john­ca­tral via Compfight

If you own a Kin­dle then you may already  know that the books occu­py­ing the first, sec­ond, and third posi­tions on the Kin­dle Top 100 Paid list are  the Fifty Shades of Gray tril­ogy by E. L. James.  This tril­ogy also occu­pies a spot on the New York Times Best­seller list.

What does this mean?

My son just burst into my room a while ago to give me some impor­tant writerly advice.  “Mom.” he says with a straight face, “Just one.  All you need to do is write one trash book and you would never have to work another day in your life.  As good as you write, you could pol­ish off a 300 page crap man­u­script in no time.”

“Never,” I tell him.”

LHG Cre­ative Pho­tog­ra­phy via Compfight

“Mom.  Throw in a cou­ple of vam­pires, or,” he said eyes bright­en­ing as if a light bulb has just turned on inside his head, “make a were­wolf romance and you can just sit back and watch the money roll in.”

The funny thing is, this is the first time I’ve been given this advice.  A few days ago I told my daugh­ter about a book that I’d found in iTunes, an ter­ri­bly writ­ten unin­spired sappy vam­pire story (see my review here).  I was aston­ished to find that this book had received 34/46 five star reviews on Ama­zon.  I was more than aston­ished, I was appalled.  My loathing for this book in con­trast with other read­ers isn’t a mat­ter of a dif­fer­ence of taste in gen­res but this book is poorly writ­ten among many other things.  My daugh­ter turned to me and said, “You know mom, since peo­ple seem to like read­ing crap, why don’t you just write some­thing crappy?”

Why not?

Because as much as I want peo­ple to read and enjoy my work, I also want to be proud to put my name on what I’ve pro­duced.  I want to learn while I write, about myself and about oth­ers and about how things are and how they could be.  I write as a means of con­fronting my fears, learn­ing from them, and ulti­mately over­com­ing them.  I write to grow and evolve and stretch.  I write to prove to myself that I can and in the hopes that I will be bet­ter at it tomor­row than I am today.

Could I do any of that if I sub­mit­ted to writ­ing the cur­rent hot hip thing that is so much trash?  Not so much.

A few weeks ago I asked a co-worker what she was read­ing these days.  She said, “You’re going to think I’m a bad per­son if I tell you.”  I assured her that would not be the case.  She whis­pered, “Fifty Shades of Gray.  But it’s not just ‘mommy porn’, it has a deeper story.”  I asked her to elu­ci­date and she did.  Appar­ently, 50SoG does indeed have a deeper story.  And I still think it’s trash.

Marco Bel­lucci via Compfight

So I pose the ques­tion again.  What does it mean about us and our soci­ety that some­thing so trashy, that even the read­ers them­selves call it trashy, is at the top of read­ing lists.  Why are peo­ple down­load­ing such dri­vel in droves?  I’m hon­estly baffled.