Can books really be "Bad" for you??

leahzero said:

Really? Meyer's talent alone sold that many books? You don't think marketing, timeliness, or a burgeoning paranormal romance boom (of which she happened to ride the crest) had anything to do with it?

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I think the writer's talent isn't why books resonate powerfully with readers--at least not totally.

To turn a reader into a zealot, the writer has to hold a mirror up the reader's subconscious longings and fears. Meyer tapped into a female fantasy that is very common when you're young. I remember having it (albeit with different characters.)

Constrained passion, especially if constrained by angst, social anxiety and fear of the other, is simply what teens go through as they sort out what love and sexuality are about.

What Meyer created accurately reflected the kinds of dark, Freudian fantasies many young women have while they're going through this. Thus, the books resonated powerfully with that demographic.

It also happens to be a demographic where word-of-mouth endorsements are particularly effective, and where the members of the demographic are more likely to be open-heartedly enthusiastic, thereby initiating the word-of-mouth buzz.

I'm pretty sure Meyer had no idea she'd written something that would explode. She wrote that book straight out of her subconscious.

But the publishing industry knew it. If I remember correctly, the book went to auction and the advance Meyer got for it was record-breaking for a YA book, at the time.

Yes, books can be bad for you. If that weren't the case, people wouldn't be so keen on banning them all the time.

Jessianodel said:

I personally hate the Twilight series. However the one good thing about it is that it caused tons of teenage girls who otherwise were not reading to read. And when they finished with Twilight, they started to move onto to slightly better books like Hunger Games. So hopefully they will eventually cause them to start reading not just "popular" books but good ones. And therefore, more people will read. So no, I don't think it's bad to read it. It's just not what I think is close to the best out there.

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Amen!

I don't read Harry Potter, Dan Brown or Twilight, but I love it how they showed that books can still shake this world (or, at least, the global market.)

Mustafa said:

With all due respect, the people who believe "luck" plays into publishing are usually bitter writers who lack the skill of those "lucky" few but need a reason that they haven't broken into the market yet. I am not saying that to be mean, I'm saying that because the doors that have to open to get an agent, to get a publisher, to get that book onto the market, to get it distributed nationally and internationally, to get attention by media and word-of-mouth, are so many that "luck" really doesn't play into it. Timing, sure, but only combined with skill.

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I couldn't disagree with you more. For one, it's naive to think that luck doesn't have a part in most anything to some degree. Secondly, it's kind of ironic in a thread about Twilight since she may never have even gotten published if it wasn't for the fact that the assistant who read her manuscript had no idea that 130,000 words was a bit steep for a YA novel.

Anyway, I think it's true that for the most part landing an agent and a publisher is more about skill than luck, but Stephenie Meyer is a prime example of how sometimes it does play at least a small role in the process. Moreover, I don't think anyone here is saying that's the step in publishing where she got lucky. Landing an agent and eventually getting published definitely requires some degree of skill (though sometimes it doesn't seem like very much.) But once you're published, skill isn't enough to make you stand out from the crowd. There are a lot of amazing writers out there, and most of them will never become best sellers. So what is it that causes some writers to rise to the top and become best sellers, while others are forever stuck at midlist? How do you differentiate yourself?

goldmund said:

Well, whoever "said that time and time again" was wrong.

You can write a moderately successful book by planning, but only if it's a rip-off of a currently popular book, and most often you'll be too late.

Harry Potter, Millenium, Da Vinci Code --

J.K. Rowling sat one time and thought:
"Ah, I'd gladly earn $10.000.000 or so. I know, why not write a book about a teenage wizard boy? This is a goldmine, everybody knows that."

Dan Brown:
"I'm a bit short on dough. Let's write about Holy Grail and Christ -- this is the most popular subject of pop-culture and people will buy my book like crazy!"

Stieg Larsson:
"Man, female hackers are hot shit, everybody wants to read about them. And everyone loves long, stilted titles! To the typewriter!"

Come on.

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Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that makes absolutely no sense at all. If you write a very successful book, but didn't plan it, it's luck? If that's what you mean, you have no clue what talent is, or what luck is.

leahzero said:

Stories have that kind of power when you're an impressionable teenager, and all your friends will talk about is this book/movie, and to fit in you read or watch it, and because you don't have any real experience yet with relationships, you think a man stalking and controlling a much younger woman is normal and romantic.

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I'd like to make it very clear that I'm not having a go at you personally but at the argument. I've seen many instances of the same/similar argument.. and I think it's crap.

I don't know where the idea comes from that teenagers are like so many sponges who just absorb, without question, every bit of media that's funnelled in their direction. Like they have absolutely no mental processing faculties of their own. Yes, they're young and will make mistakes of inexperience and immaturity, but that's not the same thing as being a passive, completely retarded, blank slate.

And of course teenagers have experience with relationships! Even the ones who haven't had boy/girlfriends yet. Their ideas about romantic relationships come from observing their parents, their friends parents, their older brothers and sisters... the relationships around them. It's, amongst other things, how they know that a rom-com or TV show isn't typical of how a real relationship works. To put it the other way around, which do you think has a bigger impact on a teenagers concept of a relationship, the way their parents have interacted with each other every day of the teenager's whole life, or some book which they've read over a couple of weeks?

In short, I don't think you guys give teenagers anywhere near enough credit.

As a final thought, I remember reading 'Romeo & Juliet' in my early teens. I don't remember anyone being concerned that I'd think that both parties killing themselves was normal behaviour in a relationship, even though it's considered the canonical love story. And I won't even start on the 'normal relationship' portrayed in Macbeth.

-edit: For what it's worth, jjdebenedictis' assessment (post #26) seems pretty astute to me.

Jamesaritchie said:

Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that makes absolutely no sense at all. If you write a very successful book, but didn't plan it, it's luck? If that's what you mean, you have no clue what talent is, or what luck is.

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Yes, that's what I mean.

Writing a hugely successful (in the economic sense) book is a question of luck, because you can't reasonably take into account myriads of variables and shifts in the cultural Zeitgeist that make a bestseller.

And also, you are very rude. :'-(

silent_count said:

I'd like to make it very clear that I'm not having a go at you personally but at the argument. I've seen many instances of the same/similar argument.. and I think it's crap.

I don't know where the idea comes from that teenagers are like so many sponges who just absorb, without question, every bit of media that funnelled in their direction. Like they have absolutely no mental processing faculties of their own. Yes, they're young and will make mistakes of inexperience and immaturity, but that's not the same thing as being a passive, completely retarded, blank slate.

And of course teenagers have experience with relationships! Even the ones who haven't had boy/girlfriends yet. Their ideas about romantic relationships come from observing their parents, their friends parents, their older brothers and sisters... the relationships around them. It's, amongst other things, how they know that a rom-com or TV show isn't typical of how a real relationship works. To put it the other way around, which do you think has a bigger impact on a teenagers concept of a relationship, the way their parents have interacted with each other every day of the teenager's whole life, or some book which they've read over a couple of weeks?

In short, I don't think you guys give teenagers anywhere near enough credit.

As a final thought, I remember reading 'Romeo & Juliet' in my early teens. I don't remember anyone being concerned that I'd think that both parties killing themselves was normal behaviour in a relationship, even though it's considered the canonical love story. And I won't even start on the 'normal relationship' portrayed in Macbeth.

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This. Honestly, I find it distressing that many adults think teenagers are so very, very stupid.

*nods at Silent Count's comments.* In my time, it was VC Andrews's Flowers in the Attic. Everyone read it and there were comments by some parents that it would be damaging, which I disagreed with then and now.

I do not see the harm in reading books that are scary or have unhealthful relationships in them, such as Twlight, which I thought was a wonderful concept horribly executed. Did all of us run out and do drugs after reading Go Ask Alice? Nope, I don't believe so.

If the question was 'is it harmful to read poorly written fiction' my answer would remain the same. In fact, it's helpful to me as a writer, and I agree with a previous poster who commented that at least young people are reading. I hope they keep doing it.

silent_count said:

I don't know where the idea comes from that teenagers are like so many sponges who just absorb, without question, every bit of media that funnelled in their direction. Like they have absolutely no mental processing faculties of their own. Yes, they're young and will make mistakes of inexperience and immaturity, but that's not the same thing as being a passive, completely retarded, blank slate.

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That's really simplistic, though. Nobody who argues that media has an effect on people thinks that the effect is "Monkey see, monkey do." Arguments about the desensitizing effects of violent video games and movies, for example, do not claim that anyone is programmed to become a violent psychopath and that some percentage of kids will snap and go Columbine if they play too many violent video games. Likewise, saying that books with unhealthy relationships can have an unhealthy effect on kids who read them and find them romantic does not mean we think every girl who sighs over Twilight wants a boyfriend who will hover over her bed while she sleeps.

The intersection of media and pop culture and the zeitgeist is more complicated than that. It's ridiculous to claim that reading a book will have a specific, discrete, predictable effect on any given individual. It's also ridiculous to claim media has no effect on the people consuming it, or that teenagers aren't more impressionable than adults.

As a final thought, I remember reading 'Romeo & Juliet' in my early teens. I don't remember anyone being concerned that I'd think that both parties killing themselves was normal behaviour in a relationship, even though it's considered the canonical love story. And I won't even start on the 'normal relationship' portrayed in Macbeth.

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But Romeo and Juliet is not presented as a happy relationship, and Macbeth sure as hell wasn't. Shakespeare didn't expect his audience to think "Aww, how romantic!" The authors of these YA books clearly do.

MostlyBecca said:

Yes, books can be bad for you. If that weren't the case, people wouldn't be so keen on banning them all the time.

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Well, a book being banned says more about state-sponsored censorship than if they are genuinely 'bad.' I'm all for books that contain 'revolutionary and dangerous ideas.'

I don't believe that books such as A Clockwork Orange, The Satanic Verses, Lady Chatterley's Lover are bad for you. I actually encourage people to read them.

Thanks, Mustafa!

(Wow, I ran off for a few hours and this exploded!)

I think that luck - as it were - has some role to play in publishing, though I'm not sure "luck" is really an accurate word for it.

I'm lucky in that I'm writing YA (a hugely popular and profitable genre) and sci-fi (which people think is going to be the next trend). I'm lucky in that I've been able to build a platform that brought me to the attention of agents, to the point where several sought me out.

There's some skill and precision/timing involved in all of this, but if I weren't a writer in the 21st century with things like Twitter and the internet to help boost my visibility and easily connect with others and network and learn about all the minutiae that drive writers insane, I'd be (most likely) unagented and (definitely) writing my way into obscurity.

A shorter version of my point:

There are books that have had very little or no marketing and gone on to be breakaway hits.

There are also books that have had million-dollar marketing campaigns, that I promise you've never even heard of.

Just as there are books I think are crap that do depressingly well, and books I think are brilliant that are criminally under-appreciated.

Marketing is an enhancer, not alchemy. No amount of publicity can spin success from something that doesn't already resonate with the cultural zeitgeist.

Writing something that resonates, at any given time, for any given reason? That's luck.

gothicangel said:

Well, a book being banned says more about state-sponsored censorship than if they are genuinely 'bad.' I'm all for books that contain 'revolutionary and dangerous ideas.'

I don't believe that books such as A Clockwork Orange, The Satanic Verses, Lady Chatterley's Lover are bad for you. I actually encourage people to read them.

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I wasn't condoning the banning of books or that those books are 'bad.' Sorry, I should have made myself a little more clear. I was just saying that people recognize that books have power, and if they have the power to educate or do good, they clearly have the power to do bad.

readitnweep said:

*nods at Silent Count's comments.* In my time, it was VC Andrews's Flowers in the Attic. Everyone read it and there were comments by some parents that it would be damaging, which I disagreed with then and now.

I do not see the harm in reading books that are scary or have unhealthful relationships in them, such as Twlight, which I thought was a wonderful concept horribly executed. Did all of us run out and do drugs after reading Go Ask Alice? Nope, I don't believe so.

If the question was 'is it harmful to read poorly written fiction' my answer would remain the same. In fact, it's helpful to me as a writer, and I agree with a previous poster who commented that at least young people are reading. I hope they keep doing it.

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I think what the person was trying to say was that it's bad to read things with unhealthy relationships, and thinking that relationships are really like that. I think as long as you go in knowing "This relationship isn't normal or is unhealthy" then it's fine. However, that's just my opinion.

Mustafa said:

With all due respect, the people who believe "luck" plays into publishing are usually bitter writers who lack the skill of those "lucky" few but need a reason that they haven't broken into the market yet. I am not saying that to be mean, I'm saying that because the doors that have to open to get an agent, to get a publisher, to get that book onto the market, to get it distributed nationally and internationally, to get attention by media and word-of-mouth, are so many that "luck" really doesn't play into it. Timing, sure, but only combined with skill.

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Granted, I'm not published, but I think that's the wrong attitude to have. Plenty of the books that are popular and were or are bestsellers were rejected plenty of times before they were accepted, including Twilight. For a book to get a published, takes a bit of luck in my opinion. For that book to become a highly popular best seller is even greater luck. That's just my opinion.

I'm more pro-literacy than pro-art, so I think *ANYTHING* that gets any one person reading at all is good.

It's not just teen girls reading Twilight. I know grown women from all avenues of life involved in the Twilight fandom. I don't think it will fade quickly or be forgotten in 50 years.

I don't believe it will ever be thought of as a staggering piece of writing, but I do think it will be around in some form.

As for it being bad. I think as long as readers are exposed to a range of books there shouldn't be a problem. I can't count the number of times someone has said Twilight was the first book they picked up in years, or teens saying it was the first book they picked up, or that it inspired them to write.

If someone reads Twilight and it leads them to reading other books are well written, I think that's a great thing. If it leads them to discover a love of writing, that's even better. If those people work at the craft, improve and go on to be the great writers of tomorrow, well that's better again.

Mormon agenda?

Mustafa said:

They said it made girls think that the perfect man will sneak into your room at night, or try to control you. I tried to point out that some of them (my friends) were girls and they didn't think that kind of relationship was "good." But they were adamant.

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Well, to be fair, if they're not fans of the book they're probably unlikely to be influenced in a major way by it.

I think it's unfair to readers, including teens, to assume that they'll be this impressionable. But I do think it's fair to criticize the themes or messages a book contains.

And while I try to give readers some credit, there is a real problem of glamorizing abusive behavior, and it can have real-life consequences. But more importantly, it doesn't make a writer or story look good to me when the writer seems unaware of the implications in what they write.

There were other "dangers" that they associated with her religion but I actually don't feel comfortable repeating them because I actually found them pretty disturbing. Not the beliefs, the fact that someone could be that bigoted to that extreme and seem oblivious to the fact.

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I think it's hard to judge if their arguments were unfair or prejudiced without knowing what they were. Criticizing religious philosophy that appears to be present in a work of fiction is not necessarily bigoted. Doing so out of ignorance or bias is.

I think Meyer's has talent. Maybe a sub-par writer, but what she did the most, the thing I think that really worked for her is that she followed her heart. If you read about where the story comes from on her website, it's clear that she really cared about and really believed in this story. And, like JJ said, it really resonates with a certain female fantasy, that the guy who ignores you is really in love with you.

I expect, like others, that this story will have little staying power, but so what? A lot of people liked it. Its a good story. Nice mindless brain candy, if you like that sort of thing, well, maybe you'll get a cavity, but if you brush your teeth you should be ok.

& sure, luck counts in publishing, right? If they've just accepted a story like yours, you'll have to submit somewhere else.

Mustafa said:

I would replace "luck" with "time." There are lots of anecdotes of books not finding a publisher right away (Twilight is not one of those stories, by the way - SM landed an agent straight away and a publisher almost immediately), but generally those books had *some* success in the meantime. JK Rowling, (to use an oft quoted example) didn't find a publisher right away, but she found an agent pretty quick.

A good book will find a home, it sometimes just takes a bit of time.

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That bolded statement is a prime example of luck being a huge factor in a writer's success.

I'd love to think that a good book will always find a home. But how are we defining "success" here? Getting an agent? A publishing contract? Legions of fans and a movie franchise? All of those things take a combination of persistance, timing, and luck. If you don't believe that luck is a key factor in success, then okay, but it's still a factor.

RichardGarfinkle said:

Exposure to only one set of ideas, whatever the source can be very bad for people.

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Richard, I think this really hits the nail on the head for me.

I would probably not have any feelings about the underlying themes or messages of Twilight (besides 'sexism, gross') if it weren't feeding into such a larger, greater narrative that repeats the same messages over and over again.

As one book, can it be damaging? Maybe.

But as part of a greater whole, I think it can be devastating. The way relationships and teen sexuality are portrayed in YA, in general, is something I find really disconcerting at the moment. I think Twilight just takes so much more heat because it's vastly more popular.

I realize this is something I've pretty much said already, but your quote above just helped me conceptualize it in a new way. So thank you!