In Defense of Popular Writing

I love the Harry Potter series. If you tell me to pick a favorite book, I will first curl up in a ball, then attempt to escape, then refuse to answer but, if you keep pushing, I will probably default to something from the Harry Potter series.

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Harry Potter is for kids. Harry Potter is popular. Harry Potter is not supposed to be an MFA candidate's favorite book. Each time I tell people I love Harry Potter, those words bounce around my head. But you know what? Forget that.


The word popular comes from a Latin word meaning people. Popular means "liked or enjoyed by many people." When did that become a bad thing?


There's a reason a book, or a series of books, becomes popular. There's a reason that you, I and we all like a certain thing, and while my cynical side is telling me that advertising and the socioeconomic status of the protagonist and so many other things play a role in popularity, there's a part of me that believes that there's a certain quality to good writing that shines through a book, popular or not.


If you take away one thing from this post, I hope it is this: if you love a book, or a story, or a poem, or an essay, don't listen to what anyone else says. You love it for a reason and, if you can figure out that reason, there's something it can teach you.


Harry Potter constructs an full, believable world and a series of complex characters who act in believable ways (mostly). Nicholas Sparks (against whom my high-school English teacher had a particular vendetta, and who I've never read because of that) pulls on your heartstrings better than a lot of other writers do. Even Fifty Shades of Grey (of which I read a page before deciding that the quality of the writing was too terrible to continue) showed that there is a market, and a certain degree of acceptance, for long-form erotica.


So, here's your prompt for today, and it's both simple and extremely complicated:
Think of your favorite book, poem, story or essay. Think of something that you love, that made you sink lower in your chair, smile and close your eyes for a moment when you read it, before you heard or read anyone else's reaction. Now think about why you love it so much (it might help to write this part down). Try and emulate that in your writing.

Read more of Rukmini's excellent work on Floodmark.