Merlion said:
But shoes can be judged objectively by physical standards that everyone can agree on.
No, really, they can't. Some people are going to like some shoes, and some people will like other shoes. There are questions of comfort, of weight positioning, of the width in various locations, and so forth. If we go with your "there is no bad" theory, even a pair of shoes that falls apart after one use can be judged as wonderful because someone wore them for one night and liked them.
If you're going to play the "it's subjective" game, then
everything is subjective.
But I believe that either I've been unclear or you've misunderstood me. In a lot of your quote, you're going on about my academic elitism and all that good stuff, which is wonderful, since I've been out of school for about eight years and can tell you that working at a video-game company writing dialogue isn't exactly academic elitism. You're also putting words in my mouth to the effect of "There is an absolute standard that nobody disagrees with, and all the academic elites agree on this." I never said this.
I will agree with you 150% that the line is blurry, that there's a lot of gray area. These standards are there to minimize the gray area, to come up with a basic set of principles that two people can use to talk intelligently about a given work.
I will disagree with you 150% that Eragon is in the blurry part.
That leads me to a question. Two actually. you've established that in your opinion, wether a written work is good or bad depends on standards of plot, characterization, voice etc as set down by the academic elite.
No.
As set down by those in the know in the genre in question.
If Eragon was trying to be the next Ulysses, then yes, the academic elite would be the people to ask about it. But it's trying to be fantasy, so the academic elite don't come into it.
Standards of plot, characterization, voice, and setting (among others) are set down by professionals in every field out there. Any fiction writing workshop is going to talk about that stuff, whether you're writing a mystery or a romance or an SF epic or a big fat fantasy novel. They'll have different standards, but they will all HAVE standards.
Ok so heres what I question about that
1) I asked this one before, but you didnt address it, and I guess its actually several related questions itself. What exactly gives them the right to make those decisions? How are they decided on? How do they decide well this type of plot is bad and that type is good, this voice should always be used for this and never that etc. How can it be anything other than their opinions?
1) Years, often decades of experience and critical study.
That's really just about it. They read a whole bunch of the genre in question, and they study it. They look at books that work and books that don't work, and they figure out what the differences are. They argue relentlessly over whether something was bad because it was a poorly done version of a good idea, or because it was a bad idea to begin with.
If what you're really asking is, "How is the idea of critical reading at all valid?", you're on your own. You don't have to accept any of this, just as I don't have to accept the assertion that there's no such thing as a bad book.
The reason that critical theory and the ideas of character and plot and setting and voice are are good things is that they give writers tools to use to become better at what they're doing, and that they give readers common ground on which to discuss a work. Instead of just "I liked it," "I didn't," "Okay, see you next week!", people can actually discuss the reasons why they did or did not like a given book, and what did or did not work for them.
2) what if the elite experts disagree on something? Either on the "good" or "bad" of a specific work, or on the principals themselves? If two equally well trained "experts" both read a book, and one declares it "good" and the other that its "bad", which one is right? Doesnt the fact that this can happen mean that the criteria your so fond of are indeed subjective opinion and not objective law?
No. It means that there's gray area. You're the one who wants it to be all or nothing. I in no way want it to be all or nothing. That said, in the vast majority of book reviews, critics who are able to differentiate between what they like and how they judge a book's different aspects are able to come to a relative agreement.
And again, that's not perfect. Sometimes a critic cannot get out of his own mindset, whether that means praising a bad book because it happened to hit his happy notes or slamming a good book because it triggered one of his pet peeves. That's why you get a wide range of opinions, so that if 98 people gave ERAGON a 3, 4, or 5, 1 person gave it a 1, and 1 person gave it a 10, you know that either the 2 wacky people really saw something nobody else did, or it pressed their personal buttons in a profound way (either good or bad). You also know that the vast majority of the reviewers gave it something in the mediocre-to-middling range.
I get that you'd like me to say "Aha! It's all absolutely thus!" so that you can poke holes in it, but it's really not all absolutely thus. Very few objective standards are that exact, precisely because an objective standard has to have the leeway to stand up to a wide range of opinions and still be valid.
My friend loves setting and grim writing. I love dialogue and happy writing. Our lists of favorite books do not overlap in any meaningful way. That said, I can still read a book and tell whether it's something that she might like, regardless of whether it's something I like. I can tell whether it's good in such a way that both of us will like it, good but weak in areas that matter to me, or bad but really strong in areas that she's going to love enough to get over the bad stuff.
And my friend and I can do that because we can separate our opinions from objective standards.
What I meant was, there are some of those among your gods of literature who believe that ALL fantasy fiction, the very style and subject matter of fantasy fiction, automatically go against the criteria you mentioned and are all automatically "bad writing", based on their interpretation of those criteria.
So?
If your point is, "Some academic people are snobs," I will try hard not to have a heart attack from surprise.
There are also some fantasy readers who turn up their noses at the fine literature section of the bookstore because that stuff is just for old stodgy academic elites.
Snobbery is everywhere. I don't see how that relates to this. If nobody in your world is allowed to say "This is a bad book" without it being snobbery, then there are a lot of snobs in your world.
First, as Mark Hope says, conversation doesnt soley imply making a judgement about the works quality. I would think someone of your credentials would realize that. One can still simply discuss the work itself apart from rating it, and even though enjoyment and quality are subjective, many find it interesting to find out other peoples opinions and the reasons behind them anyway.
Yeeeees.
But you haven't read the book.
I'm not talking about people in general. I'm talking about YOU. YOU say that the only valid criteria is "did I enjoy it?" If so, then by your own standards of judgment, you have nothing to contribute to this conversation at the moment until you actually read the book.
Also, as I've mentioned, I do feel that some works are *better written* than others. And that all authors can grow and improve and have flaws, and having those pointed out can help that proccess.
But what constitutes a flaw? Unless, of course, there actually is some standard of judgment out there somewhere.
Again you misunderstand. This is my belief. Anything, especially a creative work, that a person puts time, energy, thought and feeling into has worth and value and is not "bad", or "crap" in any objective sense, regardless of anyone's opinion.
Enjoyment of the work, is entirely a matter of read/viewer opinion.
Did you read above, multiple times, where I wrote that many people enjoy books that are bad? I mean, I could slap "by the standards of judgment for that genre" on the end of "bad" if it would make it more palatable for you.
Enjoyment
is a matter of personal opinion.
But I do
not subscribe to your notion that books are solely instruments of enjoyment. They are also demonstrations of craft, among other things, and a demonstration of craft
can be judged by standards. Most of the standards grew out of a basic understanding of "here's what makes a book enjoyable for the most people", so there's a lot of overlap, but the two are distinct.
This is another thing I'm surprised someone of your self proffessed expertise and intelligence needs to ask, especially since I've stated it more than once.
Let's try it one more time. I'll see if my self-professed expertise helps.
It also makes me think you tend to see and think of things in a very narrow focused way, which is probably why you apparently did well in school.
I'll say what I said near the top of this post. There's a difference between saying "there is no gray area" and "this particular work is not in the gray part". I'm saying the latter. It's a poorly written book. I get that you want me to be saying the former, because the former is pretty easy to disprove, but that's not what I'm saying. Yeah, there's gray area, and there are places where people can honestly disagree.
But take "Eragon" into any reputable fantasy-novel workshop with your own name on the top, and people are going to tear it to shreds for having bad characters and a derivative plot.
I have been speaking almost the entire time about general principles, brought on by some peoples posting about Eragon. People assuming it must be terrible because a 15 year old wrote it, and people stating that it sucks or its awful, simply because they didnt enjoy it, sparked me to comment on the broader issues.
I didn't say that it was bad because a 15-year-old wrote it.
I didn't say that it was bad because I didn't enjoy it.
I said it was bad. I also said that one major reason it was published was
because the author was 15 -- it's a stunt-casting book, the fantasy-lit equivalent of Charlotte Church.
I don't believe that age and writing ability have a 1:1 ratio, but I do believe that people generally get better at a craft the longer they practice it. By that logic, the kid's books will likely get better as he keeps writing, which coincidentally is also as he gets older. That doesn't mean that it would have been impossible for him to write a good book at his age. It didn't happen -- ERAGON is not a good book -- but the cause wasn't his age.
Discussions have a way of growing you know.
I do indeed. Do you understand how it might appear that you might be talking about ERAGON when you talk about these generalities in a thread about, well, ERAGON? If someone is talking about the Nazis and I step in and say, "Everyone deserves a second chance, and we shouldn't judge people," folks are going to assume that I'm talking about the Nazis, even if I'm just talking in generalities.
By all means, talk generalities. Let the bad book rest.
