Bad Horse's Bad Advice--Avoiding comparisons · 9:02pm Nov 6th, 2017
For some reason, B_25 thought it might a good idea to ask me for advice. The best advice I could give would probably be not to ask an unemployed ponyfic writer living on oatmeal and fimfiction notifications for advice. But I could hardly turn down an invitation to indoctrinate someone with my opinions. So here is the first installment of
Bad Advice
Do you have any advice on trying not to compare yourself to other writers? For the past little while, I've been reading the stories of a user called Ardensfax, and killing myself over just how well they are written.
I've been trying to improve for the past few months, to get to this level of quality that these good writers are on, but I always seem to fail. No matter how many drafts I do, books I read, I always seem to stagnate in mediocrity—or just below that.
Then I go read Arden and feel like quitting, only to start back up again the next day, just to fail some more.
Do you have any advice on how to improve, or at least, to stop comparing yourself to others?
~B_25
Yes. I've found that I can stave off those confidence-crippling comparisons with this one simple trick: Be better than everyone else. Just make sure everything you write is better than anything anyone else ever wrote in every way, and those comparisons will stop troubling you so much.
Sometimes, though, I suspect that my stories are not better than everything anyone else wrote. This usually happens when I've been foolhardy enough to read a story that someone else wrote. Avoid that! If Tolstoy didn't read other people's work, why should you?
Wait, scratch that. Read some Tolstoy. Oh, stop groaning. Just one or two thousand pages of War and Peace should be enough.
Can You Fix Tolstoy?
Tolstoy did some things very, very well. He chose key actions and thoughts of each character which come together into a complex, surprising, yet completely realistic psychological profile, giving their motivations, goals, worldviews, and ways of thinking. Then he brought all of these characters together to construct a complex, surprising, yet completely realistic-seeming understanding of the world of the Russian nobility at the start of the 19th century. And in all of this--well, except when portraying French, Austrians, or other dirty foreigners--he was as fair and impartial as the ideal journalist, never taking sides, never creating a character as a plot device or talking point. Nobody I know is better than Tolstoy at what Tolstoy was good at.
Tolstoy did other things very, very badly. He had no sense of pacing, dramatic structure, foreshadowing, suspense, or any of the basics of how to make a reader want to keep reading. He had little sense of humor. His books are stuporously slow and put-downable, and you need to keep consulting the long index of long Russian names and family trees in the back just to figure out whom you are reading about.
You couldn't, I think, "fix up" Tolstoy's books, adding suspense and page-turning excitement, without damaging the objective, journalistic view that makes them remarkable in other ways. You have to put up with the slowness and the wandering plot to get the realism. A fast-paced plot is unrealistic, and an exciting one requires making the reader takes sides in ways that you can usually do only by taking sides your self as author and unfairly distorting the views of your antagonist.
My point is that Tolstoy was a very, very good writer--and yet, in most ways, you are probably a better writer than Tolstoy.
Playing Favorites
Answer quickly: What's your favorite flower?
Western culture has, at the center of its philosophy, the perverse notion of "perfection." Plato told us about the perfect Forms. Jesus personified the perfect human. We believe there is an ideal type of everything, and that whatever is closest to that ideal is the "best". This leads us to ask moronic questions such as "Who's greater: Tolstoy or Dostoevsky?" Every time someone ask you what your favorite flower or your favorite flavor of ice cream is, they're assuming you share this bizarre philosophical assumption.
Some people actually do have favorites. If my mom has a choice, she always buys Breyers Vanilla Bean Ice Cream. If it's before dinner, she drinks Lipton Green Tea; if it's after, Bigelow's Lemon Ginger. I think it's no coincidence that she's a fanatical Christian. The perfectibility of the soul and of ice cream are based on the same ancient Greek metaphysics.
These are America's favorite flowers to buy, according to one year's data from sendflowers.com:
- pink roses
- red roses
- sunflowers
- daisies
- white lilies
- tulips
- yellow lilies
- purple roses
These are all pretty flowers, but most are a little loud. "Say it with flowers" doesn't mean you have to shout. While roses in a vase are beautiful, on some level I'm always aware that hothouse flowers, genetically bred until they can't survive in the wild and grown with a nutritionally-optimized hydroponic system, are the
of the plant kingdom.
And one thing I've learned: I am not a pink rose.
I also have a great fondness for wild flowers, especially small, stubborn ones.
Yarrow. They're so graceful, how they wave in the wind, the silky way they feel on your hand. They smell like mint.
Ground ivy / gill-over-the-ground. These tiny flowers, about 5mm across, come in pairs, and pop up all over north-eastern American lawns every spring. Odds are good that you've stepped on thousands of them without noticing they were there.
Day lilies. Many people plant these in their yard. Those orange petals are yummy; just make sure you're not eating some other kind of lily. Pull them off and eat them. Don't feel bad; each flower blooms for just one day; the petals all fall off after sunset.
Shrubby cinqeufoil. You'll find these clinging to rocks and sand around the rim of the Great Lakes, in the empty patches between water and earth where little else can survive.
Discovering a nightshade vine hiding in the shade of a tree is made even more exciting by knowing that it can kill you.
Jewelweed or touch-me-not, found along the edge of rivers in the eastern US. The "jewels" aren't the flowers, but the tiny drops of water that collect on it and make it glisten after a rain because its leaves and flowers are as hydrophobic as a duck's back. The long, narrow seed pods explode if you touch them.
The fringed gentian is rare, fragile, and I think a little Bohemian. If Oscar Wilde were a wilde-flower, he might look like this.
Are these my "favorite" flowers? Well, I wouldn't put ground ivy on the kitchen table, I wouldn't try to pin a cinquefoil bush to my prom date's dress, and I wouldn't invest in a nightshade-bouquet delivery business. But these are all flowers I would sorely miss in a world full of nothing but roses, lilies, and tulips.
What You Do Best
Every story compromises on some things to do other things better. When we writers depress ourselves by admiring someone else's story, I believe that we're focusing on the best things in that story.
The next time you find yourself doing that, look at it from the opposite direction: What do your stories do better? What kinds of stories can you write that this other author cannot? I know authors on fimfiction who write funnier humor than mine, or characters that are more detailed, realistic, intriguing, and endearing, or prose more striking, or action scenes more exciting. I often feel like those are the most important things in fiction, but this is a kind of envy. The things that I can do seem cheap to me because I can do them.
Many of the authors I admire most can't work with dark tones at all. They don't need to; there are as many stories to tell without dark tones as there are pictures that can be made without black--but I can go places they wouldn't dare to. My stories probably are also more tightly plotted, more condensed, or have sharper shocks. The emotion and the idea at the center of my stories are usually more specific, making them less accessible, but highly resonant to those who've felt the same. I have a talent for kicking readers in the gut. (I wonder how that would manifest as a cutie mark.) It isn't the most sought-after talent, but it has its place.
The most-popular stories, and the things they do well, are the pink roses of fiction. Then there are stories by other authors, not especially popular but whose work I admire in some way--say, DuncanR or Fiddlebottoms. Let's call them the fringed gentians and the nightshades.
I've found that what I appreciate in the stories of other authors is only weakly correlated with what I'm good at writing, and what I envy in the stories of others is anti-correlated with it. But the very fact that the stories I admire are so good at some particular thing, guarantees they'll be bad at others. There is no such thing as perfection; a story can't be good at everything. So every time you look at someone else's story and see what they did better than you, look for the things you did better than them.
I don't make pink roses or fringed gentians. But I don't have to, any more than every yarrow should be a tulip.
Perhaps someday I will write hopeful-cynical-melancholy humor like GhostOfHeraclitus, or paint scenes and moods like HoofBitingActionOverload, or write as poetically as Stereo_Sub or Aquillo, or be in tune with what readers want like RainbowBob or shortskirtsandexplosions. But for now, I'm still holding up my little wild bouquet.
If Your Stories Really Are Worse in Every Way
A story can't be good at everything, but it can be bad at everything. If your stories really are worse than someone else's stories in every way, you're comparing yourself to a writer who's (currently) out of your league.
Do you know anything about that person? Are you just assuming he or she is a college kid dabbling in ponyfic between games of Halo? You may be comparing yourself to someone who's been writing for 20 years, studied creative writing in college, been in local critique groups, attended several month-long writing workshops, read several dozen books on how to write, and / or been professionally published. A little leaguer who steps up to the plate against Corey Kluber shouldn't get frustrated if he strikes out.
Are you putting in comparable amounts of work? How long did you think about your story before writing it? How many drafts have you written? How big is your backstory? Cold in Gardez writes very very fast, yet often takes months to rewrite and revise stories. When he's not writing, he studies other writing. The degree of forethought that GhostOfHeraclitus puts into his stories probably has a name in the DSM.
(I'm not saying putting in this kind of effort is "good"! I wish Ghost would think less and publish more. The most well-known writers are the Barbara Cartlands, Agatha Christies, Piers Anthonys, and Janet Evanoviches who write books quickly. P. D. James wrote much better mysteries than Agatha Christie, partly because she took 3-4 years per book to Christie's 1-2 books per year. You might want to have more followers more than you want to write better stories. Know what you want.)
When you're comparing yourself to people who really write overwhelmingly better than you do, you only have 3 options:
- Keep studying, writing, and learning until you get better
- Stop writing
- Stop caring that someone else is and always will be better than you
At some point, nearly every kid who plays baseball realize they are not going to go professional, and some people will always play the game much better than they do. A lot of them keep playing baseball anyway! They think baseball is fun. They don't have to be the best.
A hundred years ago, writing paid very well. Many famous writers, like T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and John Cheever, wrote for the money. That would be crazy today. The average per-hour rate a writer can make today for unsolicited copy is lower than it was in the 1930s, before adjusting for inflation. Even bad writers could make 2 cents a word for pulp fiction in the 1930s, with little or no revision; according to the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics, that's comparable to making 36 cents a word today. Today a market that pays 8 cents a word might accept 1-2% of submissions, which means writers need workshopping and many rounds of revision. The sorts of literary journals that TS Eliot made a living writing for in the 1930s don't even pay today--and sometimes charge you money for the privilege of being published.
So: If it isn't fun, stop writing. If it isn't fun unless you're the best, stop writing. Because there is no "best".
If you're comparing yourself to somebody you have a right to compare yourself to, meaning at the least that you've written about as many stories and as many words as they have, then probably this is not the case. More likely, there is some aspect of your story that is better than that same aspect in that other story you're comparing it to.
Actually one major thing that can help your writing is if you can find someone whose writing is very similar in style to how you write. Then you look at stories they wrote in different genres than you would write things. You can see places where they are better or worse with fine gradients as opposed to looking at someone's writing that is far different than your own.
I feel inspired and hopeful after reading something by Bad Horse.
Clearly one of us went horribly wrong at some point. I'm just not sure which one.
I AM MOST IMPREST WITH YOUR COUNSELING OF THIS YOUNG RAGAMUFFIN GOOD SIR. HOWEVER YOU HAVE NEGLECTEDED TO ADDRESS THE DANGERS OF FOREIGNISH SWEARS. EYE EE AND TO WIT WORDS THAT SWEAR FROM FOREIGN QUARTERS.
PLEASE TAKE A MOMENT TO FAMILIARIZE YOURSELF WITH THE ADVISINGS OF MISTER WILLIAM BACON AYE KAY AYE ROGER SHAKESPEARE:
"The most-popular stories, and the things they do well, are the pink roses of fiction."
I like to think of many of my stories as cheezy pepper poppers. They look so good and tasty, and the readers start gobbling them up, only to find after a few that tears have started to flow, but the end is so near, and there's just one more chapter... that all the seeds are still in.
Then, once they have had a few days to recover, I make chocolate pepper poppers....
"A hundred years ago, writing paid very well." --and today, *certain* writing can pay quite handsomely. In particular, a short set of books about a boy wizard. Still, it's the exception to the rule.
4718886 An admittedly different feeling than reading a blog post by a somewhat different author about going for a walk and seeing his neighbor and his dog... um... I'll stop there. (Darned if I can't get that mental image out of my head. What's worse, his blogs (although disturbing) are crisp and fascinating to read. Yeah, I'm sick.)
4718874 Probably more true than I'd like to admit. I'm a fair pairing for Lois McMaster Bujold, probably because I've fairly memorized some of her stuff. One thing I try to do, sometimes badly, is to expand my skill baseline is writing something else than I normally write, something totally out of my element. The downside of that is finding I have a potential career in Harlequin Romance novels. (A more improbable romance writer doth not walk the face of the earth, and yet, the darned muse sits outside my door and whispers loving words under the sill all night. Darned thing. I'm going to set traps.)
Idk, Bad Horse, that sounds sort of like the dharma to me.
I know this column is called Bad Advice, but can I really do this? Because now that you've told me I can I desperately want to.
Stay tuned for these exciting Bad Horse blogposts coming in 2018:
"I Can't Be Pregnant So It Must Be Kwasharishkor"
"Thank God It's Only Scurvy And Not Leprosy"
"So I Got Pellagra: Can Anyone Tell Me How To Make Moonshine And Conduct A Feud?"
4718991 I'll have you know, sir, that oatmeal is high in both protein and niacin.
So. Just scurvy.
4718991
Hey, don't knock Bad Horse's nutritional advice. I feel much better about myself as a mom since he told us peanut butter is a nutritionally complete food. It's about 60% of what Trixie eats anyway, no matter what I offer her, and she doesn't have Lymes Disease.
4718972 Yes, you can--but note that a day lily is not a member of the lily family. Many lilies are poisonous, including the very similar-looking tiger lily.
Also, day lilies may be poisonous to cats.
I was wondering why I kept getting Nightshade delivered to my house...
Even if you wanted to argue there was a way to write "the best" story, if everyone wrote that they'd all write the same story and then poof, gone would be all the fascinating and beautiful color we have in fiction. I dunno, sounds boring to me.
So. What are some good oatmeal recipes?
Noël Coward begs to differ, sir:
4719006
Interesting, thanks for the link.
4719002
I just learned last week that if you were actually a horse, you could synthesize your own vitamin C, and thereby be immune to scurvy.
4718991
At least he has moved on from eating beef tallow.
I sometimes think my stories are desperate pleas for attention from an aging man-child...
...wait...that's...that's not a metaphor, is it?
4719078 Oh, that's right. It's only you monkeys who have that broken GLO gene.
4719181
Stupid broken genes.
At least I can puke better than a horse.
4719078
Yes Homo Sapiens is fundamentally broken in many ways. We can barely synthesize some of our Vitamin D if we get enough rays to be in a perpetual sunburnt state. Other than that we can't synthesize anything we need.
4718964
You shoot high. Then again you do write well, so lofty goals suit you.
Thank you, Bad Horse.
The amount of effort invested in this blog-post has left me beyond grateful. You've covered subjects that I've angst over for the past month with subtle humor and real-life examples that do wonders to prove your points. I'm at a loss to explain how much reading all of this means to me, or how many times I'll return to this blog whenever I find myself in a dark place once again.
You are a well of wisdom and knowledge, and I hope I can go to you for advice again.
Until the next angst PM.
~B_25
Nice blog post. This is kind of why I stick to shitposting, because it’s something I enjoy and am ostensibly good at. I’m good at writing well written stories too; I just don’t particularly enjoy writing them.
unfortunately they have confirmed that “The Eternal Song” is dead. :(
The part about "Can you fix Tolstoy?" says what I've often thought: a writer's vices are inseparable from his or her virtues. They're two sides of the same coin and you can't have one without the other.
Which I sometimes think is true of a person's vices and virtues apart from writing, too.
4719227
As I told another writer, "You'll never be the Beatles. You'll never be the Stones. But you just might be the Kinks and that's a damn fine thing to be."
UPDATE: Oh yeah here's what I was looking for--
I just come in at number twenty-five
I feel so happy, so glad to be alive...
Hey! I resemble that remark!
Really great blog post. Even as a non-writer, it's an inspiring piece.
I dunno, Bad Horse, that sounds like decent Evil League of Evil material to me.
What do you do if writing isn't fun, but you can't stop writing? Just... literally can't stop doing it?
I mean, I'm pretty sure I know the answer, which is "write about that, too", because that's what I just did. But sometimes writing--and posting the writing in particular--really does feel like an addiction I'd be better off without.
Wonderfully put. I have the comparison compulsion, not just in writing but in everything else too. I appreciate ideas for approaching it beyond "don't do that!"
I've always loved wildflowers, but at seventeen, aspiring to knighthood, I registered an SCA device with white roses. Not because they were my favorites, especially, but because of the ideals they symbolized. I never attained them in the way I'd imagined, but that symbolism is still important to me. And it's good to be reminded there is room in the world for roses and for wildflowers, and many things of beauty in between.
Antje Duvekot has a song about this, sort of--"Dandelion."
Unexpected Leonard Cohen broke my heart a little, and I thank you for it.
4719002 I am reminded of the 1967 movie, Ironside with Raymond Burr (paraphrased, because I can't find the exact quote) when he is brought back to his apartment by Mark Sanger, only to find his entire pantry is filled with cans of chili instead of healthy food.
"Chili contains every element needed for the human being to survive and thrive."
--- Ironside
4720115
Oh yeah! That became a TV series with Raymond Burr in the title role. We used to watch it when I was a kid. Great way to relax after a hard day of clobbering brontosaurii.
(BrontosaurII? Well dear, that's what mommies and daddies used to call apatosaurii when we were your age...)
4719208
But we can puke and belch and horses can't do either, so in that tiny way we win.
4720702 Raymond Burr was an amazing actor, but an odd duck even in a pond full of odd ducks. He made up facts about his history with great abandon, to the point that nobody really knew what he did before he started acting, and sometimes not even then. I watched a ton of Perry Mason when I was a wee lad, and it fascinated me, mostly because I didn't realize at that young age that the cases were so wildly weighted, depending on the whim of an author's pencil. On nearly every case, the criminal would have avoided jail, if they had just not talked to the police.
4720782 It is said that if you dropped two identical twin Marines into a featureless room, dressed the same, with the same gear, and at the same time, they will find something to argue about. The same was true about Marines dropped into a different dimension, assigned to stand watch in front of the US Embassy to the Principality of Equestria, although they did not argue at work.
No, this kind of argument was best held at a bar.
"I tell you, Lance. Humans got it easy, and I got ten reasons." Private Murphy wriggled his fingers, then got a good grip on his crystal tumbler full of excellent local beer and took a swig. "Them ponies got their advantages, like freaky magic and wings, but homo sapiens has them all beat. What we can't do by ourselves, we make tools to do."
"You're just upset that we're not supposed to date the locals," said Lance. "And as long as I'm in charge, you're just going to have to keep your hands to creatures with hands." He looked up, or more correctly, down due to the general height difference with the locals, at a young batpony mare who was strolling in their direction. Human females were limited to a single set of hips to sway, but a slinking batpony, with shuffling wings, attracted eyes like flowers attracted butterflies.
"I couldn't help but hear the two of you talking," she purred, flowing up onto the bar stool until she was seated on Lance's lap, keeping her position by judicious use of wings and hooftips so she could look him right in the eyes. "I know something ponies can do that humans can't, no matter what tools they invent."
"Really?" Lance leaned back a little and regarded the smirking batpony. "I find that hard to believe. I took shore leave in places where you could buy anything."
The batpony smiled, and then proceeded to lick her eyebrows.
"Welp, Lance," declared Murphy, standing up and dropping a handful of bits on the table. "I'll see you back in the barracks in a few hours. Later."
4720853
Pony tongues, how do they work?
Kind of related, yesterday I learned that bats can swim. And I don't know if their technique has a name, but if it doesn't, it needs to be called the batstroke.
4719227
One more thing. This whole discussion reminds me of something I've often read in running books: everyone runs their own race.
In other words, it doesn't matter if you finished first or last. Your race was against time, distance and the limitations of your own body and mind. You alone decide how well or poorly you did.
This isn't just your school counselor saying this. This is award-winning professional runners saying this. Because they're the ones who get the book deals.
And if it sounds like "everyone gets a prize for participating," that's because it is: everyone gets a prize for pounding the pavement, sweating, straining and exhausting themselves in the race, as well as in all the training that led up to it. And that prize is self-esteem--the real stuff, made with genuine accomplishment, not high-fructose boosterism.
How does this apply to you? You write a story and it's yours. Not Ardensfax's. You're the one who puts word after word when you write, just like I'm the one who puts foot after foot when I run. Me, not some Olympic gold medalist.
So I don't have to share any of my accomplishment with him. It is mine and mine alone, won against the forces of time, space and the flesh. Just as your story is your accomplishment and yours alone.
This picture:
camo.derpicdn.net/cacc35ebdf30f4936fcccf7c6c3ee554cd9b8739?url=https%3A%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2FTWNHYNO9qjgiOfqECpEGs-XFfntEP2vvFIstKm_Mm2XZdHfrfiAzxSEAOWdQHgqaC7UaVOB6eo8_T8lFUfLzYToDcIdcltI5Dykne1aJYy96_XVMjjs3oslljyvEu2lXmDQEI_t6
Really, really wants to be this picture:
image.blingee.com/images18/content/output/000/000/000/781/739580008_665776.gif
Also also wik:
c1.staticflickr.com/3/2677/4257915432_79c104fda9.jpg
4722516
But the Leonard Cohen picture references one of his songs:
This was truly an inspiration to me. I needed this for myself and how I perceived my own writing to be.
These imeges ar really awessom... Thank you for sharing!! You may also like Pinoy Channel on our website without any login details and charge speacially Pinoy Teleserye (over seaz Philippines Workers).
But doesn't this just prove that things like pacing and suspense aren't that important? Stephen King probably does these things better, yet I'm sure we'd both agree that Tolstoy's writing is much better. That's to say, you'd rather have Tolstoy's talent than King's.
5403896 I reject the idea that we can call one "better" than the other. It's like saying novels are better than movies. No; they do different things; and there's room in the world for many kinds of different kings.
If I had a choice, I'd probably rather have King's talent, because I want people to read what I write. I don't think Tolstoy could even get published today.
5404772
So... does that mean you don’t think there’s a difference in quality between something like Anna Karenina and 50 Shades of Grey, and that you can’t say one is better than the other because they “do different things,” and that you’d rather have E.L. James’s talent because at least she could get published?
5404889 There can only be differences in quality between things in comparable properties of those things, and even then only if those properties play the same role in both things. So I might compare the quality of the paint on my car and on my lawnmower. But it would be silly to compare my car to a painting, and say the painting was of lesser quality because its paint was soft and easily damaged, while the car's is hard and thick.
Anna Karenina and 50 Shades of Grey have such different purposes that there's not much to compare between them. I haven't read 50 Shades, so let me instead talk about the novel Twilight. A generic literary critic, engaged in the pointless task of ranking all books in the world on a linear scale from good to bad, might call Twilight inferior to most novels because Bella, the main character, has no distinct personality, because she is not especially bold, intelligent, capable, or admirable in any way; because it's unrealistic to believe that a rich, beautiful, 100 year-old man would fall in love with a high school girl described as unattractive and unfriendly; and so on. But all those properties of Twilight serve its purpose of allowing any teenage girl reading it to easily identify with Bella, and to imagine that perhaps some older, more-sophisticated and experienced, rich, handsome, strong man would fall in love with her, without her having to do anything at all.
So I couldn't argue that a Tolstoy novel is better than Twilight by comparing them stylistically. I'd have to argue that the purpose of the Tolstoy novel is more noble or good than that of Twilight. There are few cases where I'd try that. I wouldn't try it with Twilight, because I don't presume to know what's good for 14-year-old girls who read Twilight.
I would try it on the writings of the Unabomber, which I happened to read some Amazon reviews for today. A lot of people praised Technological Slavery for being lucid and persuasive. I'd say that only makes it worse, since what it's trying to persuade its readers to do is to commit as many mass-murders as possible, in order to slash the number of humans on the planet to a tiny fraction of what it is now so those who remain can live in an imaginary idyllic Edenic / Rousseauian state of nature. I'm confident that that is a bad thing to do, because when the reader is literally told to go out and kill other people, the goodness of the book's purpose no longer depends on the reader's life circumstances and point of view.
The Unabomber, in writing that book, made the same mistake that book critics make, of imagining that everyone else should like the things that he likes. He justified his social reform program of just randomly killing as many people as possible by saying that a life lived in a technological society is worse than being dead. He's evil only because he fails to recognize that that's just his opinion, and that he ought to just kill himself, not other people.
5404889 I object to the idea that there is a single dimension of Goodness and Badness which you can order all novels on. This comes to us from the neo-Platonic Great Chain of Being, the metaphysical assumption that all beings on Earth can be rank-ordered by their spiritual goodness. If books can be compared, and one called greater than another, that '>' must be on a lattice, not a chain.
That is, believing that you can sometimes compare 2 types of a thing doesn't imply that you can compare any 2 types of a thing. You can have a relationship '>' on a set which specifies only a partial ordering--it gives answers like "true" or "false" only for some pairs of the set. For instance, a police detective outranks a police sergeant, but you can't say that a police detective outranks an Army sergeant. They're not in different sets, since the President outranks both the police detective and the Army sergeant. But they're on different strands of the lattice, and can't be compared to each other.
5408992
You definitely make some convincing arguments. Are you some kind of postmodernist/deconstructionist? Or an atheist at least?
I'm not against having contrarian opinions. Tolstoy hated Shakespeare and called him a bad writer, which is about as contrarian as it gets. That's fine, I suppose. But like Orwell explained in his essay, when someone calls Shakespeare a bad writer, you instinctively feel that something demonstrably untrue has been said, even if you can't quite explain it.
I feel the same way here. Saying that you can't claim Anna Karenina is better (at least stylistically) than Twilight or 50 Shades certainly feels completely wrong, even though there's no universal law which deems it so. You may be right intellectually, but I can't accept it no matter how you shuffle it.
So instead of all this intellectualizing, I'd rather look at this empirically. That is, maybe Orwell was right in calling writers vain and selfish, and it's precisely that vain attitude—of believing certain books can be better than others, and that you can be better than others—which, I think, has motivated many of them to try to create what any literature professor would call a "great work." What you say strikes me as a view that just isn't helpful or very stimulating, which is why virtually every writer will tell you Tolstoy is better than Twilight, because not only do they genuinely believe that, but it's what gives credence to literary standards. I mean sure, 14-year-old girls might like Twilight, but will they keep liking Twilight once they've grown up and read Tolstoy? Or, maybe something less highbrow, Harry Potter or ASOIAF? Whether a dimension of goodness or badness exists, I don't know, but most art is based on those assumptions, without which you wouldn't have most art.
I don't know how else to put it. In any case it's definitely why I try to improve my writing, and improve on some universal basis, not just to do things differently but to actually be better than most everyone else, because only that would satisfy me. And that takes hard work. Writing some trashy novel and declaring that it can't be surpassed by Tolstoy doesn't take a lot of work, not to mention it wouldn't leave me feeling any sense of accomplishment.
P.S. I'm not a fan of your analogy at all. Cars and paintings are different things entirely. Anna Karenina and Twilight are both novels, both have plots, characters, dialogue, and so on. They're definitely more comparable than cars are to paintings.