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M_Gargantua posted:You’re being disingenuous to my premise. Just because a book is popular doesn’t mean it’s great. But equally just because a a few people gush oversome obscure book doesn’t make that book great either. You can have the opinion that a book is fantastic, and that you wish it were popular. But unless that book actually appeals to a majority of readers who would normally appreciate the generalized content of the book then it cannot be great. To say that your opinion is better than that of peers regarding the same type of content is textbook elitism. What the gently caress are you on about
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Apr 19, 2018 18:42
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M_Gargantua posted:You’re being disingenuous to my premise. Just because a book is popular doesn’t mean it’s great. But equally just because a a few people gush oversome obscure book doesn’t make that book great either. You can have the opinion that a book is fantastic, and that you wish it were popular. But unless that book actually appeals to a majority of readers who would normally appreciate the generalized content of the book then it cannot be great. To say that your opinion is better than that of peers regarding the same type of content is textbook elitism.
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Apr 19, 2018 18:50
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The point seems to be that what makes a book great is that they've heard about it and think it's deserving, hence they complain about "obscure" books. It's an appeal to M_Gargantua's personal ignorance.
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Apr 19, 2018 18:56
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No, I’m restricting it to books that are successful within their target audience. That is not at all antithetical to creative expression because creative expression is independent from commercial success. Your opinion on a works ‘greatness’ is your own, if that opinion is reflected among similar peers than maybe it really is a great work of art. Your subjective opinion alone is not enough to declare something good or bad, and you individually do not get to decide for everybody else.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:03
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M_Gargantua posted:No, I’m restricting it to books that are successful within their target audience. That's idiotic. You're saying that artistic greatness is defined by marketing category.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:04
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what was moby dick's target audience
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Apr 19, 2018 19:06
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M_Gargantua posted:No, I’m restricting it to books that are successful within their target audience. That is not at all antithetical to creative expression because creative expression is independent from commercial success.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:14
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Tim Burns Effect posted:what was moby dick's target audience Let’s keep this generic: people who enjoy reading stories Is it great? Ehh. Not to me. But it is taught because as a work is has content that is beneficial to teach. So now it’s target audience is students, a field in which the content presented makes a meaningful impact. A field in which the peers of the field have bulk consent on its status as great work. And yet as a work of fiction moby dick isn’t particularly great, and was a total flop. I can understand why too, despite being taught it, I don’t enjoy it as a work. Hence Moby dick today is great because it’s a success in its modern target audience (academia).
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Apr 19, 2018 19:18
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Things that make a book great: succeeding with its audience, having a positive impact Things that have nothing to do with greatness: the writing
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Apr 19, 2018 19:21
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M_Gargantua posted:Let’s keep this generic: people who enjoy reading stories
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Apr 19, 2018 19:25
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Apr 19, 2018 19:40
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Sham bam bamina! posted:Jesus Christ. Scathing commentary. A book is not great just because it is well written. A painting is not great just because it’s well painted. Nor are either great by content alone. All these forms of creative works must have some mix of characteristics of quality and content that are acknowledged as good by those experiencing it. It’s a venn diagram, and no one lobe alone makes it great. Quality, content, these are fixed at printing, and peer appreciation which changes over time. If nobody likes your esoteric book then it isn’t great, it’s just you who likes it.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:52
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I don't even like Moby Dick all that much but holy moly thar blows a real bad take
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Apr 19, 2018 19:53
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M_Gargantua posted:A book is not great just because it is well written. A painting is not great just because it’s well painted. Nor are either great by content alone. All these forms of creative works must have some mix of characteristics of quality and content that are acknowledged as good by those experiencing it. It’s a venn diagram, and no one lobe alone makes it great.
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Apr 19, 2018 19:56
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The idea of a "target audience" is commercial. Creative expression is for the author. When something interesting happened to you in real life and you want to talk about it, do you tell? A) Everyone you know. B) People who you think would find it interesting. It's totally fine to write for yourself but then your target audience is you and expecting commercial success because you wrote a great product for you is the height of self-centered thought, and entirely too common among aspiring authors and artists I know. BravestOfTheLamps posted:Things that make a book great: succeeding with its audience, having a positive impact Quality of writing is how well you can convey what you intend to convey to the reader. A book that's successful on it's target audience has clearly succeeded at this. Whether that intent is fluff/bad/good does not come into account on how good the writing is. I do completely disagree with the assertion he made that a book must be successful within it's target audience to be great. Because, marketing and timing are huge parts of success unrelated to the books quality. I also find quality of art in some ways subjective, even though there are objective ways to look at quality based off what different successful methods to convey thoughts. ShinsoBEAM! fucked around with this message at 20:02 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 20:00
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Sham bam bamina! posted:So what you were trying to say (in the most obtuse way imaginable) was that greatness involves not just quality but influence. That would be a fair point, except that you conflated quality, influence, and greatness in the first place when you complained that people were wrong in "thrashing" popular books. Nobody needs this BS. This came from people thrashing the lists of ‘great fiction’ that weren’t very great. Yes obviously the lists were mostly fluff but dismissing all the books on it for being popular. Not all popular books are good. Not all good books are popular. But the ~greatest book of all time~ is not too great if nobody else shares that opinion. There is some nebulous threshold for popularity and acknowledgement to cross into greatness
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Apr 19, 2018 20:08
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M_Gargantua posted:Let’s keep this generic: people who enjoy reading stories i use a lot of hyperbole when i post but i want you to know that i am being totally sincere when i say that in my eleven years on this forum i have never, not once, seen a dumber post than this
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Apr 19, 2018 20:15
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Sham bam bamina! posted:The idea of a "target audience" is commercial. Creative expression is for the author. M_Gargantua's ridiculous notion aside, there's much more to the idea of having a target audience than this. The commercial consideration is really not much more than a surface-level one. A far more important reason why you need to have a target audience in mind is that you can't create a cohesive style, let alone a uniform narrative, if you don't at least have a vague notion of who it is you're writing for. For instance, any presumption you make about your readers' pre-existing knowledge of a certain aspect of your work carries with it a host of other presumptions that both precede and follow from it. You can be very demanding of readers - many amazing authors are - but consistence is key and having a vague notion in mind of who 'your' reader is helps tremendously in that regard. They are still your terms, but good writing is consistent in the terms it sets. That said, I realise that isn't the interpretation discussed here. I'm just annoyed that having a target audience in mind so often gets conflated with thinking about what would sell the most books. Apologies for the slight derail.
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Apr 19, 2018 20:18
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chernobyl kinsman posted:i use a lot of hyperbole when i post but i want you to know that i am being totally sincere when i say that in my eleven years on this forum i have never, not once, seen a dumber post than this Ok let’s unpack this a little more. Moby dick was a critical and financial flop when it was originally published. I infer this is because it missed its target of the average reader of fiction. I don’t particularly like Moby Dick, and know plenty of people who don’t partially like it. The book hasn’t changed since it was written obviously, so there is some coherence to peer opinion there. It did however get chosen to be great by a quara of other authors and literary scholars decades after publishing, finally having found its audience. So even though my opinion differs from the popular thought, it is a great book.
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Apr 19, 2018 20:30
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I will send you, via paypal or the United States postal service, a not-inconsiderable amount of money in exchange for a promise that you will never post again
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Apr 19, 2018 20:34
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chernobyl kinsman posted:I will send you, via paypal or the United States postal service, a not-inconsiderable amount of money in exchange for a promise that you will never post again I'll make the same offer to you  .
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Apr 19, 2018 22:35
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You're right; I overreacted. I had read M_Gargantua's post as asserting the necessity of commercially defined fiction genres, given that this was originally about fantasy novels in particular.M_Gargantua posted:But the ~greatest book of all time~ is not too great if nobody else shares that opinion. There is some nebulous threshold for popularity and acknowledgement to cross into greatness M_Gargantua posted:Ok let’s unpack this a little more. Moby dick was a critical and financial flop when it was originally published. M_Gargantua posted:It did however get chosen to be great by a quara of other authors and literary scholars decades after publishing, finally having found its audience. So even though my opinion differs from the popular thought, it is a great book. Determining the ideal audience for Moby-Dick to be academics of the early twentieth century raises further issues. The intellectual fashions of the time have not lasted, so that audience and its approval no longer mean anything. Today, the fashion is to treat Moby-Dick and western literature at large skeptically, and in that case, is the book's unavoidable greatness, which you don't even allow yourself the luxury of disputing, now up for review? Once a book's greatness has been established as fact, how many people does it take to have that overturned? If overturning greatness is possible through numbers, why has popular indifference not trumped academic enthusiasm? You say that academics are privileged in the case of Moby-Dick by virtue of being "its audience", the ideal readership, but you define them as such post hoc because they liked the book. This reduces the question of greatness to even less than the popularity contest that you initially implied. A book is now objectively great if it has any substantial readership and appreciation at all, in which case my earlier quip about Dan Brown and Stephenie Meyer was not only correct but an understatement. The Turner Diaries is a great book because its ideal audience of white supremacists loves it. Dianetics is a great book because its ideal audience of Scientologists swears by it. Do you see how incoherent your idea is now? By your own criteria, if Moby-Dick is a great book, then so is The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, but if they aren't, The Da Vinci Code is. The only way for it to be any different is if you pick and choose which ideal audiences actually count toward greatness, in which case you're just deciding greatness yourself, on your own terms. Why, it's almost as if greatness isn't objective after all, and people decide for themselves what to think of a book. Sham bam bamina! fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Apr 19, 2018 |
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Apr 19, 2018 22:35
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ShinsoBEAM! posted:Quality of writing is how well you can convey what you intend to convey to the reader. A book that's successful on it's target audience has clearly succeeded at this. Whether that intent is fluff/bad/good does not come into account on how good the writing is. You're confusing quality of writing with clarity of writing. Writing can be great without being clear (ex Finnegan's Wake, Gravity's Rainbow) and clear without being great (most genre stuff.) The discussion breaks down when you start getting into the vagueries of things like quality because it's really difficult to pin down exactly what it is and you can't tick off a checklist of features in a piece of writing that make it quality. The problem with most genre writing and lower-tier writing in general is that this notion that, because quality is difficult to pin down, it allows people who do not consume and do not enjoy more challenging pieces to flatten the playing field and claim a fundamental equivalency between capital L Literature and what I would call popcorn novels. The discussion falls down to either a claim that they're either all fundamentally legitimate or that Literature is an arbitrary category used to delegitimize certain works of art in favor of those chosen by a group of self-appointed elite intelligentsia. Like that impossibly dumb post about Moby-Dick and if you don't put the dash in the name I will loving destroy you What it comes down to for me is that it is incredibly easy to spot someone who reads genre exclusively by how they respond to Literature and discussions about Literature. Without exception they have a personal and often hostile response to being challenged about what they read and when questioned about what does or doesn't make a work great they fall back on meaningless and historically very recent notions like target audience, popularity, and world-building, because they simply do not have the vocabulary to describe good writing-as-written and take the discussion entirely as an attack on their intelligence instead of recognizing what people who consume Literature know is an acquired and practiced skill and not a matter of intelligence. You have to read Literature to get Literature. And that's hard to do, because most of the best is very time consuming, and will burn a lot more of your brain power to look beyond what is explicitly written on the page to see a larger story. It's what allows you to read a book like Pale Fire and appreciate how someone like Nabokov is able to build a nuanced and fascinating story that is entirely outside the book itself and exists almost completely within the metanarrative. And that's the thing about books like that: you could describe any given fantasy novel to me in your own words and tell me the essence of a complete story, but it is really hard to describe what Pale Fire is to someone who hasn't read it, but when you can get together with someone who has, you've both developed an understanding of the nuances and can talk about it on a deeper level that just isn't available with most genre fiction.
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Apr 19, 2018 22:42
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And as an addendum I also think reading criticism of a work is an important key to a deeper understanding of it, especially if you can get criticism of a work from another author. Nabokov's Lectures on Literature helped me have a much deeper appreciation of Proust, for example.
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Apr 19, 2018 22:49
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No but you see critics are just failed authors who are jealous of the people who made it, those who can't do teach, a bluh bluh bloo buh
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Apr 19, 2018 22:50
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Heath posted:You're confusing quality of writing with clarity of writing. Writing can be great without being clear (ex Finnegan's Wake, Gravity's Rainbow) and clear without being great (most genre stuff.) I know what you are saying here, and I almost wrote a giant paragraph in my original post kind of discussing this. I believe they are related. Lets say an action scene where 2 characters are shooting at each other, you could write extremely clearly and just describe what everyone is thinking and everything that's happening, but I really doubt you are just trying to convey the fact that 2 characters are shooting at each other, but instead want to convey the tension of the scene or maybe the badassery of it. A more effective and higher quality writing would convey that tension, badassery, or whatever to the reader and let the reader fill in the gaps.
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Apr 20, 2018 00:01
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Lyon posted:I'll make the same offer to you you can't afford me
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Apr 20, 2018 02:21
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Otto Von Jizzmark posted:I cant wait for book 3 to come out and make all the haters eat some crow. Kvothe rules! If I had a dollar for every time someone made this argument to me... So I was like, wow 60 posts in the rothfuss thread? I bet he said something dumb. Nope! M_Gargantua came in to challenge BravestOfTheLamps for the worst poster in the thread title.
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Apr 20, 2018 06:13
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Tim Burns Effect posted:what was moby dick's target audience A better question is what was the target audience for Moby's dick? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13580896-moby-s-dick
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Apr 20, 2018 07:02
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Otto Von Jizzmark posted:A better question is what was the target audience for Moby's dick? Moby had a few good songs, but I don't think anyone was at all that interested in his dick.
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Apr 20, 2018 13:18
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chernobyl kinsman posted:you can't afford me Based on the quality of your posts I'm sure I can.
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Apr 21, 2018 19:03
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may I have money please
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Apr 23, 2018 20:59
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Tosses two jots on the table with the effortless grace of a morning sun.
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Apr 24, 2018 13:38
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Tim Burns Effect posted:what was moby dick's target audience Readers of the smash hit sailing novel Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, available wherever project gutenberg allows downloads
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Apr 24, 2018 13:46
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Readers of the smash hit sailing novel Two Years Before the Mast by Richard Henry Dana, available wherever project gutenberg allows downloads You and your loving public domain novel bullshit!!!!!
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Apr 24, 2018 13:46
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Mel Mudkiper posted:You and your loving public domain novel bullshit!!!!! After I got my first kindle I spent a few years reading just about everything that was in the "top 100 free downloads" category on Amazon, or that reading one of those books led me to in turn. Melville references Dana, so, why not? Dana was far more commercially successful than Melville -- his book is a clear factual account but well-written, and it ended up being the *only* book that described California at all when the Gold Rush first hit, so everybody read it. It's basically "Moby Dick, but nonfiction, also, waaaay less gay, and no whales," so only read it if you love historical travelogues and/or wooden ship tales, but who doesn't? Hieronymous Alloy fucked around with this message at 17:08 on Apr 24, 2018 |
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Apr 24, 2018 17:00
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Moby Dick is maybe 200 pages of interesting wrapped in 600 pages of "paid by the word" bullshit.
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Apr 24, 2018 21:32
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Solice Kirsk posted:Moby Dick is maybe 200 pages of interesting wrapped in 600 pages of "paid by the word" bullshit. You sound like a man who doesn't love sperm.
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Apr 24, 2018 21:35
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:You sound like a man who doesn't love sperm. Hey! Like any true red blooded American man I love sperm! 
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Apr 25, 2018 03:27
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When BravestOfTheLamps is on probation, I want him to take the time that he'd otherwise spend posting and write the third Kingkiller book for Rothfuss. We'd have it by the end of the year.
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Apr 25, 2018 03:31
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