Two comments on Saturday struck me. One, at a workshop for apprentice and master fiction writers, from a multi-published writer: Jane Austen is fun to read, and to read in many ways, and to re-read..
but we don’t need to hold ourselves up that high.
She aims for a level that would be fun to read two or three times, and then moves on to the next book. I know some of the series writers (such as those who write for Harlequin’s lines) feel pressure to produce 3-4 books a year, both to earn a decent living and to be “marketable.” Write it, edit through it once, and get it out the door.
Reinforcing that attitude, I read in Time magazine this week the article Books Gone Wild: The Digital Age Reshapes Literature by Lev Grossman, which describes how publishing is changing, and what that means for the type of “content” in a novel:
And what will that fiction look like? Like fan fiction, it will be ravenously referential and intertextual in ways that will strain copyright law to the breaking point. Novels will get longer–electronic books aren’t bound by physical constraints–and they’ll be patchable and updatable, like software. We’ll see more novels doled out episodically, on the model of TV series or, for that matter, the serial novels of the 19th century. We can expect a literary culture of pleasure and immediate gratification. Reading on a screen speeds you up: you don’t linger on the language; you just click through. We’ll see less modernist-style difficulty and more romance-novel-style sentiment and high-speed-narrative throughput. Novels will compete to hook you in the first paragraph and then hang on for dear life.
So am I writing for the few that will pay for a “bespoke” edition of novelish content, filtered through the editorial lens of a now-boutique publishing house? Do I want to be constantly updating every novelish piece of content I produce? Am I over-thinking?
On the other hand, I do enjoy romance-novel-style sentiment. And I like the idea of fewer gatekeepers and more chance for the odd-duck work to gain fans and fame. And I don’t like to edit more than three times. And I’m learning how to let go perfection (hello, blog). And I can’t stop progress. So be it.
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