The dating website OkCupid has a blog, OkTrends, where they analyse their data and often pull out surprising insights into human relations and human beings.
In their post The Mathematics of Beauty, they note an interesting phenomenon. When they graphed how many (heterosexual) men contacted a (heterosexual) woman as a function of that woman's perceived attractiveness, there was a big spread in the data.
That is to say, one pleasant-seeming woman who was rated as "cute" might get twice as much mail as another pleasant-seeming woman who also rated as "cute"--and why was that, if they were equally attractive?
What the data-crunchers found is that it wasn't a woman's average rating that mattered, but rather the amount by which she polarized opinion.
A classically pretty woman would have a bell-shaped attractiveness rating, with most people considering her "cute" and smaller numbers of people rating her either prettier or less-pretty than that.
However, a pretty woman with unconventional features, or atypical makeup, or facial piercings and visible tattoos, would often have an inverted bell in her attractiveness rating, with the majority of people considering her one of the extremes--either "hot" or "ugly". Her overall rating might average out to "cute", but she really evoked much stronger reactions from people than that.
The data-crunchers found that the latter sort of woman--the polarizing figures--were the ones who overwhelmingly got more interest from would-be mates. It was far better to have a few people consider you ugly than to have the majority of people consider you (merely) cute.
So how does this relate to writing? You can probably guess. Think of all the times you've read about/heard a literary agent saying, "I have to fall in love with the book to offer representation." They don't get excited if they think your novel is merely "cute"; they have to think it's "omg-hawt".
Have you ever heard of the book Lolita? How about American Psycho? Or Fight Club? I don't even read the genres these books fall into and yet I've heard of every one of them because they were polarizing novels. They horrified some people and electrified others. In dating terms, they were the woman with the dreadlocks and the tongue stud.
This implies that when it comes to writing (and maybe life) you should put your quirkiness very firmly on display. Courage is attractive, and playing it safe might not get you anywhere at all.
There is a nice corollary to this principle, too. If you ever have the misfortune to have someone blow up at you because of your writing--to get emotional and tell you the work stinks, that it's offensive, that it will nevereverEVER be published--that may be a very good sign indeed.
Because what one person hates is often what another person adores. If you're provoking emotion, then potentially you're doing something very, very right.
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What do you think? When is it prudent to be safe, and when should you wave your freak flag high? Do you think books that are good-yet-weird really do better than books that are good-like-the-other-good-stuff? Can being different help you break into publishing, or will it get in the way?
Or is it, like so many things, a matter of degree? Where's the line between "fresh" and "inaccessible"? I'd love to hear your thoughts!
