Unbalanced Scales in Literature

Do readers pay attention? Do they? 

Here’s what I’ve been marinating on this week, and it’s a bit of a doozy!

A colleague of mine once said that as a Black author, “you have to produce A-quality work to get C-quality recognition.” In light of the FSOG phenomenon from a couple of years ago, never truer words were ever spoken.

*Awww, hell, here he go again with THAT book again? What is it now?*

Watch me work, I promise you’ll get where I’m coming from with my train of thought, seriously! As much as you might not want to hear about it, the fact that the movie will be upcoming in the next six months, I don’t think we will be able to collectively avoid it, do you?

Indulge me…

I personally watched the phenomenon grow to staggering proportions when it was a written piece called Master of the Universe. It was fan fiction back then, and while it drew a following, it didn’t exactly break writing ground. The thing about fan fiction that doesn’t have people taking it too seriously is in the fact that it really isn’t written well (although there are some VERY well written pieces in the fan fiction world, don’t get it too twisted), and it is meant to entertain because it rips the characters from a current movie or popular book and places them in some above-PG-13 situations. Such was the case with Master of the Universe.

Edward was no longer a vampire, but a billionaire “dominant” with fetish proclivities named Christian Grey. Bella was no longer a teenager, but she was still chaste as a 21 year old college student named Anastasia Steele who somehow had learned how to overcome all of that after getting with Edward…er, Christian. It was popular because of the Twilight phenomenon, and the bottom line is it wasn’t supposed to be anything more than that.

Until E.L. James decided to do something that most of the fan fic writers usually don’t do: she decided she wanted to try and see if it would go main-stream. Especially considering the following it already had, all she had to do was tweak the story a little bit and that would be that, right?

Who would have thought that this…story…would become the most talked about book on the planet?

Considering Mrs. James’s background in television and the fact that she had connections, it really isn’t hard to figure this out now. Call a few outlets, let them know what’s going on, get them in front of the right eyes and watch the sales fly!

Except… it was piss poor on the writing. Grammar was all off and the prose is completely choppy as all to be damned. But because the book is entertaining, she was given a pass.

Do you think Terry McMillan would have been given such a pass if Waiting to Exhale were written so poorly?

What about E. Lynn Harris if Invisible Life had been written with the grammar lessons of a fourth grader?

For that matter, do you think either one would have even been able to make it past a publishing editor’s desk? I wonder how that rejection letter would have looked?

Not to say they didn’t get rejected, but that’s not my point?

I mean, fine, we know that the average article is written so that a person with an eight grade education can understand. I’m not expecting the piece to be Nobel Prize-worthy or anything like that, but the same mistakes that we are ripped to shreds over by our editors and readers alike, E.L. James, by and large, has been glossed over because the book is selling every few seconds globally.

Three words: numbers don’t lie.

My high school English teacher would be turning over in her grave right now if I attempted to turn something in like 50 Shades of Grey, and not because the content is too steamy. In fact, compared to what I write, 50 Shades is a kids’ book.

But this ain’t about what I write versus what she has written. This is about the fact that she put in C-quality work and has gotten A+-quality praise and recognition. Not on the whole because no one is immune to their detractors, but how many “smut” writers have you seen make it to NBC or ABC on the morning shows, or have lines wrapped around the corner waiting for a glimpse at your “entertaining” writing.

Brit, please!

So, the next time you want to downgrade a black author’s book because the typos are too many and it ruined it for you regardless of how good the story was, don’t turn around and raise FSOG as an example of how a book can overcome horrid writing to become a NYT Bestseller simply because the shade of the person writing it is several shades lighter than the one you just bashed.

The minute you do that, you might as well stop reading, because you don’t possess the ability to be objective anymore.

I’m just saying!

Forgive me for being a bit irritated, but it is what I have been marinating on today…