Quality Control
Years ago a very pretty girl turned me on to Outside Magazine, particularly the "Out There" column by the wonderful Tim Cahill. She said, and I came to agree, that buying the magazine for his column alone was worthwhile. He no longer appears monthly in that magazine, and hasn't for years, but a decade or so ago he wrote the introduction for the fifteenth anniversary issue.
In that piece he wrote about an editor they had back in the early days of the magazine and how bad writing in and of itself actually offended him. Waving a particular article in the air, he demanded of his staff the whereabouts of this particular author. "Where is he?" he asked. "Can we find him and kill him?"
At first blush the point of ths struck me as fairly harsh. After all, there is no ultimate arbiter of taste or quality so who is anyone to really judge? If you don't like it, simply don't publish it. But then it began to sink in a little bit, so much so that I've come to embrace that same philosophy. I get angry when books (and movies and essays and any other writing based projects) are bad, and allow myself to become offended when dammit I know the writer(s) could have done better. If they have could have done it better, they should have done it better. Not only is it my time and money you're wasting by not fulfilling your own promise and the hype of the market, I'm insulted that you would think these underachieving efforts should pass scrutiny. (This helps explain my last post about bad TV).
There is a suspension of disbelief inherent in a reader's mind whenever he or she picks up a novel, or a viewer sits in front of a movie screen. This is not a suspension of plausibility however, and failing to make that distinction leads to the dreck that makes up the majority of the mass media.
If I'm reading a mystery or a thriller novel, I'll willingly not question how any one person can find themselves in the variety of exciting situations necessary to the plot. Personally I'll even grant you one coincidence in the book (but no more than that). When a single cop finds a body, figures out whodunnit, tracks down the killer, then throws him bodily off the water tower at the end, we let that go. We know that in real life related events and actions occur spread out among many people and much time; trying to achieve that level of realism would ruin that story. And who says we need that much realism anyway?
Now if you throw in a killer who can squeeze his body through casino airshafts (Wouldn't they be too small and too filthy for breathing? How about inaccessible, or noisy, or filled with bends or drops? Too dark?), or a sidekick who can hack into the Department of Defense computer in minutes from his home computer, or any of many millions of stupid pet tricks that I'm supposed to swallow without question, you pass the threshold of plausibility. And you lose me.
For that I get offended, I'm genuinely angered, and I wish they'd do better. For all our sakes. In an earlier post I mentioned authors whose first two books are the best they'll ever write. Capable of producing excellent work, they settle for the routine offerings that come out every season. They become their own formula and it's wrong because they can do better. You know it and they should know it. If you can do something and do it well, yet choose not to, what does it make you? A fraud, perhaps? A traitor to your talent? A waste of time? I can name many authors that fit this description, some of whom I still read. It's called hope...
Tim Cahill doesn't write novels but for an example of someone who writes well and lives up to his potential with every outing, pick up some of his work. There are a half dozen or so collections of his writings and he won't let you down. He made me feel that we have a right to expect quality from our writers, and that we can take it personally if we want to when it's found to be lacking. This kind of emotion is an ingredient of passion and if we let the monkeys throw it out the window in their work, we'll find it easier to do the same in our own.
That would be wrong. We should demand more from all of us.
In that piece he wrote about an editor they had back in the early days of the magazine and how bad writing in and of itself actually offended him. Waving a particular article in the air, he demanded of his staff the whereabouts of this particular author. "Where is he?" he asked. "Can we find him and kill him?"
At first blush the point of ths struck me as fairly harsh. After all, there is no ultimate arbiter of taste or quality so who is anyone to really judge? If you don't like it, simply don't publish it. But then it began to sink in a little bit, so much so that I've come to embrace that same philosophy. I get angry when books (and movies and essays and any other writing based projects) are bad, and allow myself to become offended when dammit I know the writer(s) could have done better. If they have could have done it better, they should have done it better. Not only is it my time and money you're wasting by not fulfilling your own promise and the hype of the market, I'm insulted that you would think these underachieving efforts should pass scrutiny. (This helps explain my last post about bad TV).
There is a suspension of disbelief inherent in a reader's mind whenever he or she picks up a novel, or a viewer sits in front of a movie screen. This is not a suspension of plausibility however, and failing to make that distinction leads to the dreck that makes up the majority of the mass media.
If I'm reading a mystery or a thriller novel, I'll willingly not question how any one person can find themselves in the variety of exciting situations necessary to the plot. Personally I'll even grant you one coincidence in the book (but no more than that). When a single cop finds a body, figures out whodunnit, tracks down the killer, then throws him bodily off the water tower at the end, we let that go. We know that in real life related events and actions occur spread out among many people and much time; trying to achieve that level of realism would ruin that story. And who says we need that much realism anyway?
Now if you throw in a killer who can squeeze his body through casino airshafts (Wouldn't they be too small and too filthy for breathing? How about inaccessible, or noisy, or filled with bends or drops? Too dark?), or a sidekick who can hack into the Department of Defense computer in minutes from his home computer, or any of many millions of stupid pet tricks that I'm supposed to swallow without question, you pass the threshold of plausibility. And you lose me.
For that I get offended, I'm genuinely angered, and I wish they'd do better. For all our sakes. In an earlier post I mentioned authors whose first two books are the best they'll ever write. Capable of producing excellent work, they settle for the routine offerings that come out every season. They become their own formula and it's wrong because they can do better. You know it and they should know it. If you can do something and do it well, yet choose not to, what does it make you? A fraud, perhaps? A traitor to your talent? A waste of time? I can name many authors that fit this description, some of whom I still read. It's called hope...
Tim Cahill doesn't write novels but for an example of someone who writes well and lives up to his potential with every outing, pick up some of his work. There are a half dozen or so collections of his writings and he won't let you down. He made me feel that we have a right to expect quality from our writers, and that we can take it personally if we want to when it's found to be lacking. This kind of emotion is an ingredient of passion and if we let the monkeys throw it out the window in their work, we'll find it easier to do the same in our own.
That would be wrong. We should demand more from all of us.
posted by Rick Ollerman at 8:16 PM
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