The other day I went to get my hair cut. My new stylist is about thirty, with a loud, infectious laugh and an endearing way of drawing out your shy writer-type with a series of questions that showed she was paying attention to the answers. I was so flattered by the whole conversation that I ended up buying three products I didn’t need and booking my next appointment six weeks out. She’s working one hell of a business model.
Anyway, when she heard I was a writer (yeah, I can’t believe I said it either), and that I’d written a sexy psycho-thriller (I know, I’m telling you the girl is good), she said, as she wrapped my wet head and shuttled me from bowl to chair: Have you read . . . You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?
Ah yes. The Fifty Shades conversation.
She swears, she resisted for a long time, but then her best friend recommended the books, and her sister, and everyone at the salon, and her fourth cousin once removed who dropped like a plum from the family tree just for the privilege of recommending these books, until finally my new friend succumbed.
She asked me what I thought, and I asked her what she thought, and then she grinned and said, You first. I told her I haven’t read the books, only excerpts which were enough to turn me off. I may have moaned something about, The writing! The writing! She seemed puzzled by this. What about the writing? It’s silly, I pleaded, riddled with cliché. The inner goddess? The unsexy sex? The millionaire and the virgin?
She nodded thoughtfully. Yes, she did understand, sort of. It’s as if your girlfriend is telling you a story. 
Uncomplicated, confiding, and often inadvertently funny.
We talked about it for a while. I was interested to hear what she loved so much about the books. It’s the sex, of course. The campiness of the writing renders the topic safe for public consumption. It’s the cotton-candy ease of the read (stick your tongue out, little girl). It’s the zeitgeist, the groupthink, the weight of one’s peers. The books are right for the times and no amount of dissection can fully explain why.
But for me the most interesting takeaway from this conversation was the way she’d received my judgement on the quality of the writing. It was clearly the first time anyone had said to her, These books are poorly written. In all the conversations she’s had (probably with every female client), the topic of craftsmanship had never come up. It was uninteresting to her, as topics go. I felt like a vegan trying to spread the gospel of sprouts.
I think we’re alone now, writer-friends. We’re writing for each other.
Does craftsmanship even matter?
It makes me sad that she didn’t notice how crappy the writing was. Is it only other writers that notice? I bitch and moan when other writers go on about the golden rules of writing (show, don’t tell specifically), and to hear a reader say she didn’t even notice it wasn’t done is like a knife to the heart. My sadness morphs into anger because I wonder if people even recognize quality? Aside from one or two scenes, the sex was unarousing and uninspiring. How are people lapping that up? I’ve read better erotica in kindle singles 10K words or less. Dear reader, stop encouraging people to write poorly. E. L. Isn’t your bff. If you want girl talk, read her diary. She’s like reality Tv, bad in a way that’s fascinating, but brain cell rotting.
Now I’m indignant and angry. This is not the place to vent though… apologies.
This is absolutely the place to vent, as evidenced by your angsty hostess.
It occurs to me that maybe these are inexperienced readers, with little basis for comparison. I thought the first book I’d written was the bomb-diggity at the time, and now I look at it and cringe, and wonder what on earth I was thinking.
That’s possible. The more I write, the more I recognize good writing. I guess it’s what the reader wants as well. Sometimes technique matters little when you’re wanting to be titillated. I’d think readers wise up as they continue to read the same author, but maybe not.
YES (I can’t type this loud enough) it matters. It matters it matters it matters.
When you buy furniture. When you get a great haircut. When you go out to eat. When you find the most perfect pair of handmade earrings. Craftsmanship is all that matters because whatever it is we do, if we’re doing what we’re here to do, the craftsmanship of it stands both for the worth of the thing and the person who crafted it.
That being said, I’m going to offer a theory on the 50 shades, (as if the blogosphere needs another one).
A couple weeks ago, I spent the evening with six other women from my neighborhood. We were celebrating a b-day get together at a place that offers a 2-hour painting course along with wine and cheese. You show up, pay your fee ($29) and they give you a canvas, an apron, some paint brushes, and a piece of cardboard to pump your acrylic paint onto. (Above the paint table, there were instructions for how many “pumps” from the gallons sized jugs of paint, you were supposed to take.) You got your drinks and took your stool with your mini-easel in front of you while the instructor led the class through steps 1 through whatever to paint the portrait of the night.
First, let me just say that I couldn’t do it. As soon as the instructor starting leading people through what to paint, “You’re going to take a liberal amount of the yellow and mix it with your white paint…” I was off in my own direction painting my own thing.
The most interesting/maddening thing to me were the women I was with and women at the other tables who were filled with fear about making their first strokes on the canvas. In my group alone, all of the women made a point of saying how, “…scared they were,” they would mess up.
I could barely stand it. “We’re fucking painting pictures!” I thought. The whole point is to make a mistake.
It occurred to me that night, that what I take for granted, the freedom to follow this drive of mine, to write, is extremely freeing. These women were too scared to put a paint brush to canvas. Can you imagine their fear when admitting what they like and don’t like? To drift away from the norm?
Anyway, I think the 50 Shades has somehow become a vehicle for many, many woman who are…scared. It’s now a common thread through our collective conscious that is opening a door for them. Through this book, simply by saying they liked it, they can admit to all the scary things that feel good. Things they weren’t allowed to say before.
And while I am with you on the craftsmanship, I have respect for anyone who can earn a living churning out words.
That’s a really good point. We’re all a bunch of freaks. Men have known this about themselves for time immemorial, but woman are only beginning to figure it out.
It’s all about story, for most readers. Just because it’s about language AND story for some of us isn’t necessarily sad.
This is the way it works: story, story, story.
I’ve made my peace with it.
I’m totally with you on the idea that story trumps everything else. I write genre fiction, I believe in the power of the story. And I don’t even mind the huge success of these books so much as I mind the fact that people are not aware of what they’re reading. It’s one thing to eat a puff of cotton candy and enjoy it–hell, knock yourself out if that’s what you’re in the mood for–but to give no thought whatsoever to the pure-sugar content is bewildering to me as a writer. I’d hoped it was a deliberate wink on the part of the reader: Yeah, I know this is crap but what of it?
Now it seems as if that wink was a grain of sugar in her eye.
In the end, I think craftsmanship only really matters to the craftsman, and to other craftsman of similar ilk. It’s a losing game to try to try understand why certain poorly written books burn through the literary firmament like meteors while other beautifully crafted gems are never unearthed from the schist.
I have always been about the cult following. Maybe that’s the same thing as writing for other craftsmen, in that you know from the outset who your readership will be and who’s not gonna dig your book.
I’d like to ask: is there anyone here who’s had a haircut or color in the last couple of months who HASN’T had this conversation in the salon? * ugh *
The first time my stylist asked about Fifty Shades, I said I’d read a few pages online and that it wasn’t for me. She said, “I didn’t like it either! I couldn’t figure out what everybody was talking about!”
Yea! A connection!!!!
Then she started describing the story and I asked her to show me the book on her Kindle. She had the wrong book. She’d been reading “Fifty Shades” by somebody else. We had a good laugh, but alas …. while the color cooked my gray hair back to brown, she went right on-line and ordered the REAL Fifty Shades. So excited, she was.
I’m really looking forward to my next haircut.
Snort. Just when you thought you’d found a kindred spirit.
Teri, How totally funny that she had the wrong book. My boyfriend’s mother was supposed to be reading one of my books on her Kindle. He asked what she thought and she said, “I just couldn’t read something with all that stuff about diarrhea.” He and I looked at each other and burst out laughing. Diarrhea? Huh? She has a wee problem in that area, and she’s 87 years old, so I think she fell asleep while reading the beginning of the book and then dreamed it was about her problem. Which is (did I mention this?) DIARRHEA. I’m a little insulted and greatly amused.
We’re having a very similar conversation/debate over at my blog, and I’d say the opinions are pretty evenly split between “damn right it matters” and “let the tastes of the mob rule” (my interpretation of course). Yeah, people want story. Craftsmanship? Mostly they don’t care; wouldn’t know it if they saw it; just want to be entertained. As writers we have to accept that and decide which audience we’re writing for. Which matters most, art or sales?
I’m not sure I agree that we have to–or, more accurately, are able to–choose between art and sales. I believe I’m writing for the reader every time I sit down. That’s the point. It’s not to satisfy some rarefied artistic impulse, but to connect with another person, to tell a STORY. However, our voices and sensibilities are so deeply ingrained that I tend to think we’re stuck with them, and the outcome will be whatever it is.
I say we all just read the damn thing and get it over with.
The book is creeping me out. I can’t even get a shower curtain at Target without catching it lurking on every other endcap. It’s a fucking stalker, that book.
It matters. To me. I’m not reading 50 Shades. I want you to be my first.
I wish I could promise to be gentle with you.
XO
You never read Anaïs Nin, MDSB? The Story of O? Marguerite Duras? Let me guess, you didn’t go to Catholic school, did you? Averil, what about you?
I detested The Story of O, but thought Anaïs Nin was wonderful. Such a voice.
No Catholic school for me, though I’ll admit to a penchant for knee socks.
I read Delta of Venus and thought it was pretty sloppily crafted. It was a privately commissioned work. Apparently the instructions she received from the client were not to concern herself overmuch with craft, but rather just to get the fuckin’n'suckin’ down.
I’ve never read any erotica. Sad, right?
No. You’re a classy chick, you are.
»Ours is the first age in history which has asked the child what he would tolerate learning . . .
»In other ages the attention of children was held by Homer and Virgil, among others, but by the reverse evolutionary process, that is no longer possible; our children are too stupid now to enter the past imaginatively. No one asks the student if algebra pleases him or if he finds it satisfactory that some French verbs are irregular, but if he prefers Hersey to Hawthorne, his taste must prevail.
»I would to put forward the proposition, repugnant to most English teachers, that fiction, if it is going to be taught in the high schools, should be taught as a subject and as a subject with a history.«
—Flannery O’Connor
I think readers have always delighted in bad books; the difference is that they used to be educated, early in life, to have a basis for comparison. Then you could enjoy crap because it was crap. Now, anything goes, because at least they’re reading.
The rest of the essay is brilliant and accessible here: http://georgiabulletin.org/local/1963/03/21/a/
I’ve been guilty of the ‘at least they’re reading’ mentality myself, because after a while you become so desperate to see noses in books that it almost doesn’t matter.
It’s been decades since I was in high school, but I seem to remember getting some decent instruction. Don’t English teachers follow a curriculum?
Thank you, T-P, for the link. I went there and read it before I continued here.
I keep thinking about this scene from Little Children.
Meaning that, women are somehow finding Fifty Shades “acceptable” reading, “acceptable” thought, “acceptable” conversation.
Soon we’ll all find ourselves hanging from the ceiling fan, choking on a ball gag, cursing that E.L. James to the fiery depths of hell.
(This scene makes me crave a Kate Winslet marathon.)
(And I want to slap the shit out of that blonde chick.)
Me, too, about the Winslet marathon, slapping the smug blonde chick and the whole “acceptable” business. I feel that way about the supposedly polite boobs versus breasts debate, and the vajayjay(?) versus vagina one. I don’t want to use the “acceptable” euphemisms for my body parts. I want to talk about real sex and desire without worrying that I’m scaring people (including myself.) I’m a woman who knows what I want from sex and from my life. I shouldn’t have to hide that fact behind a giggle and a vacuous, poorly written book in order to accept myself that way.
I want to read what YOU write Averil. I was born in the fifties and I’m still a little scared to actually speak the down and dirty, but I’m tired of the trap of not doing it.
I’m shaking now because I think I actually might press “post comment.”
“I shouldn’t have to hide that fact behind a giggle and a vacuous, poorly written book in order to accept myself that way.”
Well said. Still, I suppose it’s a place to start.
Yes, Teri. This is one of my favorite movies AND books, both. And I love this scene. Just the sanctimonious looks on those women’s faces. Bliss.
Too true, Averil. I’ve had a similar conversation with my hairdresser about books and writing. He too goes for the content, what I call the MacDonalds of writing, the junk food quality filled with fats, salt and sugar and disregards the sprouts and good health of craftsmanship.
I wonder what men talk about when they’re getting a haircut. Anyone?
Depends.
No, I don’t mean we talk about “Depends.” I should say, for me, it depends. Times when I was wearing the skinhead look, I either cut my hair myself, during which procedure I said nothing, or I had a barber do it. He and I didn’t talk much. Other men in the barbershop talked a little more, but it was exactly what you might think they talked about: family, politics, the economy, and sports.
Often I’ve also gone to stylists, most frequently the same one, who has been cutting my hair off and on since the mid-90s. We’ve shared a lot about our lives during our cutting conversations. We’re almost cousins to each other, given how long we’ve known each other and all we’ve talked about: family, politics, the economy, and the artsy writerly life.
Yes, craftmanship matters. No, not in the way we all hope.
I just spent ten minutes vacillating between ‘as if’ and ‘as though’. Surely it doesn’t matter that fucking much.
Only if what you’re trying to say doesn’t matter that much. There’s a point of diminishing returns when striving to find the right word/phrase/sentence, but that’s craft.
It matters as fucking much as you want it to matter. Money is in closing the sale, but art is in the details. And communicating clearly is a writer’s job, even if the pay sucks.
I am comforted in my neuroses. (As if. Definitely.)
I decided to lead with this instead of making it a PS: When you first wrote about that book, I found sample chapters from some sci-fi book with the same name without realizing it was the wrong one. Now that I really have read some the book everyone’s talking about, I’m even more apalled for the same reasons you mentioned.
I’m so scared by the craftsmanship question. I think good reviewers think about the writing as much as we do, but their parts of newspapers and magazines are being stripped and whittled down by popular publications to the point where it seems many of them aren’t talking about the writing anymore, but just about the plot, in order to keep hold of what’s left of their salaries.
Last Saturday the young acquaintance who missed the drink event invited me to lunch to apologize. She asked me about my blogs, which she still hadn’t visited yet. When I told her how much I’ve learned about writing in the past couple of years, she looked a little strange, then told me how she’s always wanted to be a writer but hasn’t had the time. I was surprised and asked how long she’d been writing. She said she hasn’t written anything yet, but so many things have happened in her life (she chuckled there) that she could really write some good ones. This is only the most recent instance I’ve experienced of this sort of thing.
I think well-crafted writing is something many people don’t notice and aren’t taught to notice anymore. If a book is well-written with a good plot, they only notice the plot or the fun, and think anyone with the same idea could have written it just as well.
This time I didn’t read the other comments (I’ll have to come back later.) Sorry if I repeated a point that was already similarly made.
After watching the recent reality series about ad agencies on AMC, I think I’m going to have to seriously look into advertising, even though the lying hurts my soul. I can at least prove that I’m capable of saying lots of things in very few words. And I’ve decided that I really do deserve the opportunity to earn a salary.
I try to drag everyone I know into writing, so your young friend would have gotten the hard sell from me. My strategy is to spread the word that writing is hard work and a writer deserves that $12.99, a lesson I believe is most effectively taught by experience. It’s a slow-moving revolution, the streets filled with the twitching carcasses of the exhausted and their poor, neglected pages.
I left out a lot of the conversation where I was encouraging her because I thought she was serious. From the looks she gave me, I’m sure she’ll be the kind of writer who thinks anything she writes is wonderful.
My WordPress iPod app holds onto some pages after I leave coffeeshops with wifi, so she got her first look at a bit of WOH. She didn’t even attempt a wan smile. She simply didn’t understand that trying to write well is hard work. No one has to care about mine, but I’m scared by the number of young people I’ve met who are truly resistant to the idea of writing being a respectable and difficult thing to do.
She’s studying hard to be a dentist, so I think writing could be something she tries at a much older age, if at all. She’s a nice person at heart, but after the week I’ve had, I’m determined to break my habit of befriending (and encouraging) people who don’t think of openness and understanding as reciprocal things. I’m too weary to spur them to those “poor, neglected pages.” Though I would love to be there when it happens to them.
It’s hard to take anyone seriously when they claim to want to write. Show me the blood first, and the clumps of missing hair, and the gnawed-off fingernails . . .
Speaking of which, where oh where is our darling Tetman?
Averil, I was in Santa Fe all day with my darling Susan, drinking iced chais and visiting galleries where paintings and sculptures were offered for sale at prices that could purchase significant chunks of artistic freedom. What most of the artworks had in common was they were well-crafted.
What a lovely day, it makes me happy to think of you and Susan with your chais. Please tell me you held her hand. Drew always races ten yards ahead of me and I slow down in retaliation, as if the distance between us was my idea. (Yes, I reached emotional maturity at age 13.)
Averil, yes, Susan and I do usually hold hands while we walk. We even often hold hands while we fall asleep.
Not while we drive, though–it’s a stick-shift.
And yesterday we took the train to and from Santa Fe. We didn’t hold hands on the train. We’re not kids.
»Drew always races ten yards ahead of me and I slow down in retaliation, as if the distance between us was my idea«
It may be your hubby who’s 13, as is mine. He used to always outpace me, and I, feeling like I should be wearing a burqa, would call out, “Yo! Mahmood.” He got the idea and stopped. I’m bitchy that way.
I wonder why it always comes down to art vs. sales. Why versus? Why not an ampersand? I’m waiting for someone to do both– write something fabulously beautiful that everyone wants to read. Nabokov did it with Lolita. Who else did it all? Maybe the next one will be you, Averil.
Maybe it will be YOU, Anna.
Stephen King gets my vote. Not as fancy as Nabokov, but the guy can write his ass off and he always has a story to tell.
I’m with you on Stephen King. Fantastic writer.
I’m also chiming in in agreement regarding Stephen King. His work is not to my taste so I’ve read very little of it, but what I’ve read was brilliantly done.
I hope craftsmanship means something, or I’ve been dicking around with the WIP for three years for nothing. Except, even if it doesn’t, I can’t bring myself to believe I have.
I know. I know.
On what men talk about when getting a haircut.
We don’t want to hear all that shit. That’s why barbers still exist. They do haircuts, and charge for haircuts, and don’t waste your energy or their own shitting on about nothing to lull you into buying 3 products you don’t need.
Actually, I say fuck barbers, and when I do decide to cut my hair, which is not often, I do it myself. And I don’t talk to me while doing it, although occasionally I start laughing. I’m no hairdresser.
King and Nabokov both get my vote. Stephen King wasn’t the first to say it, but subscribes to “kill your darlings”, but Nabokov, on the first page of Lolita, tells us “You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style.”
Of course craftsmanship matters. But not to everybody.
I’d lay down good money to watch you cut your own hair, Mr iPants. Bet you a tenner you talk to yourself while you’re at it.
It’s possible. But at least I don’t pick up a fucking mirror and make myself look at the back of my own head and neck. I mean, who wants to see that? Maybe if I had a neck like Rachel Ward… or Ms iSkirt… hey, I just realised Ms iSkirt is a bit like Rachel Ward. What was I talking about again? I think I’d better go cut my hair, I need someone to talk to.
Sharpen up the poultry shears, Ms iSkirt, he’s going in!
Craftsmanship matters. In everything. We just need to stick to our guns. The success of this book is great for those involved, but it’s a quick fix for the non-reader. It has nothing to do with real reading – so far I haven’t a thing about plot or style..
It sounds like an expanded and raunchier television commercial – the more it crops up, the more it will alienate real readers from reader junkies, a divide already so distinct.
Why do I sound so haughty this morning?
The great part (and I do mean this sincerely) about these books is the injection of cash into the publishing house. Money in publishing = opportunity for writers.
The Fifty Shades talk had gotten so oppressive for me a month or so back that I was thinking about just biting the bullet and reading the damn thing. I sense that other followers of this blog our feeling the heat from their inner goddesses as well. Good news. I found a happy alternative to reading the legit book. jenniferarmintrout.blogspot.ca/2012/04/-50-shades-of-grey-chapter-one-or-why.html
That’s the link to a romance novelist’s blog who wrote chapter by chapter recaps of Shades. They’re pretty quick reads with some humorous commentary. I’m thankful for the friend that turned me on to the blog; it cured me of the nagging curiosity. Be forewarned though, it confirms what you already know : the book is not good. At all.
Okay, the blog posts? HILARIOUS. I just read the last one and it’s so damned funny I woke my husband up to read part of it aloud. (He’s not as amused as I am.) Can hardly wait to go back to the beginning and read the whole commentary.
Thanks, Chris.
Bless you, Chris, for giving me something fun to read on a Friday afternoon at the office (as a break in-between all my stressy stress work, of course).
Chris, my inner goddess doesn’t give a rat’s ass about the 50 Shades mass orgasm. She’s been around so many blocks and down so many dark streets that the 50 Shades crew would piss themselves silly if they ever thought they’d have to traverse, she’s long since decided she prefers to hang with the grown-ups; though she is tantalized by the link you’ve provided and is asking me, politely, if I might take her there for a few. She loves to both feel superior and laugh.
Who told me about this parody, Sarah W, Hat Girl? Anyway, it’s hilarious.
http://www.evilreads.com/fifty-one-shades/
Then there’s the Gilbert Gottfried audio book (feel free to delete this immediately, Averil):
My computer is 50 Shades of fucked up, actually, and I can’t get this to play. It will be a treat for later, when Drew steps away from his laptop.
Averil, it wouldn’t play on mine from this link, either, so I went to YouTube and watched it there. It’s exactly the way I would want to hear that masterpiece read. Maybe I can get him to do High Street.
Oh god, oh god, I need a new genre. I may never write again.
That was amazing. I had to pause the clip several times so I could laugh out loud without missing anything. It may be a blessing in disguise that this book is such great comedic fodder. Just the hint of a silver lining to a very black storm cloud.
This post gives me just a slight sheen of anxiety sweat. Also, I totally have a container of alfalfa sprouts in my fridge.
I have pea shoots, sister. Fuck ‘em.
50 Shades, Magic Mike, maybe women are just wanting to get in on the sex action that for so long seemed only to be made by men, for men? What burns my butt is that it’s all about submitting to a man. But to be fair, I haven’t read it. Too many people have commented on how poor the writing is, so I’m not going to bother with it. Averil, you need to get your book out soon and save humanity. No pressure.
I’m very afraid you will read my book and realize how fatally skewed is my moral compass, Doc. Please don’t count on me to represent the gender. I’m worse for feminism than E.L. James!
So, I’ve been through the whole roster of comments before replying at last to your question: “Does craftsmanship even matter?”
To me it does. To anyone whose opinion matters to me, it does. As for the rest of ‘em, it would be rude for me to say, fuck ‘em.
I could point out–and I will–that there are no few writers who earn or are earning degrees that include the words “master” and “fine arts” but whose work indicates that they don’t really understand what mastery and fine art involve.
(Say, the babe at the typetyper–is that Marilyn?)
That is not Marilyn. Unless you want her to be, daddy-o.
I wonder what you make of this, in which some writers delicately suggest their favourite sex scenes. All except the last man. He knows what he likes: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jul/06/best-literary-sex-scenes-writers-favourites?CMP=twt_fd
Thanks, schietree. I like it. Good to have as a reference.
Looks like I’ve got some new additions to my reading list. I particularly love the description of The Names, with all that titillating dialogue. Thank you!
This is why I rate every book either 5 stars, or 1 star, along with the note that “this book failed as a masturbatory aid.”
Oh, wait, no, that’s the opposite of me. Nevermind.