Tag Archives: literary fiction

The novel as a form

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I’ve have been thinking about the novel as a form. And how — despite what I once deeply believed — I no longer see the “genre” v “literary fiction” as a useful model for understanding the publishing industry.

Here’s how I see it, now.

Novels their start as medium for long, drawn-out stories, serving increasingly literate middle class audiences. Think 17th-19th century, pubbed in serial form in newspapers.

The best novelists realized the form would enable them to explore large ideas as well — for example the human condition, politics, marriage.

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Next came the Modernists and as long as I’m indulging in assertions, how about this: they were hugely influences by what was going on in the visual arts (modernism, cubism) and as a result, writers started to think of novels as art. Writers approached novels as if they were a textual versions of Modernist paintings. Linear narrative was less important than evoking emotions or responses. Examples: Finnegan’s Wake, Virginia Woolf’s novels. Good times good times.

Then in the 20th century an industry grew on the shoulders of the early 20th century Modernists. The MA in Writing was born.

Novelists were no longer self-taught. The publishing industry hunted for degree’d “authors” who would uphold the Modernist ethos. Genre was sniffed at because it bypassed Modernism and continued to emphasize story, i.e. it viewed itself as entertainment and emphasized “spinning a good yarn.”

So the industry split. We had pulp and later mass market novels on the one hand and Literary Novels on the other. This is the state of affairs that B.R. Myers poked at in his 2002 Atlantic article, A Reader’s Manifesto.

But the end of the 20th Century also brought a couple other things. 1. The Entertainment Industry as we understand it today and 2. Shake-ups/disruption driven by the Internet and e-reader tech. The former influenced consumers’ tastes and entertainment preferences, and the latter disrupted the economic underpinnings of the publishing industry itself.

So publishers, their margins squeezed, shifted to a new hunt: Commercial fiction. Conceding that the vast majority of readers would prefer Dan Brown to yet another free associative Faulknerian clone.

Notice that today’s “how to be a successful novelist” industry teaches writers to create based on the architecture of commercially successful movies. I.e. the mechanics of “good” fiction is codified, more in more, in ways that are modeled on movies: structured as three acts, nadir at ¾ mark, driving the plot as beats, hero’s journey, etc.

So the question is: have we come full circle?

There are some fine novelists today spinning terrific yarns while also exploring large ideas. Off the top of my head: Ann Rice Interview with a Vampire (1976 early clue to the new direction) Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, Jess Walter’s Beautiful Ruins.

So writers: if I’m correct, what does this mean for the future of genre? Perhaps this is why genre categories feel more fluid today than even 10 years ago? And what does this imply for Indie Authors who don’t care to write genre?

Can we write and self-publish breakout commercial fiction? Or will that remain impossible because the math to market to wide audiences is so crazy? (Because with genre, you can zero in on audience. With mainstream you are as @Alter_Space put it, a droplet lost in a tidal wave.)

Or as I think of it: Indies are trying to sell a P&G product on an Etsy budget.

So. Thoughts? Lamentations? Corrections? And let me know if you are an unpublished or Indie trying to play in the mainstream or literary fiction space…

Writing, seriously

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If you’re looking for a Serious Article about Serious Writing, here’s a dish served up by the Guardian [UPDATE, article gone, sorry]  from U.K. writer Zadie Smith.

Smith starts by asking why it’s so difficult to write a perfect novel. She doesn’t try to define “a perfect novel” however, and right off the bat dismisses critics, falling back instead on an assertion that writers aren’t ever satisfied with their own books, ergo, their books can’t be considered “perfect.” This dissatisfaction, she says, can be traced back to dissatisfaction with one’s ability to fully and truthfully capture “the truth of experience”:

There is a dream that haunts writers: the dream of the perfect novel. It is a dream that causes only chaos and misery. The dream of this perfect novel is really the dream of a perfect revelation of the self. In America, where the self is so neatly wedded to the social, their dream of the perfect novel is called “The Great American Novel” and requires the revelation of the soul of a nation, not just of a man … Still I think the principle is the same: on both sides of the Atlantic we dream of a novel that tells the truth of experience perfectly. Such a revelation is impossible – it will always be a partial vision, and even a partial vision is incredibly hard to achieve-

Hmmmmm.

Obviously this refers to literary novels, since a novel’s entertainment value plays no part in the equation. There’s no room here for the perfect “page turner” ha ha ha, nor for the sort of innocent reading my daughter enjoys, where she loves books for the pure pleasure of being lost in their pages.

Literary novels, on the contrary, are Serious; writing them is no less than a moral act, as per part 2 of the piece:

The chief enemy of excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy, the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what there is outside one … This is not easy, and requires, in art or morals, a discipline. One might say here that art is an excellent analogy of morals or indeed that it is in this respect a case of morals.

A case of morals. Yeah. “I’m a writer, and I’ve come down with a baaad case of morals.”

Interestingly enough, there’s nothing really about craft / writing process in either of these lengthy piece’s two lengthy parts.

Maybe craft is assumed . . .

(RELATED: I’ve shared more thoughts on literary versus commercial/popular fiction here and here.)

Some thoughts on potential. Market potential.

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How many copies of a book do you need to sell to make it a best seller?

By definition the audience for literary fiction — for difficult, or as Ralph Nadir would prefer ;-) “challenging” books — is smaller than the audience for mainstream books.

It’s probably impossible to know for sure how small, but that doesn’t stop people from speculating. Via Publishers Marketplace, in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, James Adams writes that 15 years ago, it was estimated that about 3000 Canadians read “serious” books. Adams speculates that number has since fallen by as much as half.

The adjective “serious” was never precisely defined, but it was understood to describe those readers who could be counted on to go to a bookstore at least once a week and buy one or two titles on each occasion, mixing purchases of fiction with those of non-fiction. Since then . . . that estimate has dropped, I’m told, to between 1,600 and 2,000, the result, one imagines, of the competing distractions-attractions of the Internet and the rise of digital media.

In 1993 (about the same time the 3000 figure was being floated for Canada) Kurt Andersen wrote an essay for Time, “It’s a Small World After All,” in which he attempted to suss out the size of the market for “high end cultural artifacts,” including the market for literary fiction. He noted that

250,000 Americans bought Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera in hardcover. Every thoughtful reader in America did not, despite Knopf’s best efforts, buy the Garcia Marquez novel, meaning that the potential audience for any given book is larger. “It might even be a million,” says Knopf’s Ann Close, who edits Alice Munro and Norman Rush, among others. On the other hand, all the actual buyers of any typical serious novel would fit in Fenway Park, or even a Vegas showroom.

Presumably, a “typical serious novel” would be one written by someone without the sort of reputation Garcia Marquez enjoys. So how many actual buyers might this novelist count on?

If we extrapolate from Adams’ figures we can just multiply by ten (since Canada’s population is roughly 1/10 of the United States’). That would put the US lit fic market size at somewhere around 20,000 people today.

Think that’s low? I dunno, maybe it is. It’s a long way from that quarter of a million figure for Garcia Marquez’ book. What possessed all those people to buy Love in the Time of Cholera? Were they all shopping for I’m-quite-the-intellectual coffeetable tchotchkes? Why aren’t they buying other lit fiction? Hey, why aren’t they buying serious Canadian books?

By way of context, some 280 million copies of Nora Roberts’ novels have been sold to date. Granted, she’s prolific (this registration-required NY Times article mentions her next book as number 166) but that still averages to over 1.5 million copies per book.

OTOH, most commercial fiction doesn’t scale those heights. John Scalzi* cites the New York Times as his source for this fact: a mainstream novel is considered a bestseller if it sells 25,000 copies.

(Scalzi also says that anecdotally it seems publishers offer larger advances on lit fiction than on genre fiction — despite the fact that lit fiction may have poorer odds to earn out. Gambler’s fallacy perhaps?)

* AKA the guy who just won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer.

Step away from the book

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In the Telegraph, Nick Hornby wonders at our insistence on reading “difficult” books:

. . . we have got it into our heads that books should be hard work, and that unless they’re hard work, they’re not doing us any good.

I recently had conversations with two friends, both of whom were reading a very long political biography that had appeared in many of 2005’s ‘Books of the Year’ lists.

They were struggling. Both of these people are parents – they each, coincidentally, have three children – and both have demanding full-time jobs. And each night, in the few minutes they allowed themselves to read before sleep, they ploughed gamely through a few paragraphs about the (very) early years of a 20th-century world figure.

At the rate of progress they were describing, it would take them many, many months before they finished the book, possibly even decades. (One of them told me that he’d put it down for a couple of weeks, and on picking it up again was extremely excited to see that the bookmark was much deeper into the book than he’d dared hope. He then realised that one of his kids had dropped it, and put the bookmark back in the wrong place. He was crushed.)

Hornby then comes to a theme I’ve blogged about before: the artificial & unhelpful split between “literary” and “commercial” fiction. We’ve come to believe that there’s something superior about books that are difficult or that better us, somehow. But perhaps this is a conceit:

Those Dickens-readers who famously waited on the dockside in New York for news of Little Nell – were they hoping to be educated? Dickens is literary now, of course, because the books are old.

But his work has survived not because he makes you think, but because he makes you feel, and he makes you laugh, and you need to know what is going to happen to his characters.

Read the article & then let me know what you think. Is it best if people read soley for the sheer pleasure of it?

Reading through feminist eyes

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Okay, when I first caught wind of the This is Chick Lit vs. This is Not Chick Lit controversy, I thought it was a matter of highbrow vs. lowbrow novels. Obviously I was wrong. It’s about who’s being the better feminist.

What Elizabeth Merrick’s anti-chick lit camp argues is that serious female writers are getting shorted. Their books don’t receive equal attention by the [presumably — I’m restating what I gather is the argument here, haven’t fact-checked] male-dominated publishing industry and [presumably] male-dominated book-review industry (limited, for the purpose of this battle, to the venues that most matter in the literary world, e.g. The NYT Book Review).

And now, into this sad situation, introduce a glut of lite novels with pink covers that quickly begin sucking the air out of bookstores and the dollars out of female readers’ purses.

So what does Merrick want for her writers?

Money?

According to a citation of The Top 10 of Everything by Russell Ash (found originally on The University of Michigan’s Internet Public Library but page now deep-sixed), of the top ten bestselling books of all time, only one is a novel: The Valley of the Dolls, by Jacqueline Susann, comes in at #9.

Of the thirteen other novels Ash lists as having sold at least 10,000,000 copies worldwide, another four are by women (Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird, Colleen McCullough, The Thorn Birds, Grace Metalious, Peyton Place, Margaret Mitchell, Gone With the Wind). Granted, five out of 14 isn’t quite 50 percent, but the list cited by the (now defunct) website is also nearly 10 years old — it predates J.K. Rowling, for instance.

According to Guinness World Records, the best-selling fiction writer of all time is Agatha Christie.

A quick peruse of author names on the the top selling books by year linked here suggests that men have edged out women by about 2:1 over the past several years. But this seeming disparity may have an innocuous explanation: it may be that the pool of male readers concentrates on fewer novels. From Writers Digest:

The books men do purchase tend to be purchased on brand. Brand loyalty, [Pages editor John] Hogan says, is especially important to the male book buyer — the brand being a recognizable name like Harlan Coben or Scott Turow. This makes it more difficult for an unknown author geared toward a male audience to get recognized.

So maybe the only thing hindering woman from achieving parity on the yearly bestseller lists is the reading inclinations of men — something that also makes it hard for aspiring male writers to dislodge a Grisham or Turow. This may also explain why men perhaps read fewer female writers than vice versa, as well as why bestseller lists skew toward male novelists, even though the majority of novel readers are probably female.

Women are simply more adventurous book buyers ;-)

That’s commercial fiction. But what about literary fiction?

Or put another way: if money isn’t the problem, what is?

Recognition?

I dunno. If that were the case, then the issue must be that women writers aren’t being taken seriously by (for the sake of simplification) male reviewers.

So what?

A good friend of mine who acts as an occasional reader of my manuscripts declined to read my last one. The premise didn’t grab her — it wasn’t a match for her sensibilities.

That’s not a problem. I don’t expect everyone to get excited by my books’ premises. I certainly don’t expect many men to! lol

So what?

So what?

And who are you writing for, btw?

Update: none of the best-selling books by women made the Snarkling Reading List, for what that’s worth…

“Cold Mountain,” by Charles Frazier

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I finally read one of the books on the Snarkling list. And coincidentally, this is a great book for considering the so-called demarcation between literary fiction and pop fiction. Cold Mountain is most definitely literary fiction in terms of its atmospheric writing style (the dialogue isn’t even set off by quotation marks, but by single m-dashes, as if Frazier decided not to interrupt the book’s poetry with something as mundane as human speech) but the book is also very much plot-driven; it follows two people: a Civil War deserter as he makes his way back to his home and sweetheart, and the sweetheart as she struggles to acquire the skills she needs to run a farm after her protective and indulgent father dies and she finds herself rendered cash-poor by the South’s impending collapse.

I liked the book a lot, although I was somewhat disappointed by the ending, which I arrived at around 2 a.m. today. And so here is the rub. The book has big bones: not only the emotional toll of the war but even more interesting to my mind its effects on civilian life, the moral and actual anarchy that sets in as its consequence. As a deserter, Inman has to negotiate what would normally have been the fringes of rural Blue Ridge society but has grown, as the war has waned down, to occupy a much larger influence : “outliers,” fellow deserters, the thuggish Home Guard charged with capturing deserters, Federalist raiders, Federalist sympathizers. So naturally as I rode along with the characters and the plot I was looking to Inman as a metaphor for, perhaps, contemporary America (the book was published in 1997 so is pre-Iraq but by Frazier’s photo on the back he looks to be a boomer, so it could have been a statement about Viet Nam) or even more likely the post-War American South. I was looking, therefore, for something in the book’s resolution that would point to such themes.

Instead, I felt that the book was looking through the wrong end of a telescope, ending as it did as a “mere” romantic tragedy.

I put mere in quotes because far be it from me to belittle the lives of fictional romantic figures, lol.

But truly, I wanted more. You have two sensitive people rebuilding their emotional selves in the aftermath of experiences that were both physically and emotionally brutal. Brutalizing, literally, in Inman’s case. That’s plenty to hang a book on, yeah. But against that particular backdrop, for some reason, I wanted more. Instead, I got the exact invert of a romance novel’s HEA, every bit as improbable in its own way as a bedazzling kiss in the last paragraph of a mass market paperback.

There’s a caveat to this criticism, of course: my disappointment reflects perhaps my own expectations more than any objective failure on the part of Frazier (although perhaps not; there are many stories nestled within this story, and aren’t they all about how the war tore peoples’ lives apart and left them alone to patch the scaps together?) Nonetheless, what captivated me more than Cold Mountain‘s love story was the question of how individuals who survived the Civil War rebuilt their lives afterward. They did, somehow; we did patch this country together again, somehow.

About midway through the book, Inman is betrayed to the Home Guard and finds himself bound chain-gang like to fifteen other men being yanked toward either prison or death, and suddenly Frasier breaks in with this:

Like the vast bulk of people, the captives would pass from the earth without hardly making any mark more lasting than plowing a furrow. You could bury them and knife their names onto an oak plank and stand it up in the dirt, and not one thing–not their acts of meanness or kindness or cowardice or courage, not their fears or hopes, not the features of their faces–would be remembered even as long as it would take the gouged characters in the plank to weather away. They walked therefore bent, as if bearing the burden of lives lived beyond recollection.

So maybe that’s the fulcrum, then, and maybe that’s why the book’s ending narrows down the way it does; maybe it’s intended as an existential back of the hand about the meaningless of individuals’ lives. But then why do some characters not only survive but come to be pictured, some decade later, as flourishing? To highlight also that fate is arbitrary? And why go easier, ultimately, on the women than the men? (I’m trying to do this without inserting blatant spoilers, btw, sorry if that makes this part of my post go a bit vague.)

What succeeds in the book is that it’s written with a literary hand, yet for the most part I don’t feel Frazier himself inserted into the prose; the story-telling is that strong; when he does, as in the paragraph I quoted above, it’s not unwelcome, it works as a clue to help frame the narrative; it’s not intrusive. But somehow with the ending it seems his hand suddenly becomes both evident and heavy, as if as the deity of this book’s world he had his own private reasons for snipping particular threads.

So I’m left thinking “why did you do that?” where before the ending I was thrilling to the idea that I’d be left with a different question altogether.