Peter Galen Massey

To hack or not to hack, that is the question.

An article in the New York Times last month describes several start-up companies whose goals are “to do for books what Netflix did for movies and Spotify for music.”

As an incentive for authors and publishers to add their work to these online collections, the companies promise to deliver insights into reader behavior: how many finished the books or skipped to the end, which passages readers lingered over and which they skimmed, and so on.

The article goes on to question the viability of the business model, and quotes one writer who is both interested in seeing this reader data and worried that it might reduce her creativity or her willingness to take risks.

All in all, “E-Books are Reading You” was a good article. Thoroughly reported. Balanced in its considerations. And temperate.

This is more than I can say for the Letters to the Editors selected by the Times to publish in response to the article, under the headline “Writers Desperately Seeking Readers,” which are as neat a collection of vanity, arrogance, contempt, elitism, and reductionist thinking as you are likely to find on a mere one-eighth of a standard broadsheet.

From this description, you might think I didn’t like these letters. But I did. Because they encapsulate so many of things I find wrong with writers.

I’m not going to out the authors of these letters – they are quite easily found through Google with the information I’ve provided anyhow – I’ll simply provide my response to what they wrote. To wit:

Art is a supremely individual expression.

Yes, I agree with that.

It doesn’t ask permission; it doesn’t take an exit poll and adjust accordingly.

It doesn’t? You mean no artist has ever taken an audience’s reaction into account? How about the opinions of mentors, other artists, editors, agents, critics, friends, spouses, or lovers? Where does acting on feedback end and pandering begin? Or does the definition depend on the status of who is giving the feedback?

Artists say what they know … they have no choice in the matter.

Yes, I agree with that too. Unfortunately.

And it’s our privilege to be brought into their world.

Our privilege? I would like to decide for myself whether entering that world is a “privilege”. Many times it is. However, from my experience, when someone declares that my attention to their work is a “privilege” this is often a sign that it ain’t. In any case, I think an audience’s attention to a work of art is also a “privilege” that is earned by the artist, rather than something that is his or her natural right. Or something to be demanded in a fantasy-fascist world where the artist, self-proclaimed or otherwise, rules as a cult-of-personality dictator.

Once artists start asking how many “likes” they’ve garnered, or listening to customer-satisfaction surveys to increase their sales, they’re no longer making art: they’re moving product.

Okay, here we go. Did Shakespeare move “product”? Because we have a fair amount of evidence that he did, from his output and popularity, to his becoming one of the owners of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to the records of his investments and property purchases including New Place in Stratford. Will didn’t start rich. But he ended up that way. And he did so while becoming, as it turns out, the immortal genius of literature in English.

Then we have the famous Robert Greene, who seems – with some scholarly doubt, but not too much — to be referring to Shakespeare in his comment about “an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers … [who] supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you.”

I have two points to make here. The first is that earning money from art, and earning it through popular success, is in no way incompatible with the highest artistic achievement; and the examples of this are so numerous and so decisive you would think there would be no need to have the discussion. Dickens. Bob Dylan. Heck, even Nabokov. I bet you can name plenty of your own. All these guys made serious coin. But not one of them ever once considered the satisfaction of their “customers”? (Well, I’ll give you Nabokov.) No real artist ever once bent to a requirement of a pope with gold or a publisher who could pay or to what people or a patron seemed to like? They never once took a commission? Really? Hum.

The second point is that a great number of the attitudes I’m spanking the hell out of here, possibly to my peril, are not really about art. They are about the vanity of people who want to be seen as artists and who jealously guard the elevated social status that perception confers.

This is where Greene comes in to play. Greene was a university-educated playwright who clearly believed Shakespeare was infringing on his turf. Where is Greene’s work now? Or consider where the reputation of Shakespeare’s two long “art” poems sit compared to his plays.

Another way to say it is that the intention to create art is no guarantee of artistic success just as the intention to please an audience is no guarantee of artistic failure. And these are just two of the many complex factors, complexly interacting, that actually drive the act of creation.

Writers such as these could be described as ‘tech savvy’ or known by an adjective that predates the digital age: hacks.

A variation on the theme here, but a couple points. First is the idea that a “hack” appears to be someone who acts on aggregate feedback from a large audience. The author of this letter describes himself as an editor. I assume that if a writer listens to his editorial feedback, he does not think this makes the writer a hack. But if so, I would like to know the reasons why acting on his advice is not pandering too.

Hovering around the fringes of these letters are two relevant ideas. The first is the genre fiction / literary fiction divide, in which the former is characterized by the low-quality pursuit of money and the latter by the high-quality pursuit of art. The second is that the categories are absolute. You are either Fifty Shades of Grey or you are The Waves; you are either a hack or you are not; you either listen to everybody or you listen to nobody but your own genius muse.

But there is actually a wide spectrum between these two poles and different artists, and different works by the same artist, fall all over the place between them. Some work that is perceived to pursue popularity and profit turns out to be art (Shakespeare again). Some work that is perceived to be art sinks into rightful oblivion. Some art is art and some crap is crap. Then there is a whole lot of mediocrity muddling around in the middle. It’s all incredibly hard to categorize, and the best we can do is begin with individual reactions to individual works.

I’d like to think that valuing integrity over popularity is fundamental to … writing books.

Ah, the idealism of youth (the writer identifies himself as 19). Actually, he seems like a nice fellow and I have no desire to criticize him. But question. Are integrity and popularity mutually exclusive?

Because by now, you know I don’t think they are and that most books are built, in part, from some combination of integrity and popularity: or if you will, the amount of work the reader performs to approach the author versus the amount of work the author performs to approach the reader. Also, popularity we can measure in all sorts of ways. How do we measure integrity?

Let’s keep going. Is integrity founded on intention or results? Let’s say for example – I don’t know this, but give it to me as a “for instance” – that E.L. James intended to write a good / high quality / literary book but her talent wasn’t up to the task of producing anything other than Fifty Shades of Grey. Does that mean the novel has integrity?

If Joyce wrote Ulysses in cynical bad faith, does that mean we should reject the book? And if Jonathan Livingston Seagull was written with total sincerity – which would make it even scarier in my opinion, but anyhow – does that mean we should embrace it?

In the end, I suppose I’m saying that it is the work that matters. The work is certainly much easier to access compared to the artist’s good or bad faith, in any case.

Well, that about wraps it up. Hope you have a good day. Now I have to get back to reading Count Fabio and the Sexy Pirate Queens on my Kindle. I’m skipping the dull parts.