I was just thinking that it is hard for me to come up with a solid argument for the essay, because a lot of the topics and arguments of this course are subjective and debatable. I was thinking for the final essay that it is the author's job not only to entertain the readers, but also to entertain him or herself. An author needs to enjoy what he or she is writing, otherwise, who would write? Then it came to me that it's debatable of wheter or not the writer should sacrifice his or her entertainment for the sake of writing a good book. It may be that the authors of the bad literature of this course took too many liberties (and then the publishers liked 'new' ideas, and that's why they would publish such bad writing), and that that's why the books are bad, even though some of the books have good ideas but bad and repetitive writing. It can also be argued (even though this argument seems stupid to me) that the authors were going out of their way to make it good, or entertaining for the reader, and the book resulted as bad. I know that this is true in my jazz writing class. My teacher wants to help us by throwing out our writing now that we're in the course, rather than have us write badly when we're out in the professional world, and he says that the parts that he sees as bad writing, are the parts that seem like we spent the most time on, that we were thinking too hard about, and that doesn't flow musically. LIke I said, I don't think that this is likely the reason why the books are bad....but who knows, maybe the authors are trying too hard...but I don't think that there really are bad writers. I think that there's something more to that, something that caused a particular book to be bad, and that is has to be discovered and fixed. As I said, a lot of the material read in class has subjective reactions, but also, there are books that are less subjective in my opinion, because I couldn't stand them personally.
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2 comments:
You mention that bad literature may result when authors take too many liberties and still manage to get published, but I would argue that it is a good thing when authors take liberties, even if the result isn't very good, at least there's a creative process. I think at least some of the middlebrow books we read were less than stellar for the opposite reason - they tried to stick too closely to the LA literature stereotype and could have benefited from a more different, unique voice.
I think it's good when authors take liberties too. If they didn't, then everything would be the same...or stereotypical. What I was talking about what the possibility of the author taking too many liberties and leaving normal structure and form altogether.
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