The Expiration Date for Literature - Like Milk, Books Go Sour

First, a terrible admission: I don't read enough.  It isn't that I dislike literature on principle, it's just that it's very hard for me to find books which hold my attention.  And it's grown worse over time - it might be that I'm easily distracted, or it could just be that I don't have the patience of my younger years.  The Once and Future King, even, when I reread it, simply wasn't as riveting at 29 as it had been when I was 15.  And it's even worse when I go to the bookstore.  I might spend hours in the science fiction section (my genre of choice) and not find a single book that I really want to read, the kind of book where you're eager to invest the ten or twelve hours it might take to go through each page.

No go back a couple decades - or, tougher still, a century - to the days when books were even more wordy than they are today.  Pushing my way through Henry James is like getting a buy-one-get-one-free on root canals.  And Henry James is a great author - The Turn of the Screw is the classic example of a novel that literally thrives on deconstruction and "spook-factor."  I've read the book twice for class, and it fully deserves the literary reputation it's built over the years, just as it's earned the reputation for terrifying boredom.  I think I can safely say I'm not alone in my visceral desire to avoid reading this book.  Yet I also own three copies - again, a result of studying literature.  It's a testament to the quality of the work that professors are still assigning this work as required reading for many, many higher-level literature courses.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to this loyalty many hold toward the canon of classical literature.  Anyone who's read a riveting novel - Harry Potter, for example, or The Silence of the Lambs - and then tried writing a story realizes that the styles of other authors will bleed over into your own.  You can unwittingly find yourself trying to write like J.K. Rowling or Thomas Harris, losing your own unique voice to their mastery of the language.  And this isn't entirely a bad thing - this is actually how we learn to write well.  Just as children learn to speak from hearing the spoken word, we pick up the essential techniques of writing from our reading.

The problem is that many writers end up reading too much of the wrong books.  For me, if I spent all my days reading trashy science fiction, I would eventually write only trashy novels.  And - disturbing as this declaration may be - too much great literature has the potential to pollute your writing with an obsolete style.  If you simply read The Turn of the Screw, you'll know that the book would never sell on the bestseller racks at the grocery story today - it's great literature, sure, but very few in the general public would find it worth the investment.  Yet the literary writers of today - anyone in an MFA program, for example - are reading disproportionate quantities of old-fashioned literature.  To me, it'd like trying to make science fiction movies if the only experience you've had comes from watching Star Trek's Captain Kirk "boldly go where no man has gone before."  Yes, it's crucial viewing if you want to understand the science fiction tradition, but Captain Kirk and Buck Rogers alone wouldn't be inspiration enough if you wanted to produce something as edgy and modern as Battlestar Galactica.

By reading classic literature exclusively - by ignoring the new (and unproven) novels of the past ten-to-twenty years - writers may fail to absorb the changing face of literature.  And let's face it - the novel has changed a lot over the past fifty years.  Direct, clean prose has mostly triumphed over the older, wordier narratives of Dickens and Hawthorne.  It's a reflection of the modern era.  Today's readers, racing to keep up with Facebook, Twitter, and cell phone bills simply don't have the time to slog through fifty pages of text without a clear conflict in sight.  Sure, we can argue that people should make time for "good" literature, but the great books of the past aren't competing with just the pulp racks at the supermarket - they face stiff competition from ten-dollar blockbusters and the instant gratification of YouTube.  Then we have Netflix - why spend twenty-five dollars and a hundred hours of your time to slog through six or seven classical reads when you can take in maybe fifty movies for eight bucks a month?

As modern writers, we have to be careful that we don't condemn our selves to the "classics" pile before we've even published.  Never mind that agents and editors are looking for modern material with an edge - if you want to make a living selling novels, then you'll need to attract an audience that keeps coming back.  You need to target the individuals who are harried by the stress of modern life - you need to attract them with something new enough and entertaining enough to keep them fastened to their seats, eyes glued to Amazon waiting for your next book.

This requires that we keep abreast of not just modern books, but the new language of these books.  I hate reading lines like "in my estimation" and "as a subscriber to the local magazine" in stories written by students and classmates during the past month - phrases like this may not be dead, but they're obsolete. They carry the kind of impact one gets from quoting Shakespeare over the course of a dinner date - wordy, pretentious, overdone.  Trying to attract steady readers with phrases like this is like trying to build a successful car company using Henry Ford's original assembly line - unless you're selling to a crowd that really, really likes the Model T, you'll be struggling to break even.

So as you choose your reading, make sure to throw in good books of the modern era.  Cormac McCarthy's The Road or even Stephenie Meyer's Twilight will reveal the turns-of-phrase and plotting which have held millions of readers in their seats for hours at a time.  Neither book is perfect, I know (many sentences in Twilight read like an ivy shrub - tangled and growing).  At the same time, you'll need to read authors who are not yet well known.  Nascent talents will write the literature of tomorrow, and you'll want to learn from them if you want to keep up - Syne Mitchell's science fiction is a fine example, or Evie Shockley's poetry (both are great writers who are well-known in their own right, but not yet household names).

This involves taking some risks, of course.  You may purchase books with incredible opening chapters which lead nowhere (I hate posting this link, but here's a book I wanted to return after reading it: Old Man's War.  If you want to read the more timeless classics from which John Scalzi pulled his story, check out Starship Troopers or The Forever War.)  You might end up with books you can't finish.  Or you may even pollute your writing with the ills of the modern style: misplaced colloquialisms, blunt-force metaphors, and similes which cause your liver to bleed out into your spleen like a dank moldy sponge.  But that's okay.  Because, armed with knowledge, you'll watch out for these problems in your own writing.

And, of course, because you're a writer, you'll ignore half my article and keep reading the classics anyway - as you most very well should.

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Style and Popular Literature

One of my favorite writing teachers, Bill Henderson, addresses a fundamental question on his blog:

Are commercial bestsellers poorly written?

If you have a chance, definitely check out his post at TrueVoice - The Blog. I've included my response below, but there are several great perspectives on TrueVoice regarding the role of style in popular (and successful) fiction.

Style and Popular Literature

I'm afraid I have great respect for certain popular writers. The latest Harry Potter book was filled with dozens of horribly structured paragraphs, and there are some Stephen King books simply not worth reading, but I enjoy these authors. I appreicate what they can do with a character, how they can bring a story right up to the edge and somehow create a happy (and believable) ending.

At the same time, I have incredible respect for some of the literary short-story authors I've read lately. I can't remember their names, and I only remember their stories from which magazine I found them in (e.g. Georgia Review or Ploughshares). But these are stories I could not have read six years ago. I hated them, dreaded them. In college, the complex literary stories made me avoid the serious literature classes (quite a feat for an English major). I wanted to study creative writing - I didn't want to get bored out of my mind and then start pulling C's. I didn't understand story structure well enough then to appreciate what these stories accomplish. And what I understand now I learned from writing. Workshops taught me how to read stories in-depth, and I will never again enjoy my cherised "pop" novels which happen to be filled with run-on sentences and poor speech attribution.

Most readers, though, are like my mom - they don't write. Hand her Ann Rice and she'll pass the time; hand her Moby Dick and she'll talk about the ex-cousin-in-law who dropped out of his Ph.D. program. Readers like my mom enjoy a good story, and they rarely notice adverbs or participles that dangle into space. If they're good readers, they might feel queasy as the brooding superhero was saying his words darkly, but not always. To many readers, good writing is a product of deep thought. They think that "specificity of detail" means using phrases like "the fact that" and "he was verbed adverbly." They use these phrases themselves, and then they tell people like us (their friends/neighbors/bartenders who claim to be writers) things like "oh, yeah, I'm working on a book, too. It's about..."

Do I begrudge the bestsellers they're fame? Not really. They tell stories that are fun and witty and enjoyable despite transgressions of style. Honestly, I despise awards committees who slap labels like "A Genre Essential Book" on novels that lack either plot or fully realized characters. I worry about the editor who let it go when dozens of poorly-worded paragraphs in Harry Potter 7 crossed the desk. I feel robbed of my time when the books are bad and robbed of an even better read when the books are good but flawed.

Is style important? To us, certainly. To the typical reader? I'm not sure. I feel like an elitist saying this, but I remember the days when I could read a book without critiquing the word order on every other page. When I was younger, I had no patience for many of the books we call "literary." I read E.B. White because the book was about King Arthur, not because I understood the meaning of clean prose. Pride and Prejudice was a favorite because I thought Elizabeth Bennet was fun.

This, I think, is where the popular books excel - they develop characters who readers relate to. They provide compelling plots and exciting action to help readers quickly escape this world of work, taxes, and parking tickets. They reveal that it's possible to write a compelling story despite structural mistakes. It's the kind of trick I'm still trying to pull off.

In the meantime, though, I'll keep working on the fundamentals of style. I'm already much better at sentence structure than conflict, but there's always room for growth. When the day comes that I discover my compelling blockbuster story, I want the style to back me up all the way. I want the the story to read fast so the reader can dive in and forget that the images dancing through his mind are the product of black ink on white paper.

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Why Fantasy Novels are Overlooked

Our waking hours are limited. In the free moments left to us after e-mail and dinner and getting the kids to bed, we do our best to be productive in our leisure. For many, this means skipping the dragons and ignoring the elves in favor of lighter fair – that unread copy of Macbeth, perhaps, or another shot at page twenty of Moby Dick.

To many, fantasy novels are not literature. These readers view fantasy as cheap escapism, simply another way to the forget the boss and ignore the economy – except that there is no chance of Merlin installing a round table in the White House. Thinking that in reading they should “better themselves,” many readers choose books that they believe will directly apply to their lives. They pick up John Grisham and Tom Clancy because certainly those books hold a grain of truth – people get sued every day, and you never know which wars our nation may be fighting outside the view of CNN. Stephen King is a harder sell, but he writes so believably that, for a moment, a reader could imagine those horrible evil things lurking in the shadows under the refrigerator. But fantasy? Dragons that belch flame? A world of dirt roads and enchanted chain mail? Pardon me, but I have work tomorrow.

Unfortunately, this nagging literary discrimination has become quite widespread. It affects many genres – fantasy, science fiction, romance, even Westerns. Part of this ironically results from the high demand for novels in these genres. Readers who love the likes of John Wayne and Captain Kirk will buy many, many books – as a result, genre novels are often not as well written as a New York Times bestseller. Readers unfamiliar with a genre – especially fantasy – see these rows of books at Barnes and Noble and don’t know what to look for. They get swamped by the cover illustrations of damsels and unicorns and knights in heavy armor. They might spend a few minutes reading the back covers before giving up and heading for the bestseller racks. If they’re brave and happen to buy a book, they’re often disappointed. It’s hard to make sense of a good fantasy without at least some familiarity with the standards of the genre. But a poorly-written fantasy novel? Our realist reader might put down the book at chapter one and never go back.

As these mainstream readers face their own poor experiences with fantasy, they spread the word. Instead of “oh, I didn’t like this book by author X,” it becomes “I tried reading a fantasy once – it just didn’t make sense to me.” These views, unfortunately, are still further reinforced by the popularity of the genre. As “typical readers” go about their daily lives, they run across people who love fantasy novels and are very vocal about this love. Renaissance Fairs coupled with Dungeons and Dragons players dressing up for their weekly game leave mainstream readers thinking that fantasy novels are more of a subculture than simply another form of literature. Like Brahmin avoiding Untouchables, these readers avoid “that guy” at the office who spent his weekend dressed in a tunic while turning a pig at a spit – chances are he still smells like boiled grease. Never mind that pig-turning-tunic-guy has always been a little nutty – the fact that he talks about warlocks and magic amulets makes it seem as if it was the books that made him this way. No one really considers the cute secretary down the hall who adores Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and R. A. Salvatore – she never talks about books because she doesn’t want to get lumped in with greasy weirdo dude or (worse yet) encourage him to talk to her.

As this pattern continues, most readers become turned-off to the idea of fantasy novels. They might pick up a copy of Harry Potter because everyone says it’s good, but they’ll never browse the fantasy section looking for it. It’s unfortunate that this happens – these readers miss a very entertaining and insightful genre. Well-written fantasy novels provide more than a magical setting. They develop a metaphorical world for readers to explore, a world that is different from our own but always close to home. But the only way to visit these worlds is to first find a book – a good book – and dodge the ever-watchful eyes of the literary purists.

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