If a few people don’t hate you, you’re doing something wrong. Or at least that’s how writers ought to feel, instead of feeling that if someone hates their work, he hates them. We know that’s not reality, that a negative review of our work says nothing about us. Yet we pour ourselves into the stories we write. Of course it affects us personally. But a writer’s feelings isn’t really what I want to talk about. Rather, I want to point out that a good writer will have a few naysayers. And those naysayers will be vociferous. And if he has no vociferous naysayers, he isn’t that good. Instead, he’s mediocre. And mediocrity is a powerful trap that any of us can fall into.

Thanks to the magic of the Internet and to the folks at the IMDb, we can find out which movies are good and which are not so good. Go to any movie page at the IMDb. Let’s try Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. Right under the Plot Outline and User Comments is User Rating, a score of 8.5. That’s a very good score.

But the score doesn’t mean anything. Click on the “vote here” button. You’ll see a bar graph (a histogram) that shows that 36.7% of the audience rated Modern Times a 10. Fewer rated it a 9, and fewer still an 8. The graph continues like this, until it gets to the bottom. More people rated Modern Times a 1 than rated it a 2. This U-shaped curve is exactly what we want to see. We look for the biggest bar, the score the plurality of voters gave the movie. This is called the mode, and we want it to be 10, ideally, or maybe 9 with the 10’s in close second-place. Then we want a U-shaped curve, with a noticeable spike at the very bottom.

The other shape we see is a bell-curve. For example, look at The Godfather: Part III. The average score is 7.4, which is still a very good score. But the mode is 8 with sharp drop-off on either side. Part III was a mediocre movie, especially compared to Part I and Part II.

We sometimes see both patterns in the same title. Try The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. From the average score of 7.0, you might think it’s not so great. But look at the histogram. 33.4% of the voters rated it a 10. There was a sharp drop-off to 9, and then a resurgence at 8 and 7. What’s going on here? We have both curves happening, each in a different group of voters. Scrolling down, you can see scored by demographic group. Males rated it on average 6.6, while females rated it 7.9. And so forth. Click on the demographic labels, like “Males” or “Females.” You’ll start to see a pattern. The movie had an audience among females of all age groups, but most notably in the teen and young-adult groups. Most guys thought the movie was mediocre, except in the under-18 group. Under 18 years old, a lot of males thought the movie was great, and a bunch thought it stunk.

This is what you want to see. Because you can’t do everything great and you can’t please everybody. It’s better to do well what you can and to leave the rest behind. This means that some people are going to find your work really bad. But at least they will have known ahead of time that they will think it’s bad. And the people with whom your work resonates, those that latch onto the things you do great, they’ll absolutely adore it, and you. (Just ask Ann Brashares.)

Mediocrity happens when you try to please everybody. You end up with a final product that’s okay, kinda, but that doesn’t inspire anyone. So show off the best of your storytelling prowess. And don’t be afraid to irritate a few people along the way.

-TimK