Literary Validity

What is it that gives validity to a single book or literature as a whole? What is it that makes a book good, worth reading, worth talking about, or worth studying? I have my beliefs, I'll make my stand here, but what led me to write this blog was a debate I had last night with an old friend who just got a Masters in Literature and who is planning to get a PhD in the same area. He is also a writer.

He and his contemporaries believe that it is them, the educated professors and critics, that decide all of those things I mentioned above. It is their belief that they are the only people qualified to decide these things. He likened it to being a medical doctor, a comparison with which I have issues. The belief of these people is that only a small number of books in the genre of General Fiction or Nonfiction have any literary validity at all, and that genres such as Science Fiction and Fantasy have none. The statement made was that these genres "lack craft". This comes from a person who has read half of one book out of either the Sci-Fi or Fantasy genres. He read half of one book, and based on that dismissed thousands of others as not worth reading. This is a person who is going to be teaching kids how to write and what to read. This is a person who says that all of his contemporaries feel the same way. This bothers me a great deal. These people took their years of study and instead of understanding that they had been given the keys to try to understand why a particular piece of literature has validity, they believe that it gives them the right to decide which forms of literature are valid. If you'll look into it you'll find that most of the books they deem valid are written by them, which is a thing that I won't go into, but I feel that it says a lot. What I will go into is why I feel that these people are wrong, lost, and completely missing the point of literature in general. This is made particularly blatant by the fact that most books on writing, written by the people that do the publishing, say to forget most of the things you learned in literature class because it only makes you write badly. I'm sure the egos hate that.

First, literature is about what moves the masses. If a book has the power to move people, in great numbers or small, it is valid. It may not be perfect, no book is, but it is valid. It is the people who do the reading, even us sad little uneducated people, that lend validity to writing. It is the people in the stories that attract the readers. It is not where those people are standing, what era those people are living in, or which genre the book is classified as. The people in the stories are what make the story what it is. It still needs plot, structure, and a nice flow, but it is the people that bring all those things together. It is the willingness of the masses to read these stories and whether or not they enjoy them that makes them valid. Stories teach us about ourselves. They help us to understand who we are, why we do certain things, and why we enjoy certain things. Validity does not decrease as the level of enjoyment rises. Tragedy and drama does not equal validity. Pain, suffering, violence, hatred, angst, and all those other unhappy emotions do not by themselves mean a story is good. It is the willingness of the people to read a story that gives the aficionados a job. They might disagree, but I can prove it.

The two main places where the egos get paid to work are the University classroom and the critic's office. We'll start with the first. What makes kids going into college want to write? It was every book they read growing up, every step of the way, every year, that brought them to that class. That makes every one of those books and every one of those authors valid. That means that it was these things that gave the professor the ability to teach. It means that every one of those books influenced that young aspiring author in some way, and helped them to find their identity as a writer. That is validity. Furthermore, most of the books that the egos deem valid can only begin to be understood at the college level. In most cases it takes people a lifetime of experience to be able to read these books and understand them. It takes a lot of reading to get to that level of understanding. As a professor, you cannot dismiss everything that brought the bright young minds to you as invalid, because that would make you invalid. The end result cannot even begin to matter without every step that brought it into being. The critics? They get even less credit than the professors. They get paid to read and criticize books. Not the books that the professors deem valid, and not the books that they deem valid, but the books that the people are reading, passing around to each other, and lending their own validity to. I'll admit that the critics and jump-start a book's life or an author's career but they do not make them valid. If the people to not identify with the books that the critic is reviewing, then the critic will not have a job for long. That's the reality.

You cannot understand people until you can read what the people are reading and understand why they are reading it. This is the disadvantage of denying whole genres and all of the people that read them. The readers understand the books. They identify with the stories. To say the books are not valid is to say the people are not valid. This is not what the egos mean. What they mean is that they think most people are stupid. They think that only they can understand what is truly a good story, or at the very least this is what they tell themselves and each other. What they forget is that all of these people they look down their noses at were writing and telling stories long before the professors and critics ever came into existence. They can look down their noses all they want, but it is us that gives them validity, not the other way around. All of the dismissing without understanding that they do does not make us look stupid, it makes them look stupid. Knowledge and education, the valid kind, comes with understanding. You cannot deny what you haven't tried to understand and call yourself an expert.

There is validity in every type of writing that effects even one person on an emotional level. Until the educators understand that, they will never be able to pump out the good writers that they like to pretend they pump out. They don't understand. They're not even trying very hard. It's not about craft, criticism, or class. It is, and always has been, about people.

Prove me wrong.

For all the Writers

A fella has just contacted me about a new website he has started up that is designed like a forum and is intended to be a sort of collaborative effort for authors and writers. Anyone interested please check it out and join up if you'd like. I think it's a good idea and I think it could be very interesting. We'll see. It's new, almost brand new, so there are not very many members which kind of appeals to me. But if it's going to work then we need quite a few more people. Here's the address. www.feelswrite.com I hope some of you will find it exciting enough to join.