Writers are aware of how their work–not just their own work but work rather like theirs–is perceived, evaluated, and judged in the world.\u00a0 Writers–as shown by the current WGA strike–are not nearly as highly valued as they used to be, when fewer people could write but many wanted something to read.\u00a0 But this post isn’t about that–the overall devaluation writers across most fields have\u00a0 suffered in recent years.\u00a0 This is about how what people DO read is judged by those who claim the expertise to comment on it.\u00a0 As in most things, for many years white male writers were given a boost by reviewers and critics because they were the group that were “of course” doing the writing.\u00a0 But even then, even in the early days of published writing, there were distinctions.\u00a0 Serious people (scholars, academics, clerics) took some writing more seriously than others.\u00a0 Tragedy was ranked with in its own category from top to bottom (failed tragedies)\u00a0 but when compared with comedy…well, tragedy was *serious*.\u00a0 Comedy was just for laughs.\u00a0 No matter how good a writer of comedies, they would rank below tragedies.\u00a0 Romance in the *old* system (not love stories alone but covering the range now considered popular fiction)…travel stories, adventure stories, politically related stories…lay somewhere between the tragedies and the comedies, with a broad range of assumptions about the specific types.<\/p>\n
There were also assumptions about the readers: which were good readers, which were inferior readers wanting only entertainment, and which should not be reading at all (women: reading meant they weren’t working.\u00a0 O horrors!\u00a0 Girls lounging around reading stories instead of sewing, knitting, cooking, cleaning, weaving, embroidering, scrubbing things…)\u00a0\u00a0 Boys wanted to read entertainment (inferior) and adult men of sufficient quality wanted to read (paging rapidly past what they did read) SERIOUS writing about SERIOUS things like political theory, history, and serious things like accounting and mechanics.\u00a0 (Yes, this may be a simplification.)<\/p>\n
But publishing kept happening, and books became numerous enough, cheap enough, and soon writing wasn’t just one occupation but many.\u00a0 Within fiction, it developed quickly into various genres, and then (with the advent of review publications that claimed to divide the worthy from the unworthy)\u00a0 into genre snobbery.\u00a0 Snobbery runs both up and down, by the way.\u00a0 Some readers like one thing, others like another, and competing readerships (fandoms?) developed naturally.\u00a0 But the review publications and university professors continued to play gatekeeper to official approval: books were either in the canon or out, on the basis of what these gatekeepers decreed.\u00a0 Religious arbiters approved only books that accorded with their notions of what people *needed* to read. Improving fiction.\u00a0 Fiction that was designed to, and effective at, making its readers better (whatever better meant to that arbiter.)\u00a0 Academic arbiters approved books that were difficult, on the grounds that nobody had have the easy ones explained…which meant they were useless for the curriculum.\u00a0 C. S. Lewis, for instance, mocked this approach to deciding what books were “good” (needed explication or even “would never be read just for enjoyment.”)\u00a0 Over time, between the early-mid 19th c. and the early-mid 20th, when ballooned and so did reading as an approved recreation for more and more people,\u00a0 the emerging genres were judged firmly by the established arbiters: churches and professors.<\/p>\n
Serious fiction was approved.\u00a0 Serious fiction was, initially, all written by white men (women were too flighty to write it), and read by men, and appealed to men of sufficient education.\u00a0\u00a0 Occasionally a Black man might write serious fiction but if so it must not have any real connection to Black culture, because that wasn’t culture.\u00a0\u00a0 Women, if they wrote fiction, were assumed to be writing for women readers, and writing about “women’s issues” (family, home, babies, love stories: _Little Women_, or _Pride and Prejudice_, not for instance about politics, war, sex, travel, or “touchy-feely stuff.”\u00a0 Women DID write about male topics and sometimes got published and even read by men, but it was tough going.\u00a0\u00a0 A woman writing about “women’s issues” knew her work would be devalued, no matter how good the actual writing was.\u00a0\u00a0 It wasn’t “serious”. Family issues weren’t serious.\u00a0 Children weren’t serious.\u00a0 The work women did was not serious work, though of course they must be made to do it.<\/p>\n
Romance in the modern sense, love stories, stories about courtship and love in particular, were considered fit only for women to read, and suited to women writers.\u00a0 Since women–readers and writers–were not as important as men, any genre women read regularly–no matter how well-written–was not going to get favorable mention in the big reviews.\u00a0\u00a0 Men could indeed write about courtship and marriage–from a man’s perspective–and be considered serious as well as amazingly sympathetic (even when they weren’t.)\u00a0\u00a0 But the men who wrote romance-genre books for women to read used female pseudonyms.<\/p>\n
Now sticking an art form into a less-respected ghetto has the unfortunate effect of lessening its overall quality for some time, especially if it’s popular within its restricted reading group.\u00a0 “Westerns” and “romances” both declined in “average” quality from the first westerns and courtship stories by women that were published.\u00a0\u00a0 Because neither was well-respected, and there was a definable market, and there was no hope of a Pulitzer for either, publishers had no incentive to be over-choosy.\u00a0\u00a0 As a voracious and fast reader, I read some of both and quickly moved onto something more interesting because then–in the early to mid-50s–so many in each were just anemic versions of each other.\u00a0 Westerns held me a little longer because horses, but still they were all pretty much alike and the children’s book horse stories had more horse detail.\u00a0 By the time better writers got into both again, I was “past that” and have only in the past decade or so found that *some* romance books are really fun reads, with interesting characters doing interesting things in the context of a courtship.\u00a0 Apologies to the writers I missed out on, that I would have enjoyed.\u00a0 (Also I hated pink, for reasons, and all those pink covers…ick.)\u00a0 Multi[e genres: modern romances, science fiction, most of fantasy, westerns, thrillers, police procedural mysteries,\u00a0 anything that becomes “too popular,” will be excluded from consideration for “serious” literary study and awards consideration, while fiction that explores whatever is currently in vogue in academia will get a pass if it’s well-written enough.\u00a0\u00a0 There is always enough bad writing in anything called a genre to justify complaint. There is always, however, better writing, better characterization, more complex consideration of relevant issues, etc. than the bottom end.\u00a0 Readers of the genre past their first year of reading in it can tell the difference but will often read at least partway down into the depths because they’re interested in the topics, the type of story.<\/p>\n
Which brings up the other complication of genre writing.\u00a0\u00a0 If you like adventure stories, you want to read more adventure stories.\u00a0 If you like political intrigue stories, you want more of that.\u00a0 If you like stories of certain periods of history, or certain places or cultures in the world, or stories about particular occupations…you want more, and you will read more, and you will also avoid stories about those things that don’t interest you.\u00a0 For many readers, the *content* of the story is more important than the style.\u00a0 As a child I read every book in the town library about dogs and horses before I moved on to airplanes and spaceships (and kept reading about horses…)\u00a0\u00a0 I learned early that the quality of writing in horse stories goes from Kipling’s “The Maltese Cat” at the top to one of the later “Black Stallion? franchise ghost writers at the bottom (I forget the title, but it was the one about the Black Stallion’s filly-something and it was awful.\u00a0 The original Black Stallion<\/em> book wasn’t superbly great prose, but it also did not suck…it was lively, colorful, interesting, exciting in places, competent and consistent.\u00a0 Later…no.)\u00a0\u00a0 Higher up than Walter Farley as horse writers were Marguerite Henry and Dorothy Lyons…and a few others.\u00a0 But nothing, initially, would get me to read E.B. White’s _Stewart Little_ or the one about the spider and the pig.\u00a0\u00a0 I discovered E.B. White as a writer with his book on Arthur, because I was already hooked on that mythology.\u00a0 Subject matters intensely to many readers.\u00a0\u00a0 I liked Nevil Shute a lot but not his most famous book, On the Beach<\/em>…my favorite was Trustee From the Toolroom<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 I was hooked on Steinbeck all one summer (my mother had a row of his paperbacks) but left him forever with The Winter of Our Discontent<\/em>.\u00a0\u00a0 I liked spy stories, mysteries, thrillers (Helen MacInnes, then a bestseller of many good ones), stories of people doing things more than musing about life.\u00a0 I’m not blind or deaf to style, but it’s not what I notice first very, VERY good or pretty bad.\u00a0\u00a0 This means that I tolerate some pedestrian writing because it’s about something that interests me,\u00a0 and toss other fiction for pedestrian writing because I do not ever want to see another story about young men angsting about how much sex they’re not getting (or getting.)<\/p>\n So judging by the reader I know best (myself) who has read widely from ancient classics to books out in the last few years, who used to be able to zip through 2-3 paperbacks a day (Dick Francis, for instance…then suddenly you *know* that author’s style and sense of structure so well that you pick up the next book and know on which page a horse will die, someone important to the main character will be threatened or injured, and …so on.)\u00a0\u00a0 I’m not a one trick reader…and I know how I react to topics, styles, attitudes…etc.\u00a0\u00a0 Judging by that, other people are also affected by all these aspects of a book: its cover, the writer’s first page, the writer’s sense of structure and how much “stuff” goes into each part of the book, the writer’s choice of and handling of different characters, the writer’s assumptions about people, the writer’s complete style right down to the punctuation….and every other thing I’ve mentioned.\u00a0\u00a0 At root, all judgments on books are opinions.\u00a0\u00a0 A non-native speaker can write a fascinating book for some native speakers, or can write a book that other native speakers drop after the first paragraph.\u00a0 A book hooks you, glues you to the page, drags you along will-he, nill-he, until either you finish it with a great sense of having had a wonderful time…or not.\u00a0\u00a0 All whole-genre judgments reflect a lack of experience in that genre, because no genre is homogeneous.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s not worth arguing with the academics, though, because they won’t listen until they fall in love with a writer hidden in that room and come out all enthusiastic and eager to tell their colleagues.\u00a0 Let them find their special places in your favorite genre on their own.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Writers are aware of how their work–not just their own work but work rather like theirs–is perceived, evaluated, and judged in the world.\u00a0 Writers–as shown by the current WGA strike–are not nearly as highly valued as they used to be, when fewer people could write but many wanted something to read.\u00a0 But this post isn’t Read More…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[59,60,10],"tags":[17,7],"class_list":["post-1519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-life-beynd-writing","category-other-writers","category-the-writing-life","tag-life-beyond-writing","tag-the-writing-life"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1519"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1520,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1519\/revisions\/1520"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/elizabethmoon.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}