jagardner@watmath.UUCP (Jim Gardner) (02/17/86)
[...] Let's distinguish between authorial responsibility and the responsibility of editors/publishers. An author has a responsibility to him or herself, to the work she or he is writing, to other works (past or future), and to that nebulous entity called Art. Off the top of my head, I find it difficult to imagine a book that fulfilled its responsibilities in these areas and did not offer readers something worthwhile too, but that's a different topic entirely. Editors and publishers are the ones who have to worry about audience response. They're the ones who ought to be saying, "This should go back to the drawing board." "This chapter is incomprehensible." "This will not sell." "This book will hurt your reputation." "This story makes a travesty of your previous work." "This is boring." "Your public will lynch you." The editor/publisher is in some sense a consumer advocate for the reader: asking the questions a reader might ask, making the demands a reader might make, and so on. The E/P is the person who should be sitting in judgement on what the author has done. Suppose the author has written a story in an odd sort of dialect (as in Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban, a book that was mentioned here recently): the E/P should decide if the effect of the dialect is worthwhile enough to justify the added burden placed on the reader or if it's more trouble than it's worth. In some ways, the author _cannot_ make such decisions objectively. I speak from personal experience on this -- I've just finished writing a story that absolutely refused to be written in anything other than dialect. Is the result comprehensible? I don't know. I hope it is, or I've wasted a lot of my time...but I've thought in this particular dialect for so long that it's second nature to me, and I can't tell how it would hit anyone else. Whether or not editors and publishers live up to this responsibility is an important question, of course. Many people on the Net feel that someone should have said No to Heinlein on some recent books, not to mention Frank Herbert, L.Ron Hubbard, Piers Anthony, and many others. I'm sure that publishers are to blame for a lot of schlock -- pressuring authors to write sequels to big sellers, for example. Publishers have responsibility towards stockholders too. But if a novel that is clearly a failure makes it to the stands, I would say that it is the editor or publisher who is lacking in integrity, not the author (although the author may be a schmuck too). Now, I'm not saying that a writer should be absolutely blind to his/her audience. A professional writer should BE a professional, and a certain amount of business sense is part of the package. Writing a book takes a large investment of time and effort; before starting, the professional should assess the probable financial rewards and decide if the return is going to justify the investment. At the same time, the business of writing has nothing to do with the art and craft of writing. A writer may have to write a particular book just to get it out of his/her system; the writer may be interested in an experimental piece that just doesn't work; or the writer may just come up with something that is commercially unwise (think of Agatha Christie writing Poirot's last case -- that was kept under wraps until she died, just because the publishers didn't want to have Poirot die any earlier than he had to). As a side note, the word "responsibility" has many meanings and it's important to be clear what I'm talking about. All I'm talking about is the responsibility for producing something that "pleases" the audience. That is not a writer's responsibility; it should be laid at the door of the editor or the publisher, or conceivably the business person who shares the same body as the writer. An equally important question, and one that is much harder to answer, is how much responsibility an author should take from the "fall-out" of the work. If a book describes how to make jellied gasoline with easy to find ingredients, and some kid uses the formula and kills himself, how much should we blame the writer? Most of us would likely say the damage is the writer's fault. But should we blame the people who write Superman comics for the kid who pins a towel around his neck and jumps off the 10th floor balcony? Very tough to make hard and fast rules. Anyway, that's a discussion for another time. Jim Gardner, University of Waterloo