It seems inevitable that the more popular something is, the more insistent people are that it's really terrible, if you actually look, see, right there, that bit's just awful, and the rest of it isn't all that, really, you're just being a sheep if you can't see the truth. Most of the time, the people who're loudest about how terrible something is are the people who haven't actually bothered to read it / see it / listen to it / taste it, etc.

Nowhere have I seen this more than with Twilight. Hell, I'll admit I was one of them - I'd never read Meyer's books, but I was sure they were garbage. Why? Because she was making money, and millions of people were devouring the books like potatoes.

Surely lots of people liking your book means there're absolutely no redeeming qualities about it whatsoever. Having now read them, I have to say - yeah, I can see why they were so popular. There's an emotional intensity to them that taps right in to the sense of all-consuming love and passion that we idealise and search for in many forms of art.

I have some theories as to where this habit comes from. I think, in part, it's an Australianism - as a culture, we have difficulty seeing anyone come out on top (unless they're an athlete), difficulty admitting to liking something that's mega-popular. It becomes one giant in-joke of "yeah, we know it's popular, but we haven't been sucked in. Everyone who's really got a brain secretly knows that it's crap." Or the backhanded "yeah, I know it's garbage, but I like it. You wanna make something of it?"

But it's more than that. It seems that anyone who works or lives in the literary world - not the publishing world, but the literary one, where 5000 is a bloody good print run and you chuckle bitterly at the idea of a royalty cheque - has an automatic resentment towards anything popular, no matter the quality. I saw it most strongly in my undergrad and my publishing masters, where even buying from chain bookstores was on par with dancing naked around a fire in the woods and sacrificing a goat. Everyone was eager to make jokes about sparkly vampires and wizards.

There was only one lecturer in my six years there who chided us for dismissing Dan Brown without having read him, or even intending to read him. Who pointed out the idiocy in scorning the hugely popular just because it was, well, hugely popular. Who made us realise that our elitism was preventing us from learning what it was he did to make his books that popular. The scorn we were heaping would prevent us from ever attaining the same success.

Let's leave aside the reasons we do this - there's elitism in there, and some bruised ego, frustration (because there's always a better-written piece that never reaches that kind of popularity), a refusal to be lumped in the same category as people who camp out for four days for a movie premier, and probably a host of complicated individual reasons per sneerer. Those are things that have to be addressed on a personal level.

I'd focus instead on what you really have to gain by heaping scorn, as opposed to approaching it with an open mind, studying it, and working out not whether or not you think it's any good (that's irrelevant), but why everybody else does seem to think so. What is it that made this one catch fire? What can you learn from this book? How can it help your writing, your success?

Remind me to reread this post when the next J.K / Meyer appears, though.

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Comments (1)

• |2010-07-18 14:17:57 Mujtaba Hussain  - Sometimes the urge is to scorn the sub standard!
  There is a part in all of us which even to our old age is bent on being peer pressured. And most of what you call egotism, is in a manner, peer pressure. Sometimes you cannot defend something, which your peers will not defend. It helps if you have read the book in question, but most of the times, we as a generation do not. Twilight is an example of this I believe.
  
  I have not read it, simply because it is not something I would. Yet I will fully admit that I have at times panned it and might have used the words "Die before touching it"! But I do not deny at all, that there are people who might like it, and I will not for a moment deny that Stephanie Meyer is a hell of a talented lady.
  
  As for the Australianism you mention, I do not know about that. Most of the people I know don't care that much about sports anyway and yet they pan Twilight Saga and it's ilk; but they also liked the Harry Potter series. I believe this was so simply because the latter one was a corollary of a...
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