What It Means to Be a Writer Today, Part 5: OMG I Loved the Wrong Book!

OMG I Loved the Wrong Book!

By Don Wallace

In my last post, in the interest of lessening the level of general anxiety, we gave out Genius Passes to all writer-readers. (If you weren’t there, stick around and see me after this session. But don’t come empty-handed.)

Anyway, as an exercise in self-esteem inflation the results were so great that this time around we’ll take on another potential downer: the relationship of author worship, critical influence, and peer pressure to our personal development as writers. Let’s see if we can’t turn our secret under-the-covers-flashlight-reading into radiant happiness. (You’re looking very well today, I might add.)

But a word of caution: see title above.

The first thing to say, it seems to me, is that if you love the right books, your writing will one day be just as good. Love Joyce? Love Woolf? Love Cortázar? Congratulations, you must be right up there on the New York Times Bestseller List.

Oh. You aren’t? So sorry.

And they’re not either? No Joyce, Woolf, Cortázar? OMG!

Well, we’re really not that naive. We ate our Wheaties without expecting to become Lance Armstrong or Kristi Yamaguchi. But I will say that we who write have a right to be ticked off at the system. In terms of the books we were told to admire, we were raised on Grape-Nuts only to be let loose on a world that buys Froot Loops.

Fortunately, most of us snuck Froot Loops or Count Chocula or at least Frosted Flakes, so we have an idea of what the marketplace truly wants. And the same went for books. We all read crap and loved it.

That leaves the question of what to do about those furtive, secret itches we get when we’re writing our usual very serious and profoundly meaningful stuff. Do we repress the urge? Do we admit to it and apologize to the muse and try to ignore it? Or do we open the creative floodgates and invite Little Boy Bad Book to play with Little Lord Fauntle-Book?

If you’ve had kids, you know how that’s going to turn out.

So reading bad books does create what the Wall Street wizards call “moral hazard,” in that like the recent unpleasantness, it encourages the mingling of toxic assets with AAA-rated securitized literature. And as we all know, today Wall Street is wolfing down steak while we’re eating our seed corn.

Is the same thing happening to our published, approved, canonized literature? How can it not, is the reply. Into the realm of the high-falutin, Chabon introduced the comic book, Lethem the super-hero, Franzen the talking turd—and the critics fell all over themselves in their rush to praise. Rather than fight it, and risk looking like old fogies, like the 1950s Comic Book League of Decency, we tried to dig it. And, you know what? Two out of three ain’t bad.

Anyway, there still are standards. A few walls have been left standing. How do I know this? Well, if reproducible results were the only criteria with which to measure literary success, obviously the genre known collectively as ZVSF (Zombie and Vampire Shopping and/or Fucking) would be taught in our better universities.

Oh. They are? Boy, did I miss THAT boat.

But I’m not complaining, really. Quixotic as it may seem, here’s the crux of this ongoing blog and the reason it’s called What It Means to Be a Writer Today and not, say, WIMTBAW-Yesterday. Time marches on, taste trailing in its wake like a sulky poodle or John Galliano in an S&M collar.

Taste changes. Writers die. Books die. Sometimes they resurrect. One thing we can be sure of is that the books we read live on as long as we do.

Unfortunately, that goes for Bad Books, too. In fact, when it comes to our earliest books, the Froot Loop ones maybe made us into writers as much as our Grape-Nuts ones.

So be proud of having read Huckleberry Finn in fourth grade, or Pride and Prejudice in sixth grade, or The Fall as a sophomore. But don’t be surprised if your other early reading now makes you a laughingstock—but only in your nightmares, we hope.

Unless you really did say that thing about Pippi Longstocking in your creative writing seminar. (Really? Well, at least Pippi’s a girl. Women’s studies are going to love that. But tell me you didn’t . . . Star Wars novels? All 136 of them? How interesting. What? When you were twenty years old? Of course I agree that Jabba the Hutt is a perfect example of how bodyism can be turned into something positive, like sex work-ism. Yes, it’s all very transgressive, I’m sure. And I loved Princess Leia’s outfit.)

To close, let us paraphrase a canine classic and bestseller and say, There Are No Bad Books. At least when it comes to what inspired you—and still inspires you—to write.

Next time out we’ll continue the “hair on fire” roadshow by examining The Problem With Good Books. This will include an examination of the Influence & Taste Machine as it trimmed and embroidered the careers of John Cheever, Ray Carver and his army of imitators, and why it is necessary to blow it once in awhile. Should be fun. Eventually, after a detour or two, we’ll get to the way the real world of fiction publishing works, and where it might be headed. And we’ll also reunite with our companion-examples of the earlier blog, the 23-year-old and 45-year-old, both just starting out on the path.

This post also appeared on the We Wanted to Be Writers website.