Plot Holes, Improbabilities and Glaring Errors

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Paul Whybrow

Full Member
Jun 20, 2015
Cornwall, UK
I'm at risk of confirming my Mr Grumpy status here, but I feel the need to vent some built-up steam pressure about mistakes that appear in novels.

I'm an avid reader, devouring three or four novels a week, concentrating on my chosen writing genre of crime thrillers. In creating my own Cornish Detective stories, I do a ton of research and fact-checking, even if I think I know what's right, so it's irksome to come across published novels that are rife with errors. I'm annoyed twice over, for not only did the author foul up but whoever did the editing couldn't be bothered to do their job properly.

I recently read a thriller where the goodies evaded capture by shooting a bad guy with a hidden gun, that he hadn't expected the prim and proper woman to be carrying. She used a Ruger .327 which is one of the loudest compact pistols around—I know, as I fired one at an American gun range. This wouldn't have mattered, had the plot not gone on to then have a nosy next-door neighbour question the goodies about what they'd been doing in the empty house, alerted by them slamming the front door; she didn't mention the gunshot at all.

In the same novel, Miss Prim & Proper, who was plainly more feisty than she looked, was kidnapped by the dead baddy's colleague who threw her into the boot of a Chrysler 300 saloon, with her arms and legs untied. 'Hmmm', thought I, 'This'll be good, she'll get out of there quickly, as that model of car is fitted with an emergency trunk release inside the boot/trunk.' This is a lever with a bright yellow luminous rubber grip that's almost bright enough to read a book by, there as an anti-kidnapping feature. Despite having many opportunities to open the lid and spring out, the abducted woman stayed where she was and was used as a hostage. The author hadn't done his research.

In another novel, which carried a dozen endorsements on its cover by leading thriller writers, the protagonist fired shots at the motorcycles of an outlaw biker gang camped in the desert, to distract them from his buddy sneaking in to release a prisoner. All quite credible, except the author described one Harley Davidson falling over when a bullet hit its petrol tank like it was a frail goat. That bike weighs 600lb and wouldn't have moved. I almost expected the Harley to cry out, "Ooh, owy owy ow, yer got me!" What's even weirder about this, is that the author is a prize-winning rifleman who's won national shooting competitions, so should know better.

I could go on, and I know that stories are 'sexed-up' with daft and illogical froth to make them more appealing, but I still despair when I read something that's bolted beyond the realms of fiction and into the wasteland of implausibility. I immediately stop believing in the story.

Have you come across any glaring errors, plot holes big enough to drive a tank through or details that didn't ring true to you?

Go on, vent, it feels nice!
 
I'm an avid reader, devouring three or four novels a week,

OK, first things first: I hate you. For reasons I still cannot comprehend, I am the slowest reader in the world, and when people whip through books at light speed I am enormously embittered. :p

That being said, I could not agree with you more. I always - always - require logic in what I read, even in fantasy and science fiction. If the writer does not know what they are doing, or does not have at least some knowledge of the technology/physics/chemistry they are using as a pivotal point on their plot, I lose interest instantly.
And its not like this stuff is hard to research! I am not saying I require an author to be an expert in every field they work touches, but we have the internet, people! The greatest store of searchable knowledge mankind has ever known! 10 minutes with google can tell you I your ideas are workable and solid and to not put that time in is arrogant and lazy.

Rambling rant below! Enter at own peril!
Current example, the "trilogy" of books that start with Wool, by Hugh Howey (I was going to make a post about this, as its a popular book, and I seem to be the only person on the entire internet who was annoyed by this). I have just started reading them, and the ideas he is throwing around appeal. A post-apocalytptic society, trapped in some underground structure because the world outside is now uninhabitable and the reason they are all down there is now lost to time. Great stuff.
But...then you get to the nitty-gritty. In short (no spoilers) these people live in the "Silo". This is an enormous cylinder, buried in the ground with only its uppermost level sticking out into the sky. The Silo is 144 floors deep, with living quarters, gardens, food production, computer areas and so on. Again, all fine and good.
The problem is the way people traverse this place. The whole conceit of the main story is that the Mayor of the Silo goes on a pilgrimage to the lower levels to recruit a specific person. Now, the Silo is traversed by way of a central, spiral staircase; you have to walk down hundreds of steps to get where you want to go. The person they want to see is very far down (I don't know how far yet, as I gave up).
The issue is that, to traverse these floors, they mayor will apparently take four whole days of walking! Four days?!
If we take the floors to be a fairly generous 10 feet higher and even if we assume this person is heading to the 144th floor, the math does not hold. 144 floors at 10 feet each is, obviously, 1440 feet. If we, for the sake of ease, assume average stairs, at 3 stairs to 1 foot of descent, then you get 4320 stairs.
(Still with me?)
OK, so 4320 stairs over 96 hours. Knock that down to 48 hours of actual walking as they stop a lot to sleep. 4320 stairs in 48 hours is 90 stairs per hour or 1.5 stairs per minute! Unless this woman is moving by way of dragging herself by her eyebrows, how the hell can anyone walk that slow?
Oh, but what if the floors are bigger, you ask? Well, they aren't, I checked, but even if we assume an increase of floor size by a factor of 10, making the floors 100 foot high each, the math still fails as she is still only moving 15 steps per minute, well below the pace of someone on crutches. Even factoring in how crowded these stairs are, with people jostling for space, it makes no sense. And, moreover, at this scale, a) the building cannot support itself structurally under its own weight and b) as there are no airlocks, the pressure at the bottom of this Silo would be like living on Venus.

Rant ends

So, yeah: check your simple facts, folks. If someone studying high school math and physics is raising their eyebrows over your setup, it may be time to do something else.
 
I must admit Paul, like Howard, I am impressed with your reading skills. The boy racer of reading.
 
OK, first things first: I hate you. For reasons I still cannot comprehend, I am the slowest reader in the world, and when people whip through books at light speed I am enormously embittered. :p

That being said, I could not agree with you more. I always - always - require logic in what I read, even in fantasy and science fiction. If the writer does not know what they are doing, or does not have at least some knowledge of the technology/physics/chemistry they are using as a pivotal point on their plot, I lose interest instantly.
And its not like this stuff is hard to research! I am not saying I require an author to be an expert in every field they work touches, but we have the internet, people! The greatest store of searchable knowledge mankind has ever known! 10 minutes with google can tell you I your ideas are workable and solid and to not put that time in is arrogant and lazy.

Rambling rant below! Enter at own peril!
Current example, the "trilogy" of books that start with Wool, by Hugh Howey (I was going to make a post about this, as its a popular book, and I seem to be the only person on the entire internet who was annoyed by this). I have just started reading them, and the ideas he is throwing around appeal. A post-apocalytptic society, trapped in some underground structure because the world outside is now uninhabitable and the reason they are all down there is now lost to time. Great stuff.
But...then you get to the nitty-gritty. In short (no spoilers) these people live in the "Silo". This is an enormous cylinder, buried in the ground with only its uppermost level sticking out into the sky. The Silo is 144 floors deep, with living quarters, gardens, food production, computer areas and so on. Again, all fine and good.
The problem is the way people traverse this place. The whole conceit of the main story is that the Mayor of the Silo goes on a pilgrimage to the lower levels to recruit a specific person. Now, the Silo is traversed by way of a central, spiral staircase; you have to walk down hundreds of steps to get where you want to go. The person they want to see is very far down (I don't know how far yet, as I gave up).
The issue is that, to traverse these floors, they mayor will apparently take four whole days of walking! Four days?!
If we take the floors to be a fairly generous 10 feet higher and even if we assume this person is heading to the 144th floor, the math does not hold. 144 floors at 10 feet each is, obviously, 1440 feet. If we, for the sake of ease, assume average stairs, at 3 stairs to 1 foot of descent, then you get 4320 stairs.
(Still with me?)
OK, so 4320 stairs over 96 hours. Knock that down to 48 hours of actual walking as they stop a lot to sleep. 4320 stairs in 48 hours is 90 stairs per hour or 1.5 stairs per minute! Unless this woman is moving by way of dragging herself by her eyebrows, how the hell can anyone walk that slow?
Oh, but what if the floors are bigger, you ask? Well, they aren't, I checked, but even if we assume an increase of floor size by a factor of 10, making the floors 100 foot high each, the math still fails as she is still only moving 15 steps per minute, well below the pace of someone on crutches. Even factoring in how crowded these stairs are, with people jostling for space, it makes no sense. And, moreover, at this scale, a) the building cannot support itself structurally under its own weight and b) as there are no airlocks, the pressure at the bottom of this Silo would be like living on Venus.

Rant ends

So, yeah: check your simple facts, folks. If someone studying high school math and physics is raising their eyebrows over your setup, it may be time to do something else.



He should have slid down the banister balustrade—wheeee!
 
If you live and work in Africa, you get used to the stream of inaccuracies in all kinds of novels and non-fiction written about cities and countries all around the continent. Writers come out to Cape Town for three weeks on holiday, go home and decide they want a romance based in the shadow of Table Mountain. And they get all kinds of details wrong because there isn't enough online information about African destinations as yet and because the Cape has a complex backstory made up of many histories at odds with one another. It's easy to get it wrong, and any successful 2017 book about South Africa published on the international market will be read by South Africans here and abroad. Who get onto Twitter and turn errors into memes or jokes, expose the mistakes.

It is even worse to get non-fiction wrong. One of the first writers on modern Africa who enthralled me was Ryszard Kapuscinski, a brilliant Polish journalist and political analyst. In 1976 he wrote a book on Angola called Another Day of Life and I bought it a decade or so later. The writing was magnificent, the definitive portrayal of a city veering into surreal after years of civil war. The difficulty was that I knew Luanda well, I had family there, I had friends working there. The Luanda described by Kapuscinki didn't exist, had never existed. He made up the scenes showing people living in crates at the harbour. He invented suburbs, streets, personalities. He placed himself in imaginary dangers, played a role that was pure fiction.

Kapuscinski never expected to be read by anyone outside the West, certainly not by people who called Luanda home. He didn't think real live Africans would ever get to criticise his supposedly factual accounts. Like Bruce Chatwin, he loved the exotic, the surreal, the magical. He liked story-telling. If he'd called it fiction, there would be no problem. He claimed though that he was writing gritty front-line journalism.

For bathos, there was the infamous Louise Linton who wrote a selfie of a travel biography about her travels as a student in deepest darkest Zambia, terrified by conflict on the edge of the Congo, nearly eaten by snakes and lions etc. She was a naive white woman with 'angelic' blond hair, messianic and delusional. She went back to friends in Britain and the US and told her glammed-up versions of the dangers of wild Dark Africa and everyone told her she should write a book. The real ethical problem I have is why the publishers didn't do some elementary fact-checking. After the outcry on Black Twitter and official Zambian govt protests, the book was pulped. She apologised for giving offence. Then went on to give further offence elsewhere...
 
The Bible comes to mind, although I haven't read it recently (memories of studying it in Welsh in Sunday school when a boy).

In 'Gate of Tears' I struggled for a few days to get the maths right on a fictional boat trip down the Red Sea (even with my seagoing experience), because the plot at that point depended on fuel load and rate of fuel consumption. I could probably have winged it but that would not have seemed right to me.

Sci-fi allows more latitude but as @Howard points out even then one has to be careful.
 
If you live and work in Africa, you get used to the stream of inaccuracies in all kinds of novels and non-fiction written about cities and countries all around the continent. Writers come out to Cape Town for three weeks on holiday, go home and decide they want a romance based in the shadow of Table Mountain. And they get all kinds of details wrong because there isn't enough online information about African destinations as yet and because the Cape has a complex backstory made up of many histories at odds with one another. It's easy to get it wrong, and any successful 2017 book about South Africa published on the international market will be read by South Africans here and abroad. Who get onto Twitter and turn errors into memes or jokes, expose the mistakes.

It is even worse to get non-fiction wrong. One of the first writers on modern Africa who enthralled me was Ryszard Kapuscinski, a brilliant Polish journalist and political analyst. In 1976 he wrote a book on Angola called Another Day of Life and I bought it a decade or so later. The writing was magnificent, the definitive portrayal of a city veering into surreal after years of civil war. The difficulty was that I knew Luanda well, I had family there, I had friends working there. The Luanda described by Kapuscinki didn't exist, had never existed. He made up the scenes showing people living in crates at the harbour. He invented suburbs, streets, personalities. He placed himself in imaginary dangers, played a role that was pure fiction.

Kapuscinski never expected to be read by anyone outside the West, certainly not by people who called Luanda home. He didn't think real live Africans would ever get to criticise his supposedly factual accounts. Like Bruce Chatwin, he loved the exotic, the surreal, the magical. He liked story-telling. If he'd called it fiction, there would be no problem. He claimed though that he was writing gritty front-line journalism.

For bathos, there was the infamous Louise Linton who wrote a selfie of a travel biography about her travels as a student in deepest darkest Zambia, terrified by conflict on the edge of the Congo, nearly eaten by snakes and lions etc. She was a naive white woman with 'angelic' blond hair, messianic and delusional. She went back to friends in Britain and the US and told her glammed-up versions of the dangers of wild Dark Africa and everyone told her she should write a book. The real ethical problem I have is why the publishers didn't do some elementary fact-checking. After the outcry on Black Twitter and official Zambian govt protests, the book was pulped. She apologised for giving offence. Then went on to give further offence elsewhere...

Louise Linton is a symptom of what's wrong with modern day society's obsession with celebrity—where if someone is pretty and glamorous they're assumed to have a brain capable of pronouncing worthwhile thoughts—it's all window-dressing with no real content.

Incidentally, an anagram of Louise Linton is Nullities—"a thing of no importance or worth"....which sums her up very well!
 
OK, first things first: I hate you. For reasons I still cannot comprehend, I am the slowest reader in the world, and when people whip through books at light speed I am enormously embittered. :p

That being said, I could not agree with you more. I always - always - require logic in what I read, even in fantasy and science fiction. If the writer does not know what they are doing, or does not have at least some knowledge of the technology/physics/chemistry they are using as a pivotal point on their plot, I lose interest instantly.
And its not like this stuff is hard to research! I am not saying I require an author to be an expert in every field they work touches, but we have the internet, people! The greatest store of searchable knowledge mankind has ever known! 10 minutes with google can tell you I your ideas are workable and solid and to not put that time in is arrogant and lazy.

Rambling rant below! Enter at own peril!
Current example, the "trilogy" of books that start with Wool, by Hugh Howey (I was going to make a post about this, as its a popular book, and I seem to be the only person on the entire internet who was annoyed by this). I have just started reading them, and the ideas he is throwing around appeal. A post-apocalytptic society, trapped in some underground structure because the world outside is now uninhabitable and the reason they are all down there is now lost to time. Great stuff.
But...then you get to the nitty-gritty. In short (no spoilers) these people live in the "Silo". This is an enormous cylinder, buried in the ground with only its uppermost level sticking out into the sky. The Silo is 144 floors deep, with living quarters, gardens, food production, computer areas and so on. Again, all fine and good.
The problem is the way people traverse this place. The whole conceit of the main story is that the Mayor of the Silo goes on a pilgrimage to the lower levels to recruit a specific person. Now, the Silo is traversed by way of a central, spiral staircase; you have to walk down hundreds of steps to get where you want to go. The person they want to see is very far down (I don't know how far yet, as I gave up).
The issue is that, to traverse these floors, they mayor will apparently take four whole days of walking! Four days?!
If we take the floors to be a fairly generous 10 feet higher and even if we assume this person is heading to the 144th floor, the math does not hold. 144 floors at 10 feet each is, obviously, 1440 feet. If we, for the sake of ease, assume average stairs, at 3 stairs to 1 foot of descent, then you get 4320 stairs.
(Still with me?)
OK, so 4320 stairs over 96 hours. Knock that down to 48 hours of actual walking as they stop a lot to sleep. 4320 stairs in 48 hours is 90 stairs per hour or 1.5 stairs per minute! Unless this woman is moving by way of dragging herself by her eyebrows, how the hell can anyone walk that slow?
Oh, but what if the floors are bigger, you ask? Well, they aren't, I checked, but even if we assume an increase of floor size by a factor of 10, making the floors 100 foot high each, the math still fails as she is still only moving 15 steps per minute, well below the pace of someone on crutches. Even factoring in how crowded these stairs are, with people jostling for space, it makes no sense. And, moreover, at this scale, a) the building cannot support itself structurally under its own weight and b) as there are no airlocks, the pressure at the bottom of this Silo would be like living on Venus.

Rant ends

So, yeah: check your simple facts, folks. If someone studying high school math and physics is raising their eyebrows over your setup, it may be time to do something else.


And yet, this guy has made tons of money. Dan Brown, anyone?
 
I agree that mistakes in books can throw a reader out of a story faster than a mic drop - that's what good editors are for! However, not all editors are created equal.

I'm equally surprised at the errors I find in books published by some of the larger publishing houses. I once grew so incensed by the frequent adverbial dialogue attributions all over a middle grade novel that I highlighted every instance and sent to back to the editor - this was an educational publisher for heaven's sake! Of course I didn't hear a thing back.
 
I agree that mistakes in books can throw a reader out of a story faster than a mic drop - that's what good editors are for! However, not all editors are created equal.

I'm equally surprised at the errors I find in books published by some of the larger publishing houses. I once grew so incensed by the frequent adverbial dialogue attributions all over a middle grade novel that I highlighted every instance and sent to back to the editor - this was an educational publisher for heaven's sake! Of course I didn't hear a thing back.

This made me laugh. I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when that editor got the book from you! It must have felt good--I know I've been tempted to do the same.
 
No! Don't open the Dan Brown debate again!!!

I always thought that, at least, he has the perfect name for his output....:confused:

Whenever I see his name, I'm reminded of a disgusting quip that somebody said to me in America. (Sorry about this). When someone gave a particularly loud fart, she commented, "Mmm, lick your lips, you can taste the brown."
 
Say what you want about Dan Brown and prolific authors like him, but they're giving the reading public what they want. And unfortunately, our average reading public doesn't know the difference between a technically well-written book and one that is abysmal as far as the technical aspects of writing are concerned. :)
 
Say what you want about Dan Brown and prolific authors like him, but they're giving the reading public what they want. And unfortunately, our average reading public doesn't know the difference between a technically well-written book and one that is abysmal as far as the technical aspects of writing are concerned. :)
You are absolutely right, Carol. I've been reading a lot of James Patterson recently. At times I roll my eyes at the writing - but his books sell and people will continue to buy them. I thought his idea of BookShots was a great one, until I read one of them! Nope, not good at all. I suspect even the reading public will feel the same way. But hey, what do I know?! He's prolific, is a mult-millionaire and has clearly found his formula.
 
The success of authors whose literary skills show them to be hacks, conforms to my theory that writing is comparable to food. Some books are the equivalent of processed food—produced to a formula that requires the minimum of effort from the maker and the consumer.

As author Stan Barstow observed:

The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
 
I don't like using the word "hack" because, and this is just my personal opinion, it implies no skill level at all. And I don't believe that's true of writers whose books are formulaic. If it is, then all romance writers are hacks, and sorry, but that's simply not true.

Everyone knows how a romance will end. We don't read them to see if the hero and heroine end up together. We read them for the middle - the journey of how they get there. And that's where the skill level needs to come in for a genre writer. To make that middle different each time.

If a writer in any genre fiction wrote the same characters each book, who behaved in the same way, had the same types of friends, had the same types of experiences, the same job, wore the same clothes, spoke the same way, book after book after book, I would say there was little skill level there. I would guess they were using a template of sorts. But writers like Dan Brown, James Patterson, and Stephen King aren't doing that. They're writing for the most part in the same genre each time, but their books are each unique in terms of characters and details.

Their readers expect a certain type of book from them, and that's what drives the market. Reader expectations. Reader demands. And, let's be real - fiction writing for the most part is formulaic. Each genre has certain expectations, as determined by their readers. Commercial fiction is all reader driven, whether we want to accept that or not. :) Agents and editors keep an eye on it and that's why they only take books they believe they can sell. If you've written something that doesn't conform to genre specifics, you have a better chance of doing well with the book if you self-publish it, but that's an animal unto itself these days.

Your best chance there is to watch the market, just like you should be doing anyway in the genre you write. :) This is why it's vital to first understand what you are writing. Who reads it? What expectations do readers have in that genre? What are other authors writing in it? Give it your own twist, to be sure, but don't venture too far away. Not at first. Once you have a following and some published titles under your belt, you can experiment. But be forewarned. It doesn't always work. Trust me on this one. :) I've had some massive flops because I tried to venture too far away from what I'm now known for writing, and my readers didn't like it. It's happened to authors I know who sell way more than me, too.

As for our reading public, well, bless them. LOL! They may not understand a dangling modifier when they see one, or appreciate the beauty of a well-turned line of prose, but without them, we wouldn't be here at all. There would be no one to read what we write. :)

This is a business. It always has been, at least in the last century or so. And if you're going to treat it like a business, you have to understand the market. Plain and simple. You have to understand what you're selling, and you have to give the readers what they want. :)
 
The success of authors whose literary skills show them to be hacks, conforms to my theory that writing is comparable to food. ...
I don't like using the word "hack" because, and this is just my personal opinion, it implies no skill level at all. ...
Slightly irrelevant, but I always thought a hack was a writer who produces dull or unoriginal work because they are too cynical to care – not someone who is unskilled (quite the opposite, in fact).

--

Anyway, that's beside the point. @Carol Rose, I think you nailed the genre argument, and I totally agree.


[edited for spelling]
 
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Slightly irrelevant, but I always though a hack was a writer who produces dull or unoriginal work because they are too cynical to care – not someone who is unskilled (quite the opposite, in fact).

Well, someone who bangs out the same characters, situations, jobs, clothing, speech patterns, etc. time after time is dull and unoriginal, no matter what their motivation for not caring what they produce is. Whether it's cynicism or laziness, there's no skill involved. Almost anyone could "write" books that way if given a template to start with, no? We have software now that "writes" them. :(

I don't know if the TV show "Friends" is available everywhere, and it's been a while now since it ended, but there was an episode on it where we met Chandler's mother, played by the actress Morgan Fairchild. She's supposed to be a successful romance writer, and makes a quip about how all you have to do is change the names and locations, and voila! You have another novel! Pissed me off at the time and I wasn't even published yet. It's not the only time the media has portrayed novelists - and especially romance novelists - as doing nothing more than banging out a book with only a few details changed each time. Then again, with the proliferation of so much garbage on Amazon, the general belief these days is that literally anyone has the talent to write a book. So there you go.
 
Yeah, it's easy to feel it's an uphill struggle. But hey ho, we'll keep writing, eh? And screw the hacks.

[Although I must say, as someone relatively new to this writing game, I live in fear that I am dull and unoriginal. But then, no one got good by not writing.]
 
I don't like using the word "hack" because, and this is just my personal opinion, it implies no skill level at all. And I don't believe that's true of writers whose books are formulaic. If it is, then all romance writers are hacks, and sorry, but that's simply not true.

Everyone knows how a romance will end. We don't read them to see if the hero and heroine end up together. We read them for the middle - the journey of how they get there. And that's where the skill level needs to come in for a genre writer. To make that middle different each time.

If a writer in any genre fiction wrote the same characters each book, who behaved in the same way, had the same types of friends, had the same types of experiences, the same job, wore the same clothes, spoke the same way, book after book after book, I would say there was little skill level there. I would guess they were using a template of sorts. But writers like Dan Brown, James Patterson, and Stephen King aren't doing that. They're writing for the most part in the same genre each time, but their books are each unique in terms of characters and details.

Their readers expect a certain type of book from them, and that's what drives the market. Reader expectations. Reader demands. And, let's be real - fiction writing for the most part is formulaic. Each genre has certain expectations, as determined by their readers. Commercial fiction is all reader driven, whether we want to accept that or not. :) Agents and editors keep an eye on it and that's why they only take books they believe they can sell. If you've written something that doesn't conform to genre specifics, you have a better chance of doing well with the book if you self-publish it, but that's an animal unto itself these days.

Your best chance there is to watch the market, just like you should be doing anyway in the genre you write. :) This is why it's vital to first understand what you are writing. Who reads it? What expectations do readers have in that genre? What are other authors writing in it? Give it your own twist, to be sure, but don't venture too far away. Not at first. Once you have a following and some published titles under your belt, you can experiment. But be forewarned. It doesn't always work. Trust me on this one. :) I've had some massive flops because I tried to venture too far away from what I'm now known for writing, and my readers didn't like it. It's happened to authors I know who sell way more than me, too.

As for our reading public, well, bless them. LOL! They may not understand a dangling modifier when they see one, or appreciate the beauty of a well-turned line of prose, but without them, we wouldn't be here at all. There would be no one to read what we write. :)

This is a business. It always has been, at least in the last century or so. And if you're going to treat it like a business, you have to understand the market. Plain and simple. You have to understand what you're selling, and you have to give the readers what they want. :)

The writer of this article, Sonja Palmer, rather shuts down any snooty arguments for disliking styles of writing that don't meet a discerning reader's standards:

Stop Saying Things Don’t Count as Real Art Because You Don’t Like Them

I agree with her observation that there's no point in agonising over people's choices while remaining bothered by how dumbing down has affected (infected) everything.
 
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