wrong with that. He’s just not someone who appeals to me any more. And there’s a lot of people who will defend King’s works as legitimate literary efforts. Nothing wrong with that, either. I don’t agree, but all this is ultimatly totally subjective.
These are not mutually exclusive. Reading is an intellectual exercise, and like all forms of exercise, the more you do it, the better you get at it. The fact that your friends who never read anything are interested in Dan Brown tends to argue that his books are pretty lightweight. If your friends were life long couch potatos, and they finally started getting up and going for twenty minute walks every day, well, that’s certainly a good thing. But it’s not at all comparable to running the Boston Marathon, and there’s a certain value, I think, in maintaing that distinction.
OK, around sophomore year in college, students start saying, “If it’s popular, it’s crap.” It’s snobishness. Some people outgrow it, some don’t.
But the key issue is that popularity and quality are independent variables. You can have popular and good, popular and bad, unpopular and good, and unpopular and bad. There is no correlation between popularity and quality. None. It’s just as wrong to say popular books are all bad as it is to say popular books are all good.
Musician Robert Fripp once offered this insight: In the modern world, we have both “popular culture” and “mass culture.”
To use Fripp’s oversimplification, “Popular culture is where something is very good, and everbody knows it’s very good, and everybody races to buy it.” His examples? Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles.
“Mass culture is where something is rubbish, and everybody knows it’s rubbish, and everyone races to buy it.” Too many examples come to mind to list!
Popularity doesn’t automatically mean a writer is a hack, of course. Even a great artist sometimes produces works that bring him fame and fortune. But popularity alone is not proof of quality.
I didn’t say I regret it! I’m talking about the ages of, give or take, 10 to 14. He can definitely write. Maybe he can’t plot or deal with characters, but even if he has to be called a hack, I don’t think he’s near Brown’s level.
King’s an easy target – he’s prolific, and he’s written as many bad books as good (and a handful of groaners), he writes in a genre that’s typically denigrated or outright dismissed by “serious” literary critics, and he’s (I’m pretty sure) the richest, most high-profile author in the world. Not to mention that he’s been coasting on his own popularity for years.
He may not deserve the level of success he’s acheived, but King doesn’t deserve the label of “Hack” either. Read the Body, Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redeption, the Long Walk, Thinner, Misery, the Dead Zone, Cujo, or Dolores Claiborne, and tell me he doesn’t have at least some talent.
It’s hard for some people, but I think it’s best to dismiss popularity (or lack thereof) when judging an author. Judge the work based on it’s own merit – don’t let others make up your mind for you.
[shrug] All those criticisms apply with equal force to Michael Crichton or Tom Clancy or John Grisham. Brown writes at least as well as they do. Apparently that’s good enough in the “bestseller genre.”
In economics there’s something known as Gresham’s Law, “Bad money drives good money out of circulation”. It means people hoard that which is good, and spend that which is not, as when base metal coinage eliminated the silver coins used before the early sixties.
I think there’s a cultural equivalent to this, where bad culture drives out good by rendering it indistinguishable. People seem to think that just because they enjoy something that it’s good. Just like you can enjoy a Big Mac and fries, you can enjoy the latest Dan Brown crapfest. That doesn’t make the Big Mac cuisine, and it doesn’t make Dan Brown’s work literature.
They might; I haven’t read Clancy or Grisham, and I was maybe nine when I read Jurassic Park and Congo. Looking at King’s list of works, it seems I stopped reading him at age 12. Maybe I’d be less critical of Brown’s work if he was open about writing for pre-teens.
Um, cept you can’t GET any hackier than Crichton, Clancy, or Grisham, so I’m not sure of the comparison you’re drawing here. Your words are agreeing, while your tone is disagreeing.
The OP makes an assumptive leap that does more to reveal his own biases than to address the actual issue. As Reality Chuck pointed out, after accidentally making as egregiously fals a generalization as the OP, there is ZERO correlation between quality and popularity. The OP draws that false parallel, as does RC in his own first paragraph. One of my and Toni Morrison’s favorite authors is Elmore Leonard. Where’s your popularity=hack equation now?
The OP, and others in this and other threads, is only interested in building strawmen to hurl at “snobs,” which is itself the snobbiest action occurring in this thread.
Chricton is such a hack. I was relieved when my 12 yr old son got through his Crichton phase. Being popular does not equal hack. JK Rowling is quite good in my opinion.
I’m talking about the ages of, give or take, 10 to 14. He can definitely write. Maybe he can’t plot or deal with characters, but even if he has to be called a hack, I don’t think he’s near Brown’s level.