Popular writers considered hacks? (Brown, King)

Cafe Society
21

Dan Brown, Stephen King, Danielle Steel, et al. are not what I consider hack writers. These folks are, after all, writing what they want to write and being wildly successful at it.

I am a true hack writer (or was), and there is a difference. I wrote political speeches and editorials presenting a certain politician in the light in which he wanted to be perceived, the perception being that he wrote those words and harbored those sentiments. Which he didn’t, he was a jerk and everyone around him knew it but he was a powerful jerk and he was presented to the public in a way that made him look really good. I contributed to this and was paid very well for my efforts. To the detriment of my bank account I didn’t do this for very long, but I sure felt like a hack writer while I was doing it, when I didn’t feel like a flat-out whore.

Dan Brown is not a very good writer but the test of good writing is that people keep reading it–if somebody writes a story so compelling that you can’t stop reading it even when the writing is godawful that doesn’t make them a hack.

Stephen King, on the other hand, can be a very good writer. The shorter the better, when it comes to his work. Give the man a word limit and by gosh he can deliver. HE also comes up with fascinating ideas.

Face it, these guys are providing entertainment, not art. Not enlightenment. They may not be great writers but they’ve got talent. There are a lot of writers out there, who are getting published, who aren’t any better at writing than Brown or King and in fact are considerably worse, and who don’t have the benefit of fascinating ideas. (Although actually as far as I can tell, Danielle Steel had only one idea. I’m really hard put to explain her popularity.) And there are writers who could mop the floor with the likes of Brown and King but who will never get as popular as those two because they lack the common touch–writing too dense or too rich, ideas too hard to understand, plots too circuitous. Or they set too high a standard in the first part of the book only to lose me and many other readers in the third quarter of the book when the flame burns out. The good old page-turner may not be great writing but it is consistent.

22

The OP makes a lot of absurd assertions, and I’m not going to argue them all, but the assertion that “Every book read improves your vocabulary, your grammar, your spelling, and most importantly your imagination” is false. If you read something under your reading skill level, then all you’re doing is practicing what you already know. Do you want to spend the rest of your life practicing at something under your skill level? There’s no way to improve unless you go beyond your established skill level. If all someone ever read in horror was King, they’d never bother to get the hundreds of writers far and above him, without whom there would be no horror publishing industry past or present.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with hacks, but you have to understand that most hacks are made by churning out huge bodies of work which are, by virtue of quantity over quality, repetitive and in time, mediocre. When someone essentially writes the same book over and over again, that means there’s only going to be a few “original” works, and a wealth of pale variations on the theme. For example, with romance novels, they all tend to follow the same general formula, which is how books on how to write romance novels can be written, and why the books in the genre are so easily interchangeable. Harlequin romance novels are written so that you don’t have to have a reading comprehension level above a 6th grade education to be able to read them. In that vein, given one of the OP’s assertions, even if someone does have a high school reading comprehension level, if Harlequin romance novels are all they ever read, they’ll never get good enough without a dictionary by their side to get through a book by Jane Austen.

With hacks, you may get some quality, creative brilliance, at some point. Some early King is memorable for those reasons. But the problem becomes the interchangeability, the indistinguishableness, the sameness. I’ve read, I think, three Koontz books in my life. That’s all I needed, they were all about the same. There’s way to much out there to read, I will never live long enough to read it all, so why bother endlessly treading the same old same old?

The OP’s theory, that 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” is such bunk. Because about a million hack books are, as a whole, less important and effective and all about equal, to me personally, than reading one “critically acclaimed book written by a literary genius”. It’s quality over quantity, substance over crowd-pleasers, a book written by a smart person with something to say, versus someone repeating a formula or template. But I’m not the target audience of someone like King or Brown or Danielle Steele or whomever. And it’s to the laziness and lack of risk-taking or curiosity (or sometimes age or reading comprehension level) that such hack writers appeal.

23

Somebody else had Dan Brown’s ideas. :wink: Those somebodies included Leigh and Baigent, Umberto Eco, Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea, to name a few of them.

24

Let’s just say it this way - being popular doesn’t make you a great writer. On the other hand, being popular does not make you a bad writer or a ‘hack’. Charles Dickens was considered a ‘hack’ by the intelligentsia in his day because he was popular. I believe Mark Twain suffered the same.

Judge the work, not who or how many are reading it. Stephen King has turned out some works that border on great literature. I’ve never read a word of Dan Brown’s, so I don’t know if the same can be said for him.

Sometimes a writer you consider to be a ‘hack’ can come up with some surprising stuff and cause you to re-evaluate him. For example, I used to like reading Robert R. McCammon’s horror novels, but never thought of them as anything but escapist light reading, and never thought of the author as anything more than a decent author of horror books that could keep you turning pages. Then I read Boy’s Life, which, while perhaps not great literature, is certainly a very good book, which can stand up with the better works of Stephen King.

25

Exactly the point I was going to make. Some years ago I read a piece about the fallability of art criticism through the ages. The piece listed large numbers of writers (including Shakespeare and Tolstoy), musicians and directors (Hawks and Hitchcock) who were dismsissed as hacks by contemporary critics. The things that they considered “real” art were basically forgotten now.

26

I can always tell a hack writer by the way they write women. Now, women are rarely given a fair shake in any art form, but if all the women in a single book all act like no human you’ve ever met, than you know you’ve got a bad writer on your hands. Other clues are if the women are all “fiesty but secretly chaste” or “chaste, but secretly fiesty” and are largey distinguishable from each other based on the inevitable head-to-toe physical rundown provided when each female character is introduced. From Tom Clancy’s writing, it’s hard to tell if he’s ever had an actual long conversation with a woman. None of his female characters act remoting like people.

Dan Brown…where do I begin. His characters were plot points. You could make any one of them say any other one’s lines and nobody would know the difference.

Ultimately, bad writing is when a writer did not convey what they set out to convey. Popularity has nothing to do with it.

27

Maybe I am not so rigid and perforated with bias and dogma, but I have never read a bad writer. I have only read communiques. They are all such and I apply my discretion. I am not so discretionary to shut out any enrichment of perspective. I might take exception and prejudice, but that is my shade.

It is all equal in my mind.

28

I somewhat disagree. I think that there is a correlation between quality and popularity, but that it’s fairly weak. In general, I think that the more popular a book, movie, play or other work is the more likely it is to be moderately good but not great.

A truly bad work will usually be seen as such. “Battlefield Earth” didn’t exactly rock the box office. And very good works will sometimes not be accessible to a widespread audience. Or maybe the audience would “get” it perfectly fine, but just tends to prefer something else. In any case, what happens (or so I suspect) is that the extremes of the quality spectrum tend to get largely ignored, while the stuff in the middle draws a large audience. We get a rough bell-shaped curve when plotting quality and popularity.

29

Yes you can. Piers Anthony.

30

It’s true that there’s no correlation between popularity and quality, but let’s not delude ourselves. The “Steven King = hack” claim is mostly just intellectual snobbery. Literary critics pride themselves on being above us unwashed masses, and most of them would rather have saxaphone reeds shoved under their fingernails than admit to enjoying a popular book.

31

I’m in partial agreement, but I would qualify this in a couple of ways.

One, I think there is a somewhat higher correlation between quality and long-run popularity. (I would conjecture that this is true at least partly because, what makes a hack a hack is that he just writes essentially the same book that he or someone else has already written; and once the fuss has died down, readers aren’t going to keep going back to a work if they can get the same thing elsewhere.)

Second, the quality of a work is not a single, scalar quantity. There are many different scales on which a book can be measured, many different things a work can potentially do well, poorly, or not at all. An author can be good at some things but not at others. And some of the ways in which a book can be good are conducive to increased readership and popularity, while others are not, particularly, or may even detract from it.

32

What reasons?
Why do one book sell and get numerous printings, while another collects dust in the publishing house warehouse? Marketing can’t be the only reason. We’ve seen lots of example where a publisher, tv channel, movie studio tried to lure the audience with massive marketing, which might work for a short while but not in the long run.

So there must be another reason.

Now, if I knew what it was, I’d start my own publishing house. But I don’t. The closest I can come is The Story.

It all starts with a story. If you can tell a story and make people listen (read / watch), you’re halfway there. If the story is good, compelling, exciting, fascinating, in any way invokes emotions of some kind, well so much better.
And people will buy (and most importantly) spend their time with a story the interests them. Sometimes, the person telliong the story might be able to produce literature as well, sometimes not. But the larger audience is not very interested in literature. They want a good story. And Dan Brown can spin a yarn. As can J.K. Rowling, King and numerous other bestseller writers. Some people who are capable of literature can tell a story too, but not all of them. But all the bestseller “hacks” sure can tell a story, albeit sometimes with crappy characterization, simple language, worn metaphors or idiotic plot twists.

Now, how to identify that story before all that money is put into publishing a book…

33

Extremely weak. You can find examples of all four cases (I’ll use movies):

Good and popular: Psycho, The Godfather, Gone With the Wind, The General, Stagecoach, The Quiet Man, E.T.

Good and unpopular: Cries and Whispers, Z, Crash, Duck Soup (a major flop when it was first released), Citizen Kane (just broke even on first release), Days of Heaven, any good non-English language film, etc.

Bad and popular (the smallest category, and one most prone to debate, but there are still plenty of examples): The Matrix Revolutions, Dr. Seuss’s How the Grinch Stole Chistmas (Jim Carrey Version), Mrs. Doubtfire, Madagascar, The Day After Tomorrow (Fun, but stupid and cliched), Independence Day, nearly all the top weekly grossers since January…

Bad and unpopular (the largest category, of course – if a movie stinks, no one goes to see it). Some include Battlefield Earth, Cutthroat Island, Godzilla (Matthew Broderick version), Space Mutiny, Gigli.

For the Bad and Popular category, it generally lists light, popcorn films – “thrill rides” that have little else, but which appeal to the teenage male audience that dominates moviegoing today. There are also films that are very much of their time, but which are badly dated today.

34

I agree with you Mr. Diceman.

35

Is it a bad thing that I’m really curious about this reference to ‘a woman with a short skirt in the Vatican’? :wink:

36

I think Exapno has boiled it down to the essence, and then some. Which is to sayu, there’s something to his argument, but I disagree with it.

Any reasonably successful work has to have a degree of audience appeal, and I think that the creators of those works definitely play to that appeal. The great ones factor it into what they produce, anmd are very good at managing to work it in without compromising their artistic vision. But any work that doesn’t have audience appeal will fail through not being seen often enough./ It’ll die simply because no one wants to see/read/hear it. So you can write your novel that’s a Great Work of Art exactly as you want it, but if nobody reads it, it won’t get reprinted, and it will disappear forever. This was as true of the Iliad and the Odyssey as it is of Stephen King.
Dickens, already named, is one example I immediately thought of. Twain said “The works of great Authors are Wine, those of mine are Water. But everyone drinks water.” King often dragged up the example of Edgar Allan Poe,. “The Great American Hack”. I don’t know who called him that. I never thought of Poe as a hack, or encountered any critic who did. I’ve said many times that I think King himself will have a fate like Dickens – he’ll be read in the future, long after his critics and those thought to be Great Writers in his lifetime are forgotten. He has a gift for dialogue, and he, better than anyone else I’ve read, has fossilized late twentierth century middle-class existence in print, and without condemning it. He’s written some truly awful stuff, I have to agree, and I’m, not fond of his attitude to science and SF, but I think a lot of his work will survive.

37

Anyone who thinks Stephen King is a hack should read the Dark Tower series. I’m surprised at how GOOD it is, I haven’t read King since I was 13 (like a lot of other people) but I’m really enjoying this and I think it’s one of the best American fantasy series ever. Of course, there are people who think any fantasy or speculative fiction is hackery (except when an approved “literary” writer does it, then it’s fun and experimental), but one shouldn’t give their opinion any mind.

The only thing that makes people think a lot of modern popular writers are “hacks” is time. People thought Dickens, Poe, and Doyle were hacks, but now they’re taught in classrooms all across the world, and where are those “literary writers” (i.e. the “society writers” who wrote books for gentlemen and ladies whose books had print runs of 1000 or less) of the past now? Of course, some things won’t stick. I doubt that people will read Dan Brown in 100 years. I do think people will read Stephen King in 100 years. I might be wrong, but I don’t think so.

And of course, there will be people who think any writer of genre fiction is a hack, while giving a pass to very popular writers of literary fiction. Jonathan Franzen and Toni Morrison sell hundreds of thousands of books, as much as Stephen King does, yet nobody would call them hacks. I don’t know, the whole dichotomy is outdated and doesn’t make much sense. Just read what you like, and don’t care about what other people say about it.

38

One reason I don’t often read out of my comfort zone is that I don’t “get it”. I understand the words, but the theme or associations or subtext will go right over my head. I’ll read a good review later and think “Oh yeah? That’s what the book was about? Hmmmm.”

I can recognize that something is “good” but I wouldn’t be able to tell you why it’s good, or why it’s “better” than something else. “Bad” writing is much easier to analyze.

I never learned to read critically, just fast. I’m probably not alone.

39

You raise an interesting point. I think the point of much of the assigned reading in high school and college English classes is to expand your reading “comfort zone” and teach you how to “get it.” Which may be a legitimate reason why the student the OP mentioned wasn’t allowed to read Stephen King.

40

Some people have raised the point that there needs to be a distinction between ‘popular’ and ‘good’ using McDonald’s as an example. If you eat at McDonald’s all the time because it is popular and therefore must be good, you will be doing unhealthy things to yourself. However if all you do is read books that are popular and must be good you will not be doing any harm to yourself. I believe, in the long run, you will be improving yourself, maybe not as much as if you read only books that were critically acclaimed, but improvement nonetheless. Reading itself is a good thing. Anything that gets anybody reading is, IMO, a good thing.

Books that are constantly the same, ones that are at a 6th grade level, and you are at a 12th grade level do provide value. Practice. Even books that are below your level are written in different styles, they use the language in different ways, different methods which you in turn soak up, and learn to use yourself. Not mention having to use your imagination to picture all of these things, which in turn will help keep your brain in tune.

Lissener , thanks for contributing an ever so helpful post. I am sure many writers are considered hacks. I choose the 2 most frequently used examples of said hackery. Not all popular writers are hacks, not all hacks are popular. If you have nothing of substance to say, it’s nice to know you still say it.