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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27816
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/27816
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think cheese, as you call it, is simply one aspect of work that is not morally serious. What do I mean by morally serious? In the literary sense, I mean that a work that is morally serious is one in which the author works to ensure that they are presenting an accurate portrait of human life as it actually is, not some gratifying fantasy of life.

This does not mean realism. It means honestly presents the moral aspects of human life, our choices and the reasons we make the, as they really are, even if the setting is fantastical. Lord of the Rings is, for the most part, a morally serious work (it is a study on the nature of temptation and our capacity to resist it). Fifty Shades of Grey is not.

Being morally serious has nothing to do with adhering to or advocating for a particular moral code. Rather it is about the artist's moral responsibility to be truthful. In _The Power and the Glory_ Graham Greene writes the story of an alcoholic priest struggling with his vocation and trying to stay alive in the anti-catholic purges in Mexico in the 1930s. He contrasts the story of the priest's actual life with the hagiographic representation of him that is later written for children. The hagiography is morally heroic, but not morally serious; the real story is morally serious, and heroic too, in its own way, but it does not paper over his temptations or his failings the way the hagiography does.

Being morally serious is by no means a prerequisite for literary success. In fact, it is probably an impediment. There is generally a much larger appetite for aspirational works, works that tell us that the world is how we would like it to be, not how it is, or that allow us to indulge in some fantasy of how we would like to be, not how we are. From Iron Man to Harry Potter to 50 Shades of Grey, there are all kinds of aspirational works, none of them morally serious, and all of them making people lots of money.

Cheese is simply one variety of aspirational literature. It is characterized by simplified and artificially heightened emotions. It offers a vision of a simple, happy, always cheery emotional life. While it may be false, it is obviously desirable to many.

But we only find aspirational literature appealing when it matches our own aspirations. Thus we laugh at a taste for comic books or romance or cowboy stories if these things don't match our aspirations. And we also tend to leap too pasionately to the defence of the works that do support our aspirations, since admitting that they are fundamentally not truthful to the nature of human life would diminish our pleasure in them.

So, there is a market for cheese. But those who don't like cheese will really not like it and will pour scorn on it. The question for a writer who discovers that many readers consider their work cheesy, is whether they want to be morally serious in their work, of if they are looking for a field of aspiration they can plow, and are happy to serve cheese to the cheese lover despite the scorn on non-cheese loving critics.

If you want to be a morally serious author, then the challenge is to discipline yourself to see the world as honestly as you can, which starts with the morally and psychologically difficult task of being honest with yourself. There are no tricks and techniques to being a morally serious author. It is all about the honesty of your vision.

Original score: 3