![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I want to rant because I just read someone declaring -- and I feel like this is the fifth or sixth time I've read this sentiment -- something like "If you want to talk about what talent is in writing, you have to quantify that with sales figures, or something else quantifiable, or it's just totally arbitrary."
I feel that, if you want to sell a lot of books, and so you want to look at what megabestselling authors are doing right, that's a good thing and perfectly understandable.
And I also feel that it has nothing to do whatsoever with having a genuine aesthetic response to a book.
I've told this story before, but one of the best meals I've ever had was when I got lost in the red light district of Fukuoka, and I just kept wandering and wandering through the streets of soaplands and porn bookstores until I caught a very faint smell. A food smell. I took courage and proceeded forward, following my nose, until I got to a little park where an agricultural festival was being held, and I ate a ridiculously delicious ear of buttered roasted corn. You cannot turn that into an equation about my level of hunger and the sugar content of the corn. And that is how I feel about the books I really love.
It is okay that opinions are just opinions, and that everyone has different ones, and that in the end they are a bit arbitrary (although you can always find places to point to and say, Oh, that was sloppy or Oh, that was a very clever and thoughtful way to work out that particular problem). If you could reduce it to "Book A is better than book B, which is better than book C," then you're squeezing out all the room for a particular reader to have a relationship with a particular book -- a relationship that's based in personal history and personal interests. Craft is really important, but in the end I feel like craft is not what you have in order to write an objectively great book; it's what you have so that you can build those relationships without tripping over yourself.
I feel that, if you want to sell a lot of books, and so you want to look at what megabestselling authors are doing right, that's a good thing and perfectly understandable.
And I also feel that it has nothing to do whatsoever with having a genuine aesthetic response to a book.
I've told this story before, but one of the best meals I've ever had was when I got lost in the red light district of Fukuoka, and I just kept wandering and wandering through the streets of soaplands and porn bookstores until I caught a very faint smell. A food smell. I took courage and proceeded forward, following my nose, until I got to a little park where an agricultural festival was being held, and I ate a ridiculously delicious ear of buttered roasted corn. You cannot turn that into an equation about my level of hunger and the sugar content of the corn. And that is how I feel about the books I really love.
It is okay that opinions are just opinions, and that everyone has different ones, and that in the end they are a bit arbitrary (although you can always find places to point to and say, Oh, that was sloppy or Oh, that was a very clever and thoughtful way to work out that particular problem). If you could reduce it to "Book A is better than book B, which is better than book C," then you're squeezing out all the room for a particular reader to have a relationship with a particular book -- a relationship that's based in personal history and personal interests. Craft is really important, but in the end I feel like craft is not what you have in order to write an objectively great book; it's what you have so that you can build those relationships without tripping over yourself.