The Tyee has published my article The 10 Most Harmful Novels for Aspiring Writers. Excerpt, and then a comment on the reaction:
Any young person who wants to be a novelist should of course be a reader as well. But some novels can be more hazard than inspiration. They are often well-written, but their effects have generally been disastrous: they inspired younger writers to imitate them, they created awful new genres that debased readers' tastes, or they promoted literary or social values that we could very much do without.
Here are ten 20th-century novels that have done more harm than good to apprentice writers. My list is both entirely subjective (I am a scarred victim of several of them) and in no particular order.
Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.
This at least has the virtue of being so widely read and discussed that we don't really need to read it ourselves. I tried a couple of times and bogged down badly. Others apparently found Rand's novel an inspiring political blueprint; they are numerous enough to form hazards to navigation on the Internet, not to mention Rand's impact on Alan Greenspan. Perhaps significantly, no successful novelists have carried on in her tradition.Update: Two weeks later, I'm still bemused by the reaction to this article. It got over 50 comments on The Tyee, and made its "Most Read" and "Most Emailed" lists. Then Alternet picked it up, and the uproar continued.
The bemusement comes from the responses that took my article to mean these novels were plain bad. Well, some of them are, but most are brilliantly written—and that's just the problem. They're technically on a scale far beyond the skills of apprentice writers, but they make the writing look easy. So apprentices think they can do the same thing without tedious reading, drafting, and maturing. Somehow I hadn't made that clear.
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