Why does writing get called 'bad' as soon as it's popular?

What makes poor writing? We've seen a not entirely unpredictable backlash against Fifty Shades of Grey from some quarters. It's the reaction that seems to kick in whenever a book (or in this case a trilogy) reaches a certain level of popularity. And I don't think it's completely justified.

It isn't just that it looks like snobbery, although there is, I think, an element of that. The idea that if you are genuinely to appreciate the joy of reading, you must have had a certain level - and a certain kind - of education. If millions of people are enjoying a book, it can't be that good because there can't be that many people with that kind of education. Our 'club' is more exclusive than that ... isn't it?

I said it's not just snobbery because, to be fair, what you think of as good writing will of course be affected by how widely you've read. My reading tastes have certainly changed over the years, and now I would cringe at some of the things I read and enjoyed in my teens and even in my twenties: books full of cliché-ridden characters and hackneyed turns of phrase.

It's also true that we live in a world in which winning a publicity lottery can bring undeserved success - we have celebrities who are famous for nothing more than being famous. And, thanks in no small part to phenomena such as YouTube, people and things can gain incredible popularity (or notoriety) for the most trivial of reasons.

But even if a snowball of hype is how Fifty Shades of Grey achieved its initial success, people are still reading it and they're still enjoying it.

And that's the point: if a particular writing style succeeds in firing your imagination, taking you off to another reality, painting pictures in your mind ... then that writing is good for you. A cliché is a cliché only if you've encountered it many times before.

What's more, if it fails to do those things for someone else, I don't think that person can legitimately say that it's objectively 'bad', even if it's bad for them.

Of course, you may be able to apply all kinds of objective measures to a piece of literature. You may be able to dissect it, analyse it and come up with the conclusion that it's either good or bad. But if your conclusion is at odds with the reaction of millions of readers, might not the flaw be in the analysis, rather than in the readers?

The 100 year old solution to all editing problems

Editors and proofreaders can find themselves under a lot of pressure. After all, it's their job to do the impossible: to achieve 100% accuracy. We all know, of course, that no-one can possibly do this all the time. People are bound to make mistakes.

I recently came across a wonderful solution to the problem in a travel guide published in 1913. Towards the middle of the book, there's a small scrap of paper, bound in, which contains the following message:

TO READERS.


Every care has been taken to render this volume accurate and trustworthy. But changes take place, both in town and in country, with a rapidity which often thwarts the efforts of the most alert and painstaking writer. We should, therefore, esteem it a favour if readers discovering errors, either of omission or of commission, in these pages, would promptly inform us. Such communications will be duly acknowledged and the inaccuracies rectified at the earliest opportunity.


THE EDITOR.

Absolutely marvellous. Maybe this is - or was - standard practice, but I've never seen it before, and I love it.

Are we plunging into a new dark age without realising it?

And can the publishing world help to drag us out of the mire if so?

Apologies for the mixed metaphors, but they both seemed to fit somehow.

Exhibit A: Paul the Octopus. Of course, it's not Paul's fault (and in fact, for all I know, the creature may be a genuine miracle of nature – it's not my place to say otherwise!), but he's the latest in a constant stream of stories that put me in mind of medieval levels of superstition.

To me, they're the modern equivalents of 'two-headed cow in next village predicts doomsday'.

And we seem to love it. My guess is that we've always loved it. And we always will.

It almost seems now as if the 20th century was a brief renaissance – a flirtation with enlightenment, where intellect and learning were respected, but that now we've reverted to type. Give us psychic octopuses (not octopi, by the way!), miraculous images on bits of toast, faces on Mars...

It's not that we didn't have all this a few years ago. Of course we did. But two things have happened to give this kind of thing more prominence and more credibility.

One is, obviously, the internet. You can now publish all kinds of pseudo-science and conspiracy theories online without having to go through any kind of review or approval process. A lot of the nonsense falls by the wayside, destined to be ignored.

But some of it gets noticed.

And some of it does more than get noticed – some of it wins the 'social media lottery'. People set up Facebook groups, start blogs. Before long, the tabloids get wind of the story, then the broadcast media...

And so many of us seem to be taken in. I think it's partly because 'giant spiders could be living on Mars' is just more exciting than 'geological features on Mars slightly resemble spiders' (I did just make this up, by the way).

But I think there's more at play. It's the same phenomenon that means you're guaranteed a great job if you can confidently come up with a lot of meaningless business-speak in the face of a rude and/or aggressive interviewer. Forget whether you can do the job. Just do the interview. If you can talk in a certain way, it almost doesn't matter what you say.

I don't know whether to love or hate the film, but we seem to be hurtling towards Idiocracy with alarming speed.

What's all this got to do with publishing?

Well, I think we really, really need publishers now more than ever.

We need trade publishers to look after our language, to nurture genuinely good writers, to thrive and to produce work that will not be lost in the sea of online material that hasn't been through the rigorous editorial processes that you will find in a publishing house.

And we need academic publishers to be just as vocal in debunking some of the crazier unverified pseudo-science as some bloggers are in proposing it.

This comes down partly to understanding the value of information. The trouble with the internet is that it has led us to believe that information costs nothing. That good writing is free. Journalism is facing the same problem. People don't want to pay for news, and as the traditional business models become unworkable, good quality journalism is in danger of being replaced by pure rumour. Because we've come to see rumour as just as valuable as real news.

To be fair, I think much of the book publishing world is doing itself a lot of good. Publishers are using social media and other technologies to show off the value of what they do. And there seems to have been some movement towards publishers strengthening their own brands, now that it's no longer enough to rely on authors as brands. The message has to be: you can trust this to be a good read – or to be accurate – because we published it.