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Comment by edw519 | Hacker News Reader

I know that negative criticism can hurt, no matter how insignificant or pointless. So to people like Steve Yegge, Joel Spolsky, the 37signal guys, pg, and many others who put part of themselves out there for the benefit of others, I suggest putting things into perspective with this handy formula:

Let n = the number of people whose lives your writing has effected.

Let m = the average magnitude of that effect.

Let e = the distribution effect of your medium (for one on one, e = 1,in a room of others, e = 2, print, e = 3, popular blog or forum, e = 4, etc.)

Let z = the sum of all the negativity of those who don't matter.

Then if the net total effect of your writing is A, we can say:

  A = (n*m)**e - z

So, for almost any value of z, A will remain positive. Keep on writing. Please.

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There's one thing your analysis is missing: A has a diffuse effect across the entire Internet community; whereas, z directly and personally affects the writer. Even if A >>> z, the impact of z on a writer can still be unpleasant enough that it isn't worth it to them to continue in their work.

I don't think any of Steve's critics is imploring him to stop writing altogether — they're asking him to start writing well.

What exactly is it about Steve's writing that is bad? Bad writers almost never have a following and certainly never have the following that Steve has acquired. I would argue the contrary, that Steve's writing is quite good in that it evokes an emotion in the reader almost without exception. The emotion may be positive or negative but the fact that the emotion exists is evidence that his writing is not bad.

Maybe you disagree with it or maybe you find it objectionably long but those things are different from saying he is a bad writer. I think Steve's critics are typically angry about something he has written about one of their hobby horses but I strongly doubt too many of them are imploring him to write better.

Bad writers almost never have a following

Let's see, the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code, the lady who writes the Twilight books, Ayn Rand, oh we could go on. Now, if you're willing to redefine the meaning of 'good' to mean 'creates a response' then a lot of bad things can pass for good. But it's the sort of silliness that might evince a response that is not, you know, good.

That could be a bad sign -- I pasted in my lasted blog to the http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1514016 from a few days ago, and got Dan Brown. Surely a bug! Then the next two also came up Dan Brown. Doh!

>> ...the guy who wrote the Da Vinci Code, the lady who writes the Twilight books, Ayn Rand, oh we could go on.

Shall we call those the Good-Enough-Writers (TM)?

Seriously, truly awful anything do not ever see the daylight. Not even the children of emperors make it to public life if they not manage to make it to average (unless as posers or puppets).

The Da Vinci Code is cheesy, but otherwise well written. Dan Brown is not going to make it to the classics, but is not an idiot either.

Same can be said about Steve Yegge. His writing is opinionated, controversial, and sometimes grammatically incorrect (which I read as a token of informality rather than sheer ignorance). But the guy has a bunch of fresh ideas! You cannot have any good idea if you don't push the limits and throw some crazy shit as byproduct.

The Da Vinci Code is cheesy, but otherwise well written

The Da Vinci Code is so poorly written, it's spawned a minor cottage industry of amusing commentary about how poorly it is written. A good place to start is here:

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/000844.h...

[heh, I wonder what refined consumer of English literature and fan of Dan Brown was so upset by this so as to downvote it]

Let's put things on perspective, shall we.

Take 100 random people who has not read the book, but have seen the movie. Pay each of them to write a novelization of the movie. Take the best 5 "novelizations", and I bet the original will circle around them, with the eyes closed.

Repeat the above experiment, but substitute random people with random English literature mayors. Maybe the average "novelizations" will have fewer grammar errors than the top 5 of the previous experiment... but over all, I still expect the original to be better written than the top 5 of the second experiment.

The guy had a good idea, and executed it well enough to make a success out of it. Get over it!

I'm not sure what I'm supposed to get over. The simple statement was that bad writers have no following. This is untrue.

Dan Brown, just to go with our example, is a terrible terrible writer, by just about every imaginable standard of good writing. Dan Brown is a bad writer with a following. Nobody will remember who Dan Brown was 50 or 100 years from now.

Dan Brown is also a tremendously successful writer and you seem to have great difficulty believing, just like the original poster, that a bad writer can be tremendously successful. You also seem to believe that there is some inherent dichotomy between Dan Brown's success and his lack of writing skill. There isn't. That's my entire point.

Dan Brown is a dreadful, highly successful author. There is nothing logically or morally wrong with that. There's no reason there should be. He's simply an excellent counterpoint to the strange notion that bad writers cannot be successful.

P.S. Just for the sake of completeness, it's English majors, not mayors.

" Nobody will remember who Dan Brown was 50 or 100 years from now."

Are you so sure about that? Let's take the most popular mass-writers from the 18th or 19th century and see if they're remembered now:

18th century (US): Susanna Rowson / "Charlotte: A Tale of Truth" - doesn't ring a bell for me, and has a very small Google Search result (60.000)

19th century (US): Harriet Beecher Stowe / "Uncle Tom's Cabin" - I think everyone has heard of it :) and it has 15 times as many results as Susanna Rowson (Dan Brown has 17 times as many as Beecher Stowe, fittingly)

I personally at least recognize most of the bestsellers from the 19th century - probably Arthur Conan Doyle's books or Alexandre Dumas could have been seen to be as bad as Dan Brown in their time (I'm not arguing that they are)

20th century: Agatha Christie - still widely read as I recall.

sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_literature , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_fiction_au... , and related Wiki articles, and googling

Dude, unsuccessful writers think people want "good writing" - they don't. They want to be entertained, inspired, informed, distracted, improved, whatever - you don't need a mastery of language to do that. In fact, if you let your mastery of language get in the way of entertaining, inspiring, informing, and otherwise serving people's needs, then that's quite silly.

> But it's the sort of silliness that might evince a response that is not, you know, good.

Start by cutting out words most people don't know. I read between 3 and 10 books per week (closer to 10 lately) and I don't know what "evince" means. Start spending less time looking smart and more time serving people and you'll go much, much further in life.

Ignore this advice if you're secretly a best-selling multi-millionaire author who has inspired a lot of people who don't normally read to pick up a book instead of watch TV. In which case, carry on using the big words to bash other best-selling multi-millionaire authors who are inspiring a lot of people to read who normally don't, and entertaining them for doing so.

Dude, unsuccessful writers think people want "good writing" - they don't

Dude, what does that have to do with anything? The claim was bad writers have no following. Which is not true. That's all.

I read between 3 and 10 books per week (closer to 10 lately) and I don't know what "evince" means

Happy to do my little bit broadening someone's vocabulary.

Ignore this advice

Thanks, I will. Mostly because I don't think I or any of the people I was having a discussion with were asking for advice. But I'll come back and re-read this during my next advice shortage.

Bad writers almost never have a following

Much like software, television, food, movies, etc, product quality is not the sole determinant of market success. The author who sold more books than anyone else in the United States last year, for example, is a wretchedly poor writer. (Let's just say "Product/market fit covers many sins" and we'll leave it at that.)

Whom are you talking about? James Patterson?

Evoking emotion is one of the easiest things to do as a writer. You do not have to be a good writer to evoke emotion.

"Steve's writing is quite good in that it evokes an emotion in the reader almost without exception."

The fact that it's somewhat formulaic is probably what annoys a lot of people. Personally I enjoy formulaic nonfiction, but almost every writer in the genre has a ton of haters, e.g. Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, Zed Shaw, etc.

I don't understand this. With all of the many people who provide their writings for free on the internet, why even care about somebody whose writing you don't like?

I really don't care for Jeff Atwood's writing, but I don't tell him to change or to stop writing. I don't read his blog.

My only conclusion is that the negative people actually don't give a crap about his writing/style/length/whatever. What they care about is his success and how it shows they don't have it.

> What they care about is his success and how it shows they don't have it.

I think this isn't quite right. In general, the people criticizing him aren't other bloggers who are jealous that he has more readers than them. I think it's simply that they feel he is undeservedly popular, and that his following/influence is out of proportion with his talent. You see this kind of backlash against commercially successful/critically panned art all the time. With a blog, it's one of the few places the commentary gets so close to the art.

[for the record, I like his writing and am glad he's back]

Steve writes, for example: "She was pulling out a giant needle as she told me this. It just sort of materialized from under the table, the way a knife appears in a bar fight. It was a very large needle."

I'd say that's some rather good writing right there.

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