Years ago, someone told me (and I haven’t been able to verify the quote, so this is very word-of-mouth, my friends) that in an interview, Kurt Cobain was asked to explain the lyrics to “Smells like Teen Spirit.” Cobain refused, and said that he makes music that people like him will understand. My friend was offering this up to me in an “Isn’t that cool?” sort of way, but my reaction at the time was that it was a lame way of getting around the fact that the lyrics didn’t mean anything. I thought, Shouldn’t good art be comprehensible? If you create a work of art but nobody knows what it means, you failed as an artist. Right???

Thinking back on it now, after years of advanced education in literature and creative writing, it’s an interesting idea to revisit. Do I still feel that way? As a writer myself, what audience am I trying to reach? Can I picture myself telling somebody who doesn’t understand one of my stories that I write stories that people like me will understand?

For the past few years, I feel like I’ve been constantly going back and forth on the question of whether “good” art is art that is appreciated by a lot of people or whether it is art that people educated in that particular artistic genre will be able to appreciate. I think there are strong arguments for both sides. Since there can be no set-in-stone standard for what makes a work of art “good,” or what the word “good” even means, it makes sense to say that a work of art’s quality can only fairly be judged by how popular it is. If people like it, it’s “good.”

However, if I pick up a book by, say, Nicholas Sparks (who is my go-to example of a terrible writer who is nonetheless hugely popular), I’m going to be so utterly outraged by how awful the writing is, how contrived the plot is, how one-dimensional the characters are, that there’s no way that I would be able to enjoy it. If you give me a Nicholas Sparks book and ask me, “Is this good art,” I will assume the question is sarcastic because the answer, to me, is so obviously, “No.”

But. If you must have an advanced education in literature to access a particular writer’s work, does that actually mean that the writer is “better” than a popular writer, whose work is accessible to ordinary people? Some days I think that “good” writers should try to bridge the gap between the educated folks and the masses. Other days I think that “good” writers should just accept that ordinary, everyday people will never be able to appreciate “good” art, that we have to decide between writing something that is actually artistically worthwhile and writing something that the average Joe will be able to understand.

Other days, though, I think it’s just not as cut-and-dry as that. There are some brilliant writers who are very successful (the top of my list includes Rick Moody, Bret Easton Ellis, J. D. Salinger, Zadie Smith, and there are many more). Yet for every one popular writer who I would say is “good,” there are many more popular writers who, in my opinion, are writing stuff that my seven-year-old nephew could have written. Of course, “good” art is in the eye of the beholder. If a reader—many millions of readers, actually—likes Nicholas Sparks, then to that reader, Sparks is “good.”

The question, though, remains, what should I be aiming for as a writer? Do I want to reach as wide an audience as possible, or do I want to write stuff that people with MFA's and PhD's will like? Back before I had a book published, I admit I had an idealistic image of somehow bridging that gap between the two, of being one of those lucky few writers who has managed to write accessible stuff that actually becomes popular while also pleasing those of us who look for subtlety, craft techniques, unique plots, etc. I certainly like to believe that the stories in my book would be accessible to most readers while also being able to withstand the critical magnifying glasses of my peers, but I’ll probably never know, because my book will not reach a very wide audience no matter what. Ordinary people don’t read literary short story collections written by unknown writers and published by small presses, and so I guess I made my decision without even realizing it when I wrote the book and decided to try to publish it.

And the truth is, now that the book is out, I’m glad that I wrote something that I don’t feel ashamed to share with my friends, who are mostly English instructors and writers themselves. I’m not so deluded that I don’t know that some people will read the book and feel that it does not line up with their image of “good” writing, but I do believe that an educated, literary person could read and appreciate what I’ve written. And even though I would have made way more money and be considered, by more people, a “good” writer if I had written, say, a cheesy romance novel, I’m still glad that I wrote the book that I did. Even though I can’t seem to find an agent for the novel that was my thesis, I’m still glad that it’s the novel that it is. I’m fine with being published in small journals that nobody but other writers read and putting out books through small presses that don’t have the funds to market their catalogue to a wide audience.

Because really, even though the much younger, more naïve version of myself would have said this older me is just a bad artist justifying bad art, I’ve decided that I really don’t mind only writing stuff that people like me will understand.