Are Contemporary Writers like Ostriches? And Other Pertinant Questions
Are we committing literary suicide?
The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read it.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the state of literature in America, and maybe it’s not a new conversation, but we’re sure feeling it in a personal way around here seeing that our own EWU Press is closing its doors. Like a social disease–violence among children–we’re left wondering about the cause and what we can do to reverse the damage, assuage everyone’s fears. This month’s issue of Mother Jones takes a stab (no pun intended) at a reason for and solution to the problems we face in literary publishing. The article, “Final Chapter,” written by Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, discusses the fact that literary journals are dropping like flies, and apparently writers are to blame. Genoways suggests that because of the overwhelming number of MFA programs, 822 and counting, and the fact that we have an incestuous relationship with our readership (or should I say masturbatory since sometimes it seems like we’re only reading ourselves), which is mainly made up of other writers, often our friends, that we “have become less and less interested in reaching out to readers–and less and less encouraged by teachers to try.” I’m not sure exactly what reaching out to readers looks like, but as a poet, it sounds like someone begging for accessibility, something my language-poet counterparts would rolls their roosters at. (See what I did there. I was trying to be all language poety.) But since he’s mainly talking about prose, I don’t think accessibility is the issue.
The part of Genoways’ article that most interests me is when he blames postmodernism for our literary woes:
…most American writers seem to have forgotten how to write about big issues–as if giving two shits about the world has gotten crushed under the boot sole of postmodernism.
Maybe he’s right. Maybe we are acting like ostriches by putting our heads in the proverbial sand and not writing about the issues of the day, but is this a postmodern problem? And aren’t we over postmodernism by now?
I think the answer to both questions is yes. Postmodernism, like language poetry, aims to strip our lives (and language) of meaning, deconstructing our cultural values and norms, sometimes, usually even, for the better (i.e. civil rights, women’s lib), but like most movements and philosophies that arise as a reaction to something else, postmodernism has run out of legitimate ways to react to a culture that no longer exists. (I suppose that’s arguable since there are plenty of structures hanging around that don’t do us any damn good: race, our current government, traffic cops…) Postmodernists would say that writing about “the issues” is futile, that what matters is spontaneous experience, and if no one “gets” what fiction writers are writing about or if they are writing stories that don’t “matter” to people, then so be it. There’s no “meaning” to “life” and trying to “create” meaning is pointless.
Whether there’s meaning to life or not is frankly beside the point; we’re alive and so better prescribe some meaning in our own meager ways or what the heck are we doing, which is, I think, what Genoways is getting at, and why, in my opinion, postmodernism is over. We need meaning. It’s one of the cool aspects of being human. So when we walk around claiming that everything is ironic and meaningless, avoiding our own historical relevance, we are rejecting an essential part of who we are, and my generation is certainly good at being ironic and meaningless. (Or should we blame it on the Dadaists who came before us and trained us to be silly monkeys?)
But still, do we have to write about war and politics and tragedy to get America reading? Are we blaming Marilyn Manson when we should really consider Barry Manilow the culprit for our cultural malaise? We’re made uncomfortable, after all, by being too emotional, too earnest, too real. Look at how confessional poets have been treated. If all 60-some-thousand new writers coming out of MFA programs this decade were writing about Haiti and Iraq, homelessness and health care, would the provost reconsider the value of the literature we publish at the press? Maybe he would. But I’m not convinced it’s that simple. (Of course there’s the budget to consider and the fact that the colleges of business, engineering, and hospitality sciences seem like so much more practical investments.) We like to believe that problems such as this have a singular cause that can be located and solved, but what if the problem starts with the fact that fewer people are reading, period, or that all of our technologies make it difficult to catch our attention long enough to read a literary journal, or that the big national magazines stopped running fiction because they needed the room for ads (I’m not sure if this is true. I’m speculating, after all.)? Is there a moral imperative for good writers to write about “issues” that “matter”? If we started, would it save us? Genoways seems to think so:
To pull us out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes…young writers will have to swear off navel-gazing in favor of an outward glance onto a wrecked and lovely world worthy and in need of the attention of intelligent, sensitive writers. I’m not calling for more pundits–God knows we’ve got plenty. I’m saying that writers need to venture out from under the protective wing of academia, to put themselves and their work on the line. Stop being so damned dainty and polite. Treat writing like your lifeblood instead of your livelihood. And for Christ’s sake, write something we might want to read.
What do those non-writers want to read, anyway? My mom, who is a psychologist, wants to read deep, inspiring books–not too sad, depressing, or futile. She says she gets enough of those “sitting with clients.”
My engineering students seem to like science fiction most.
I’m just another writer, so I don’t really count, but I want to read things that transport me, make me feel and think things I wouldn’t come up with on my own.
I sometimes worry about the fact that my undergraduate and graduate degrees are both in creative writing. As I think about readers I know, many of them want a combination of good story and factual connection with the real world–an exploration of archeology/anthropology (one of my little brothers), an exploration of science (my students), many people like historical fiction because it doesn’t feel as decadent as reading a fully imagined work–they might actually learn something. Aren’t we getting more oriented towards the practical these days? If I had studied anything other than writing, then maybe I could actually explore the concrete world and information about it better in my writing.
At the same time, that drive/need to research the world seems to me to be one of the most exciting parts of being a “writer.”
Come to think of it, one of my favorite reads from the past few years was Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma because of the fact that he was writing about something that matters to me in a personal way while also teaching me something. That aspect of learning while being entertained is what always pulls me in, and I was so impressed by the level of research Pollan went through to write this book.
Not sure why everything was put in italics. I was just trying to format the damn title.
I fixed it.
Thanks!
Isn’t this the same bullshit argument that Franzen made a few years ago, and that gets trotted out again and again, that somehow writers who write anything remotely challenging have betrayed readers and the publishing industry? Or is it a paraphrase of Tom Wolfe’s bullshit, that American fiction is too preoccupied with the internal and doesn’t engage with race relations anymore? As if writers do it on purpose. As if they think, “Screw readers.” As if they could just, if they tried, write accessible pablum that also wrestles with Big Issues.
What are these Big Issues, by the way? Because the only writers I can think of who deal with big, newsworthy topics are Michael Crichton and the staff of Law & Order. Do we need an Iraq war novel that gets at the heaviness of it all? Is it going to tell me that war is bad?
I’m pretty sure the real problem isn’t that writers aren’t writing accessible, big-issue stuff (whatever that means, anyway), but that readers don’t care enough to think about anything other than the handful of headlines they can skim off the daily paper.
Or maybe this is me (a writer) trying to convince myself that it’s not my fault; it’s everyone else’s.
People don’t want to be talked down to, but neither do they want to be told they are just too stupid to understand, which is, I think, a tendency in the literary world. I think accessibility is an issue, but not just in writing. Literacy rates, as far as I have seen, statistically are going up, not down so maybe we should stop insulting the public and start trying to talk to them, isn’t it supposed to be a conversation? I’m not saying dumb down what we write and I don’t think this is entirely a writers issue. I think publishers and marketers are polarizing readers into elitist and mass market worlds. I never see literary journals marketed anywhere other than literary sites, like the two marketplaces are thumbing their noses at each other instead of sharing what each has to offer.
Tiffany– two excellent points. I think you’re spot on about literacy rates going up and about publishers/marketers splitting readership into factions that despise/don’t understand each other.
Part of the problem is that it’s difficult to analyze what makes mass-market work “good” and what makes literary work “good,” because those definitions vary by group. Until the two can come to some kind of consensus on what positive traits are, it’s difficult to create any kind of hybrid writing that bridges the gap (because we don’t know how wide the gap is so we don’t know how long of a bridge to build).
Anyone know a writer or a work that’s trying to do that? Trying to be respectable both in a mass-market and a literary sense? Is it possible? I’m not just talking about a literary work that sold well, but a piece with that intention behind it.
Dan’s right. This does bubble up every few years. No one’s reading! Blame the writers: too precious, too well-educated, too refined for their audience. I’ve read a version of this essay at least five times, blaming modernists, po-mos, MFAs, the death of plot, and, my favorites: “New Yorker style short stories dripping in epiphanic dew” and … “the cult of the sentence.”
It’s such a fatuous argument that … it’s worth considering. No one liked those dewy epiphanic New Yorker stories (and I’m starting to get sick of its contemporary cousin, the ironic and whimsical, gently allegorical tale). And hell, SOMETHING has gone wrong between reader and writer. We may as well admit this is a two-fault divorce.
Look at the 1963-64 #1 hardcover best sellers below: J.D. Salinger? McCarthy? Bellow?!?! If you keep going, you see that even Faulkner was a bestseller, in 1968. Now look at the 2009 list — any of those books in danger of cracking a thesis reading list? (That WOULD be a worthy thesis: reading every #1 bestseller for two years.)
Little of this has to do the writing. Books used to be sold only in bookstores; now they’re in the bic lighter aisle of Walmart. Technology gives us 240 channels and this has taken away the event-movie and event-TV show, the event-book, too (note how often the #1 book changes now.) And there’s probably too much contemporary literature out there. Reviews and blurbs are cheapened — who has time for the latest “tour de force”? As with music, we have instant cheap entertainment (and illumination) fractured in a thousand different directions and the good stuff seems to suffer. The bell curve flattens on the refined edges and what rises in the middle seems like crap.
Blaming writers for this is like blaming horses for traffic jams. And yet, if we lose what Franzen haughtily dismissed as Oprah’s “middle-brow” readers, literary fiction becomes just another practioner-supported art, so what’ve we got to lose by asking if we are partly to blame? Maybe it HAS all gotten too clubby, too precious. Maybe we do focus too heavily on craft while readers care mostly about story. The natural vantage of the writer has always been outlier. It just feels wrong if we’re the ones left defending some refined, highbrow club.
1963
Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters by J. D. Sallinger (Little, Brown) – March 10, 1963
The Glass Blowers by Daphne du Maurier (Doubleday) – May 19, 1963
The Shoes of the Fisherman by Morris West (Morrow) – June 30, 1963
The Group by Mary McCarthy (Harcourt) – October 6, 1963
1964
The Spy Who Came in from the Cold by John le Carré (Coward-McCann) – February 23, 1964
The Rector of Justin by Louis Auchincloss (Houghton Mifflin) – October 4, 1964
Herzog by Saul Bellow (Viking) – October 25, 1964
2009
Black Ops by W.E.B. Griffin (Putnam) – January 18, 2009
Plum Spooky by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin’s) – January 25, 2009
The Associate by John Grisham (Doubleday) – February 15, 2009
Promises In Death by J.D. Robb (Putnam) – March 15, 2009
Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult (Atria) – March 22, 2009
True Detectives by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine) – April 12, 2009
Long Lost by Harlan Coben (Dutton) – April 19, 2009
Turn Coat by Jim Butcher (Roc) – April 26, 2009
Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark (Simon & Schuster) – May 3, 2009
First Family by David Baldacci (Grand Central) – May 10, 2009
The 8th Confession by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (Little, Brown) – May 17, 2009
Dead and Gone by Charlaine Harris (Ace) – May 24, 2009
Wicked Prey by John Sandford (Putnam) – May 31, 2009
Gone Tomorrow by Lee Child (Delacorte) – June 7, 2009
The Scarecrow by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown) – June 14, 2009
Skin Trade by Laurell K. Hamilton (Berkley) – June 21, 2009
Relentless by Dean Koontz (Bantam) – June 28, 2009
Knockout by Catherine Coulter (Putnam) – July 5, 2009
Finger Lickin’ Fifteen by Janet Evanovich (St. Martin’s) – July 12, 2009
Swimsuit by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro (Little, Brown) – July 19, 2009
Black Hills by Nora Roberts (Putnam) – July 26, 2009
Best Friends Forever by Jennifer Weiner (Atria) – August 2, 2009
The Defector by Daniel Silva (Putnam) – August 9, 2009
The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson (Knopf) – August 16, 2009
Bad Moon Rising by Sherrilyn Kenyon (St. Martin’s) – August 23, 2009
South of Broad by Pat Conroy (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) – August 30, 2009
Alex Cross’s Trial by James Patterson and Richard DiLallo (Little, Brown) – September 13, 2009
Dark Slayer by Christine Feehan (Berkley) – September 20, 2009
The Last Song by Nicholas Sparks (Grand Central) – September 27, 2009
The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown (Doubleday) – October 4, 2009
The Gathering Storm by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson (Tor/Tom Doherty) – November 15, 2009
Ford County by John Grisham (Doubleday) – November 22, 2009
Under the Dome by Stephen King (Scribner) – November 29, 2009
I, Alex Cross by James Patterson (Little, Brown) – December 6, 2009
“U” Is For Undertow by Sue Grafton (Putnam) – December 20, 2009
So… you’re saying I need to re-do my thesis list?
In all seriousness, though, it’s refreshing to see an established author be willing to point the finger at himself. And the point about how writers (partly because of writing programs) are becoming increasingly self-interested in their audience and practice is a point worth emphasizing every so often. I think anyone who’s been through an MFA program (and is honest) could hardly refute that there’s a self-serving aspect.
In fact, one of the things I’ve seen a lot of in such programs (through my own experience and four friends of mine in different programs) is that faculty constantly emphasize that your immediate peer group within the program will be your readers for life. Students are encouraged to develop those relationships and find a handful of students that they’ll be able to count on indefinitely when work needs reviewing and opinions. I think this is dangerous, because it’s a sort of in-breeding of the elitist mentality. And it brings me to another thought: I’ve taught a couple of public writing workshops, the kind of thing you find in the parks & rec catalog. There are always a couple of writing workshops going at any given time, in just about every city at least big enough to be a college town. But I have never once seen a reading workshop that has a course description saying the goal is to help people learn to appreciate quality literature. And if we have any interest in being viable cultural/economic entities, don’t we have a sincere interest in helping people understand why what we do is good? I mean, isn’t that about the simplest thing we could do? The first thing any decent writing instructor will tell you is that the key to writing well is reading a lot. But in broader culture, we’re encouraging laypeople to write and they think they can do it, but if all they’ve read is J.D. Robb and Dean Koontz, how can there be an expectation of quality or even understanding of what quality is?
Hell, this is such a good idea I think I’m going to write a letter to the parks & rec asking them to put this in the catalog.
Seriously. I am. Right now.
But this bestseller list comparison is apples and oranges. Before BookScan was launched in 2001, the bestseller lists were just a guess, with plenty of info supplied by publishers and a handful of retail outlets.
Malcom Knox writes about the introduction of Bookscan in Australia here, and this excerpt seems germane to American publishing:
“In pre-BookScan days, here’s how it worked. A publisher would print, say, 5,000 copies in the first run of an Australian literary novel by an author with a reasonably high reputation. Around 4,000 might be “sold in”, or ordered by bookshops on a consignment basis. That is, the bookseller pays only for the books she sells, or “sells through”. (When “selling” is the verb, it’s the preposition that follows it that means everything.) Of those 4,000 copies a book might sell through about 2,000, the booksellers might keep 1,000 and another 1,000 would be returned.
“When the novel’s individual publisher met her boss to review the book’s performance or consider acquiring the novelist’s next effort, she would be asked how the earlier book “did”. If the publisher wanted to back the author, she might say the book sold 5,000, or she’d round it to 4,000. (Publishers still do this, hyping sales by quoting the “sold in” rather than “sold through” figure. The difference is, they now pull this on outsiders – press, public, booksellers, potential foreign rights buyers – and sometimes to the insecure author as well. But not to the boss.) In fact, the book sold only 1,732 copies. Two hundred and twelve of these were ex-royalty, or offloaded in some way (freebies, for example) that fell outside the BookScan net. So an author who was once thought to have reliably sold 4,000 or 5,000 copies is now known – known – to sell 1,520.”
Today, we have raw data of what is actually sold, with BookScan reporting approximately 75% of actual retail sales. If we’d had this “tool” in 1963, I bet the lists would be radically different, with bodice rippers and westerns and mysteries edging out all or most of the literary fiction. Even without the data, we know that Gone With the Wind way outsold anything Faulkner or Joyce ever wrote, probably more than all of those two authors’ sales combined.
While the NYT still doesn’t use BookScan to tabulate its list, it has come under increasing pressure to justify a book’s placement on its list, especially regarding discrepancy between a Times listing and Bookscan numbers. At the Standford Graduate School of Business Website, Marina Krakovsky reports on a sales record study of books for 2001 and 2002. The study was conducted by Alan Sorensen, an assistant professor of strategic management, who “looked at data from Nielsen BookScan, a sales monitoring service that tracks retail sales of books across the nation. Unlike the New York Times, which samples sales from only some stores, Nielsen BookScan captures most actual sales.
“Consequently, Sorensen found differences in the two lists. In fact, in the two years he studied, Sorensen found 109 different books that failed to make the Times list even though Nielsen reported they sold more copies than other titles on the Times’ list.”
In response to public outcry and criticism about the Times’ claim to be reporting bestsellers on its list versus serving as a cultural gatekeeper, I’m assuming that the Times started gathering more data to support its bestseller claims. And I’m also assuming they didn’t like what they found, since on 9/23/2007, they launched a “a new best-seller list devoted to trade paperback fiction…, the editors explain[ing] that the list ‘gives more emphasis to the literary novels and short-story collections reviewed so often in our pages (and sometimes published only in softcover).’
The Times concludes its explanation of this new list, as follows:
“You may still wonder why we decided to separate the mass-market and trade best-seller lists. The reason is that mass-market books — no surprise — tend to sell in larger numbers than trade. A list based on the number of copies a paperback sells will usually be dominated by mass-market. (Similarly, advice and self-help books sell more than most general nonfiction, and they dominated the nonfiction best-seller list until they got their own property in 1984.) But the Book Review — like most review media — focuses on trade fiction. These are the novels that reading groups choose and college professors teach. On the paperback best-seller list for Sept. 16, the week before we switched to the new system, only 7 of the 15 entries were trade fiction, but the new list of Sept. 23 presents 20 trade paperbacks. The seven books that made the list the week before, including “The Kite Runner” and “The Alchemist,” are still there, near the top of the list. But now there’s also room for Irène Némirovsky’s “Suite Française” and Kiran Desai’s “Inheritance of Loss.” And there’s a fuller listing for mass-market novels and paperback nonfiction as well.”
So it seems like the Times had already felt the pressure to make the lists more like the Bookscan lists, but in still trying to serve as a gatekeeper of culture, they also created a new list, to better “report” the sales of literary fiction.
My long winded point is that in the past, in 1963, when BookScan didn’t exist, the Times was working with publishers as a gatekeeper or cultural taste maker to “report” on bestsellers. With the advent of BookScan, they’ve had a much tougher time doing so — because BookScan reports what actually sells. And what actually sells is often sort of uninteresting, or has less literary “value.” And I bet that’s been true for a long, long time.
I can’t argue that the lists aren’t entirely comparable. And maybe those lists were ginned up by the Times, but that manipulation also caused those books to be listed as best-sellers, which in turn caused stores to discount those books and book-of-the-month to feature them and people to go buy more of them … the very gatekeeping you describe created bestsellers in that way.
But I also think it’s undeniable that literary fiction is simply less culturally relevant than it was fifty, forty, thirty years ago. (Imagine an author “disappearing” like Salinger did creating any sort of ripple in the culture now.) Like “alternative music” and “independent film,” literary fiction has a smaller niche audience than it did even ten years ago. No publisher would deny that. I’m not saying it’s because the writers have gotten more clubby or refined, or somehow worse. In fact, I don’t think it has anything to do with us. And while I’d never suggest pandering or writing down to the market, or even thinking for one second about this stuff while you’re writing, I also think it’s telling that we can get so defensive when someone is essentially asking writers to be more entertaining and relevant.
Hell, I could think of worse advice.
I wonder if the loss of the gatekeepers is in fact indicative of a problem — that we’re now saying let the market decide what’s good. I know we’re not saying that, but it seems to be implied with all the counting in our culture — box office numbers, BookScan numbers. I totally agree that the manipulation by the Times had a positive effect. They were promoting good work. There are always winners and losers in that kind of system, but there are always winners and losers no matter what. My concern is that today we — meaning the culture at large — seem to buy into the idea of markets determining quality. Markets can determine all kinds of things, and certainly popularity, but I don’t think they can determine quality. I’d rather have the old gatekeepers.
And I also worry about a kind of club growing out of the cultural worship of markets — the anti market club –in which “difficult” work is lauded simply because it’s difficult, creating a low-stakes reward system that makes the work more and more obscure. The comparison to “alternative music” feels especially apt and reminds me of all the people I know who hate any music once it becomes popular, because it’s no longer cool, no longer “theirs.” I’ve found myself doing that and always try to remember the second rule of popular culture, which is that just because something is popular does not mean it sucks.
The revelation to me in studying the comparisons of the bestseller lists, is that we used to let the Times or whomever sort of help determine what was good, for better or worse. And they still do, but probably not as much. There was plenty of bad mass market stuff around in the past, but it didn’t really enter into the discussion. It was there, but the Times and other taste makers didn’t bother to count it. And no one could really call them on it. That could be good and bad. With the arrival of BookScan, though, that perhaps benevolent paternalism got wiped out by quantitative evidence of what, indeed, is a bestseller. And the entire industry has, it seems, become kind of consumed with that. Just like Hollywood with opening weekends. I don’t think that will or can change. But one result does seem to be further balkanization, less relevance, more niches. And who are the new gatekeepers? Only “the market?” Or are there others? I think the Times’ new trade bestseller list is an attempt to maintain status as a gatekeeper. And I’m glad they did it. But I don’t know how to make something more relevant. I do know how to resist obscurity for obscurity’s sake (not in the culture at large, but in what I read and write). I also think most writing in the last hundred years has probably been sort of irrelevant. The Times just didn’t mention it. And I agree that fiction’s become less culturally relevant– maybe simply because of all the other media/entertainment/sources of “enlightenment” or engagement available today, as mentioned so often in the comments to this post and elsewhere.
Just to screw with your numbers some more- based off working at Barnes and Noble and keeping in mind this is one of the largest national bookstores and therefore responsible for a significant portion of the market numbers- “Bestsellers” displayed at B&N frequently come in as bestsellers before they’ve been on sale. You may think this doesn’t effect your numbers of how many actually sold, except this means we have more available for sale with higher visibility and the elevated sales value “bestseller” gives a title. Let’s face it, with so many titles to choose from, limited readers who may only read a few titles a year are going to gravitate toward what the bookstores elevate from the pack. Marketers rather than readers frequently determine what will be a bestseller. They create self fulfilling prophecies with their lists.
By the by, romance and sci-fi love including poetry in their work and frequently enjoy referencing literary works. Genre writers aren’t completely opposed to looking at what literary works have to offer, maybe we should be open to considering what they offer their readers without looking down our noses, and then as marketers we may learn to position ourselves better.
I don’t think that “literary” writers are necessairly looking down their noses at genre work for no reason. And I think that if you asked people who consider themselves literary writers what the positives of genre work are, they’d probably tell you plot is the biggest thing. And while some writers are willing to eschew that entirely, I think most literary writers would emphasize that plot *is* quite important, it’s just that it’s not the only driving force behind a narrative.
I’m not sure how this would apply to poetry. I also know that I sort of just contradicted my post comment from earlier…
Plot is important in genre writing and it draws the focus- but genres by common conceit work with plot formulas. (This isn’t entirely accurate in the definition of scifi and fantasy, but that’s a different discussion.) If the plots are near identical, then it stands to reason there is something different at work. We- cause yes I read a lot of genre fiction- absorb the same plot over and over, and yet may disdain to read any one of these books more than once. If we just wanted to read the same story, why wouldn’t we find the book that fills this need the best and just reread it all the time? Why the different stories? What is it we are looking for or at that defines these stories as different from each other- I’ll give you that it isn’t the prose.
Actually, I don’t know that I really have a good answer to this, but it’s a question I like exploring.
Some interesting background on Ted Genoways, including his enormous salary, his friend Nepotism, and his self-published (though publicly funded) book of poetry. I don’t know him, but the guy sounds like a scoundrel.
http://alancordle.com/blog/?p=3776
I don’t think those “inaccessible” movements can be boiled to down to just meaninglessness–seems more like those movements (Dada, especially) point out the meaningless inherent in the world in order to disrupt it, find something new. That’s not going appeal to a lot of people. But if writers/artists aren’t aiming to disrupt things in some way, then the work feels meaningless to me.
I don’t want prose and poetry to be solely practioner-supported arts, but I’m more uncomfortable with telling artists to keep readership in mind when they are creating. Nobody writes this article about painters, telling them to be more relevant or more accessible or whatever is the issue. I don’t mind the question being asked, but on one has given a good answer.
I have a potential solution. See earlier reply to Jess Walter’s comment.
Not saying this is the solution or even an effective one, but I think it may be pointed in the right direction. Step 1: stop encouraging isolated elitism; Step 2: help people understand what good writing is, rather than saying they’re stupid for not getting it.
Maybe the answer is solely in the asking. There is a tension at work that needs balance. In asking, we encourage some to pull in the other direction and therefore keep the tension, because certainly we’re artists and as such we are stubborn and independent enough that not all are going to bend to the suggestion.
Why do we keep telling our good writers to be more entertaining & relevant instead of telling the entertaining authors, the ones on the bestseller lists, to be better writers?
Because there’s no incentive for them to become better writers. If they’re making big bucks writing generic drivel, why would they be interested in being more like your typical MFA grad?
(I’d like to think there’s a natural human drive to become better than what one already is, but I haven’t seen that in practice very often.)
Also, I would think it’d be easier for someone who’s skilled and nuanced to become a little more entertaining than it is for someone who follows a formula to completely re-interpret their approach.
I think every writer tries to be as good as they can be. Those “lousy” writers probably don’t think they’re so lousy. Though I might.
But i don’t really believe that literary fiction has only recently become a niche, aimed at a clubby, refined group. I think it’s been that way for a long time, and that it feels pronounced now because of the overall decline in reading-slash-glut of books.
Faulkner might have been on the best-seller list in the 1960s, after he’d died and won the Nobel, but he sure wasn’t in the 1920s and 30s, when he wrote his masterpieces — works that are notoriously difficult, averse to plot and storytelling mechanics, and self-consciously artistic. The whole 20th century, it seems to me, was an artistic march away from the popular in art and toward the obscure or the insider-ish.
That certainly pushes away some readers. But it draws some of us in, too. I’ve tried for a long time to justify in my mind that my opinions on this front aren’t elitist. but the truth is, they are.
i am interested in writing that aims for goals that might not make them popular, and i think of these goals — originality, fresh language, a degree of entertaining or engrossing difficulty — as “higher” in some sense. Loftier. More important. Refined. Plenty of popular works have these qualities, but plenty do not.
it’s snobby. my nose is sticking way up right now. but it’s just my preference. everyone ought to read what they like, and write the stories they want to write.
Your last sentence says it all, Shawn.
I think the crux of the problem is that people have too many immediately gratifying entertainment choices for many people to choose to read fiction that might require some thought. I think it was one of the Marsalis brothers who said if he’d been able to turn on the TV as a teen and see some of the most beautiful women in the world shaking their nearly naked bodies in his face, there’s no way he would have ever picked up a trumpet. I think this applies to reading as well. Everything is available on TV (in a cheaper, much less gratifying form, but if you don’t know what you’re missing, are you really going to miss it?); we get poetry in commercials and narrative from programming. None of it is very good, but all of it is shiny. Too shiny for the written word to compete. And maybe this is why so many stories hint at experiences/emotional states that can’t be explicitly spelled out for people – no description of action is going to garner the response that the guy flailing his limbs as he’s blown away from a technicolor explosion is going get. We shy away from the large and turn inward, to material unexplored in the rest of popular media; the subtle grandeur of everyday experience, which most people sleepwalk through, so they have no interest in reading about it. Hell, most people go to such extreme lengths to ESCAPE those emotional/intellectual/spiritual experiences, the last thing on earth they want to do is read a story about them that they barely understand anyway.
So in the end, what is the answer? Or, more to the point, what is the problem? People are lazy and self-interested and capitalism and modern culture encourages them to be more so. Writing, like painting, is a dying art. If literacy rates are indeed up, I strongly suspect “literacy” is being measured in terms of who can read a badly misspelled screed posted in a chat room by someone who may or may not be a twelve year old girl.
What constitutes literacy is troubling, definitely. I wish all people could read so that we could then encourage them to read interesting, intelligent words. Until that happens, well, we’ll keep trying.
As for the rest: Yup.
[...] describe as cold, that didn’t transcend their form. But I’m also nervous about spilling into Ted Genoways’ territory. Different written works craft different Others, reach for the reader differently: with a [...]