A Few Words on Personal Taste

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ChaosTitan

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I love reading Nathan Bransford's blog. His posts are insightful and, often, blunt. There's always something new to be learned, and his most recent post touches on a topic that comes up A LOT here at AW. Namely, personal taste and "trash."

Making Taste Overly Personal

Hopefully, this can be an honest and polite discussion, since many of these threads go off the rails when people let their fingers run away with their brains. So what do you think of the post?

It was nice to hear an agent's take on the issue, especially when he was talking about query letters. And his closing paragraph really nails it for me:

Nathan's blog said:
In other words: sure, go ahead and irrationally hate something. It's in your DNA! (Note: probably not true) But try and resist the "trash" syndrome, especially if you're a writer. Not only have you probably stopped learning, but don't forget: someone else thinks your books are trash too, and they're no more right than you are.

Thoughts?
 

ishtar'sgate

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So true. I once put my foot in my mouth by saying I loved Gerald Durrell's books but couldn't stand his brother Lawrence's books. I said it on Nathan's blog and Nathan handles Lawrence's books. Ooops.:D
 

Bubastes

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I :heart: Nathan. He's absolutely right: you can learn something from every book, even the ones you think are "trash."
 

Rarri

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A refreshing read. :)
 

CaroGirl

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I read Nathan every day and think he's awesome and generous for sharing his perspective as a literary agent with the rest of us. I really like his concept of making taste overly personal. Of course taste is personal, that's the definition. I like what I like, but don't necessarily like what you like. It's subjective. Although some would argue there's an objective "good" or "better", the value judgement on a piece of work still comes down to personal taste. It's when we make it overly personal (like Nathan said) that debates get heated.
 
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I don't get it. If you hate something, it's irrational?

Are you not allowed to dislike something and give reasons for that dislike?
 

Williebee

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So very true. I've said more than once that I'm not suited for "literature". I just want to take the reader on a good ride. And not everybody likes the same rides, otherwise there'd be just one of them at Six Flags, and the line would be HUGE!

:)
 

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I don't get it. If you hate something, it's irrational?

Are you not allowed to dislike something and give reasons for that dislike?

That's not what he's saying; he's saying even if you can't give a reason, if you KNOW you have an inexplicable "irrational" loathing, it's OK.

In other words: sure, go ahead and irrationally hate something.

Just don't, he asks, call the thing you loathe and others love, trash.
 

RG570

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I'm not really feeling it.

Some stuff actually sucks. Its suckitude can be measured objectively. I wish this were the magical faery land Nathan Bransford sees from his office tower, but he is clearly unaware of or just plain doesn't want to acknowledge the methods for measuring this suckitude: the amount of stomping and ranting required to expend enough energy to boil 1cc of water is equal to one unit of suck. These units are called "Franzens."

Anyway.
 

Samantha's_Song

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Well that's complete bollocks for a start. If people like me, they like me, if they don't, I don't give a rat's arse. I don't actually want people to like the things I like either; I love to be different and not part of 'the clones'.
And when The Da Vinci code came out, every person I knew, who read books, at the time was raving about it. I wasn't here at AW then. I had no bother in spewing my bile out about that awful written and predictable book, and I soon told everyone how the best parts were taken from The holy blood and the holy grail, which I'd read some twenty years before, and was saying it was copied long before the courst case over it, where I say the judgement was wrong too.
We want people to like us, and we want people to like the things that we like. When something that we can't stand becomes very very popular some sort of survival instinct kicks in, and we want to tear that popular thing to shreds so that we are not left out of the group. And we will even turn ourselves into Crazy Raving Lunatics in order to make this happen.
 

Willowmound

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I'm not really feeling it.

Some stuff actually sucks. Its suckitude can be measured objectively. I wish this were the magical faery land Nathan Bransford sees from his office tower, but he is clearly unaware of or just plain doesn't want to acknowledge the methods for measuring this suckitude: the amount of stomping and ranting required to expend enough energy to boil 1cc of water is equal to one unit of suck. These units are called "Franzens."

Anyway.

How many Franzens on a Twilight? I ask because I haven't read it.
 

C.M.C.

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I'm afraid the distinction may be too subtle for many people. There is a very real difference between something that is hackneyed, something that has technical errors, and something that is derided as being "a steaming pile of crap". Unfortunately, a too large percentage of the writing world, as in the world at large, considers their opinion to be the gospel.
 

CheshireCat

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I'm afraid the distinction may be too subtle for many people. There is a very real difference between something that is hackneyed, something that has technical errors, and something that is derided as being "a steaming pile of crap". Unfortunately, a too large percentage of the writing world, as in the world at large, considers their opinion to be the gospel.


QFT.
 

mscelina

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Amen.

Since the cyberworld became commonplace, the last thing any new writer can afford is foot-in-mouth disease aka not thinking before you hit send.

And there's a substantial difference between pulling out logical and intellectually based reasons for disliking a work (ie-I think Romeo and Juliet is the worst of Shakespeare's plays because it was derived from an earlier work) and trash-talking a writer for no tangible reason whatsoever. ESPECIALLY when you then admit during the course of said heated discussion that you've never read the works in question, which has happened to me in more Harry Potter discussions than I care to acknowledge on other boards.
 
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I'm not a fan of R&J simply because having a romance fail with one female, then immediately glomming on another, obsessing about each other and ending up topping yourself doesn't seem all that romantic to me.

If it was marketed as a tragedy, fair enough, but 'star-crossed lovers'? Puh-lease.

Why does no-one spare a thought for Rosaline?

*mumbles like an old git*
 

HelloKiddo

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Funny you started a topic on this because I just left Nathan a comment on his blog:

Wow wow wow! I cannot believe the comments I am reading here.

Nathan, ordinarily I agree with you and I think your blog is awesome, but not today.

I'm sorry if the rest of you don't consider literary criticism legitimate and you think giving a book a bad review is "mean," but that's your opinion, not mine.

Book reviews are very important to me. I read a lot and almost every book I read is based on recommendations from other people (reviews). Those recommendations count for zero if nobody is permitted to give books negative reviews. Negative reviews are important to literature. No great reviewer I know of gave good recomendations by only giving positive reviews. You need to see both sides of the coin for it to count.

And the argument that negative reviews are mean and that reviewers are just jealous is, quite frankly, childish. Seriously, grow up. People like me enjoy and value book reviews. You want better reviews? Then write a better book! That's the way to do it, not lamely accusing negative reviewers of "jealousy."
And he replied with this:

There's a pretty huge difference between writing a negative review and calling something "trash." I never said people shouldn't write negative reviews, just that writers should avoid shutting closing off their mind to the books they don't like.

I'm not quite sure I get it. It is the word trash that everybody is objecting to? Based on the comments for this entry I'm under the impression that most posters there think that bad reviews are mean and people have no right thinking it's their place to run around criticizing someone else's work.

I still maintain my early comment--reviews are important and they count for nothing if bad reviews aren't also allowed. I agree that a few people do take things too far, but if you don't want others to review your work don't publish it. Saying you want to publish your book but the rules that apply to everybody else--meaning your book goes under scrutiny for both positive and negative reviews--don't apply to you is rubbish. All our books go to the same place, everybody deals with the grind. That's the way it is, it's the way we decide which books are worth reading and which aren't. Without that how would we know what to read?
 

mscelina

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I'm not a fan of R&J simply because having a romance fail with one female, then immediately glomming on another, obsessing about each other and ending up topping yourself doesn't seem all that romantic to me.

If it was marketed as a tragedy, fair enough, but 'star-crossed lovers'? Puh-lease.

Why does no-one spare a thought for Rosaline?

*mumbles like an old git*

LMAO--star-crossed lovers actually does mean tragedy. If their stars are crossed, according to contemporary astrology, their love is doomed.

But of course you knew that. ;)
 
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Ah bollocks.

I shall now rip my own guts out in shame.

(Or brush up on my Shakespeareanese...)
 

Nathan Bransford

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Funny you started a topic on this because I just left Nathan a comment on his blog:

And he replied with this:



I'm not quite sure I get it. It is the word trash that everybody is objecting to? Based on the comments for this entry I'm under the impression that most posters there think that bad reviews are mean and people have no right thinking it's their place to run around criticizing someone else's work.

I still maintain my early comment--reviews are important and they count for nothing if bad reviews aren't also allowed. I agree that a few people do take things too far, but if you don't want others to review your work don't publish it. Saying you want to publish your book but the rules that apply to everybody else--meaning your book goes under scrutiny for both positive and negative reviews--don't apply to you is rubbish. All our books go to the same place, everybody deals with the grind. That's the way it is, it's the way we decide which books are worth reading and which aren't. Without that how would we know what to read?

Thanks for the great comments, everyone.

HelloKiddo, I agree with you - bad reviews have their place (provided, in my opinion, they are constructive and respectful). It's okay to dislike some books! As others said in the comments section, if everyone agreed on everything the world would be a really boring place.

But this isn't what my post is about - my post is about how some people, when confronted with a book they don't like, especially a popular book, develop an irrational hatred toward that book and try and tear it down by calling it trash or writing needlessly scathing reviews or silently seething. Or other people just wave their hands over the bookstore and say everything in it is trash.

All I'm saying is that if writers are doing this with all the books they don't like they're not recognizing how subjective individual taste is, and more importantly they're closing themselves off from learning anything about why the book has reached the level of success it has.
 
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