I was idly browsing in the Waterloo Station branch of Foyles bookshop recently, when I found myself in front of a surprisingly large display of "recent fiction". There were at least a hundred books there, maybe even twice that – presumably itself a curated selection from the latest publications – mostly by authors I had never heard of or seen reviewed, and who, according to recent figures – if they're among the lucky ones – will be earning a typical income of around £7K, which is not very far from just half of the new UK State Pension. Most must therefore still be living with parents, supported by a partner who has a reliable income, writing in the spare time afforded by a full- or part-time job, or have some sort of independent income. The days of cheap living in garrets, bedsits, and squats surviving on generous state benefits have long gone. [1]
As someone who abandoned the idea of living the writing life decades ago, I find it hard to understand why so many people still feel the need to write fiction that practically no-one will ever read, and which will never earn them a living wage. It's not as if finishing a novel worth reading and then actually getting it published is either easy or quick. It's even harder to understand why the publishers keep pushing out such overwhelming quantities of not particularly outstanding fiction. It surely cannot make sense as a business model, unless the gamble is that one or two mega bestsellers will emerge every few years that are able to pay for all the rest; apart, that is, from those who do not even make it into the pension-level "mid-list" and who are doubtless regularly and unceremoniously culled.
I am not and have never been a publishing insider, and have no insights to offer on that front. Self-evidently, though, I am a writer of sorts. See? This is me writing! I can't help it. I enjoy it. So much so I don't even ask you to pay to read what I have written. What an idiot, though: "No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money", as Samuel Johnson reportedly said, and he's not wrong. But today there is an irresistible alternative to adding to some publisher's "slush pile" for those of us blockheads who enjoy writing for its own sake, which is, of course, self-publication on the Web. Blogs, Substack, Bluesky, even Facebook and that other thing that used to be Twitter... The internet is packed with so many thousands of self-styled writers like me asking for your attention, sometimes even for your money, that the very idea of being a writer has been diluted into something approaching homeopathic status. We're all scribblers now.
Finishing a novel may be hard, but banging out short pieces like this is relatively easy, certainly as compared to singing or playing the piano (which is actually impossible, as I have previously demonstrated to my own satisfaction, if nobody else's). In effect, a social-media writer is like one of those prolific letter-writers of earlier centuries, in love with the new communication technology of the postage stamp. I think of John Cage's often-quoted words:
I have nothing to say
and I am saying it
and that is poetry
as I need it
(Lecture on Nothing, 1949)
Just substitute "writing" for "poetry" and there you have most social media. How far anyone else needs it is a good question.
You don't need some fancy literary theory to realise that there are two main variables that add distinction to any sort of writing: content and quality. And also, I suppose, entertainment value... There are three main variables... Plus, of course, an appreciative target audience... There are four main variables... [Stop it. Ed.]. But, being able to write well and even entertainingly is one thing; thousands of us have that capacity. Good content, however – having (or at least believing you have) something to say – is rather different.
I'm not talking about originality, which is both rare and overrated. Even the most celebrated "original" things usually turn out to be versions of other less-celebrated things, and mere novelty fails to inspire that most sincere tribute, imitation. True innovation, like evolution, is wary of freakish outliers; four legs good, five legs ridiculous. Often, when writing these blog posts, I have been convinced that I'd just come up with some amusing expression, perhaps some twist on a familiar phrase, that had surely to be a first. Sometimes I check, and almost always Google instantly assures me that I was wrong. Almost always...
[A digression: whenever I think about "originality" I have a flashback to an upstairs classroom around 1968, where one of my secondary-school English teachers – George Partridge, a gaunt, elderly eccentric, a survival from an earlier age and perhaps the very last man still to wear an academic gown in a state school – is striding between our rows of desks, and declaiming:
I want to do something original
But I don't know where to begin
For there's nothing original in me
Except an original sin... [1]
George was given to random corporal punishment for real or imagined transgressions, and the way he was whacking his fist into his palm to pound out the metre implied an ear-clipping for someone was imminent. Frankly, I doubt whether any of us had the faintest idea of what "original sin" might be, although we knew well enough when to shut up and look innocent when George was off on one.]
So, forgetting about originality, writers are sometimes classed as either foxes or hedgehogs, as in "a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing": an idea often attributed to Isaiah Berlin, but which – see "originality" above – appears to have proceeded to Berlin by a road that leads from Ancient Greece via the Renaissance Netherlands. Writers of fiction tend to be "hedgehogs" – not a few famous novelists have been accused of having one idea that they tackled multiple times from slightly different directions – as do bloggers and allied social-media trades, where the stakes are low but the ego is high. We have this thing, and we keep bashing away at it.
The main thing we have to bash, of course, is an endless fascination with the various Just-So stories that account for the bottomless source of wonder that is our own really quite ordinary life. You've probably noticed. We may try to disguise it by making ourselves exemplars of broader themes, but the underlying self-obsession always shows through. Of course, virtually none of this Web-scale torrent of self-scrutiny will ever make it into print. Certainly not as the equivalent of those multi-volume collections of some luminary's correspondence, marginal notations and unpublished leftovers: you need to be known for something else, something rather more substantial, for those scraps to have any value. The not particularly exciting or unusual tale of how, say, a heterosexual white male was transformed from a mildly rebellious teen with a taste for the safer recreational drugs into a responsibly sober citizen and family man with, oh, let's say an administrative job in a university and a sanity-saving sideline in some sort of art is not a story that is of much interest to a publisher these days, if it ever was. Just, you know, to pick an example at random.
Genre fiction aside (that's a very big "aside", I realise), what many readers seem to crave – that is, those people who actually buy books, and keep publishers in business – are misery memoirs, true crime, tales from the wilder fringes of identity, and above all stories of triumph over adversity. Combine three out of these four, and we're talking potential bestseller. So if, for whatever reason, you suffer from the urge to see yourself in print, one way is to write a jazzed up, fictionalised version of "what you know best" – i.e. your own life – calculated to satisfy that public appetite. Which is not a problem, if you choose to go down the fiction route; this is, after all, pretty much what all first novels have always been. I don't read much "literary" fiction these days, but I understand that tricksy "autofictions" where the protagonist has the same name as the author, or the book is a self-scrutinising account of how it came to be written, are all the rage with the smart set. So there's that, too. But I'm a simple-minded guy at heart, and I'm happy with the idea that an author is just making it all up; it doesn't excite me to be invited into some unhappy soul's hall-of-mirrors jousts with "language" and "reality", with everything safely insulated within multiple layers of ironic stylistic scare quotes. Besides, I'm never sure how far such obsessive probing of metaphysical wounds is genuine or merely a fashionable writerly pose, a ticket of admission to some inner, alienated circle of "important" readers.
But autofiction is clearly a rarefied taste, and first novels rarely make the bestsellers list. What the mass readership really wants – apart from ripping yarns, romantasy, and tales of swords 'n' sorcery – are The Juicy Facts and The Inspirational Truth, with the emphasis on "facts" and "truth". So it's not surprising if outrage explodes when it is revealed that your allegedly True Account of My Amazing Journey From Darkness Into Light is a self-serving pack of lies.
There is a revealing list on Wikipedia of "fake memoirs and journals", from the 19th century to the present day. It is astonishing how fake Holocaust memoirs have come to be published to great acclaim, for example, not to mention the military fantasies of saloon-bar SAS fanboys and phoney combat veterans. You'd think publishers would be wise to this sort of thing by now; maybe even do a little rudimentary fact-checking before drawing up a contract? But somehow offerings like The Salt Path and Great and Unfortunate Things keep hitting the shelves, tasty and marketable concoctions that, after someone else does do a little rudimentary fact-checking, turn out to be hovering somewhere rather too near fiction than fact. [3]
Of course, if they're well-enough written, and tick all the right boxes – content, quality, entertainment value, and target audience – such made-to-measure fabulations are probably enjoyable and even instructive to read anyway, and all publishers know that the publicity value of exposure and scandal may even boost sales. After all, hasn't the whole point of "literature" always been that "something to say" can be attractively wrapped up in a pack of lies? See, for example, Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe's big, bold, bare-faced fibathon, the fake memoir that is usually held responsible for kicking off the whole subsequent tradition of literary fabrication for fun and profit, a.k.a. the writing of prose fiction in English.
Well, perhaps not so much for "profit"; not for the authors, anyway. Would-be writers should take note of Defoe's lifelong familiarity with the inside of a debtors' prison. I mean, really? £7K a year, if you're one of the lucky ones? No, listen to your parents, kids, and get a proper job first. And we don't mean teaching "creative writing"...
2. Actually a misremembered rendering of some occasional verse, "To a Young Lady, Who Asked Me to Write Something Original for Her Album", composed in 1840 by the now largely-forgotten, but apparently once well-known and influential Scottish poet James Campbell:
An original something, fair maid, you would win me
To write—but how shall I begin?
For I fear I have nothing original in me—
Excepting Original Sin.
3. You might be interested to read of a particularly curious case of self-fabulation in this post from 2013, Second Acts. Or, even better, the astounding true story of Count No Account, Charles DeRudio.
No comments:
Post a Comment