We Need More Bad Books

In this guest post, author, poet and 'literary curator' Dan Holloway looks at the potential for self-publishing to enable a punk revolution in publishing, and explains why we need more bad books. What are your thoughts? Let us know in the comments section below.




I have been writing a lot about editors recently. It’s odd, because my own relationship with editors has been wholly positive. They’ve made the books I’ve had edited infinitely more reader-friendly than they would otherwise have been.
But in a way I’d argue that those books are part of the problem, even though they’re mine.

And the problem is this. Working with a good editor is the best way to produce a very good book. We don’t need any more very good books. If there was never another very good book published, it would be no real loss. We need more bad books. A *lot* more bad books. People who dismiss the self-publishing boom because of the “unexpurgated dross” or whatever else they decide to call it have sort of missed the mark.

I remember reading a piece about induction during my time as an undergraduate studying Philosophy and Theology. Inductive reasoning is using the past to predict the future – the more times you’ve been to KFC and they’re out of wipes in the past, the more likely that if you go in the future they’ll be out of wipes then. That kind of thing. One of the problems with induction was archaeology. Specifically the kind that went digging up bones looking for the Missing Link. The problem was that induction told you the more bones you dug up that weren’t the missing link, the less likely any future bones were to be the missing link. But any MissingLinkologist worth their trowel would tell you that – so long as the wrong bones were the right kind of wrong bones then the opposite is true – the more you found of them the *more* likely you were to find the right right bones eventually. As it were.
You can see where this is going.

It’s going back to punk. And the '70s. Most punk music was dreadful. Really dreadful. First up, that didn’t matter. Punk wasn’t about being good. In fact, once the bands started caring what they sounded like, punk was pretty much dead. And second up, without the 99% of rubbish, the 1% of mind bending brilliance wouldn’t have existed.

And it’s the same with literature. The next great voice, the next Big Movement that comes along, will come out of the mire of slush swilling unfiltered around the internet. It will come from people who haven’t been taught How Not To Be Creative. It may well come from someone who can’t spell for toffee and doesn’t know an adverb from their arsehole. But it sure as anything won’t come from the “I want my manuscript to be so polished it sings into the ear of potential agents” school of writing.

Of course, literature doesn’t have to be “new”, and there’s more than a place for highly-polished, ultra-slick books. I love to indulge in a Lee Child or a Val McDermid as much as anyone. But I also want books that take me where I’ve never been, that turn my world upside down and shake me to my core. I want books by writers who believe in something, and for whom that belief, that hunger, that need to turn the world on its axis is as strong as their need to get a advance or hit the Amazon bestsellers list. I want to read their work before it’s been checked and balanced and OK'd and run past marketing.

There are theoretical reasons why I think editors are inimical to art that have to do with my “art is confessional” approach, but the practical reasons are as strong. Sometimes I want to sit down with a book and feel like the author is inside my head with all their filth and fury, screaming at me until I listen. I don’t want their dial turned down, I don’t want them more palatable, I don’t want their edges knocked off.

And there’s a moral in there for the cultural media as well. If you’re going to pretend to bring us, the reading public, the new, shocking, daring, dazzling, unmediated fist-fighting, pogo-dancing reality of contemporary literature, you have to broaden your horizons and look what’s happening in the world of 'zines and self-publishing. It’s fine if you don’t, but in that case at least have the decency to admit you’re playing it safe and don’t patronise your readers. And realise that it’s actually rather dangerous to our cultural well-being to take the watered-down and the acceptablised and pretend it’s the edgiest edge.



Dan Holloway is a spoken word performer and the author of several novels including the absolutely unedited The Man Who Painted Agnieszka’s Shoes and the unedited and unexpurgated collection of his performance shorts and poems (life:) razorblades included and is the curator of the literary project and publisher eight cuts gallery

Want More? Find out what Workshy Fop contributor and For Books' Sake Deputy Editrix Alex Herod had to say about eight cuts' recent publication, Zoom Zoom by Penny Goring.