DD Holley, there's a blog, (no longer being updated but still there) called Miss Snark which has an enormous amount of useful information on finding an agent and publisher. At one point as a project I went through and created an index for the blog by topic. It's at http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com/2007/09/truly-garagantuan-miss-snark-index-post.html There's also a partial index of writing topics for this site that I put together at: http://wyrdsmiths.blogspot.com/2007/10/writers-index-to-making-light.html
I find myself leaning toward Abi's position as well for the reasons Bruce Baugh sites, though I have a great sympathy with heresiarch's position on the absolute value of free speech--perhaps because I am writer by vocation, perhaps because there are certain places where I feel the libertarians have a point.
I suspect that a huge part of the problem in the USA has to do with the ever-increasing legal equivalence between individual rights and corporate rights. The supreme court's treatment of corporations as though they were people (which looks as though it is about to be expanded) is, IMO, poisonous to the body politic.
Immortal, amoral, collective entities created solely for the pursuit of profit are fundamentally/=people and should not have the same rights. Pretending that the speech of these entities--who typically have vastly greater resources than individuals--is somehow legally equivalent to individual speech has had an incredibly distorting effect on our culture.
John Stanning @ 423 At a guess, it's happening the science blogs realms where Greg and Steph* are both large presences, though it might also be in the skepchicks or other rationalists blogospheres.
*Note, both are friends of mine in the F2F world.
I should not have looked back in. ^%%*&! &&*^&*! &%*&&^!
Abi @ 736 Thank you, it was keeping me up at night and making my stomach hurt. Unfortunately, so does leaving post 735 unanswered.
Raine @ 722 it wasn't you, thank you for the concern, it's appreciated.
Nicole J. LeBoeuf-Little @ 735 I agree with you completely in 95 cases out of every hundred, have qualifiers for 4, and find it potentially poisonous in 1.
Case 1, Brain surgeons, check.
Case 95 Bridge builders, check.
Case 96 Picking out books, depends. Does the expert's taste agree with mine. If not, then the expert may be useless to me. Someone who has read five books but likes what I like may well be more valuable to me then someone who has read 10,000 but hates the things I like.
Case 97, deciding about installing seat belts in cars, depends. What are the priorities of the expert? Cost? Safety?
Case 98 Smoking policy in bars. What constitutes an expert? Bar owners? Smokers? Public health experts?
Case 99 Experts in making the machinery of Washington do what they want it to do. Al Gore is one such expert. So is Dick Cheney. Expertise isn't the only thing that matters in this decision. So does agenda.
Case 100 Voting. What sort of expertise limitation shall we place on who is allowed to vote?
Expertise is incredibly valuable in most things most of the time. The closer something is to purely objective and to having one correct answer, the more expertise is a clear cut advantage. The more it is subjective and there are competing answers the fuzzier it gets.
I'm going to withdraw from this discussion thread at this point for reasons of mental health. I apologize to anyone who would like to continue to debate the point with me. If we are ever in the same place at the same time at a con or in some other venue where there are secondary social cues I would be willing to take it up again in person, but I find that this discussion in this format is becoming a truly brutal drag on my general well being. Again, my apologies.
Avram at 722, hooray! I would be delighted if the conversation moved that way. I really don't think good/bad is a very useful tool, and I've certainly come to regret commenting on it in the first place.
Wesley @ 719 When it comes to discussing books, I'm not sure this is a harmful thing to privilege--breadth of reading broadens readers' tastes (or at least helps them understand their existing tastes better by giving them additional points of reference), expands their minds, informs their opinions, and exposes them to a wide variety of viewpoints, cultures, styles, and kinds of writing.
I'm not sure it's harmful either but it's a point to be aware of. I'm perfectly willing to say that it gives you better perspective on some things, but I also think there's an enormous amount to be learned from the kind of books that bring in inexperienced readers, many of which seem to come in for an awful lot of bashing from more experienced readers—for example Dan Brown or Robert James Waller—and from the perspectives of readers who will only pick up the best sellers. If I could bottle some of that and add it to the books that I love that are perhaps less commercially successful, I think it would be a wonderful thing. Both because it would improve the health of publishing and because more people reading more is an admirable goal in itself.
Tim Walters @ 714,
Once again, given a choice of trying to create or proclaim a quality metric that is supposed to be objective vs. not doing so, I would opt for not.
If forced to pick one however, I am just as happy to go for sales figures as a measure of quality as I am to cede the decision to a privileged class as has so often been the case in the past with things like college reading curricula, which have quite often been used to, in your words, "grant more power to those who already have the most." One of the reasons I'm really not a big fan of trying to claim objectivity about the quality of art is for exactly that reason.
Personally, when I teach writing I try to choose stories that I know well and that I can use to illustrate what I see as successes and failures at specific aspects of writing craft, but I try never to make broad claims that the stories I have chosen are objectively good.
Apropos of the good vs. bad thread Justine Larbalestier is talking about reviewers and good vs. bad vs. opinion.
Leah Miller @ 707,
First, apology cheerfully accepted and my own tendered as well. I very clearly failed to convey what I meant when I said that I agreed with you, and did so in a way that was offensive, mea maxima culpa.
Your proposed system would be, I think, better than most in terms of reliability of results for recommending books. My two caveats would be that it still strikes me as primarily a measure of opinion and there's an underlying privileging of breadth of reading as expertise that makes me a little uneasy.
John A Arkansawyer @ 692
That sounds like the good/evil debate as opposed to the good/bad debate and it's one I'm not really interested in arguing beyond noting that I find the idea of good and evil expressed through art to be as reasonable an idea as I find good and evil—which is to say, it depends on how you define good and evil.
Leah Miller @ 699
Could we avoid the putting of words in my mouth, please? This is not true: You would argue that Charlotte Bronte's books are better than Anne's because they are more famous.
I won't argue that anything is objectively good* or more good than something else. What I will argue is that if you must come up with a metric for whether something is good, popularity is as reasonable as any other metric and that it at least has the value of being measurable and democratic. Full stop.
Am I always happy with the results of democratically held elections? No, absolutely not. There are many times when I feel that the results are significantly worse than if the other candidate has won. Does that mean I would choose to abandon democracy? No. It is the least bad system we've yet devised for governing ourselves. Come up with something better and I will happily sign up.
Likewise, I am not always happy with the results of the best seller lists. Some books I love vanish. Some books I loathe thrive. Take Avram's example above of LotR vs. Shannara. I like LotR much more but I know people who found Shannara to be a great, fun read and LotR to be tedious and dull, and that's okay. It's even okay if (as much as I would find it regrettable) over time it turns out that Shannara has more staying power.
My central point is that when you get into ostensibly objective statements about the quality of art you are getting into the business of making tools that have been used in some very dubious ways over the years. Such statements make me nervous because they are easily used as clubs. I have been hit in the forehead with the literary fiction=good genre fiction=bad, people who read literary fiction=good people who read genre fiction=bad club often enough that I find I have no taste for building clubs of my own.
*for values of good/bad, good/evil is a whole different discussion and one that's tangential to the discussion at hand.
Tim Walters @ 686 which is the way I talk about books generally as noted at 674. I have no objections whatsoever to talking about books that way. What I objected to was what looked like a claim that implied good or bad is an objective term.
Avram, @ 688 I certainly like the Lord of the Rings better, but I am not willing to say that what I like is or should be the primary arbiter of what is good. I'd be delighted to talk about why I like the Lord of the Rings more or things that it did more effectively. It's the whole good/bad thing and who gets to say which is which that I am leery of, in part because historically it's often been a tool the privileged use to maintain privilege.
Leah Miller @ 690 That's my point, that popularity is as valid a measure of good or bad as any other, i.e. that none of them are very good but at least this one can be measured making it possibly the least bad. At another level, popularity over time is going to be the only measure that ultimately matters and that irregardless of intrinsic value. The stuff that stays popular will survive. The rest won't.
Avram @ 675. My contention isn't that it's necessarily the ideal way to judge quality, only that it is quite possibly the least bad way to judge quality of the ways that are currently available. I am also perfectly open to the idea that the voting (sales) remains open for some period of time longer then the first three weeks something is on the shelf. In point of fact, I would be perfectly happy to concede that it's possible that one doesn't definitively know anything about the quality of a book until decades or even centuries after initial publication. Heck that gives me more hope that my stuff will someday be considered the epitome of quality.
David Harmon @ 670: the flip side of "who decides what makes it good?" is "good for who?"
Ooh, excellent point. There's some pretty objective data in there to if you can get access to it.
Marginally related note: generally, when I talk books with people I tend to talk about what I like, and what I think a book did successfully in terms of craft in my opinion. I always try to make sure that I'm talking about things in terms of my values not absolute values because I've too often been in conversations where one person or another has used "good" or "bad" as a club to try to impose their tastes as the standard of taste.
Wesley @ 671 The bestseller lists don't appear to me to support that argument. Instead they appear to support the argument that there's absolutely no correlation at all, positive or negative, between sales and quality.
Again, that depends on your metric of quality. If brings the greatest pleasure to the greatest number of readers is your metric, there's likely a very strong correlation between quality and sales.
Or, more simply, the power to arbitrate what is good and bad in a culture is a power that has been used in some very disturbing ways over the years, and thus it's something I want to be very careful about. It may well be that the least bad way to make those decisions is by vote by sales. I don't know for sure, and that one certainly has some personal downsides considering my own mid-list status.
Wesley @ 663. Point the first: Very simply. Here is the original statement:
The thing is, there are books that are bestsellers because they're good, but there is also a large field of books which achieve sales by, well, pushing people's buttons.
Which suggests that pushing people's buttons is objectively not good. Now, whether I agree with that statement or not, there is an inherent assumption within the statement that the person making it is qualified to say whether something is objectively good or not independent of anyone else's standards. David Harmon later notes that anyone can say something is good or bad but that getting others to agree with them is the problem. Now, there are absolutely some subsets of good that fit David's criteria, but I'm not willing to concede that those subsets are necessarily more valid than the mass vote of the readers that made those books into best sellers. What really made me decide to respond though was this bit:
The classic "pattern" romances are the traditional example of this, but they appear in every field -- books that don't really add anything new, just provide the superficial appearance and tropes of the current "fad". because of the mention of romance.
It's a half step from saying formulaic or light is not as good as a darker ending to one of the traditional attacks made on f&sf by those who prefer literary fiction, i.e. that lit fic is more real and more serious and thus inherently better than other genres.
More disturbingly, it also echoes the serious fiction/realist fiction argument that has been made by chauvinist academics and critics to devalue Romance in specific and more generally women's fiction and women authors as writing less important works because they don't hew to a maximally realist line.
Now, I don't think for a moment that's what David Harmon was trying to do, but the fact that to me those arguments seem to partake of some of the same assumptions is one of the things that makes me very leery of absolute statements of good and bad in art.
Point the second: You'll note that I didn't say that the number of votes/sales a book gets is a better measure of good, just "the number of votes a book gets in the terms of sales is every bit as reasonable a measure of a book's quality as that it is loved by critics, or by the people who I trust to recommend books that I like."
As to Is it arguable that Jane Cable by George Barr McCutcheon and The Wheel of Life by Ellen Glasgow are as good as Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth? I can't say whether I would personally enjoy one more than the other having read none of them, but am I willing to say that better sales might well mean that by some standards the books are better? Absolutely. That's the point of the sale metric as one measure of good.
Point the third: There's no objective standard, but that doesn't mean that there are no standards, or that a culture can't come to a rough and imperfect consensus about them, or that it's never productive or interesting to debate standards and whether particular books measure up.
Absolutely. I rather thought that was what I was doing proposing a standard that is more subject to real measurement than some of the more subjective ones.
Really, at root, my issue is that "good" is a really really slippery term. What I think is good does not necessarily equal what someone else thinks is good. When you say book X is not a good book, I have no way of determining whether I would agree with that statement unless I've read the book or you tell me what about it makes it not a good book by your standards in a fairly high degree of detail. If we discuss books a lot I can over time come to build a model in my head of what good means to you and judge from there, but until that relationship is built it's not of itself a terribly useful term, whereas bestseller at least gives me some genuine point of measure.
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