Ursula K. Le Guin--About Literary Bests (Updated)

Saw this on The Book View Cafe Blog via School Librarian In Action: Ursula K. Le Guin--About Literary Bests. She writes about how "best" books are determined, and on how the desire to win praise and prizes can have a detrimental effect on the work. Excerpts:

There are a whole lot of good writers and good novels. (Yes, of course there is even more mediocre and bad fiction; so what?) Some good novels are outstandingly good, and I have my favorites — sure! Every reader does. And the novels and stories that a whole lot of every-readers plus some honest and serious critics continue to hold in esteem over six decades might even be beginning to deserve that much abused word “great.” But there are so many different kinds of fiction, so many standards by which to judge fiction, so many ways in which one work may excel another — who’s to say which handful of them are “the greatest” or “the best”?

And when you’ve said it, what have you gained?

It seems to me that an award, a “best of,” in literature, doesn’t serve literature at all. It serves to supply commercial booksellers with a readymade commodity, and lazy-minded readers and teachers with a readymade choice. They needn’t pay attention to the books that didn’t win the prize, they needn’t exercise their own critical faculties, they don’t have to think, they can just order the prize book and believe they’ve read all there is to read.

I believe that serious artists work long and hard to do the best work they can. I also believe that “best” is a pernicious concept when applied to any art from outside, as a value-judgment.

Despite the theories of (almost universally male) critics and psychologists, the practice of an art is not inherently a competitive activity. It can be made into one, and male competitiveness often makes it into one; but the passion to do something you have a gift for doing as well as you can do it is not originally driven by the need to excel others or even to show off. I think our tendency to consider art as a competition is a mistake, and a rather sick one. People work extremely hard at something they have a gift for because the work is intensely, immediately, and reliably rewarding. External rewards are nice but really not much compared to the satisfaction of making something beautiful, knowing you’re doing work as good as you can do.

Particularly with the “big” national prizes, the pleasure of award and recognition, given or received, is damaged and diminished by knowledge of how the system plays into the advertising machinery of the bookselling business. Praise becomes fame becomes commodification and so on round — a closed circuit.

A good book deserves recognition — but must all the good books on the shortlist be dumped, thrown aside? To name one winner is to create a whole slew of losers. Why? What good is that?

I wish we could get off this one good novel a year kick. Or three in sixty years, for that matter. How mean, how ungenerous we are. I wish we could and would celebrate our writers continually and in droves.

You think literature would suffer, if prizes were given so freely? You think sharing praise diminishes its worth? You think good books are written in order to win praise and prizes?

I think not. I think the desire to win praise and prizes is likely to produce a mediocre and predictable novel on a trendy topic in a mode approved by the Sales Department of a large commercial publisher and sanctified by the buyers for the chain bookstores. I think good novels are written by writers who want with all their heart to write this novel, which is like no other. And which is therefore, as things stand, rather unlikely to win a prize.

Click here to read the whole piece.

Update: I may be going out on a limb with what I'm about to say, given that I, me, and myself, am neither here nor there, am pretty much nothing and nobody with regard to awards, but I find myself in agreement with a lot of what Ms. Le Guin has written.

Stephen King has said as much, but not about writing for praise and awards and more about writing for money. In any case, whether you're writing for praise, awards, or money, the effect is the same: you get word constipation, you get conscious of your writing, that you are writing, that you're doing what you're doing because you want accolades, prestige, attention, wealth.

Since I started PGS some years back I've met a lot of younger people, always pushing them to make reading a habit whenever I speak with them. A number of those youngsters are writers, or want to be writers. They love stories, as they should, which is why they read, and which is why they want to make up their own.

But inevitably, they always ask questions or make statements like, "I hope that one day I win so-and-so award" or "How does one make a lot of money in writing?". I listen to them as they talk amongst themselves, and they share with me their fantasies about making a ton of money and living the glamorous writing life, or they talk about how they plan to study previous winners of whatever prestigious contests they plan to join so that they can write and submit the same type of award-winning pieces that have won before.

And I end up wondering if, because of this, do they end up losing the sincerity of their stories? Do they end up trying to write stories that they think will a) sell; or b) win, based on what has succeeded before, and that only, and in the process lose track of their real storyteller's "voice"?

I'm not against stories written with the aim to entertain if that's the sole and honest purpose, or stories written because the writer has something to say and share about what he's experienced or observed of life, or stories written in an attempt to experiment and do something new whether in the form or in the telling, but these more honest pursuits can get derailed if in the back of one's head one is thinking of money or medals. The honest story a writer can tell can be lost if he's got other things on his mind.

Not that joining and winning contests or making cash off of writing is a bad thing, but the winning and the cash made would be all the more satisfying if the story submitted or published is the one an individual writer would've truly and honestly written, and not one formed with the aim of simply competing and winning, or of earning praise and prestige, or of making one's wallet thicker.

Seen against the backdrop of what is happening with the 2009 National Artist Selections, Ms. Le Guin's article can turn the focus of this discussion to one on delicadeza and perhaps procedural/technical inappropriateness; but the works of the real artists who have been honored with the title will never be diminished in the eyes of those who can appreciate, enjoy, and find the truth behind what they have seen, read, listened to, and viewed, because the award and the title wouldn't really matter.

Ms. Le Guin may have said it best: "I think good novels are written by writers who want with all their heart to write this novel, which is like no other. And which is therefore, as things stand, rather unlikely to win a prize." Substitute the word "novel" with "song", "sculpture", "poem", or any other art form, if you wish. If you write, compose, paint, etc., to win an award and only that, if you do so to make money and only that, you may lose this which Ms. Le Guin has mentioned.