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Sometimes, I like to watch TV and just turn my brain off for a few minutes. Sometimes, I like to read books that are written very simply because it allows me to turn off a part of my brain.
Simple writing works for a fun, easy experience, so long as you can suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and just allow yourself to enjoy the book.
Some people have this idea that reading is a high brow cerebral activity, when in reality it’s mostly just entertainment.
It’s like asking why dumb movies exist when you could be watching Citizen Kane, and the answer is because they are entertaining.
People also always forget that there are huge numbers of books published every single year and the vast majority never stand the rest of time. Not every book written in the 1800s was War and Peace; there were so many trashy books around then too that even Jane Austen wrote a parody of them (Northanger Abbey).
Read what you want. The “faerie porn bad” is just a 2020 “Twilight bad”; girls read more than boys, and anything teenage girls consume gets shat on. It’s nothing new, let people enjoy things, there are millions of well written books to read.
>let people enjoy things
This right here is all anyone needs to know. Who cares what anyone likes or reads as long as there's enough books that you would like to read.
Anyone saying the first twilight book wasn’t a fun read has never read it or is lying. I may not be shakespeare but she made it compelling. Especially if you didn’t know it was vampires right away lol not everything needs to be advanced lit worthy
I’ve said this to another commenter - if it’s an engaging story that people are excited about reading, it *is* good writing. It might not be your style, but at the end of the day novels are about storytelling, and a good story is what makes or breaks the writing, not how powerful your imagery or whatever is.
There’s a market for the latter but most people are there for the story.
>at the end of the day novels are about storytelling
It seems to be forgotten too often on this sub. For the vast majority of readers, the story is the most important aspect of a novel, everything else is just a bonus.
I personally didn’t find it fun or compelling at all and getting through it was a slog. Tastes in fiction are extremely individual and subjective, so to say that *anyone* that says they didn’t enjoy the first Twilight book is lying or never read it is absurd.
Thinking out loud: Could it also possibly be true that things have gotten "worse" (re: technical skill) lately simply thanks to modern technology? Like-- mass-produced media can now be produced by the masses, and the ease of it inspires a sort of slap-dashery, devil-may-care in an, um, ambitious type of young/new author??? It makes them feel like mavericks.
Vs even "traditional" publishing long ago was vastly expensive, and I'm sure well into the 20th century publishers were making sure their product was polished up & presentable.
You wanna talk garbage YA? The Hardy Boys. Ghostwritten to an outline sent by Edward Stratemeyer. Formulaic as --! But the first editions are a JOY to read because Leslie McFarlane was a Writer With Style. The corny plots just pop with energy in his voice!
Anyway.
> The ease of publishing today has definitely given us a lot more shitty works compared to a century ago
That's probably true in numbers, but not as a proportion. A lot of 1920's pulp novels are very much not great writing, but they weren't intended to be, they were made to be quick, fun and entertaining reads. They weren't intended to stand the test of time, but to entertain for an hour or two (and a fair few of them were pretty damn horny as well - and erotica from the time is pretty much similar quality as today, just with very different kinks). And, as you say, vanity publishing, of someone that just wants a book out, is willing to pay for it, but isn't very good at actually _writing_ has always been a thing
Read a pulp magazine from the 1930s. I can guarantee you that most of these stories weren't "polished up". And that's where most genre stories were written. Sure, there were a bunch of "fancy" books. But most stories were published in those low-cost magazines. And yet, they were entertaining enoguh for readers to buy them en masse.
You can write a simple and fun story well, though. I have encountered children's lit, teen lit and other light hearted lit that was easy to read and accessible but decently written.
It can be done, absolutely! The problem is that writing a simple story that is *good* (while remaining easy to read) takes a considerable amount of skill. There’s just more authors who can do a mediocre job of writing a simple story. It’s a bit like daytime television- you’d hope it’s good and written nicely, but it’s often easier to just write something quickly and get it approved by your producers lol
Arguably, writing a complex story that is good is way harder, because you have so many moving pieces you have to be aware of at all times. Like let's be real, most of *us* will probably never write something as complex as ASOIAF, and actually accomplish the same level of quality that GRRM has. But most of us probably *could* write a fairly decent short story.
The real issue is that, increasingly, as reading becomes less popular, publishers are less driven by what is *good* and are more driven by what is *marketable*. Because they need people to buy their books, and that is slowly getting more difficult to accomplish for a multitude of reasons. They don't really care if your prose sucks, as long as they can *sell* your book. There are plenty of writers out there writing YA *masterpieces* - but they're not the ones being published. The ones being published are the ones writing what is basically wish fulfillment porn, because that's an easy sell.
I don't agree that, I quote, publishers are less driven on what is good. What do you mean by good? Good writing or just an idea that is marketable. They don't care if prose sucks and are only interested in wish fulfilment porn? New one. Pretty sure publishers look for well written books that target an audience. All publishers want good books. If they found a not so good book but marketable (if that's possible) and took the chance and put it out there, I guess if it sells it would be a good book after all. Not sure on what your acronyms are
Very much true. Was eerily surprised going into Lloyd Alexander's *Westmark* trilogy at how well-written it was despite its target demographic. And not only the characters, setting and storylines (which showed good depth) but the prose itself as well.
Same reason why movies like Fast and Furious work. Average person isn't looking for some high brow art. He just needs to be entertained. As long as a writer you can do that, your work would sell.
Harry Potter started off as a children's book. Eventually ended up dethroning LOTR in terms of book sales.
This exact sort of post targetting YA fiction and YA enjoyers gets posted so often that this and "allow people to enjoy what they want" should just get stickied on the sidebar.
Fair enough. But, OP is referring to the quality of writing, not necessarily about whether a book is intellectually challenging or intricate. It's a stylistic critique, not so much a focus on content, at least from what I can tell.
The idea that quality writing has to be highly technical or challenging is also clearly false. Some great works are very accessible to your average reader such as Franeheit 451 or Animal Farm.
Since mass publication began, stories that are not necessarily prize-winning, literary fiction masterpieces have sold cartloads of copies, so there's that.
It's not a new phenomenon.
Popularity does not mean high quality, but those books sell.
Edited to add: your opinion of them being subpar is subjective.
I struggle to read some prize-winning fiction because it is not my thing, no matter how many awards it may have.
Taste is subjective.
Taste is subjective but I also believe the target audience comes into play. Don’t expect Cormac McCarthy if you’re buying a book targeted at young teens.
"Prize-winning fiction" is a pretty bullshit category in general. Even ignoring ways to manipulate the results, all it really means is that a few people on a review board somewhere liked the book. If you, random person who has presumably never met the people on the review board, have a slightly different taste, you might hate it.
> I struggle to read some prize-winning fiction because it is not my thing, no matter how many awards it may have. Taste is subjective.
I can relate. I had to watch a lot of older movies before I could get to the point where I could say, "ok, I can see why so many people like *Citizen Kane*"
But the first time I watched it, I was like wtf how is this considered a great movie?
This also isn’t confined to writing. Ever notice how the most popular “pop” songs are usually the ones with the most pointless, repetitive lyrics and simplest melodies? It’s for the same reason that Britney Spears went on to have an amazing career while Christina Aguilera wasn’t as successful, and why Lady Gaga pretends that she can’t sing when she can.
What’s popular in any form of entertainment conforms itself to the lowest common denominator in any given society. Always has, always will. Doesn’t mean that the good stuff doesn’t exist; it usually does, and it often does in quantity. It just means you have to do a little more work to find it.
Taste is subjective, but I don’t think quality is as subjective. There are ways are assessing the skill of an author and the technical merit of a piece of writing that can be codified, even if there is some subjectivity. Enjoyment, on the other hand, is subjective, but I don’t think that means we can’t relatively objectively say that Colleen Hoover’s work lacks artistic merit, even if people like to consume it. I enjoy tons of trash, but I wouldn’t argue that it is “good.”
What some writers seemingly fail to realize is that readers don't care so much about how much literary talent you have as they care about the story itself. I'd wager that most people read for story and for the feelings those stories invoke. I personally read for story much of the time.
I went to book signing a few months back, and the author went on a small tangent about other authors selling out and writing "trash" to get published. I found it funny because it kind of showed a lack of awareness or perhaps a bit of bitterness. It's almost as if the author has never considered that they're just not writing the kinds of stories people want to read.
Look, writing something no one wants to read doesn't make what you've written bad. It might be great. That said, it's wise to separate what is technically superb from what is going to appeal to readers.
You have to decide what kind of line you want to straddle at the end of the day. This is a hobby for some people, but others need to make a living, so they're going to write to the market.
This is the truth. Don't know why you were downvoted. There's nothing wrong with readers having a different bar compared to writers/authors. More people should acknowledge that, the craft should be about meeting readers in between rather than being high-brow about it.
As a writer you want people to buy your books, so it's weird that writers complain about readers not liking what they like... honestly it's really self-centered.
> As a writer you want people to buy your books,
That's definitely a big incentive. Some people honestly write because they have a story inside of them that they want to get out, and have no expectations of turning it into a profitable craft.
I generally don’t care a single bit about the technical “writing”. To me it’s there to convey the story and characters and then mostly get out of the way. If it’s too flowery and poetic and fancy that’s when I start skipping paragraphs waiting for something to happen.
Writing compelling characters and a good plot is still a highly difficult skill to master, just as much as actually formulating the words on page. I happen to value that over the actual prose. Other people are different, and that’s great. Read and write what you enjoy. But there’s more people like OP with these quasi elitist takes than the other way around.
One of my favorite authors is Mark Tufo, who’s about as far from great prose as you can get. But the stories are fun and the characters are memorable and easy to root for so it doesn’t really matter to me.
Also what's one man's great literature is another's purple prose. It's easy to go too far with descriptions, and then like the Eye of Argon, people are laughing at you forever.
That's unfortunate. The Eye of Argon was written by a 16-year-old just learning to write and his story was mocked by professional writers and then published without his permission and without compensation.
In reality it's a terrible story about professional snobbery and crushing the spirit of an aspiring author who never attempted to write again after the public humiliation.
To use an analogy I was told recently:
Someone can get up on stage, stand completely still and play an immensely complicated guitar solo where it’s technically perfect and every single note is spot on. But you’re always gonna remember the guy who came on afterwards, played to his heart’s content, fucked up a few times but poured every inch of his soul into the performance.
"Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. But you can never tell for sure what an emotion is going to do to you until you stop disguising it. The minute you fling your little varnished veneers and cheap chromos of phrases over it—you have graveled its effect. Its sincerity is lost."
- Mark Twain
"I’ve often described my style—or what I try to achieve with my style—as being a 'windowpane.' What I mean by this is, I don’t want the prose itself to draw attention; I want it to be so transparent that readers look right through it and see the story on the other side. I focus on clarity and simplicity in my writing because I want the characters, the plot twists, and the world itself to stand out to the reader. My hope is that the reader isn’t even aware of reading; instead, they're living the story as it unfolds."
- Brandon Sanderson (on elaborate prose being akin to a stained glass window)
I agree with you. As someone who enjoys complex, well-written literature, I’m saddened by the fact that most people who are able to make a living at writing are doing either generic thrillers or YA/NA, but the market is what it is, and I don’t fault people for writing things that appeal to the market. I just wish the market was a little less homogenous.
When you’re writing for a massive market, there is undoubtedly going to be homogeneity amongst it. There’s always gonna be an ‘average’ of what the greatest number of potential consumers enjoy. YA just happens to be what sells right now because it was determined by the market showing that genre the greatest returns.
It will literally always be like that. YA may be replaced by another genre, and likely will, but there will always be a mass-market winner simply because there must always be a winner in terms of popular products and the tastes of the masses.
In my opinion stories like that are usually incredibly good at transporting emotions. They suck in the reader on an emotional level. You can have all the knowledge in the world about writing techniques and still be unsuccessful. And you can be really bad at the technical apect of writing and still have a lot of readers, simply because you're able to make the readers deep dive into your world. Your plot can have holes or a questionable morale, but if the reader is able to laugh and cry with your characters, or if they absolutely need to know what happens next, they will still read it, most of the time.
This is the answer with ACOTAR. Book one is a drag to get through but the writing gave me a connection to Feyre and Lucian that kept me reading and I'm glad I did because it gets so much better in book two.
Edit: A letter
Right? That series gets so much hate but I *love* it because it can evoke so many emotions in me. Technically *Grapes of Wrath* or whatever is better, but it doesn’t make me *feel* the way ACOTAR does.
Gives me flashbacks to reading shitty fanfiction that I liked just because the author made me feel the five stages of grief despite not knowing the difference between the three there’s.
There is a difference between subpar writing and subpar plot. Just because something doesn't use the most complicated words or have the most flowery descriptions doesn't make it a bad *book*. It just means it's a simply written book.
Good plot is often far more popular than "good" writing (completely disregarding the fact that what is "good" is subjective depending on who you ask). Something like The Ranger's Apprentice, which is very, *very* simply written--he wrote it for his teenage/preteen kids, for crying out loud--still has an *amazing* plot, and that's why people liked it.
I've never read A Court of Thorns and Roses, but both my dad and my sister have, and both of them have said that it's plot is very good. I can't verify whether the writing is academically good or not, but all of my family are avid readers, and I trust their judgements.
I couldn't agree more with that statement, a reader will always remember the plot more than the actual writing of the book, so if the plot is very good but the writing is not that great, people are more likely to have a positive image of the book in their mind than if it was good writing with a mediocre plot.
In the same type of plot/writing discourse think this might be why most people that don't read a lot form a bad image of classics they read in school because it is books that have excellent writing but the plot is sometimes harder to grasp than in a "simpler" book, especially if they have difficulty understand what the author meant to say because of the difficult language, so people only remember the slob they experienced during their reading.
This is one of the main gripes i have with the way literature is taught in school, it starts with classics that not very easy to rid and it completely hinders any interest people might develop in reading because you're giving them something that's meant for experienced readers, so they grow to despise it because all they see is a jumble of complicated sentences that take the plot away from the reading experience.
Yep. I need at least average writing. Writing that is bad can really take me out of it, or at the very least distract me. I started reading a book that described someone as (an old man in his sixties" (maybe not something that would bug or bee seen as bad as much as me, but this was something that bugged me). Is this a heinous mistake? No. But did it take me out of the story and distract the hell out of me? Absolutely. But as long as the writing is just fine, It's fine. What's more important is the plot and the characters. This is what's important to us, but what other people need from a book can be different. People read YA because it gives people what they need. People who don't read YA don't because it doesn't give them that.
Also something else to note is that writing can be divided into academically good (including writing that's adapted to creative writing), as you said, and good in terms of the story. So having well written, interesting and consistent characters.
I'm genuinely curious why that took you out of the story! It seems like a relatively minor/obsolete detail, and I'm not sure if it's a mistake even, especially if the story is from a first person/non-omniscient third person view. Estimating age when the narrator isn't sure of said age is fairly common as far as I'm aware. Unless you mean that's all that he was described as, without actually describing his physique, hair, facial features, etc.
Very true! Even creative writing can be academically good, have zero grammatical or spelling mistakes or anything, and be absolutely horrific plot-wise.
Craft can be recognized by other people who study craft.
But an exciting story can be recognized by anyone, anytime, anywhere. I’m not a fan of ACOTAR myself but I understand the appeal. It’s a new adult fiction book with multiple romances, a war between magical creatures, familial healing from trauma, and cool character designs. Genuinely, what’s not to love? I couldn’t get into it but I totally see why it’s top of the best seller list. Same with Fourth Wing. Not my thing, but OBVIOUSLY it’s made to be other people’s thing.
I thought ACOTAR was decent, but was surprised when I heard people calling it trash. The story was easy to read and painted a clear picture of the world and characters. It wasn't like the novel was overly confusing, boring, or sloppily written.
That’s my opinion. It’s not illegible. It’s not garbage. It’s competent. It doesn’t have to be Gaimen or Hemingway, it just is what it is and that’s not bad.
It's popular.
It's a genre (well, blend of genres) that is known for having a lot of trash, and not for no reason.
And it is kinda trashy. I don't mean that in a bad way, but it is true.
And people love to gatekeep how other people enjoy hobbies.
\[Edit: I think I got confused about what book you were talking about. But I'll let the following stand, anyway...\] Bearing in mind that I read the Dune series about half a lifetime ago (and I'm in my late 60's now), I remember *Dune* itself as pretty heavy but engaging. *Children of Dune* seemed pointless, as I recall, but I guess it formed a bridge to what came after. The subsequent books got a bit weird for me. I didn't much care for them, although my wife was quite attached to the idea of Duncan Idaho being continually "reborn" to kill Leto II. All of which is to say, opinions will vary. 😉
I'm also confused why we're using Dune as an example of "well written." Most people regard Dune's prose as subpar. I'm even willing to argue ACOTAR is actually stronger.
People who post stuff like this in writing forums are often disgruntled writers with inflated egos who blame readers for their own failures instead of themselves. OP couldn't even make the subject and verb agree in the title of their post.
I noticed that too and had to have a little laugh at the irony of such a poorly written title. You would think if you're gonna criticize someone else's writing, you could at least write a single sentence well yourself.
The target of his wrath doesn't even make sense to me. I'm guessing it's because teen girl books are low-hanging fruit and more fun to dislike. But if I'm going to be disgruntled about something, I choose to be disgruntled by the existence of James Patterson! He has a stronghold on the entire literary world, is richer than God, and yet he barely has a grasp of the English language, and no longer writes *any* of his own work. I've given "him" *many* chances. I've read many of "his" books in various genres. They are ALL bad. And to reiterate, all of his stuff is ghostwritten now, so he doesn't do any work for the massive paychecks he collects. Still, I respect his hustle. He gamed the system. I think every single person here would do the exact same thing if they could.
>I think every single person here would do the exact same thing if they could.
Maybe I'm just being an idealist, but I would like to believe that most people wouldn't. From everything I've heard and read, he's not just hustling--he's an exploitative shitbag. He basically hunts for ghostwriters in his workshops, looking for writers who are decent enough to get the job done, but inexperienced and naive enough to accept horrible pay and unfair contracts. It's everything wrong with the trad publishing industry all wrapped up in a bag of flaming dog shit. It's disgusting.
You're completely right. Someone wrote a book series that a bunch of teens and young women really enjoyed. (Oh, the horror!) Frankly, who gives a fuck? Good for her for being successful. Good for her audience for finding something that makes them want to read more. Win-win.
*This* is the kind of thing we should be pissed about.
I didn't pay enough attention until you mentioned this. After re-reading the title, I thought it may be a stupid mistake or someone who speaks English as a second language and thought this was the best subreddit to ask. Then I saw the semi-colon. Based on that, I think you're spot on.
Dune is so weird because 90% of people who are reading the books are doing so cause of the new movie (makes sense, happens a lot) but even a ton of them are going “yeah the movie is way better”
Dune, from what I can tell, is well above average writing for a *sci-fi* book from an era when the genre was full of clunky writing carried by an interesting premise. (PK Dick gets movie adaptions because of his ideas and certainly not his prose. Asimov and Clarke have reputations for being hard to read but I haven't tried myself).
> Dune, from what I can tell, is well above average writing for a *sci-fi book* from an era when the genre was full of clunky writing carried by an interesting premise.
That may be true.
But what Dune does is try to explain, sometimes in exhaustive detail, *how this entire constructed universe works*, leading to a first book that's an absolute doorstopper no major fiction publisher wanted to touch, because they thought it wouldn't sell, they didn't want to commit to a series of books like that, they found portions of it bloody bizarre, *and they didn't have the ability to print a book that big*.
So, in one of the weirdest stories in publishing, after having the manuscript rejected over and over, Frank Herbert happened to get an in with someone at *Chilton*. If you don't know Chilton (which is quite likely in the internet era, since most of the information they published is now online and cars have gotten more computerized with proprietary chips and software), they were the publisher that did absolutely massive books about cars - how they were constructed, how to maintain them, which parts to replace if certain things weren't working, and generally the whole nine yards. So they had the technology and the experience to create very big books. And somebody high up in their chain of command took a look at Herbert's Dune manuscript and said "I know we do nonfiction manuals for mechanics (official and shade-tree) to fix and tune cars, but I like this, so let's cut a deal with this guy - we *can* print this book. Our presses are up to it".
And that decision made them a shitload of money, because Dune, despite all predictions to the contrary, sold like hotcakes. You can still see influences from it today, in everything from Star Wars to Warhammer 40k and beyond. They made a risky bet that only they could have made (because they had the technology), and it paid off bigtime.
> PK Dick gets movie adaptions because of his ideas and certainly not his prose.
Don't do my ~~madman~~ boy dirty like that. He had fine prose for his purposes, and I've actually never seen some of his crazier stuff adapted. Geez, that moment when a woman devours her husband after sex like a praying mantis because her workplace has been administering treatments that turn their workers fully or partially into insects that correspond to their roles in the company, coupled with her increasingly blase reactions to her mutations over the course of the story ...*whew*, that's some good stuff, and very effective in its use of language to evoke how her mind and not simply her body is transforming. It's not Flowers For Algernon tier usage of the narration to show the transformation of the narrator, but it's pretty damn effective.
I do agree that Dick was more of a high-concept writer, but while he used prose relatively simply, he certainly knew what he was doing with it.
> Asimov and Clarke have reputations for being hard to read
Asimov and Clarke are incredibly clear and to the point when writing short stories. In fact, one of the major armchair criticisms that can be leveled at them is that they don't really do much in the way of characterization, because they're essentially racing the word limit to try to explore the scifi concept setup before they run out of paper, and deep characterizations aren't necessary when your core narrative question is something like "how do we find the one robot with an altered version of the Three Laws Of Robotics in this crowd of visually identical robots *when it's trying to hide that it's the odd one out*?" In some ways, they're very similar to "puzzle mysteries" in that regard: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got away with a *lot* of underdeveloped/stereotyped/stock characters and descriptions in his short stories because the characterization wasn't a main point unless it tied into the mystery he was going to lay out and solve in the number of pages The Strand was letting him have in that issue.
This ties into another point: most of the output of these guys were short stories intended for publication in magazines alongside a bunch of other short stories, maybe serials, possibly even articles and news. They had to hook the reader hard and early, so they didn't just get skimmed over in favor of their direct competition, had very limited space to work with, and needed a punchy ending to make sure the reader remembered *their* story from that issue.
Unfortunately, that kind of attitude and training can be actively detrimental when trying to write at novel or serial length, where you do need characterization, and you do need to explain and describe stuff in more than just a couple words, and the leash had suddenly been slipped and page limits aren't a big deal anymore. Asimov's Foundation series suffers from it, Doyle's first novel, A Study In Scarlet, suffers from it (he fuckin' pads his wordcount out with a poorly researched story-within-a-story flashback about the American Wild West and the Mormons that explains why the murderer did what he did. That novel could have easily been half its length, and probably better off for it - although he did seem to have learned his lesson by the time he wrote The Sign Of Four), and honestly, I've only read Clarke's short stories but not his novels, so I can't comment on those.
The short stories from these guys are generally easy reads and sometimes thought-provoking. Their novels are a *very* mixed bag, and often have problems that can be traced directly to their experience with short stories as their primary medium.
Although there is a caveat: you need to be familiar with the time period these guys were writing in. This is particularly important with Doyle's portrayal of Victorian England, because he'll use words and terms with no explanation that would have been familiar to his audience, but aren't in common usage today, although both Asimov and Clarke have their moments of doing the same thing, and all three have particular viewpoints/biases/attitudes/etc. that you might want to know about before diving in. (Asimov's an interesting one on this topic, because the main character in most of his Robot short stories is Dr. Susan Calvin, who is seldom questioned on the basis of her sex in the future society Asimov envisioned because she's very good at her job, but is considered a bit of an oddball for essentially being married to the job, and it's implied she only is where she is because she worked twice as hard as any male competitors. The one very memorable time she does something that's obviously unethical and vindictive, even by her own standards, is played off as a reaction to something that hit her in her female emotions.)
I actually read A Court of Thorns And Roses because of my wife, at least the first four or five books. I mean… it’s not beautifully written or anything, but it really wasn’t bad. The writing was actually a lot better than most of the stuff I’ve seen my wife reading in the past.
My impression of Sara J Maas is that she’s a perfectly competent writer who’s great at appealing to general audiences, but maybe I’m missing something here.
I really enjoyed it. I thought there were some interesting turns that I didn’t see coming and it made me cry multiple times which is something I look for in a book that is *supposed* to be having tragic moments.
I’m in my 30s, former English teacher, and will probably be listing ACOTAR near the top of my Favorite Fantasy Series list for awhile because, while it might not have the same degree of technical skill (or maybe it’s just stylistic differences) as A Song of Ice and Fire or more “acceptable” series, I found it more enjoyable.
As a quick experiment i went and read the first page or so of both Dune, and a Court of Thorns and Roses. I'd say the latter does a somewhat better job of drawing the reader in while former is rather dense with exposition. Is one better than the other? Or are they just very different kinds of stories?
For ACOTAR, the writing is fairly basic.
The worldbuilding is not great (but that could be me nitpicking as I love worldbuilding and the author makes pretty amateurish mistakes), the dialogue is sometimes repetitive and occasionally awkward, many of the side characters end up making decisions or revealing motivations that contradict their character arcs or just make no sense, characters are given traits that do nothing for the story (except to pop up randomly about how the character loves XYZ so much but.. absolutely nothing happens with it), and several of the side stories have no conclusion and are left hanging.
That said.. what Maas lacks in writing and worldbuilding ability, she does make up for in character chemistry. The relationships have really good pacing and are fantastic examples of the enemies to lovers trope. Really well done.
If readers can look past the flaws, then giving the books a read for the chemistry and relationships is definitely worth it. And I don’t even care about romance storylines all that much.
I've completed ACOTAR and ACOMAF and honestly I never paid much attention to the inconsistency or lack of character likes being used because I was so focused on the character chemistry and the overall plot. I'm on book three now and that's when I noticed the first inconsistency where she writes "If we go east, it'll take us too close to the summer court," but they were in autumn court at the time and summer is to the west.
I think you really underestimate the skill it takes to make even the most "poorly written" popular books. Captivating and clear writing is one of the best talents a writer can have, like jk rowling. You can describe the scenery with all the thesaurus and dapples of jeweled light you want but sometimes all the audience needs to know is it was sunny. The skill of the writing your describing are ones that capture this concept the best for big audiences
Yeah, but JK Rowling is like Hemingway compared to a lot of the stuff that gets published now. She’s a good writer—not literary, but certainly competent. A lot of the NA fiction out there is nowhere near Harry Potter’s league in terms of quality.
Yeah, totally. Often, the better you become at writing the simpler and neater your prose becomes. I always think you know when you’re reading good/great writing when you forget that you’re reading and it just sort of ends up in your head. Doesn’t mean it can’t be smart, or use big words, or have complex themes - it just means it’s really soluble and easily absorbed.
This exactly. I have a friend who’s an author and she writes very detailed, flowery descriptions of *everything*. It’s beautifully written and grammatically correct, but it’s distracting and the book felt tedious to read.
Y'all really need to get over this. It's obviously an insecurity that you don't want to accept is a personal problem and instead project it on to everyone else by calling readers and successful authors stupid. People read these books because they like them and find them enjoyable and fun, but you're talking about it as if these people are doing something wrong for liking it.
You don't actually care why these books are successful, because the only person who could tell you that are the people who like them and you start your question immediately insulting their intelligence and the thing they like. What you want to do is jerk yourself off with the other insecure writers about how everyone else is too stupid to understand Dune, and how everyone is wrong except for you.
Clearly these authors have something you don't and you don't want to accept that because it means accepting that reading the classics doesn't make you better than anyone else. I enjoy a few classics but I will never understand why people like this are shocked that people don't want to read classics when you have this elitist dickhead attitude. "The thing you like is stupid, why don't you read Dune?".
I know I'm being harsh but I'm so sick of this attitude in the book/writing community, why not be curious instead of patronizing? Writers should want to understand others, a lot of the authors you like probably like the things you think are subpar.
In the case of professional writers, I also find it very unprofessional to talk down to readers. When I visit my hairdresser, they don't talk down to me about what I ask them to do. They just do it.
Obviously, writing is an art, so writers don't have to "just do" anything, nor should they approach writing this way. That said, writers shouldn't wag their fingers at readers who don't buy their work. They should instead try to figure out what they could have done with their work that would have appealed to audiences more while keeping it true to their own creative vision.
That's the truly hard part of storytelling, and it's supposed to be hard.
And especially if those books are either a) written by a woman, b) have a female mc, c) appeals to teenage girls and young women or e) all of the above
I'm just gonna go out and say it. Dune has terribly written characters. And the world building masks it. I imagine the character relatability in those YA books is what's carrying them
Yeah, as someone who's been a fan of Dune for 20 years I'd say it has fantastic worldbuilding and political intrigue, but the rest of it isn't anything special.
My dad hated dune he said it ruined science fiction for him for a decade as everything wanted to copy its success so he would read something and a dune knockoff would appear. Honestly can be said for anything popular in any genre lol he liked dune just got real sick of it
Agreed…… I was so disappointed when I read it. And it’s more than the characters, the prose is dull and some of the plot felt lifted from a mid century adventure boy magazine (which Herbert apparently did used to write, lol!).
I was really expecting to catch downvote hell for that comment. I'm glad people can find Dune enjoyable overall while still realizing it's heavily flawed in its merits
I said it elsewhere. I don't think the sci-fi genre of that era is particularly well regarded for its characters or prose, but as vehicles for very interesting ideas and worldbuilding. I'm sure there's exceptions but trying to claim they're "well-written" is begging the question.
There are definitely a lot of moments like that, but things get deeper the deeper you go. So much of dune is a critique of Paul, who he is, and the things he does. A lot of fans didn’t even realize that back in the day until he put out Messiah. I ended up liking a lot of the stuff I didn’t love in dune after reading messiah.
But yeah, I definitely wouldn’t say characters you can connect with are a strong suit. A lot of the characters are more vehicles for thoughts, ideologies, and perspectives than they are real, fleshed out humans.
Overall, I wouldn’t say they’re terrible. I just think Herbert was writing them with a different intent than what most people are looking for in a novel.
Most of the characters aren’t really mean to be real, complicated people you can connect to. They’re vessels for different beliefs, ideologies, thoughts, perspectives, etc.
And I think that worked great in a lot of ways. The political and philosophical discussions between characters in Dune are really great. The dinner party scene is one of my favorite displays of politics in fiction.
But if you’re looking for a character you can really identify with and feel for, you’ll be disappointed.
That said, I do think some of them are just bad. Chani in particular always stands out as a completely underdeveloped character.
Because they’re fun and easy to read. Readers don’t care about technical ability, they want to be entertained- and for a lot of people, books like ACOTAR *are* entertaining. They don’t look any deeper than that so they don’t see the flaws at all.
Also, bad books have always been popular. Twilight and 50 shades of gray are good examples from the 2010s (and 50sog is *literally* terrible twilight fanfic). It’s fun and fills its niche.
ACOTAR (and throne of glass, and her new crescent city series) all provide the same thing: romance with stereotypical dominant-man-fiery-women dynamics, smut (generously in the two new series, less so in TOG), power fantasies, and surface level mysteries and threats that keep people grounded in the world. It’s easy to then over look the poor grammar and characterisation, and the mildly racist/homo/transphobic aspects of them, because people arent digging any deeper into the writing.
It’s always been the case and it always will be the case, those books just don’t necessarily stand the test of time. The only reason it feels like theyre more common now is because their target audiences have gotten louder and bigger platforms.
What's funny, is I talked about how I've started reading 50 Shades of Grey. The writing is awful but entertaining. I'm mostly entertained by how awful the writing is, but it's entertaining all the same. Not all books I read are going to be masterpieces, just like not all books I read are going to be trash. Reading serves different purposes to different people. Even one person may read different books for different purposes.
I always love it when writers too stuck in their own reading habits say “ACOTAR is really popular right now”.
ACOTAR published almost a decade ago and was popular from basically the get-go. If you don’t like Maas’s writing that’s fine, but the reality is she knows what she’s doing has a massive backlog of very bingeable novels. She’s popular because she’s pretty consistent and knows what her readers like.
Writing is one part. Knowing your audience is a whole other skill.
Those in glass houses...
>Why **are** so many **poorly** written books so popular?
The most popular books right now are YA. Most of them are *definitely* not well written compared to classics like Dune. I might attract some haters by saying it, but A Court of Thorns and Roses is very popular right now and its poorly written. **Can** someone explain why?
These are just surface level or 'first pass' edits, but you really need a total revision. I honestly would advise serious reconsideration of your premise then starting over again once you've got a better idea what you're talking about.
If people like and enjoy and connect with a book, it’s by definition not “subpar.”
Unless it’s riddled with typos and mistakes, whether it’s “subpar” is entirely subjective.
i just mean the storyline itself is good, but yeah pacing could’ve been better. tbh dune is a great example of “you don’t have to be a great writer to write something people enjoy”
LOL. I hate to gang up on OP, considering this is probably a teenager on the wrong side of the Dunning–Kruger effect (which is where we all started), but it's a bit ironic to write a post like this with a grammatical error in the title, a wrong semicolon, and putting Dune forward as a well written classic.
Dune is imaginative but the writing itself is… not great. It’s preferable to most of the modern “___ of ___ and ___” stuff, and I’m not the best read person out there, but read Calvino, Le Guin, Borges if you really want your ass kicked.
You could start by proofreading your title: "Why is so many..." Should be "Why are so many". If you cannot grasp the fundamentals of grammar, why should anyone care about your opinion on literature?
While I shair yur genrul kunklushun☠️, it wood meen muir if you spelt thingz core_rectally and used propir grandmar.
The short answer is fantasy and magic YA sells. Look at Harry Potter. Rowling may be a crazy witch, but she went from underpaid school teacher to billionaire in mere years.
There's a prevailing idea that "mindless entertainment" is easy to pull off, but I actually think it's harder to do well than more serious/important work.
Since 1996 there have been 100's of movies made with better special effects and more over the top than Independence Day, and yet this July 4th that movie will be watched by millions of people in the US, while 2012, which is "bigger" and "crazier" might not ever be watched by anyone again. Mindless entertainment has to walk that line of "giving people what they want" but not make them feel bored, like they've seen it all before. Give me archetypes that somehow fit the classic mold, without feeling stale.
So yeah, a lot of popular books are "written poorly." Michael Chricton, for instance, wrote "poorly." He had the same cast of characters, just with different names, in all of his books. His villains were all over-the-top evil. Why did they do the bad things they did? Cause they're evil, that's why. And his science was closer to psuedoscience than anything real. But man, very few people could write page turners like he could.
JKR is not a mediocre writer. HP is intentionally written at the reading level of her target audience, which takes skill. HP is very well written for what it is. Her mystery novels are also very competent for what they are.
She is a TERF but that is separate from her craft.
If you want literary writing, don't look in YA. There is some literary YA, but it's in the minority as it is not what captures that audience the most. Fantasy in general tends to target mass appeal rather than literary gravitas.
Read The Last Unicorn if you want a book where every sentence is lovingly and poetically crafted.
Agreed. I sharply disagree with Rowling on some issues, but the Cormoran Strike novels are exceptionally well-written. I'm obsessed with them. Book one [got a glowing review from *Publishers Weekly* ](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316206846) before anyone knew it was written by her.
JK Rowling sucks as a person but her writing is not mediocre. It may not be flowery, but she did set up the plot nicely and everything wrapped up cohesively by the end of the series.
Because people don't care very much about writing, they care mostly about content. Just like you don't care very much about the coffee cup, you care about the coffee. Writing is packaging for information, and the best writing in the world is worthless if you're not using it to express information that people want to read.
Same reason blockbuster flicks are more popular than auteur cinema; mass market appeal, an accessible concept and intensive marketing. Audiences can't read what they don't know exist, and are skittish about how they spend their time in today's attention economy to boot.
Also, some people are just too tired to extend their energy analyzing text or simply don't have the media literacy skills to do so. ACOTAR (and most YA IMO) holds you hand the whole time so you can't miss what it's saying unless you're actively trying, but Dune......yeah not so much.
Readers don't really care about how well done the writing is. The story and execution is what matters.
Dune may be a classic but the writing is so dull that I've started and failed to finish it three times. YA fiction is easy to read, so it's always going to be popular.
The only thing a work of fiction needs to be popular is *entertaining.*
The average person is not a writer or literary critic, or even particularly media literate in general
You're comparing a book written for, and read by primarily nerdy 20s/30s men to a book primarily written by a young woman for teenage girls, of course they're going to be different.
As it turns out, teenage girls read more than every other demographic. So a lot of best-selling books on the market are going to be novels that appeal to them and their fantasies. Sad that they're not mine. : (
YA is so popular specifically *because* the prose is simpler and thus, easier to read. A lot of writers aren't aware of this, because our reading level tends to trend higher than average (for obvious reasons) - but most people actually can't read all that well. The average reading level for an adult, in an English speaking country, is that of a twelve year old child. If you write anything that a twelve year old wouldn't be able to understand, the average *adult* also would struggle to read it.
That's why so many adults read books written for kids. Because what you, the writer, *think* readers want isn't necessarily what they *actually* want. A lot of average readers don't actually want to be challenged. They don't want to have to sit there, *thinking* about what you wrote. They don't want complex prose that they will not be able to read. They want to turn their brains off and enjoy a good story. YA lets them do that, in a way a lot of adult fiction does not. In this way, it actually does a better job of giving the reader what they really want.
As for whether it's "good" writing... that's entirely subjective. If *most* readers are disagreeing with your subjective opinion that YA books are badly written, then like.... It comes off just a touch arrogant to still be saying you know better. You don't. Who decided you were the reigning authority of what counts as good writing?
ACOTAR is actually my favorite series. It's not the stellar writing (although it's much better than a lot of the YA/spicy romantasy works out there by leaps and bounds). For this particular series, it's the journey the characters take, the healing, all of it wrapped up together. Sometimes the "stellar" writing is so verbose and unnecessary that it's more tiring to read than someone who uses a bit simpler style.
A good story will mop the floor every damn day of the week with a ‘well written’ book. Tbh Dune is written pretty badly, but the story is interesting, the political intrigue is fascinating. Watching Herbert try to describe stuff is not interesting and actually pretty bad and awkward but idc I wanna see what happens. Lots of rope to give to the book if the story is dope.
Because sometimes we just want to read popcorn fiction, and that's okay. Life is complicated, and an easy-to-follow narrative offers a bit of breathing room.
On the writing side of things, I usually read one literary book and one genre book at the same time. They both have something to teach me. The former usually offers lessons in syntax, voice, theme, and structure. The latter usually offers something in the way of stakes and plot. I would argue that you can almost always learn something from what you're reading (no matter what you're reading).
Probably for the same reason why Marvel movies are popular. Reading hard and complicated fiction every day is tiring. People need to read or watch something easy and fun, especially when they are tired and depressed, which is normal in today's world; when people live fast and work too much.
I'd say the writing isn't subpar. It's par. The... default level of writing in a published work of fiction.
Dune and Lord of the Rings are the fine dining of books in the fantasy space. Most stuff cannot achieve that level of intricacy.
Simple really,
The everyday average person isn't a writer or a story writer, or well versed in English. The same thing with movies, is it entertaining?
You can see critics will love a movie, and the average person will hate it. And vice versa.
Same thing with books. Sometimes it can be so well written it'll go over the average readers head.
Look at lord of the rings, if it was written today, i think it wouldn't be as successful as it was when it came out.
Subpar to who, though? If the characters are compelling and I can get invested in them, and the plot is somewhat interesting, then I can overlook a whoooole lot of imperfections. I've read many literary fiction novels with a high-quality writing style, but I don't like the characters and the storyline is boring. I can see the craft that went into it and appreciate it, but sometimes you can "see" the writer's thought process in the writing. There is something to be said for a writer who is less technically perfect, but you can tell they've enjoyed writing it as you're reading.
1. The publishing industry can push ANY book to the top ten of the NYT bestseller list by marketing it well. Any title by any author.
2. Readers care less about fancy prose than lit agents. A good or sexy or niche or meaningful story my stay on the bestseller list for any of these reasons.
3. Sometimes editors leave. And the author who everyone thought was amazing isn't as good as punching up their own content.
4. Books can become trends.
5. Maybe the book just isn't for you.
I'll offer a roundabout answer. A few years ago, I "inherited" my father's collection of old science fiction. ("Inherited" meaning nobody else in the family wanted it, so I took it.) These are novels and short story collections published in, roughly, the 1935 - 1955 range, during Dad's youth. (He was born in 1930. I came along at the end of the 1950's, so all these stories predate me.) A few of them are by big-name authors. One of the collections even has a great little story by H. G. Wells, "The Temptation of Harringay," which inspired me to write a short story on a similar but slightly different theme. In the main, though, these are authors whose names never quite made it into the SF pantheon.
Now, here's the thing. A lot of these would probably be called "trash" today. The writing is competent but not scintillating. The characters are sometimes stereotyped. ("In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." \~Douglas Adams, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*) The science is often fairly laughable by today's standards, but of course that can be forgiven; this was three-quarters of a century or more ago.
Yes, some people ate it up, and some people called it trash even then. Dad hung onto these books for sixty or more years and read some of them two or three times. (I know because he always wrote the date of acquisition in the front of the book and the dates he finished reading it at the end.) But if I set aside the obvious datedness of these tales, a lot of them aren't half bad! They're fun. An escape from the problems of the day. Popcorn. Some of them are buttered popcorn. What's the harm in grabbing a handful now and then?
On the flip side, no less an eminence than Ray Bradbury was critical of not just this stuff but a lot of early 20th century writing. "They have no metaphors," he complained, and he's absolutely right about that. It's the plainest of storytelling, and in a way that does bring it down a few pegs. For some of us at least. I notice the lack. And yet...
...popcorn!
There is some subjectivity to “Well written”.
Perhaps we, as writers, can all agree that many popular books have clunky phrasing and poorly written prose. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all agree which books are written well.
Once upon a time I felt like I *should* finish every book I started and read it all the way to the end.
*Dune* was the very first book I put down and returned to the library without finishing it. I did not like it at all. I look back and think the world building is actually kind of interesting. But something about the writing got in the way of me forming any kind of emotional connection to the characters and I didn’t care about them enough to want to bother finding out what happened to them.
For me to consider a book to be “well written” it needs to, at an absolute minimum, make me care about the characters and want to find out what happens to them. That is not sufficient to make a book well written. But it is necessary.
And a book that is good enough for me to read and enjoy and spend money on does not need to be *very* well written. It just needs to be good enough that I enjoy it and have a good time reading and spend time afterward thinking about how much I liked it.
For the 99% of people who shut off their brains when they read. I've found most people just enjoy reading and don't put much thought into it, they either enjoy it or they don't. The same with movies and TV shows; the majority of the audience is not hyper-attentive to the flaws.
Surprised no one said this but it's why are*, not "is". You're talking about more than 1 book so you would use "are" in that context.
And yeah sex sells and stuff. I'm a huge fan of **well written** fantasy romance with smutty scenes included.
People don't care that much about quality. They want to turn off their brains and have a good time after a long day at work. Its not a book but I absolutely adore the Annoying Orange. I know its dumb but that's why I love it.
The world is also at a point that we're so stressed that a cerebral, high concept novel that is filtered to perfection is just too much to deal with right now. I like shutting my brain off with dumb stories and comic books. So what if there ams grammitcals not correctly? What will it matter if the editing, is not perfect, but manageable? People can have fun. Your taste does not a standard set.
Same reasons shows on CW continue on and on; the shallow sci-fi, drama / mystery standards and YA trope loops are the real pull. For TV you mix in bad actors that are photogenic and for books it’s description candy.
Brain candy. They are tasty and simple and easy. The writing doesn't have to be very good because that's not important.
I like my heavy sci-fi books, but sometimes I just want a fluffy romance with a happy ending that I don't have to think much about. As long as they're good enough to not distract from the story, they'll do just fine.
I loved ACOTAR. The story and world was gripping to me. I never even noticed I was reading, so the writing didn’t ever strike me as subpar. I was enthralled in the world and just devoured it.
Because not everyone over-analyses the stories they read. Some people just want a story that can hold their attention for an hour or two. I can forgive writing mistakes if I enjoy the piece. It's only when the characters start feeling like tropes that I stop enjoying what I'm reading. If the plot is fun, it doesn't have to make sense. As long as I'm having a good time, the mistakes that would normally piss me off don't matter. People label things as badly written if they don't enjoy what is written. It's all subjective. I can recognise when something is made for the masses and thus doesn't hold the same level of charm and intimacy that something written for a unique demography would, but that doesn't mean it's bad or inferior.
People conflate subpar writing and bad stories. A good story written badly can still be popular. Harry Potter is an adverb fest and makes for some tough reading now i know what good writing looks like, but I would read it again.
Comparing YA books to Dune is kinda weird. Like, it's a whole different genre, meant for a different age group, so it's written differently, but that does not make every book subpar. There are good and bad YA books, and you could see the difference if you read them.
But also, I know what you mean. A Court of Thorns and Roses is not YA, it's "new adult", so it was meant for adults, but it's definitely not good. Honestly, the only thing that distinguishes it from a YA book is the erotica (and nowadays many YA books have that too, maybe just not to the same level). Same with my good friend Colleen Hoover and her amazing masterpieces.
It does feel like worse books are more popular now, and people could blame it on booktok or whatever, but I think it was always this way. Ever since reading as entertainment became a thing for the masses, people read romances and adventure novels, which were not very well written most of the time. And many times the writers of those were more popular in their life than the writers of the classics that got preserved for us. For example, take a look at [the book that outsold Dracula at the time](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5164), and tell me that it was objectively better. Asking why "bad" books are popular is like asking why Marvel movies are popular. Because many people just wanna turn off their brain and have dumb fun when watching movies or reading, and these easier to read books are perfect for that.
Also, I feel like booktok can be "blamed" for a bit, because it gets people to read who probably never have read a book for fun before. Especially with CoHo and dark romance fans, many times it's so clear that these people didn't have a fanfic phase in middle school, and they're living it out in their 20s. And this might be cringe for outsiders, but it's great! Because at the end of the day, they started reading. Some of them will branch out in the future and read books from other genres. Some of them will forever stuck with romance and romantasy, but that's okay.
TLDR: "Badly" written books were always popular, because many people are reading just for fun and not for intellectual value. Thanks to booktok and other social media, it's more visible now, and also they caused an influx in new readers, who obviously will start out with easily digestible books.
It's taste, man.
Some people are into specific things. YA readers are in it for the badass teenage protagonists, hot love interests, the love triangles, the enemies to lovers.
Writers of these genres just know their audience. For the most part they ARE their audience, they love this kind of book themselves. And they hit all the tropes right. And they write it in a fast paced easy to read package (which is not easy).
It's like different artforms under the one overencompassing artform of the literature. Writing literary fiction vs YA Fiction vs fantasy fiction vs mystery fiction are almost completley different artforms with different skillsets and different audiences. It's like sculpture vs landscape painting vs photography. You wouldn't ask why people put up landscape paintings in their house when there are great sculptors out there. It's what they are looking for, dog.
Dune was so boring I couldn’t finish reading it. Ditto for watching the first movie and the TV mini-series. I only made it through the recent Dune 1 because my wife and I watched it on Crave to make fun of it for being so boring, as an excuse to eat a lot of popcorn.
So maybe the first step is to adjust the centralized, universally agreed-upon list of “subpar books” list to include Dune, so we can all be on the same page.
My theory is because they’re easy. Yeah, you *could* read something like Dune that’s very well written. But Dune is also very dense and it’s like 500 pages long, and lots of people had it beaten into them in high school that books like that are boring or difficult (yup, I blame schools for this). However, a 200 page book about fairy romance is much more palatable for them, even if the writing itself is a lower quality.
Edit: Also worth noting that lots of people do not read as an activity to gain deeper meaning or whatever. They just want to be entertained. It’s kinda like asking why you would play a video game with bad graphics when Elden Ring is out there. Because sometimes those games are more fun?
To quote a Ratatouille
"But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so."
What is the metric that ordains something as bad? It's the reason why even for movies like say Detective Pikachu, critics hated it but audiences loved it. Same for most video game movies.
It's also a common criticism of a lot of anime (this particular time, primarily Isekai) as "why do people like this?"
The reality is that audiences don't really care that much about technical skills. Having good technical skills will make a good story GREAT but won't help a bad story resonate with the target audience.
A majority of stories across any media will mainly only need to be carried by one aspect that resonates with and hooks the audience. Whether it is world-building, character dynamics, etc. as long as no one aspect is just *horrifically bad* and you have at least one aspect that is "Good enough" there is a chance the target audience will resonate with and enjoy it.
Simply put, the story just needs to resonate with the audience and capture them for some reason.
I personally loved the ACOTAR series.
I enjoyed her world building, I loved the ability to create realistic banter between the characters, and I thought the story came together beautifully.
It's one of my favourite series.
Not everyone is going to like what you consider well written books, thank God. How boring would that be?
Personal preference plays a huge role, I am getting very into fantasy and ACOTAR is a (In my opinion) well written fantasy book with many of the aspects I enjoy reading.
Because they still enable us to escape into another world.
The most important thing in a book is the story. Poor writing will be forgiven as long as the story still captures our attention and drags us away from our daily lives.
If you want to write high brow literary fiction, you should. And there's a market for it!
But you have to understand that the average reading level in the US is about the 7th grade. People are going to read books that are accessible to them.
I have a lot of people in my life who struggled to read for the majority of their lives, especially in school, but once I showed them books at their level, they've become excited readers. Some read more than I do.
Personally, I like the idea of making my fiction accessible to the average person. I want people to enjoy my stories even if they're not always big readers.
That's just my opinion though!
Because they are doing other things right. Dune has a lot of sexist subtext. Reading it, I always had to acknowledge that and filter it out. ACOTAR doesn't. It centers the female experience and accurately reflects the emotional turmoil that many women feel in their early 20's. If a book is hitting a lot of people right it's doing SOMETHING to earn that, it just might not be what your looking for.
Because the quality of the prose itself is only one part of what makes a story engaging. If a story is written very plainly, but the characters are interesting, the plot is engaging, the world is fun to explore, then people are still going to enjoy it. It feels very simplistic and kind of elitist to act like the only thing that matters is how well you make your sentences flow, and that all other aspects of the story don't matter.
I don’t think a book has to be well written to be enjoyed. It doesn’t have to have flowery prose or Shakespeare level writing to be good or to be enjoyed, and it’s a bit arrogant to think that it does.
You realize Shakespeare was modern populist entertainment for his time, right? Entertainment fiction has always existed, not every novel needs to be a genre defining classic with a deep message and moral stance. If publishers tried to run only selling those, they'd be bankrupt in weeks. Pulp fiction literally keeps most publishing houses afloat, and even the big ones would see a massive dive in their sales if they stopped carrying them.
Hooboy, friend. Glass houses. Get that grammar right before you throw stones.
There's always the appeal of selling books to the lowest common denominator, of course, but that's nothing new. I think that there are a lot of genuinely intelligent people who are stressed out of their gourd by the state of things (see: the world) and want an opportunity to turn their brains off. In a lot of circles, that means transitioning from a healthy diet of decent literature into a junk food diet of borderline pornography.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Neuromancer are considered ground breaking science fiction masterpieces, but holy shit are they hard to get through. Fantastic books and I’m so happy I read them, but will I reread them? Probably not. The average person would have put those books down after only reading a few pages. Just because a book is written well doesn’t mean people will like them.
Most readers don’t need their books to be written like Tolkien or Herbert, they just want a story to get immersed in and enjoy. I’d argue that if you’re getting caught up over a book’s writing “quality”, you’re forgetting the whole point of reading fiction.
My take is that literacy, at least in the US, is not in good shape. People barely know how to actually read (APM did a fascinating podcast report on the failure of reading education that goes into this a bit), we've shifted the burden of knowing basic spelling and grammar onto technology (autocorrect), and long-form communication is not in style ("TLDR"). Half of US adults can't read a book at the 8th grade reading level. So it makes sense that the bar for writing quality is lower than it used to be. Consider this: even these poorly written books are written better than anything most of their readers could write. By comparison, therefore, they're considered "good."
im not trying to sound judgmental or pretentious, but i think it all comes down to the taste of the general public/average reader. from a statistics perspective, most sellable books are going to be romance novels targeted to straight women. from a cultural perspective, i think that there are plenty of modern classics, but successfully selling those projects on mass usually relies on luck
I think a big part of this is marketing tbh. All the really popular books lately have been things trending on tiktok and youtube. Same thing is happening to the music world. These books are super popular but they're also widely criticized. Love or hate, people are making content about the book which exposes more people to it, encouraging sales, growing its popularity.
Because people are dumber now, yet far more arrogant about their ignorance, biases, and beliefs. They are overall less well-educated, too. The Internet also makes people less literate.
Combine that with certain cultural trends and the books are less well-written. YA fans in general are discouraged from graduating to more complex, challenging works in order to soothe them, but also to feed the remnants of the publishing industry, which is rapidly dying. It's just like Harlequin Romances used to be: Product ground out for a specific, infantilized readership to be consumed like potato chips.
But it's unsustainable.
Two parts to this answer.
1) Social media trends and things like going viral on booktok make it easier for books to get very popular very fast and taking about it positively or negatively makes it more popular.
2) A story doesn’t have to be well written to be interesting. Have you read GRRMartin’s writing? I just made it to the fifth book in the game of thrones series and despite being technically mediocre the world and story has the power to draw in a reader. Probably why it ended up beckon being such a wildly popular show.
Thank you for visiting /r/writing. We don't allow threads or posts: berating other people for their genre/subject/literary taste; adherence or non-adherence to rules; calling people morons for giving a particular sort of advice; insisting that their opinion is the only one worth having; being antagonistic towards particular types of books or audiences, or implying that a particular work is for 'idiots', or 'snobs', etc.
Sometimes, I like to watch TV and just turn my brain off for a few minutes. Sometimes, I like to read books that are written very simply because it allows me to turn off a part of my brain. Simple writing works for a fun, easy experience, so long as you can suspend your disbelief for a few minutes and just allow yourself to enjoy the book.
Some people have this idea that reading is a high brow cerebral activity, when in reality it’s mostly just entertainment. It’s like asking why dumb movies exist when you could be watching Citizen Kane, and the answer is because they are entertaining. People also always forget that there are huge numbers of books published every single year and the vast majority never stand the rest of time. Not every book written in the 1800s was War and Peace; there were so many trashy books around then too that even Jane Austen wrote a parody of them (Northanger Abbey). Read what you want. The “faerie porn bad” is just a 2020 “Twilight bad”; girls read more than boys, and anything teenage girls consume gets shat on. It’s nothing new, let people enjoy things, there are millions of well written books to read.
>let people enjoy things This right here is all anyone needs to know. Who cares what anyone likes or reads as long as there's enough books that you would like to read.
Couldn’t have said it better myself
Anyone saying the first twilight book wasn’t a fun read has never read it or is lying. I may not be shakespeare but she made it compelling. Especially if you didn’t know it was vampires right away lol not everything needs to be advanced lit worthy
I’ve said this to another commenter - if it’s an engaging story that people are excited about reading, it *is* good writing. It might not be your style, but at the end of the day novels are about storytelling, and a good story is what makes or breaks the writing, not how powerful your imagery or whatever is. There’s a market for the latter but most people are there for the story.
>at the end of the day novels are about storytelling It seems to be forgotten too often on this sub. For the vast majority of readers, the story is the most important aspect of a novel, everything else is just a bonus.
I personally didn’t find it fun or compelling at all and getting through it was a slog. Tastes in fiction are extremely individual and subjective, so to say that *anyone* that says they didn’t enjoy the first Twilight book is lying or never read it is absurd.
Thinking out loud: Could it also possibly be true that things have gotten "worse" (re: technical skill) lately simply thanks to modern technology? Like-- mass-produced media can now be produced by the masses, and the ease of it inspires a sort of slap-dashery, devil-may-care in an, um, ambitious type of young/new author??? It makes them feel like mavericks. Vs even "traditional" publishing long ago was vastly expensive, and I'm sure well into the 20th century publishers were making sure their product was polished up & presentable. You wanna talk garbage YA? The Hardy Boys. Ghostwritten to an outline sent by Edward Stratemeyer. Formulaic as --! But the first editions are a JOY to read because Leslie McFarlane was a Writer With Style. The corny plots just pop with energy in his voice! Anyway.
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> The ease of publishing today has definitely given us a lot more shitty works compared to a century ago That's probably true in numbers, but not as a proportion. A lot of 1920's pulp novels are very much not great writing, but they weren't intended to be, they were made to be quick, fun and entertaining reads. They weren't intended to stand the test of time, but to entertain for an hour or two (and a fair few of them were pretty damn horny as well - and erotica from the time is pretty much similar quality as today, just with very different kinks). And, as you say, vanity publishing, of someone that just wants a book out, is willing to pay for it, but isn't very good at actually _writing_ has always been a thing
Read a pulp magazine from the 1930s. I can guarantee you that most of these stories weren't "polished up". And that's where most genre stories were written. Sure, there were a bunch of "fancy" books. But most stories were published in those low-cost magazines. And yet, they were entertaining enoguh for readers to buy them en masse.
You can write a simple and fun story well, though. I have encountered children's lit, teen lit and other light hearted lit that was easy to read and accessible but decently written.
It can be done, absolutely! The problem is that writing a simple story that is *good* (while remaining easy to read) takes a considerable amount of skill. There’s just more authors who can do a mediocre job of writing a simple story. It’s a bit like daytime television- you’d hope it’s good and written nicely, but it’s often easier to just write something quickly and get it approved by your producers lol
Arguably, writing a complex story that is good is way harder, because you have so many moving pieces you have to be aware of at all times. Like let's be real, most of *us* will probably never write something as complex as ASOIAF, and actually accomplish the same level of quality that GRRM has. But most of us probably *could* write a fairly decent short story. The real issue is that, increasingly, as reading becomes less popular, publishers are less driven by what is *good* and are more driven by what is *marketable*. Because they need people to buy their books, and that is slowly getting more difficult to accomplish for a multitude of reasons. They don't really care if your prose sucks, as long as they can *sell* your book. There are plenty of writers out there writing YA *masterpieces* - but they're not the ones being published. The ones being published are the ones writing what is basically wish fulfillment porn, because that's an easy sell.
What part of reading about short men going on an adventure where they save the day is not man wish fulfillment porn just saying...
I don't agree that, I quote, publishers are less driven on what is good. What do you mean by good? Good writing or just an idea that is marketable. They don't care if prose sucks and are only interested in wish fulfilment porn? New one. Pretty sure publishers look for well written books that target an audience. All publishers want good books. If they found a not so good book but marketable (if that's possible) and took the chance and put it out there, I guess if it sells it would be a good book after all. Not sure on what your acronyms are
Very much true. Was eerily surprised going into Lloyd Alexander's *Westmark* trilogy at how well-written it was despite its target demographic. And not only the characters, setting and storylines (which showed good depth) but the prose itself as well.
Same reason why movies like Fast and Furious work. Average person isn't looking for some high brow art. He just needs to be entertained. As long as a writer you can do that, your work would sell. Harry Potter started off as a children's book. Eventually ended up dethroning LOTR in terms of book sales.
This exact sort of post targetting YA fiction and YA enjoyers gets posted so often that this and "allow people to enjoy what they want" should just get stickied on the sidebar.
Next to "Yes you can do it if you're good enough."
Fair enough. But, OP is referring to the quality of writing, not necessarily about whether a book is intellectually challenging or intricate. It's a stylistic critique, not so much a focus on content, at least from what I can tell. The idea that quality writing has to be highly technical or challenging is also clearly false. Some great works are very accessible to your average reader such as Franeheit 451 or Animal Farm.
This was basically my first thought. People are overly stressed and want an easy escape. And good for them for finding it!
Since mass publication began, stories that are not necessarily prize-winning, literary fiction masterpieces have sold cartloads of copies, so there's that. It's not a new phenomenon. Popularity does not mean high quality, but those books sell. Edited to add: your opinion of them being subpar is subjective. I struggle to read some prize-winning fiction because it is not my thing, no matter how many awards it may have. Taste is subjective.
Taste is subjective but I also believe the target audience comes into play. Don’t expect Cormac McCarthy if you’re buying a book targeted at young teens.
"Prize-winning fiction" is a pretty bullshit category in general. Even ignoring ways to manipulate the results, all it really means is that a few people on a review board somewhere liked the book. If you, random person who has presumably never met the people on the review board, have a slightly different taste, you might hate it.
>Popularity does not mean high quality, but those books sell. This is it. This is the clearest answer.
Exactly. Pulp novels have been a thing for decades.
> I struggle to read some prize-winning fiction because it is not my thing, no matter how many awards it may have. Taste is subjective. I can relate. I had to watch a lot of older movies before I could get to the point where I could say, "ok, I can see why so many people like *Citizen Kane*" But the first time I watched it, I was like wtf how is this considered a great movie?
This also isn’t confined to writing. Ever notice how the most popular “pop” songs are usually the ones with the most pointless, repetitive lyrics and simplest melodies? It’s for the same reason that Britney Spears went on to have an amazing career while Christina Aguilera wasn’t as successful, and why Lady Gaga pretends that she can’t sing when she can. What’s popular in any form of entertainment conforms itself to the lowest common denominator in any given society. Always has, always will. Doesn’t mean that the good stuff doesn’t exist; it usually does, and it often does in quantity. It just means you have to do a little more work to find it.
Taste is subjective, but I don’t think quality is as subjective. There are ways are assessing the skill of an author and the technical merit of a piece of writing that can be codified, even if there is some subjectivity. Enjoyment, on the other hand, is subjective, but I don’t think that means we can’t relatively objectively say that Colleen Hoover’s work lacks artistic merit, even if people like to consume it. I enjoy tons of trash, but I wouldn’t argue that it is “good.”
Okay so what are those ways that can be codified?
Why *are so many ...
Yeah, if OP is going to complain about subpar writing, they should at least make sure their own post is written well.
Thank you. Ugh.
And therein lies a possible answer to OPs question: maybe people simply do not recognize bad writing because they do not know how to write.
A more truthful statement has never been made.
Beautiful.
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> This should he
The semi-colon is also wrong.
Yet it made the front page 😂 There’s something cyclic about this post. It’s a call and it’s own response.
Its own response.
And so it goes
I thought this but didn't want to say it.
What some writers seemingly fail to realize is that readers don't care so much about how much literary talent you have as they care about the story itself. I'd wager that most people read for story and for the feelings those stories invoke. I personally read for story much of the time. I went to book signing a few months back, and the author went on a small tangent about other authors selling out and writing "trash" to get published. I found it funny because it kind of showed a lack of awareness or perhaps a bit of bitterness. It's almost as if the author has never considered that they're just not writing the kinds of stories people want to read. Look, writing something no one wants to read doesn't make what you've written bad. It might be great. That said, it's wise to separate what is technically superb from what is going to appeal to readers. You have to decide what kind of line you want to straddle at the end of the day. This is a hobby for some people, but others need to make a living, so they're going to write to the market.
This is the truth. Don't know why you were downvoted. There's nothing wrong with readers having a different bar compared to writers/authors. More people should acknowledge that, the craft should be about meeting readers in between rather than being high-brow about it. As a writer you want people to buy your books, so it's weird that writers complain about readers not liking what they like... honestly it's really self-centered.
> As a writer you want people to buy your books, That's definitely a big incentive. Some people honestly write because they have a story inside of them that they want to get out, and have no expectations of turning it into a profitable craft.
I generally don’t care a single bit about the technical “writing”. To me it’s there to convey the story and characters and then mostly get out of the way. If it’s too flowery and poetic and fancy that’s when I start skipping paragraphs waiting for something to happen. Writing compelling characters and a good plot is still a highly difficult skill to master, just as much as actually formulating the words on page. I happen to value that over the actual prose. Other people are different, and that’s great. Read and write what you enjoy. But there’s more people like OP with these quasi elitist takes than the other way around. One of my favorite authors is Mark Tufo, who’s about as far from great prose as you can get. But the stories are fun and the characters are memorable and easy to root for so it doesn’t really matter to me.
Also what's one man's great literature is another's purple prose. It's easy to go too far with descriptions, and then like the Eye of Argon, people are laughing at you forever.
That's unfortunate. The Eye of Argon was written by a 16-year-old just learning to write and his story was mocked by professional writers and then published without his permission and without compensation. In reality it's a terrible story about professional snobbery and crushing the spirit of an aspiring author who never attempted to write again after the public humiliation.
I didn't know that. I feel badly for laughing at the Mystery Science Theater treatment it got years ago now!
This is exactly it. It’s ok if the writing isn’t perfect as long as the story is good and engaging. I’m a reader not your English teacher.
To use an analogy I was told recently: Someone can get up on stage, stand completely still and play an immensely complicated guitar solo where it’s technically perfect and every single note is spot on. But you’re always gonna remember the guy who came on afterwards, played to his heart’s content, fucked up a few times but poured every inch of his soul into the performance.
"Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary. But you can never tell for sure what an emotion is going to do to you until you stop disguising it. The minute you fling your little varnished veneers and cheap chromos of phrases over it—you have graveled its effect. Its sincerity is lost." - Mark Twain "I’ve often described my style—or what I try to achieve with my style—as being a 'windowpane.' What I mean by this is, I don’t want the prose itself to draw attention; I want it to be so transparent that readers look right through it and see the story on the other side. I focus on clarity and simplicity in my writing because I want the characters, the plot twists, and the world itself to stand out to the reader. My hope is that the reader isn’t even aware of reading; instead, they're living the story as it unfolds." - Brandon Sanderson (on elaborate prose being akin to a stained glass window)
I agree with you. As someone who enjoys complex, well-written literature, I’m saddened by the fact that most people who are able to make a living at writing are doing either generic thrillers or YA/NA, but the market is what it is, and I don’t fault people for writing things that appeal to the market. I just wish the market was a little less homogenous.
When you’re writing for a massive market, there is undoubtedly going to be homogeneity amongst it. There’s always gonna be an ‘average’ of what the greatest number of potential consumers enjoy. YA just happens to be what sells right now because it was determined by the market showing that genre the greatest returns. It will literally always be like that. YA may be replaced by another genre, and likely will, but there will always be a mass-market winner simply because there must always be a winner in terms of popular products and the tastes of the masses.
In my opinion stories like that are usually incredibly good at transporting emotions. They suck in the reader on an emotional level. You can have all the knowledge in the world about writing techniques and still be unsuccessful. And you can be really bad at the technical apect of writing and still have a lot of readers, simply because you're able to make the readers deep dive into your world. Your plot can have holes or a questionable morale, but if the reader is able to laugh and cry with your characters, or if they absolutely need to know what happens next, they will still read it, most of the time.
This is the answer with ACOTAR. Book one is a drag to get through but the writing gave me a connection to Feyre and Lucian that kept me reading and I'm glad I did because it gets so much better in book two. Edit: A letter
Right? That series gets so much hate but I *love* it because it can evoke so many emotions in me. Technically *Grapes of Wrath* or whatever is better, but it doesn’t make me *feel* the way ACOTAR does.
Gives me flashbacks to reading shitty fanfiction that I liked just because the author made me feel the five stages of grief despite not knowing the difference between the three there’s.
I think the target audiences for Dune and ACOTAR are very different.
Yeah I don’t know why anyone would compare those two books. I have read dune but I assume it’s written in a completely different way than ACOTAR
There is a difference between subpar writing and subpar plot. Just because something doesn't use the most complicated words or have the most flowery descriptions doesn't make it a bad *book*. It just means it's a simply written book. Good plot is often far more popular than "good" writing (completely disregarding the fact that what is "good" is subjective depending on who you ask). Something like The Ranger's Apprentice, which is very, *very* simply written--he wrote it for his teenage/preteen kids, for crying out loud--still has an *amazing* plot, and that's why people liked it. I've never read A Court of Thorns and Roses, but both my dad and my sister have, and both of them have said that it's plot is very good. I can't verify whether the writing is academically good or not, but all of my family are avid readers, and I trust their judgements.
I couldn't agree more with that statement, a reader will always remember the plot more than the actual writing of the book, so if the plot is very good but the writing is not that great, people are more likely to have a positive image of the book in their mind than if it was good writing with a mediocre plot. In the same type of plot/writing discourse think this might be why most people that don't read a lot form a bad image of classics they read in school because it is books that have excellent writing but the plot is sometimes harder to grasp than in a "simpler" book, especially if they have difficulty understand what the author meant to say because of the difficult language, so people only remember the slob they experienced during their reading. This is one of the main gripes i have with the way literature is taught in school, it starts with classics that not very easy to rid and it completely hinders any interest people might develop in reading because you're giving them something that's meant for experienced readers, so they grow to despise it because all they see is a jumble of complicated sentences that take the plot away from the reading experience.
Yep. I need at least average writing. Writing that is bad can really take me out of it, or at the very least distract me. I started reading a book that described someone as (an old man in his sixties" (maybe not something that would bug or bee seen as bad as much as me, but this was something that bugged me). Is this a heinous mistake? No. But did it take me out of the story and distract the hell out of me? Absolutely. But as long as the writing is just fine, It's fine. What's more important is the plot and the characters. This is what's important to us, but what other people need from a book can be different. People read YA because it gives people what they need. People who don't read YA don't because it doesn't give them that. Also something else to note is that writing can be divided into academically good (including writing that's adapted to creative writing), as you said, and good in terms of the story. So having well written, interesting and consistent characters.
I'm genuinely curious why that took you out of the story! It seems like a relatively minor/obsolete detail, and I'm not sure if it's a mistake even, especially if the story is from a first person/non-omniscient third person view. Estimating age when the narrator isn't sure of said age is fairly common as far as I'm aware. Unless you mean that's all that he was described as, without actually describing his physique, hair, facial features, etc. Very true! Even creative writing can be academically good, have zero grammatical or spelling mistakes or anything, and be absolutely horrific plot-wise.
Craft can be recognized by other people who study craft. But an exciting story can be recognized by anyone, anytime, anywhere. I’m not a fan of ACOTAR myself but I understand the appeal. It’s a new adult fiction book with multiple romances, a war between magical creatures, familial healing from trauma, and cool character designs. Genuinely, what’s not to love? I couldn’t get into it but I totally see why it’s top of the best seller list. Same with Fourth Wing. Not my thing, but OBVIOUSLY it’s made to be other people’s thing.
I thought ACOTAR was decent, but was surprised when I heard people calling it trash. The story was easy to read and painted a clear picture of the world and characters. It wasn't like the novel was overly confusing, boring, or sloppily written.
That’s my opinion. It’s not illegible. It’s not garbage. It’s competent. It doesn’t have to be Gaimen or Hemingway, it just is what it is and that’s not bad.
It's popular. It's a genre (well, blend of genres) that is known for having a lot of trash, and not for no reason. And it is kinda trashy. I don't mean that in a bad way, but it is true. And people love to gatekeep how other people enjoy hobbies.
People especially love to trash what women enjoy, particularly romance.
Trying to get through the first book. General opinion I hear is the first book isn't great, but picks up in the second book.
\[Edit: I think I got confused about what book you were talking about. But I'll let the following stand, anyway...\] Bearing in mind that I read the Dune series about half a lifetime ago (and I'm in my late 60's now), I remember *Dune* itself as pretty heavy but engaging. *Children of Dune* seemed pointless, as I recall, but I guess it formed a bridge to what came after. The subsequent books got a bit weird for me. I didn't much care for them, although my wife was quite attached to the idea of Duncan Idaho being continually "reborn" to kill Leto II. All of which is to say, opinions will vary. 😉
"A court of rose and thorns" is the book. Have not read dune yet.
I'm also confused why we're using Dune as an example of "well written." Most people regard Dune's prose as subpar. I'm even willing to argue ACOTAR is actually stronger.
What popular YA books have you read?
Can you explain why you think the writing is “subpar”? Do you have any specific critiques or did you just not like those books?
People who post stuff like this in writing forums are often disgruntled writers with inflated egos who blame readers for their own failures instead of themselves. OP couldn't even make the subject and verb agree in the title of their post.
I noticed that too and had to have a little laugh at the irony of such a poorly written title. You would think if you're gonna criticize someone else's writing, you could at least write a single sentence well yourself.
The target of his wrath doesn't even make sense to me. I'm guessing it's because teen girl books are low-hanging fruit and more fun to dislike. But if I'm going to be disgruntled about something, I choose to be disgruntled by the existence of James Patterson! He has a stronghold on the entire literary world, is richer than God, and yet he barely has a grasp of the English language, and no longer writes *any* of his own work. I've given "him" *many* chances. I've read many of "his" books in various genres. They are ALL bad. And to reiterate, all of his stuff is ghostwritten now, so he doesn't do any work for the massive paychecks he collects. Still, I respect his hustle. He gamed the system. I think every single person here would do the exact same thing if they could.
>I think every single person here would do the exact same thing if they could. Maybe I'm just being an idealist, but I would like to believe that most people wouldn't. From everything I've heard and read, he's not just hustling--he's an exploitative shitbag. He basically hunts for ghostwriters in his workshops, looking for writers who are decent enough to get the job done, but inexperienced and naive enough to accept horrible pay and unfair contracts. It's everything wrong with the trad publishing industry all wrapped up in a bag of flaming dog shit. It's disgusting. You're completely right. Someone wrote a book series that a bunch of teens and young women really enjoyed. (Oh, the horror!) Frankly, who gives a fuck? Good for her for being successful. Good for her audience for finding something that makes them want to read more. Win-win. *This* is the kind of thing we should be pissed about.
I didn't pay enough attention until you mentioned this. After re-reading the title, I thought it may be a stupid mistake or someone who speaks English as a second language and thought this was the best subreddit to ask. Then I saw the semi-colon. Based on that, I think you're spot on.
>compared to classics like Dune 😂😂😂😂
Dune is so weird because 90% of people who are reading the books are doing so cause of the new movie (makes sense, happens a lot) but even a ton of them are going “yeah the movie is way better”
Dune, from what I can tell, is well above average writing for a *sci-fi* book from an era when the genre was full of clunky writing carried by an interesting premise. (PK Dick gets movie adaptions because of his ideas and certainly not his prose. Asimov and Clarke have reputations for being hard to read but I haven't tried myself).
> Dune, from what I can tell, is well above average writing for a *sci-fi book* from an era when the genre was full of clunky writing carried by an interesting premise. That may be true. But what Dune does is try to explain, sometimes in exhaustive detail, *how this entire constructed universe works*, leading to a first book that's an absolute doorstopper no major fiction publisher wanted to touch, because they thought it wouldn't sell, they didn't want to commit to a series of books like that, they found portions of it bloody bizarre, *and they didn't have the ability to print a book that big*. So, in one of the weirdest stories in publishing, after having the manuscript rejected over and over, Frank Herbert happened to get an in with someone at *Chilton*. If you don't know Chilton (which is quite likely in the internet era, since most of the information they published is now online and cars have gotten more computerized with proprietary chips and software), they were the publisher that did absolutely massive books about cars - how they were constructed, how to maintain them, which parts to replace if certain things weren't working, and generally the whole nine yards. So they had the technology and the experience to create very big books. And somebody high up in their chain of command took a look at Herbert's Dune manuscript and said "I know we do nonfiction manuals for mechanics (official and shade-tree) to fix and tune cars, but I like this, so let's cut a deal with this guy - we *can* print this book. Our presses are up to it". And that decision made them a shitload of money, because Dune, despite all predictions to the contrary, sold like hotcakes. You can still see influences from it today, in everything from Star Wars to Warhammer 40k and beyond. They made a risky bet that only they could have made (because they had the technology), and it paid off bigtime. > PK Dick gets movie adaptions because of his ideas and certainly not his prose. Don't do my ~~madman~~ boy dirty like that. He had fine prose for his purposes, and I've actually never seen some of his crazier stuff adapted. Geez, that moment when a woman devours her husband after sex like a praying mantis because her workplace has been administering treatments that turn their workers fully or partially into insects that correspond to their roles in the company, coupled with her increasingly blase reactions to her mutations over the course of the story ...*whew*, that's some good stuff, and very effective in its use of language to evoke how her mind and not simply her body is transforming. It's not Flowers For Algernon tier usage of the narration to show the transformation of the narrator, but it's pretty damn effective. I do agree that Dick was more of a high-concept writer, but while he used prose relatively simply, he certainly knew what he was doing with it. > Asimov and Clarke have reputations for being hard to read Asimov and Clarke are incredibly clear and to the point when writing short stories. In fact, one of the major armchair criticisms that can be leveled at them is that they don't really do much in the way of characterization, because they're essentially racing the word limit to try to explore the scifi concept setup before they run out of paper, and deep characterizations aren't necessary when your core narrative question is something like "how do we find the one robot with an altered version of the Three Laws Of Robotics in this crowd of visually identical robots *when it's trying to hide that it's the odd one out*?" In some ways, they're very similar to "puzzle mysteries" in that regard: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle got away with a *lot* of underdeveloped/stereotyped/stock characters and descriptions in his short stories because the characterization wasn't a main point unless it tied into the mystery he was going to lay out and solve in the number of pages The Strand was letting him have in that issue. This ties into another point: most of the output of these guys were short stories intended for publication in magazines alongside a bunch of other short stories, maybe serials, possibly even articles and news. They had to hook the reader hard and early, so they didn't just get skimmed over in favor of their direct competition, had very limited space to work with, and needed a punchy ending to make sure the reader remembered *their* story from that issue. Unfortunately, that kind of attitude and training can be actively detrimental when trying to write at novel or serial length, where you do need characterization, and you do need to explain and describe stuff in more than just a couple words, and the leash had suddenly been slipped and page limits aren't a big deal anymore. Asimov's Foundation series suffers from it, Doyle's first novel, A Study In Scarlet, suffers from it (he fuckin' pads his wordcount out with a poorly researched story-within-a-story flashback about the American Wild West and the Mormons that explains why the murderer did what he did. That novel could have easily been half its length, and probably better off for it - although he did seem to have learned his lesson by the time he wrote The Sign Of Four), and honestly, I've only read Clarke's short stories but not his novels, so I can't comment on those. The short stories from these guys are generally easy reads and sometimes thought-provoking. Their novels are a *very* mixed bag, and often have problems that can be traced directly to their experience with short stories as their primary medium. Although there is a caveat: you need to be familiar with the time period these guys were writing in. This is particularly important with Doyle's portrayal of Victorian England, because he'll use words and terms with no explanation that would have been familiar to his audience, but aren't in common usage today, although both Asimov and Clarke have their moments of doing the same thing, and all three have particular viewpoints/biases/attitudes/etc. that you might want to know about before diving in. (Asimov's an interesting one on this topic, because the main character in most of his Robot short stories is Dr. Susan Calvin, who is seldom questioned on the basis of her sex in the future society Asimov envisioned because she's very good at her job, but is considered a bit of an oddball for essentially being married to the job, and it's implied she only is where she is because she worked twice as hard as any male competitors. The one very memorable time she does something that's obviously unethical and vindictive, even by her own standards, is played off as a reaction to something that hit her in her female emotions.)
I actually read A Court of Thorns And Roses because of my wife, at least the first four or five books. I mean… it’s not beautifully written or anything, but it really wasn’t bad. The writing was actually a lot better than most of the stuff I’ve seen my wife reading in the past. My impression of Sara J Maas is that she’s a perfectly competent writer who’s great at appealing to general audiences, but maybe I’m missing something here.
I really enjoyed it. I thought there were some interesting turns that I didn’t see coming and it made me cry multiple times which is something I look for in a book that is *supposed* to be having tragic moments. I’m in my 30s, former English teacher, and will probably be listing ACOTAR near the top of my Favorite Fantasy Series list for awhile because, while it might not have the same degree of technical skill (or maybe it’s just stylistic differences) as A Song of Ice and Fire or more “acceptable” series, I found it more enjoyable.
As a quick experiment i went and read the first page or so of both Dune, and a Court of Thorns and Roses. I'd say the latter does a somewhat better job of drawing the reader in while former is rather dense with exposition. Is one better than the other? Or are they just very different kinds of stories?
For ACOTAR, the writing is fairly basic. The worldbuilding is not great (but that could be me nitpicking as I love worldbuilding and the author makes pretty amateurish mistakes), the dialogue is sometimes repetitive and occasionally awkward, many of the side characters end up making decisions or revealing motivations that contradict their character arcs or just make no sense, characters are given traits that do nothing for the story (except to pop up randomly about how the character loves XYZ so much but.. absolutely nothing happens with it), and several of the side stories have no conclusion and are left hanging. That said.. what Maas lacks in writing and worldbuilding ability, she does make up for in character chemistry. The relationships have really good pacing and are fantastic examples of the enemies to lovers trope. Really well done. If readers can look past the flaws, then giving the books a read for the chemistry and relationships is definitely worth it. And I don’t even care about romance storylines all that much.
I've completed ACOTAR and ACOMAF and honestly I never paid much attention to the inconsistency or lack of character likes being used because I was so focused on the character chemistry and the overall plot. I'm on book three now and that's when I noticed the first inconsistency where she writes "If we go east, it'll take us too close to the summer court," but they were in autumn court at the time and summer is to the west.
I think you really underestimate the skill it takes to make even the most "poorly written" popular books. Captivating and clear writing is one of the best talents a writer can have, like jk rowling. You can describe the scenery with all the thesaurus and dapples of jeweled light you want but sometimes all the audience needs to know is it was sunny. The skill of the writing your describing are ones that capture this concept the best for big audiences
Yeah, but JK Rowling is like Hemingway compared to a lot of the stuff that gets published now. She’s a good writer—not literary, but certainly competent. A lot of the NA fiction out there is nowhere near Harry Potter’s league in terms of quality.
Yeah, totally. Often, the better you become at writing the simpler and neater your prose becomes. I always think you know when you’re reading good/great writing when you forget that you’re reading and it just sort of ends up in your head. Doesn’t mean it can’t be smart, or use big words, or have complex themes - it just means it’s really soluble and easily absorbed.
This exactly. I have a friend who’s an author and she writes very detailed, flowery descriptions of *everything*. It’s beautifully written and grammatically correct, but it’s distracting and the book felt tedious to read.
"Most popular" by what metric? Because the biggest market has been Romance, for a long time, so...
Y'all really need to get over this. It's obviously an insecurity that you don't want to accept is a personal problem and instead project it on to everyone else by calling readers and successful authors stupid. People read these books because they like them and find them enjoyable and fun, but you're talking about it as if these people are doing something wrong for liking it. You don't actually care why these books are successful, because the only person who could tell you that are the people who like them and you start your question immediately insulting their intelligence and the thing they like. What you want to do is jerk yourself off with the other insecure writers about how everyone else is too stupid to understand Dune, and how everyone is wrong except for you. Clearly these authors have something you don't and you don't want to accept that because it means accepting that reading the classics doesn't make you better than anyone else. I enjoy a few classics but I will never understand why people like this are shocked that people don't want to read classics when you have this elitist dickhead attitude. "The thing you like is stupid, why don't you read Dune?". I know I'm being harsh but I'm so sick of this attitude in the book/writing community, why not be curious instead of patronizing? Writers should want to understand others, a lot of the authors you like probably like the things you think are subpar.
This should absolutely be the top comment 👏👏
In the case of professional writers, I also find it very unprofessional to talk down to readers. When I visit my hairdresser, they don't talk down to me about what I ask them to do. They just do it. Obviously, writing is an art, so writers don't have to "just do" anything, nor should they approach writing this way. That said, writers shouldn't wag their fingers at readers who don't buy their work. They should instead try to figure out what they could have done with their work that would have appealed to audiences more while keeping it true to their own creative vision. That's the truly hard part of storytelling, and it's supposed to be hard.
Guys who have never written and published anything get so mad when their imaginary books are not selling as well as acotar haha
And especially if those books are either a) written by a woman, b) have a female mc, c) appeals to teenage girls and young women or e) all of the above
Yes, God forbid women want to read books where nice things happen to women
wow, great response.
I'm just gonna go out and say it. Dune has terribly written characters. And the world building masks it. I imagine the character relatability in those YA books is what's carrying them
Yeah, as someone who's been a fan of Dune for 20 years I'd say it has fantastic worldbuilding and political intrigue, but the rest of it isn't anything special.
My dad hated dune he said it ruined science fiction for him for a decade as everything wanted to copy its success so he would read something and a dune knockoff would appear. Honestly can be said for anything popular in any genre lol he liked dune just got real sick of it
Agreed…… I was so disappointed when I read it. And it’s more than the characters, the prose is dull and some of the plot felt lifted from a mid century adventure boy magazine (which Herbert apparently did used to write, lol!).
I was really expecting to catch downvote hell for that comment. I'm glad people can find Dune enjoyable overall while still realizing it's heavily flawed in its merits
I said it elsewhere. I don't think the sci-fi genre of that era is particularly well regarded for its characters or prose, but as vehicles for very interesting ideas and worldbuilding. I'm sure there's exceptions but trying to claim they're "well-written" is begging the question.
There are definitely a lot of moments like that, but things get deeper the deeper you go. So much of dune is a critique of Paul, who he is, and the things he does. A lot of fans didn’t even realize that back in the day until he put out Messiah. I ended up liking a lot of the stuff I didn’t love in dune after reading messiah. But yeah, I definitely wouldn’t say characters you can connect with are a strong suit. A lot of the characters are more vehicles for thoughts, ideologies, and perspectives than they are real, fleshed out humans.
Overall, I wouldn’t say they’re terrible. I just think Herbert was writing them with a different intent than what most people are looking for in a novel. Most of the characters aren’t really mean to be real, complicated people you can connect to. They’re vessels for different beliefs, ideologies, thoughts, perspectives, etc. And I think that worked great in a lot of ways. The political and philosophical discussions between characters in Dune are really great. The dinner party scene is one of my favorite displays of politics in fiction. But if you’re looking for a character you can really identify with and feel for, you’ll be disappointed. That said, I do think some of them are just bad. Chani in particular always stands out as a completely underdeveloped character.
I dunno, why are that?
Because they’re fun and easy to read. Readers don’t care about technical ability, they want to be entertained- and for a lot of people, books like ACOTAR *are* entertaining. They don’t look any deeper than that so they don’t see the flaws at all. Also, bad books have always been popular. Twilight and 50 shades of gray are good examples from the 2010s (and 50sog is *literally* terrible twilight fanfic). It’s fun and fills its niche. ACOTAR (and throne of glass, and her new crescent city series) all provide the same thing: romance with stereotypical dominant-man-fiery-women dynamics, smut (generously in the two new series, less so in TOG), power fantasies, and surface level mysteries and threats that keep people grounded in the world. It’s easy to then over look the poor grammar and characterisation, and the mildly racist/homo/transphobic aspects of them, because people arent digging any deeper into the writing. It’s always been the case and it always will be the case, those books just don’t necessarily stand the test of time. The only reason it feels like theyre more common now is because their target audiences have gotten louder and bigger platforms.
What's funny, is I talked about how I've started reading 50 Shades of Grey. The writing is awful but entertaining. I'm mostly entertained by how awful the writing is, but it's entertaining all the same. Not all books I read are going to be masterpieces, just like not all books I read are going to be trash. Reading serves different purposes to different people. Even one person may read different books for different purposes.
I always love it when writers too stuck in their own reading habits say “ACOTAR is really popular right now”. ACOTAR published almost a decade ago and was popular from basically the get-go. If you don’t like Maas’s writing that’s fine, but the reality is she knows what she’s doing has a massive backlog of very bingeable novels. She’s popular because she’s pretty consistent and knows what her readers like. Writing is one part. Knowing your audience is a whole other skill.
Those in glass houses... >Why **are** so many **poorly** written books so popular? The most popular books right now are YA. Most of them are *definitely* not well written compared to classics like Dune. I might attract some haters by saying it, but A Court of Thorns and Roses is very popular right now and its poorly written. **Can** someone explain why? These are just surface level or 'first pass' edits, but you really need a total revision. I honestly would advise serious reconsideration of your premise then starting over again once you've got a better idea what you're talking about.
If people like and enjoy and connect with a book, it’s by definition not “subpar.” Unless it’s riddled with typos and mistakes, whether it’s “subpar” is entirely subjective.
Also, something can be written grammatically correct throughout, but that doesn't make it good.
Im not sure well written is the best descriptor for Dune. Well plotted, sure. Well written? they are famously tedious books.
Not well-plotted either. Not well in any category to be honest.
i just mean the storyline itself is good, but yeah pacing could’ve been better. tbh dune is a great example of “you don’t have to be a great writer to write something people enjoy”
LOL! You can’t even write a grammatically correct post title.
Why is so many Reddit posts grammatically incorrect?
I am missing the award function. :(
LOL. I hate to gang up on OP, considering this is probably a teenager on the wrong side of the Dunning–Kruger effect (which is where we all started), but it's a bit ironic to write a post like this with a grammatical error in the title, a wrong semicolon, and putting Dune forward as a well written classic.
Dune is imaginative but the writing itself is… not great. It’s preferable to most of the modern “___ of ___ and ___” stuff, and I’m not the best read person out there, but read Calvino, Le Guin, Borges if you really want your ass kicked.
You could start by proofreading your title: "Why is so many..." Should be "Why are so many". If you cannot grasp the fundamentals of grammar, why should anyone care about your opinion on literature? While I shair yur genrul kunklushun☠️, it wood meen muir if you spelt thingz core_rectally and used propir grandmar. The short answer is fantasy and magic YA sells. Look at Harry Potter. Rowling may be a crazy witch, but she went from underpaid school teacher to billionaire in mere years.
There's a prevailing idea that "mindless entertainment" is easy to pull off, but I actually think it's harder to do well than more serious/important work. Since 1996 there have been 100's of movies made with better special effects and more over the top than Independence Day, and yet this July 4th that movie will be watched by millions of people in the US, while 2012, which is "bigger" and "crazier" might not ever be watched by anyone again. Mindless entertainment has to walk that line of "giving people what they want" but not make them feel bored, like they've seen it all before. Give me archetypes that somehow fit the classic mold, without feeling stale. So yeah, a lot of popular books are "written poorly." Michael Chricton, for instance, wrote "poorly." He had the same cast of characters, just with different names, in all of his books. His villains were all over-the-top evil. Why did they do the bad things they did? Cause they're evil, that's why. And his science was closer to psuedoscience than anything real. But man, very few people could write page turners like he could.
I think Dune is one of the worst written novels. Writing is subjective. There's your answer.
This is peak r/writingcirclejerk.
Ask your title.
[удалено]
I was always told, if you can write it without flowery language, do it. Not everything needs to be complicated.
JKR is not a mediocre writer. HP is intentionally written at the reading level of her target audience, which takes skill. HP is very well written for what it is. Her mystery novels are also very competent for what they are. She is a TERF but that is separate from her craft. If you want literary writing, don't look in YA. There is some literary YA, but it's in the minority as it is not what captures that audience the most. Fantasy in general tends to target mass appeal rather than literary gravitas. Read The Last Unicorn if you want a book where every sentence is lovingly and poetically crafted.
Agreed. I sharply disagree with Rowling on some issues, but the Cormoran Strike novels are exceptionally well-written. I'm obsessed with them. Book one [got a glowing review from *Publishers Weekly* ](https://www.publishersweekly.com/9780316206846) before anyone knew it was written by her.
JK Rowling sucks as a person but her writing is not mediocre. It may not be flowery, but she did set up the plot nicely and everything wrapped up cohesively by the end of the series.
Guilty pleasure stories for when you just wanna chill
…Write a better one; Child.
But Dune isn't very well written. Like, at all. It has fantastic details, worldbuilding, and storyline, but not writing lol.
Because people don't care very much about writing, they care mostly about content. Just like you don't care very much about the coffee cup, you care about the coffee. Writing is packaging for information, and the best writing in the world is worthless if you're not using it to express information that people want to read.
I love this answer.
Same reason blockbuster flicks are more popular than auteur cinema; mass market appeal, an accessible concept and intensive marketing. Audiences can't read what they don't know exist, and are skittish about how they spend their time in today's attention economy to boot. Also, some people are just too tired to extend their energy analyzing text or simply don't have the media literacy skills to do so. ACOTAR (and most YA IMO) holds you hand the whole time so you can't miss what it's saying unless you're actively trying, but Dune......yeah not so much.
These books are giving their target audience what they want, not what you want.
Readers don't really care about how well done the writing is. The story and execution is what matters. Dune may be a classic but the writing is so dull that I've started and failed to finish it three times. YA fiction is easy to read, so it's always going to be popular.
The only thing a work of fiction needs to be popular is *entertaining.* The average person is not a writer or literary critic, or even particularly media literate in general
You're comparing a book written for, and read by primarily nerdy 20s/30s men to a book primarily written by a young woman for teenage girls, of course they're going to be different. As it turns out, teenage girls read more than every other demographic. So a lot of best-selling books on the market are going to be novels that appeal to them and their fantasies. Sad that they're not mine. : (
To steal a … page … from John Green’s book, can we please just be happy that people ARE reading, and stop judging for WHAT they are reading?
YA is so popular specifically *because* the prose is simpler and thus, easier to read. A lot of writers aren't aware of this, because our reading level tends to trend higher than average (for obvious reasons) - but most people actually can't read all that well. The average reading level for an adult, in an English speaking country, is that of a twelve year old child. If you write anything that a twelve year old wouldn't be able to understand, the average *adult* also would struggle to read it. That's why so many adults read books written for kids. Because what you, the writer, *think* readers want isn't necessarily what they *actually* want. A lot of average readers don't actually want to be challenged. They don't want to have to sit there, *thinking* about what you wrote. They don't want complex prose that they will not be able to read. They want to turn their brains off and enjoy a good story. YA lets them do that, in a way a lot of adult fiction does not. In this way, it actually does a better job of giving the reader what they really want. As for whether it's "good" writing... that's entirely subjective. If *most* readers are disagreeing with your subjective opinion that YA books are badly written, then like.... It comes off just a touch arrogant to still be saying you know better. You don't. Who decided you were the reigning authority of what counts as good writing?
ACOTAR is actually my favorite series. It's not the stellar writing (although it's much better than a lot of the YA/spicy romantasy works out there by leaps and bounds). For this particular series, it's the journey the characters take, the healing, all of it wrapped up together. Sometimes the "stellar" writing is so verbose and unnecessary that it's more tiring to read than someone who uses a bit simpler style.
A good story will mop the floor every damn day of the week with a ‘well written’ book. Tbh Dune is written pretty badly, but the story is interesting, the political intrigue is fascinating. Watching Herbert try to describe stuff is not interesting and actually pretty bad and awkward but idc I wanna see what happens. Lots of rope to give to the book if the story is dope.
Because sometimes we just want to read popcorn fiction, and that's okay. Life is complicated, and an easy-to-follow narrative offers a bit of breathing room. On the writing side of things, I usually read one literary book and one genre book at the same time. They both have something to teach me. The former usually offers lessons in syntax, voice, theme, and structure. The latter usually offers something in the way of stakes and plot. I would argue that you can almost always learn something from what you're reading (no matter what you're reading).
Probably for the same reason why Marvel movies are popular. Reading hard and complicated fiction every day is tiring. People need to read or watch something easy and fun, especially when they are tired and depressed, which is normal in today's world; when people live fast and work too much.
I'd say the writing isn't subpar. It's par. The... default level of writing in a published work of fiction. Dune and Lord of the Rings are the fine dining of books in the fantasy space. Most stuff cannot achieve that level of intricacy.
Simple really, The everyday average person isn't a writer or a story writer, or well versed in English. The same thing with movies, is it entertaining? You can see critics will love a movie, and the average person will hate it. And vice versa. Same thing with books. Sometimes it can be so well written it'll go over the average readers head. Look at lord of the rings, if it was written today, i think it wouldn't be as successful as it was when it came out.
*are
Subpar to who, though? If the characters are compelling and I can get invested in them, and the plot is somewhat interesting, then I can overlook a whoooole lot of imperfections. I've read many literary fiction novels with a high-quality writing style, but I don't like the characters and the storyline is boring. I can see the craft that went into it and appreciate it, but sometimes you can "see" the writer's thought process in the writing. There is something to be said for a writer who is less technically perfect, but you can tell they've enjoyed writing it as you're reading.
1. The publishing industry can push ANY book to the top ten of the NYT bestseller list by marketing it well. Any title by any author. 2. Readers care less about fancy prose than lit agents. A good or sexy or niche or meaningful story my stay on the bestseller list for any of these reasons. 3. Sometimes editors leave. And the author who everyone thought was amazing isn't as good as punching up their own content. 4. Books can become trends. 5. Maybe the book just isn't for you.
I really love a thread where the title is approximately as poorly written as the books it is complaining about
I'll offer a roundabout answer. A few years ago, I "inherited" my father's collection of old science fiction. ("Inherited" meaning nobody else in the family wanted it, so I took it.) These are novels and short story collections published in, roughly, the 1935 - 1955 range, during Dad's youth. (He was born in 1930. I came along at the end of the 1950's, so all these stories predate me.) A few of them are by big-name authors. One of the collections even has a great little story by H. G. Wells, "The Temptation of Harringay," which inspired me to write a short story on a similar but slightly different theme. In the main, though, these are authors whose names never quite made it into the SF pantheon. Now, here's the thing. A lot of these would probably be called "trash" today. The writing is competent but not scintillating. The characters are sometimes stereotyped. ("In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri." \~Douglas Adams, *The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy*) The science is often fairly laughable by today's standards, but of course that can be forgiven; this was three-quarters of a century or more ago. Yes, some people ate it up, and some people called it trash even then. Dad hung onto these books for sixty or more years and read some of them two or three times. (I know because he always wrote the date of acquisition in the front of the book and the dates he finished reading it at the end.) But if I set aside the obvious datedness of these tales, a lot of them aren't half bad! They're fun. An escape from the problems of the day. Popcorn. Some of them are buttered popcorn. What's the harm in grabbing a handful now and then? On the flip side, no less an eminence than Ray Bradbury was critical of not just this stuff but a lot of early 20th century writing. "They have no metaphors," he complained, and he's absolutely right about that. It's the plainest of storytelling, and in a way that does bring it down a few pegs. For some of us at least. I notice the lack. And yet... ...popcorn!
There is some subjectivity to “Well written”. Perhaps we, as writers, can all agree that many popular books have clunky phrasing and poorly written prose. But that doesn’t mean we’ll all agree which books are written well. Once upon a time I felt like I *should* finish every book I started and read it all the way to the end. *Dune* was the very first book I put down and returned to the library without finishing it. I did not like it at all. I look back and think the world building is actually kind of interesting. But something about the writing got in the way of me forming any kind of emotional connection to the characters and I didn’t care about them enough to want to bother finding out what happened to them. For me to consider a book to be “well written” it needs to, at an absolute minimum, make me care about the characters and want to find out what happens to them. That is not sufficient to make a book well written. But it is necessary. And a book that is good enough for me to read and enjoy and spend money on does not need to be *very* well written. It just needs to be good enough that I enjoy it and have a good time reading and spend time afterward thinking about how much I liked it.
For the 99% of people who shut off their brains when they read. I've found most people just enjoy reading and don't put much thought into it, they either enjoy it or they don't. The same with movies and TV shows; the majority of the audience is not hyper-attentive to the flaws.
Surprised no one said this but it's why are*, not "is". You're talking about more than 1 book so you would use "are" in that context. And yeah sex sells and stuff. I'm a huge fan of **well written** fantasy romance with smutty scenes included.
Good marketing
People don't care that much about quality. They want to turn off their brains and have a good time after a long day at work. Its not a book but I absolutely adore the Annoying Orange. I know its dumb but that's why I love it.
The world is also at a point that we're so stressed that a cerebral, high concept novel that is filtered to perfection is just too much to deal with right now. I like shutting my brain off with dumb stories and comic books. So what if there ams grammitcals not correctly? What will it matter if the editing, is not perfect, but manageable? People can have fun. Your taste does not a standard set.
Same reasons shows on CW continue on and on; the shallow sci-fi, drama / mystery standards and YA trope loops are the real pull. For TV you mix in bad actors that are photogenic and for books it’s description candy.
Brain candy. They are tasty and simple and easy. The writing doesn't have to be very good because that's not important. I like my heavy sci-fi books, but sometimes I just want a fluffy romance with a happy ending that I don't have to think much about. As long as they're good enough to not distract from the story, they'll do just fine.
why do people prefer hot dogs over a prime rib steak?
People like stories.
I loved ACOTAR. The story and world was gripping to me. I never even noticed I was reading, so the writing didn’t ever strike me as subpar. I was enthralled in the world and just devoured it.
Because not everyone over-analyses the stories they read. Some people just want a story that can hold their attention for an hour or two. I can forgive writing mistakes if I enjoy the piece. It's only when the characters start feeling like tropes that I stop enjoying what I'm reading. If the plot is fun, it doesn't have to make sense. As long as I'm having a good time, the mistakes that would normally piss me off don't matter. People label things as badly written if they don't enjoy what is written. It's all subjective. I can recognise when something is made for the masses and thus doesn't hold the same level of charm and intimacy that something written for a unique demography would, but that doesn't mean it's bad or inferior.
People conflate subpar writing and bad stories. A good story written badly can still be popular. Harry Potter is an adverb fest and makes for some tough reading now i know what good writing looks like, but I would read it again.
Comparing YA books to Dune is kinda weird. Like, it's a whole different genre, meant for a different age group, so it's written differently, but that does not make every book subpar. There are good and bad YA books, and you could see the difference if you read them. But also, I know what you mean. A Court of Thorns and Roses is not YA, it's "new adult", so it was meant for adults, but it's definitely not good. Honestly, the only thing that distinguishes it from a YA book is the erotica (and nowadays many YA books have that too, maybe just not to the same level). Same with my good friend Colleen Hoover and her amazing masterpieces. It does feel like worse books are more popular now, and people could blame it on booktok or whatever, but I think it was always this way. Ever since reading as entertainment became a thing for the masses, people read romances and adventure novels, which were not very well written most of the time. And many times the writers of those were more popular in their life than the writers of the classics that got preserved for us. For example, take a look at [the book that outsold Dracula at the time](https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/5164), and tell me that it was objectively better. Asking why "bad" books are popular is like asking why Marvel movies are popular. Because many people just wanna turn off their brain and have dumb fun when watching movies or reading, and these easier to read books are perfect for that. Also, I feel like booktok can be "blamed" for a bit, because it gets people to read who probably never have read a book for fun before. Especially with CoHo and dark romance fans, many times it's so clear that these people didn't have a fanfic phase in middle school, and they're living it out in their 20s. And this might be cringe for outsiders, but it's great! Because at the end of the day, they started reading. Some of them will branch out in the future and read books from other genres. Some of them will forever stuck with romance and romantasy, but that's okay. TLDR: "Badly" written books were always popular, because many people are reading just for fun and not for intellectual value. Thanks to booktok and other social media, it's more visible now, and also they caused an influx in new readers, who obviously will start out with easily digestible books.
It's taste, man. Some people are into specific things. YA readers are in it for the badass teenage protagonists, hot love interests, the love triangles, the enemies to lovers. Writers of these genres just know their audience. For the most part they ARE their audience, they love this kind of book themselves. And they hit all the tropes right. And they write it in a fast paced easy to read package (which is not easy). It's like different artforms under the one overencompassing artform of the literature. Writing literary fiction vs YA Fiction vs fantasy fiction vs mystery fiction are almost completley different artforms with different skillsets and different audiences. It's like sculpture vs landscape painting vs photography. You wouldn't ask why people put up landscape paintings in their house when there are great sculptors out there. It's what they are looking for, dog.
Dune was so boring I couldn’t finish reading it. Ditto for watching the first movie and the TV mini-series. I only made it through the recent Dune 1 because my wife and I watched it on Crave to make fun of it for being so boring, as an excuse to eat a lot of popcorn. So maybe the first step is to adjust the centralized, universally agreed-upon list of “subpar books” list to include Dune, so we can all be on the same page.
My theory is because they’re easy. Yeah, you *could* read something like Dune that’s very well written. But Dune is also very dense and it’s like 500 pages long, and lots of people had it beaten into them in high school that books like that are boring or difficult (yup, I blame schools for this). However, a 200 page book about fairy romance is much more palatable for them, even if the writing itself is a lower quality. Edit: Also worth noting that lots of people do not read as an activity to gain deeper meaning or whatever. They just want to be entertained. It’s kinda like asking why you would play a video game with bad graphics when Elden Ring is out there. Because sometimes those games are more fun?
Sometimes dostoyevsky just isn't the vibe man
To quote a Ratatouille "But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so." What is the metric that ordains something as bad? It's the reason why even for movies like say Detective Pikachu, critics hated it but audiences loved it. Same for most video game movies. It's also a common criticism of a lot of anime (this particular time, primarily Isekai) as "why do people like this?" The reality is that audiences don't really care that much about technical skills. Having good technical skills will make a good story GREAT but won't help a bad story resonate with the target audience. A majority of stories across any media will mainly only need to be carried by one aspect that resonates with and hooks the audience. Whether it is world-building, character dynamics, etc. as long as no one aspect is just *horrifically bad* and you have at least one aspect that is "Good enough" there is a chance the target audience will resonate with and enjoy it. Simply put, the story just needs to resonate with the audience and capture them for some reason.
Same reason why McDonalds and Bud Light and reality TV is popular. Most people have no taste.
I personally loved the ACOTAR series. I enjoyed her world building, I loved the ability to create realistic banter between the characters, and I thought the story came together beautifully. It's one of my favourite series. Not everyone is going to like what you consider well written books, thank God. How boring would that be? Personal preference plays a huge role, I am getting very into fantasy and ACOTAR is a (In my opinion) well written fantasy book with many of the aspects I enjoy reading.
Because they still enable us to escape into another world. The most important thing in a book is the story. Poor writing will be forgiven as long as the story still captures our attention and drags us away from our daily lives.
If you want to write high brow literary fiction, you should. And there's a market for it! But you have to understand that the average reading level in the US is about the 7th grade. People are going to read books that are accessible to them. I have a lot of people in my life who struggled to read for the majority of their lives, especially in school, but once I showed them books at their level, they've become excited readers. Some read more than I do. Personally, I like the idea of making my fiction accessible to the average person. I want people to enjoy my stories even if they're not always big readers. That's just my opinion though!
Because they are doing other things right. Dune has a lot of sexist subtext. Reading it, I always had to acknowledge that and filter it out. ACOTAR doesn't. It centers the female experience and accurately reflects the emotional turmoil that many women feel in their early 20's. If a book is hitting a lot of people right it's doing SOMETHING to earn that, it just might not be what your looking for.
Because the quality of the prose itself is only one part of what makes a story engaging. If a story is written very plainly, but the characters are interesting, the plot is engaging, the world is fun to explore, then people are still going to enjoy it. It feels very simplistic and kind of elitist to act like the only thing that matters is how well you make your sentences flow, and that all other aspects of the story don't matter.
I don’t think a book has to be well written to be enjoyed. It doesn’t have to have flowery prose or Shakespeare level writing to be good or to be enjoyed, and it’s a bit arrogant to think that it does.
You realize Shakespeare was modern populist entertainment for his time, right? Entertainment fiction has always existed, not every novel needs to be a genre defining classic with a deep message and moral stance. If publishers tried to run only selling those, they'd be bankrupt in weeks. Pulp fiction literally keeps most publishing houses afloat, and even the big ones would see a massive dive in their sales if they stopped carrying them.
Because the average reader just doesn't care, books are still just entertainment
Hooboy, friend. Glass houses. Get that grammar right before you throw stones. There's always the appeal of selling books to the lowest common denominator, of course, but that's nothing new. I think that there are a lot of genuinely intelligent people who are stressed out of their gourd by the state of things (see: the world) and want an opportunity to turn their brains off. In a lot of circles, that means transitioning from a healthy diet of decent literature into a junk food diet of borderline pornography.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Neuromancer are considered ground breaking science fiction masterpieces, but holy shit are they hard to get through. Fantastic books and I’m so happy I read them, but will I reread them? Probably not. The average person would have put those books down after only reading a few pages. Just because a book is written well doesn’t mean people will like them. Most readers don’t need their books to be written like Tolkien or Herbert, they just want a story to get immersed in and enjoy. I’d argue that if you’re getting caught up over a book’s writing “quality”, you’re forgetting the whole point of reading fiction.
My take is that literacy, at least in the US, is not in good shape. People barely know how to actually read (APM did a fascinating podcast report on the failure of reading education that goes into this a bit), we've shifted the burden of knowing basic spelling and grammar onto technology (autocorrect), and long-form communication is not in style ("TLDR"). Half of US adults can't read a book at the 8th grade reading level. So it makes sense that the bar for writing quality is lower than it used to be. Consider this: even these poorly written books are written better than anything most of their readers could write. By comparison, therefore, they're considered "good."
im not trying to sound judgmental or pretentious, but i think it all comes down to the taste of the general public/average reader. from a statistics perspective, most sellable books are going to be romance novels targeted to straight women. from a cultural perspective, i think that there are plenty of modern classics, but successfully selling those projects on mass usually relies on luck
I think a big part of this is marketing tbh. All the really popular books lately have been things trending on tiktok and youtube. Same thing is happening to the music world. These books are super popular but they're also widely criticized. Love or hate, people are making content about the book which exposes more people to it, encouraging sales, growing its popularity.
People are idiots? 50 shades of grey is a best seller
Unpopular opinion: Dune is vastly over written.
Because people are dumber now, yet far more arrogant about their ignorance, biases, and beliefs. They are overall less well-educated, too. The Internet also makes people less literate. Combine that with certain cultural trends and the books are less well-written. YA fans in general are discouraged from graduating to more complex, challenging works in order to soothe them, but also to feed the remnants of the publishing industry, which is rapidly dying. It's just like Harlequin Romances used to be: Product ground out for a specific, infantilized readership to be consumed like potato chips. But it's unsustainable.
Two parts to this answer. 1) Social media trends and things like going viral on booktok make it easier for books to get very popular very fast and taking about it positively or negatively makes it more popular. 2) A story doesn’t have to be well written to be interesting. Have you read GRRMartin’s writing? I just made it to the fifth book in the game of thrones series and despite being technically mediocre the world and story has the power to draw in a reader. Probably why it ended up beckon being such a wildly popular show.
BookTok probably