More Duds (great failures part two)
Books, like food, come in all flavors and not everyone has the same taste. Likewise, a movie critic may not share your sensibilities, and a wine critic may have opposite tastes. So how do you choose what to read? These days we’re lucky, because instead of just one critic, or one best-seller list, we can read dozens of reviews by readers. As an indie writer, it’s easy to become discouraged. Your work doesn’t pass through traditional gatekeepers (agent and editor) who serve to weed out the chaff. So the only way to know if your book is kernel or chaff is to put it out in the marketplace and let readers vet or reject it. It’s easy to doubt yourself.
Then you come upon famously awarded books that are so bad that you can’t help but feel your book is better. At times like these, you realize that the critic who pronounced that book a work of genius, was either drunk or smoking some bad weed. What else could account for such drivel. I’ll give you three examples that I bring to mind whenever I doubt the value of my own work. The first is James Jones’s National Book Award winning From Here to Eternity, which wraps poor writing around the story of a loser who makes all the wrong choices and dies for nothing. Then there’s John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, a parody of Victorian hysteria and sexual repression, where the narrator occasionally steps into the picture and reminds you that it’s small make believe and nothing to be excited about. Not to be outdone by Katherine Anne Porter’s Ship of Fools which, though well-written, presents a cast of such despicable characters that you can’t help but hope the ship will sink and take all of them to the bottom so you can be rid of them for good.
As a reader, you always have the option of bailing out before the crash, but a lot of us keep reading with the misplaced optimism that a satisfying ending will save an otherwise hollow story.
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