Man, I sure poked a hornet's nest with my comment about the Amazon popularity contest for novels. Let me clarify a few things.
I have nothing against the contest per se. What I object to is the way they promoted it, calling it a "breakthrough novel" event. I am coming from two places when I say this: I myself have been a judge in literary contests, for both books and screenplays, half a dozen times. I know how these affairs work from the inside out. Also, as an undergrad at UCLA I took a course called "19th Century Popular Literature" and this taught me a few things about the nature of pop lit in the larger literary history of a culture.
If Amazon had called its contest "the Amazon Popularity Contest for Unpublished Novels," I would have had nothing to day. Indeed, the contest deserves applause within the context of understanding what it is and is not. My objection is that the PR department promoted it to suggest it was something it was not.
Given my experience as a judge, I think a "popularity contest" is a preferable way to select popular literature. Just call it what it is. Why do I say this? Because typically in contests, it's more about the tastes of judges than the quality or potential popularity of writing. A true story. I was one of three judges to select 10 scriptwriters who would be given $7000 fellowships by a state arts commission. None of the judges lived near the state. There was myself, an LA artistic director of a theater and a theater professor from Texas. We had 79 scripts to read, from which to select 10 winners. We made our individual lists. We had a long afternoon conference call, moderated by the arts commission, to make our decision. First problem. There were no duplicates on the individual lists of top ten! Not one, not a single agreement, on the top ten scripts. Imagine! Hence, the affair now became a political event. We bargained. We agreed everyone got their top three, then we argued like hell for hours over #10. I finally won, getting a screenwriter, because no screenwriter had received an award in the top 3 formula (my top 3 were playwrights but 4-7 were screenwriters). It was a fascinating, depressing process. Surely a popularity contest can do better than this for pop lit. Good show, Amazon, just call it what it is.
If the 20th and 21st centuries follow the 19th century, then the most popular novels of the times will be totally forgotten and unread a century from now. Nobody reads the best sellers of the 19th C. any more. The breakthrough novels of that century, like Moby Dick, were failures in their own time. If Amazon meant to say the novel would be a breakthrough for the writer's career, then call the contest the Amazon Breakthrough Popular Writer Award.
As writers, we are guardians of the language. I have nothing against pop lit or writers who write it except that I almost never attempt a popular novel that I can finish. (There are exceptions: I love the work of Elmore Leonard.) If that's what you do, do your thing. But the Amazon PR department obviously wants to heighten the importance of this event by declaring "a breakthrough novel" will be discovered, which if so would be a remarkable exception to literary history.
I'm not against writers. I'm against PR and advertising departments.
It used to be, when I was starting out, that publishing companies were small, family affairs (compared to the international monstrosities they are today), run by lovers of literature, and there was on every publishing list an admired genre called "the literary novel." The literary novel was published because it was good and deserved to be published -- it was not expected to make money. If a literary novel sold 2000 copies, the publisher was happy. It was the genre books that supported these "losing" ventures. Then why publish them if they weren't going to make a lot of money? Because publishers saw themselves as guardians of the literary culture. It was their DUTY to publish good literature, books that might stand the test of time! This is the way it used to work. A number of publishers have written memoirs about those days.
Thomas Wolfe used to send boxes of unordered manuscripts to his editor, Maxwell Perkins, who arranged them into "novels." This writer-editor relationship is unthinkable today. Indeed, many editors have left the business because their job has become less editing, more marketing. Former editors have written memoirs about this, too.
Everything has changed. Publishing companies are now run not by book lovers but by accountants. It's a bottom line affair now. Today it is laughable to consider publishing a book just because it is "good."
The movie Sideways makes this point. Miles' novel gets rejected because, even though the publisher considers it "good," he can't figure out how to market it. The latter concern used to be irrelevant. You published it because it was good, and you hoped it might sell 2000 copies and sometimes even break even. The literary novel was respected for being good, not for selling copies. It's a given literature doesn't have a big audience. So what? Publishers had the charge to nurture the literary culture by publishing good literature. Popular lit would support this noble venture.
In those days, serious writers aspired to be "good", not "popular." And the publishing industry was behind us. R.I.P.
The good news. Serious writers are still serious writers. Some aspire to dramatize insights about human experience that will stand the test of time. Personally, if we still have a culture in the 22nd century and beyond, I think the "immortal writing" of the 21st century will come off of the web and the print-on-demand lists of books with no existing contemporaneous market. I think these books are being written but there is no place in the market for them because publishers no longer swallow their losses out of a sense of cultural duty. Now the serious writer has to do it alone. And I think many are. And some of this writing, far down the road, will be judged to be brilliant.
Readers of this blog know that I'm not often optimistic but I am optimistic about this. Good writing, like justice, wins out -- sometimes it just takes a hell of a long time.
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6 comments:
How do you evaluate your own writing? Will you be remembered 100 years from now?
Oh, boy.
My writing: I write as well as I can. What else can I say? Sometimes, when I get distance from my work, I marvel that I wrote it: wow, I wrote that!? And other times, with distance, I think, What a waste of time that was. But actually it wasn't. It's never a waste of time to write if you are writing inside-out.
There are two ways to write: inside-out and outside-in; or writing "for art" (trying to reach an aesthetic goal of your own choosing) or writing "for commerce" (trying to get published and make money). I've done both. Indeed, I've supported myself as a writer, writing "for commerce." But I stopped when it became too stressful. Now, and recently, I write only "for art."
Will I be remembered in 100 years? I doubt it. However, I've written a few things that will not lose their appeal in 100 or 200 years, if folks can find them. The Seagull Hyperdrama comes to mind.
A more interesting exercise is to evaluate my literary career because I've been a terrible manager of it. If reaching as wide an audience as possible were a goal, I've made choices to do the opposite. Examples:
*In the early 70s I was on a roll. I had stories selected to the "Roll of Honor" (the final cut) in BEST AMERICAN SHORT STORIES for 1971, 1972 and 1974, 3 out of 4 consecutive years. It would have been best for my career to write a novel, using these credits to open doors -- and "the literary novel" was not dead yet. Instead, I abandoned fiction for the stage. Go figure.
*At the end of the 1980s, when I had a solid reputation as a "Northwest playwright," it would have been best for my career to move to New York and really "go for it" in theater. Or even to Seattle or LA, better cities than Portland in the larger theatrical universe. Not only did I stay put, I abandoned traditional theater for a totally non-commercial obsession with hyperdrama.
*Instead of writing hyperdrama for the stage and live performances, I should have written computer games. This, a student finally informed me, is the real legacy of hyperdrama: to drive computer games. He's right. I just didn't realize it at the time.
In other words, every career choice I've made has been impractical if the goal was to "better my career," which translates to mean, better establish myself in the literary establishment.
This said, I regret nothing and no doubt would do it all the same way again. I've followed my passion at the time.
In the final analysis, I'm just another of the thousands (millions?) of marginal writers out there. I do the best I can and let the chips fall where they may. Yet several times in my career something has been discovered and appreciated long after its insignificant publication. One hopes this can happen again. After all, one does want to be appreciated. But on the writer's own terms. Inside-out, not outside-in.
I suppose I don't understand how the great classics became great classics if nobody purchased and read them. Is it entirely a matter of conspiracy between the publishers of literature and the teachers of literature?
And what you say makes me wonder nervously if entertainment and literature are mutually exclusive.
But now that I think about it, I'm certain that there are some dead authors who were widely beloved within their lives and also recognized as the writers of enduring literature (but those are of the recently dead persuasion).
All the same, I'm interested in what you think.
soula, I don't think entertainment and literature are mutually exclusive: Look at Mark Twain. But all these terms are loaded and relative. It's important to remember that there was a time when Shakespeare was NOT considered to be a major writer. It's important to remember that in the WWII era, John Dos Passos and Thomas Wolfe were considered to be major American novelists -- but are scarcely read today (and Dos Passos' USA is my own nomination for the Great American Novel, even today). All these judgements are relative.
There is no conspiracy going on. What usually happens is that an articulate and persuasive literary critic champions a writer or artist, and his passion catches on.
I think there are several reasons pop lit is forgotten in the long run: it often is very topical, speaking only to the narrow interests of a particular time and place; and it often is weak in character development, which tends to speak more to later generations than plot development.
Great lit can be both entertaining, emotionally moving, and intellectually thought-provoking. Consider my favorite stage play, THE PHYSICISTS by Friedrich Durrenmatt. We begin from the get go with a murder mystery: lights up, a dead body, a detective. But it gets complicated: we're in an insane asylum where various inmates think they are famous physicists (one Einstein, another Newton). And more complicated still: some of the inmates are not so insane after all. I don't want to give it away but what we evolve into is a morality play of sorts about the social responsibilities of scientists, all this wrapped within a murder mystery. It is a very sad play. It also is a very true play. And along the way, it keeps you on the edge of your seat. So does SIZWE BONZI IS DEAD by Antol Fugard. So does MARAT/SADE by Peter Weiss. (Perhaps it is no accident that none of these was written by an American.)
For a classic to become a classic, it must speak to later generations. I suppose that's the bottom line. It may or may not have an audience in its own time. The assumption is that if it speaks to later generations, then it says something universal, or not time-bound, about human experience.
When I read all those 19th C best sellers, they were boring because nothing was going on that moved or engaged me. They read like quirky plot-driven relics from the past. Yet the 19th C may be my favorite era of American Lit, filled with great literature! But to contemporaries then, this writing was high brow stuff at best, or ignored or invisible (Emily Dickinson) at worst.
You also have to spend time with great books. Even if that have a surface layer of engaging entertainment, their true value gets revealed only with continued readings. They are subtle. They are layered and complex. They reward reading again and again. It's like listening to a great piece of music. You read a great book over and over again for the marvel of its accomplishment.
Pop lit has its place and literature has its place. What has changed is that the publishing industry once embraced an obligation to publish literature knowing full well it would make no money. That attitude is considered madness to the bottom-line corporations now in charge. And, in fact, from a business point of view, it IS madness. But publishing once was more than a business, it was a guardian of literary culture. R.I.P.
Looks like a disagreement on the definition of "breakthrough," Charles. You're taking it to mean artistic milestone, I'm taking it to mean a breakthrough event in the life of an indiviudal professional writer. I think both might be legitimate definitions -- and the second is the one the namers of the contest intended.
Hopeful Writer
I'm more cynical than you. I think they meant the first definition and deliberately played on the ambiguity provided by the second. But then I used to drink with some ad men and learned how they think.
The Amazon ad folks didn't say YOUR breakthrough novel, or the WINNER'S breakthrough novel, which clarity would demand if they meant the second definition. They knew exactly what they were doing. In fact, I bet they even got a laugh out of it, thinking, Imagine how many lit professors we'll piss off with this!
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