7 ms·

The life, death, and afterlife of literary fiction

43 points by lermontov 3y ago

Finnucane 3y ago
Short fiction has never been a lucrative business. The 'slick' magazines that paid top-dollar for fiction were able to do so because people bought the magazines for the other content. The 'pulp' magazines typically paid very low rates for fiction.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  Supposedly, F. Scott Fitzgerald made good money with his short stories. But yeah, they were a prestige addition for the slicks.
- bamfly 3y ago
  For a time, you could make a living writing short stories for genre rags. A matter of a few decades, but still. Without needing to be a household name, even. They're still the only places that pay non-famous and non-trendy people any money for short fiction. Most literary fiction publications below the tippy-top don't pay a dime, and lit-fic fosters a culture of accepting that state of things, even shaming people for asking about pay. Can't make a living in genre short fiction and the odd hastily-written pulp novel anymore—hasn't been enough demand for decades—but getting a check feels good, at least, even if it's two figures, and you won't get that in lit-fic.
  - Finnucane 3y ago
    > For a time, you could make a living writing short stories for genre rags If you could write fast and didn't mind the occasional can of dog food.
    - bamfly 3y ago
      True—it usually wasn't an amazing living. But it was a not-totally-implausible direction to go, if perhaps not the best move. Isn't even that, now. IDK what the equivalent poorly-paid-but-is-a-career-in-fiction-writing move is now. Probably video game writing, though you won't be getting to come up with your own stories at the bottom rungs.
      - Finnucane 3y ago
        Supposedly Bob Silverberg at his peak, could do 10,000 words a day. He shared an office with another writer who was driven mad by the nonstop typing.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    This model is coming back in a few small ways. Established writers I like Brandon Sanderson have shown that you can crowdsource funding for full length novels. They're also a large number of less established authors that produce chapters and are funded by patreons are equivalent as they go, similar to the magazine model. Lasting probably at least there is a cool ecosystem of essentially book club podcasts. Some of the more successful have patreons of Their Own and kick back a percentage of donations to the original authors. I think it's very cool to see some more diversity in literature funding models
    - vkou 3y ago
      > Established writers I like Brandon Sanderson have shown that you can crowdsource funding for full length novels. ... If you're already an established household name.
      - s1artibartfast 3y ago
        That's exactly what I wrote. And it's cool
- rezendi 3y ago
  I'm reading _Divine Invasions: A Life Of Philip K. Dick_ and just got to the point where he sold his first short story. He was paid $75 for it, at a time when the mortgage on his (old, small, but still) two-story Berkeley house was $27.50. This was 1950.
  - Finnucane 3y ago
    See below about the dog food: a story from PKD's life.
- goodbyesf 3y ago
  > Short fiction has never been a lucrative business. A perfect example being Edgar Allan Poe. One of the greatest writers in history could barely support himself and his wife with his short stories and poems. Tragic.
- tasbir49 3y ago
  It's depressing because short fiction has the ability to evoke strong emotions in such few words. I remember finding Flowers for Algernon much more impactful as a short story, than I did as a novel. Perhaps it was because I read the short story first.
kmeisthax 3y ago
>For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance that results in brutal suffering and death on an unjust earth that will finally send Uncle Tom out of America to a less violent place known as Heaven. In Baldwin’s words, Stowe “was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong… This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel, and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still with the same constriction.” So, is the problem that the slaves don't fight back? Or that the author is injecting their pesky morality into "apolitical" literature? The latter is usually a veiled condemnation of something the reader doesn't like. The former is just arguing for a different moral framing[0]. I don't see morals in literature being a bad thing. The example used here, Uncle Tom's Cabin, did what a lot of books only dream they could do - grabbing their readers by the throat and dragging them to the conclusion. I've never worked with a sensitivity reader and I have no intention of working in traditional publishing[1]. I'm sure there are plenty of situations there where books have been neutered by people who misread them. However, that problem is not that readers want morally sanitized books or even that the acceptable morals have shifted. The problem is that the idiots running the business believe that to be the case. [0] Specifically, one of oppressed peoples fighting back and liberating themselves [1] Amazon sucked the life out of that business. In fact, I'm appalled that the Esquire writer wastes so many words on how technology is killing novels and doesn't even mention the kinds of shit Kindle and Audible do.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  > is the problem that the slaves don't fight back? no, the problem is, as Baldwin said, that it's a very bad novel. And he was black, if you weren't aware. You're completely wrong about what serious writers (like Baldwin) want: it isn't to "grab their readers by the throat and drag them to the conclusion." That's what a pamphlet or editorial does. If you can state it in one sentence, you don't need a whole novel.
  - s1artibartfast 3y ago
    The medium of a novel is different than the medium of a pamphlet or editorial. It will impact different people in different ways.
AlbertCory 3y ago
> He and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch just yesterday, there was an article asking when people stopped being drunk all the time. How did anyone get any work done like that?
- the_only_law 3y ago
  Ballmer peak I guess. Only half joking. There’s definitely been times where I’m at home, have a few beers and the disinhibition gets to me to work on something I probably wouldn’t bother with otherwise. Never during work though, it would be too obvious.
  - AlbertCory 3y ago
    did you mean "Boomer" ? Freudian slip?
    - the_only_law 3y ago
      At this risk of being downvoted to hell: https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/ It’s an old xkcd joke.
      - AlbertCory 3y ago
        good one. Hadn't heard that.
- dbtc 3y ago
  I don't know but I think maybe cannabis and other drugs are used more now while people work.
- 8b16380d 3y ago
  You dont drink much, do you xD
  - kayodelycaon 3y ago
causi 3y ago
For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance Why would you expect a work of literature by a Christian to not agree with Christian values? If I read a book by a Muslim author I'm not shocked if a female character expressing modesty is cast as a good thing.
- karaterobot 3y ago
  Agreed that I wouldn't be shocked if an author wrote approvingly of something they agreed with. On the other hand, I would not be shocked if they wrote characters who exhibited behaviors they personally disagreed with either.
- boplicity 3y ago
  > it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks What most people don't get about the idea of "turning your cheek" is that it's actually very pragmatic when living under a brutal dictatorship, or slavery. If you're going to resist and fight back, you have to do so with forethought and planning, and not direct confrontation. This was true back in the day under Caesar, as it was for slaves of the South, as it is today for black people under threat by police officers. Don't make sudden moves. Don't fight back at the wrong time. Or you're risking your life. Swallow your pride. Turn the other cheek. Wait for the right opportunity
- bccdee 3y ago
  By that logic, the only criticism we can ever make is an accusation of hypocrisy. "Sure, the book says some heinous things, but what did you expect? It's just a heinous author expressing their beliefs." Not to say that it's heinous to advocate turning the other cheek, but worthy of critique? Sure.
  - causi 3y ago
    He's saying it's a bad novel because of their inclusion, which is simply nonsensical. If heaven was real and Christianity was correct a complete refusal to do violence would be the right thing to do because your earthly existence would be a rounding error compared to an existence in heaven and any action that could jeopardize your salvation would be stupid. Uncle Tom might be a bad novel for various reasons but holding pacifism as a virtue isn't one of them.
motohagiography 3y ago
What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. It was an intimate experience. Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate. It's a homegenous voice. We used to laugh about the engineering students who would say without irony, "why would I want to read something someone just made up?" Now, engaging with books comes at the opportunity cost of missing internet points and time spent not promoting your brand, so I don't see it coming back among younger people. I spent a lot of years practicing to become a writer like many of the men I looked up to growing up, and when I look at writers today, there is no there there anymore. You're only ever as good as your last tweet, and part of the promise of literary culture was that the esteem of the people who were a part of it was valuable and enriching. For a while it was. It's not now. Books were a great thing to have in common and a way to find people who were really just interesting. They were a social glue. Now, authors remind me of those old soviet olympians propped up as representatives of their ideological system to be proof their system could produce peers to western athletes whose talent was the effect of freedom and desire. I think the literary novel had its moment. It was a couple of centuries, but I think it will become what victorian cameos and shadow drawings are to photos. Art assumes a level of mystery that I don't think can exist in a homogenized culture like we have online, as without an apprehension of something greater than the concrete and material, it's just another picture or inpspirational quote on a wrapper for something cheap.
- tticvs 3y ago
  Very well put, I will remember your words. Sometimes I go for a while without reading any books and I can feel the difference in myself. Yet, I spend almost all my waking life reading text. I think the difference is that this is all just information. There is profound loneliness in only reading information, I compare it to the flattening of human interaction to zoom calls in the pandemic. Practical, but qualitatively worse. The culture that produced the novel as its primary information artifact is gone forever, tragic that our cultures artifacts do reach its heights.
- coldtea 3y ago
  >I think the literary novel had its moment. Imagine a large table in a big hall. There are hundreds of people in the room. In the far left side of the table, there's a plate with fine pieces of sushi. Masterly prepared. Freshest of fish. Rice cooked to perfection. It took a long time for the chef to learn to make it, having studied with older cooks for decades as an apprentice. On the rest of the table, taking most of its over a hundred feet of length, there are microwaved Hot Pockets. They have been left out, and reheated a second time. Some have flies on them. Some drunk guy has puked all over many of the others. The sushi is left on the plate. Nobody touches it. Perhaps 3-4 persons savour a few pieces. The Hot Pockets, meanwhile, get eaten like there's no tomorrow. Hundreds of people wait in huge queues to stuff their plates with as many as they can. Some even fight for one. Now, few will even entertain the idea that they're missing anything by not going for the sushi. Many would even go philosophical, about taste being a personal matter, and how "they like what they like". But, when all is said and done, it's their loss.
SeenNotHeard 3y ago
One striking thing about pointing the finger at high tech for the death of literary fiction is that literary fiction has survived so many other technological advances. Why is this the one that topples it? While I'm sure Blythe would sneer at manga in Japan, that country has adopted high tech just as much as this country has, and yet reading paper-based stories remains as popular as ever. He would probably sniff that manga is not "literary"—and that's probably closer to the heart of the matter. Could it be that literary fiction today is not producing the stories Blythe claims it's producing—stories of memory, stories of "average" people working through the contradictions of life? Like NPR and PBS, so much literary fiction today is geared toward a rather narrow slice of American culture, a culture that implicitly agrees on a particular set of politics and cultural mores as beyond debate. If you don't agree with those mores, contemporary literary fiction reads like entering a slightly "off" world. I'm not sure Updike's short stories in the 1950s really were for "everyone" in America, but I am certain that the stories being published today in Best American Short Stories are not.

43 points by lermontov 3y ago

Short fiction has never been a lucrative business. The 'slick' magazines that paid top-dollar for fiction were able to do so because people bought the magazines for the other content. The 'pulp' magazines typically paid very low rates for fiction.

AlbertCory 3y ago
Supposedly, F. Scott Fitzgerald made good money with his short stories. But yeah, they were a prestige addition for the slicks.
bamfly 3y ago
For a time, you could make a living writing short stories for genre rags. A matter of a few decades, but still. Without needing to be a household name, even. They're still the only places that pay non-famous and non-trendy people any money for short fiction. Most literary fiction publications below the tippy-top don't pay a dime, and lit-fic fosters a culture of accepting that state of things, even shaming people for asking about pay. Can't make a living in genre short fiction and the odd hastily-written pulp novel anymore—hasn't been enough demand for decades—but getting a check feels good, at least, even if it's two figures, and you won't get that in lit-fic.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  > For a time, you could make a living writing short stories for genre rags If you could write fast and didn't mind the occasional can of dog food.
  - bamfly 3y ago
    True—it usually wasn't an amazing living. But it was a not-totally-implausible direction to go, if perhaps not the best move. Isn't even that, now. IDK what the equivalent poorly-paid-but-is-a-career-in-fiction-writing move is now. Probably video game writing, though you won't be getting to come up with your own stories at the bottom rungs.
    - Finnucane 3y ago
      Supposedly Bob Silverberg at his peak, could do 10,000 words a day. He shared an office with another writer who was driven mad by the nonstop typing.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  This model is coming back in a few small ways. Established writers I like Brandon Sanderson have shown that you can crowdsource funding for full length novels. They're also a large number of less established authors that produce chapters and are funded by patreons are equivalent as they go, similar to the magazine model. Lasting probably at least there is a cool ecosystem of essentially book club podcasts. Some of the more successful have patreons of Their Own and kick back a percentage of donations to the original authors. I think it's very cool to see some more diversity in literature funding models
  - vkou 3y ago
    > Established writers I like Brandon Sanderson have shown that you can crowdsource funding for full length novels. ... If you're already an established household name.
    - s1artibartfast 3y ago
      That's exactly what I wrote. And it's cool
rezendi 3y ago
I'm reading _Divine Invasions: A Life Of Philip K. Dick_ and just got to the point where he sold his first short story. He was paid $75 for it, at a time when the mortgage on his (old, small, but still) two-story Berkeley house was $27.50. This was 1950.
- Finnucane 3y ago
  See below about the dog food: a story from PKD's life.
goodbyesf 3y ago
> Short fiction has never been a lucrative business. A perfect example being Edgar Allan Poe. One of the greatest writers in history could barely support himself and his wife with his short stories and poems. Tragic.
tasbir49 3y ago
It's depressing because short fiction has the ability to evoke strong emotions in such few words. I remember finding Flowers for Algernon much more impactful as a short story, than I did as a novel. Perhaps it was because I read the short story first.

kmeisthax 3y ago

>For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance that results in brutal suffering and death on an unjust earth that will finally send Uncle Tom out of America to a less violent place known as Heaven. In Baldwin’s words, Stowe “was not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer; her book was not intended to do anything more than prove that slavery was wrong… This makes material for a pamphlet but it is hardly enough for a novel, and the only question left to ask is why we are bound still with the same constriction.” So, is the problem that the slaves don't fight back? Or that the author is injecting their pesky morality into "apolitical" literature? The latter is usually a veiled condemnation of something the reader doesn't like. The former is just arguing for a different moral framing[0]. I don't see morals in literature being a bad thing. The example used here, Uncle Tom's Cabin, did what a lot of books only dream they could do - grabbing their readers by the throat and dragging them to the conclusion. I've never worked with a sensitivity reader and I have no intention of working in traditional publishing[1]. I'm sure there are plenty of situations there where books have been neutered by people who misread them. However, that problem is not that readers want morally sanitized books or even that the acceptable morals have shifted. The problem is that the idiots running the business believe that to be the case. [0] Specifically, one of oppressed peoples fighting back and liberating themselves [1] Amazon sucked the life out of that business. In fact, I'm appalled that the Esquire writer wastes so many words on how technology is killing novels and doesn't even mention the kinds of shit Kindle and Audible do.

AlbertCory 3y ago
> is the problem that the slaves don't fight back? no, the problem is, as Baldwin said, that it's a very bad novel. And he was black, if you weren't aware. You're completely wrong about what serious writers (like Baldwin) want: it isn't to "grab their readers by the throat and drag them to the conclusion." That's what a pamphlet or editorial does. If you can state it in one sentence, you don't need a whole novel.
- s1artibartfast 3y ago
  The medium of a novel is different than the medium of a pamphlet or editorial. It will impact different people in different ways.

AlbertCory 3y ago

> He and I would occasionally drink two or three Negronis at lunch just yesterday, there was an article asking when people stopped being drunk all the time. How did anyone get any work done like that?

the_only_law 3y ago
Ballmer peak I guess. Only half joking. There’s definitely been times where I’m at home, have a few beers and the disinhibition gets to me to work on something I probably wouldn’t bother with otherwise. Never during work though, it would be too obvious.
- AlbertCory 3y ago
  did you mean "Boomer" ? Freudian slip?
  - the_only_law 3y ago
    At this risk of being downvoted to hell: https://xkcd.com/323/ https://xkcd.com/323/ It’s an old xkcd joke.
    - AlbertCory 3y ago
      good one. Hadn't heard that.
dbtc 3y ago
I don't know but I think maybe cannabis and other drugs are used more now while people work.
8b16380d 3y ago
You dont drink much, do you xD
- kayodelycaon 3y ago

causi 3y ago

For one thing, it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks, as it were, to be slapped again—or killed—rather than fighting back, a notion of Christian virtue and acceptance Why would you expect a work of literature by a Christian to not agree with Christian values? If I read a book by a Muslim author I'm not shocked if a female character expressing modesty is cast as a good thing.

karaterobot 3y ago
Agreed that I wouldn't be shocked if an author wrote approvingly of something they agreed with. On the other hand, I would not be shocked if they wrote characters who exhibited behaviors they personally disagreed with either.
boplicity 3y ago
> it praises the enslaved for turning their cheeks What most people don't get about the idea of "turning your cheek" is that it's actually very pragmatic when living under a brutal dictatorship, or slavery. If you're going to resist and fight back, you have to do so with forethought and planning, and not direct confrontation. This was true back in the day under Caesar, as it was for slaves of the South, as it is today for black people under threat by police officers. Don't make sudden moves. Don't fight back at the wrong time. Or you're risking your life. Swallow your pride. Turn the other cheek. Wait for the right opportunity
bccdee 3y ago
By that logic, the only criticism we can ever make is an accusation of hypocrisy. "Sure, the book says some heinous things, but what did you expect? It's just a heinous author expressing their beliefs." Not to say that it's heinous to advocate turning the other cheek, but worthy of critique? Sure.
- causi 3y ago
  He's saying it's a bad novel because of their inclusion, which is simply nonsensical. If heaven was real and Christianity was correct a complete refusal to do violence would be the right thing to do because your earthly existence would be a rounding error compared to an existence in heaven and any action that could jeopardize your salvation would be stupid. Uncle Tom might be a bad novel for various reasons but holding pacifism as a virtue isn't one of them.

motohagiography 3y ago

What made the fiction literary was it spoke the language of memory, where the reader inhabited the experience of the characters, and this changed how readers experienced the world after. It was an intimate experience. Writing on the internet is participatory, impersonal, performative, and anti-intimate. It's a homegenous voice. We used to laugh about the engineering students who would say without irony, "why would I want to read something someone just made up?" Now, engaging with books comes at the opportunity cost of missing internet points and time spent not promoting your brand, so I don't see it coming back among younger people. I spent a lot of years practicing to become a writer like many of the men I looked up to growing up, and when I look at writers today, there is no there there anymore. You're only ever as good as your last tweet, and part of the promise of literary culture was that the esteem of the people who were a part of it was valuable and enriching. For a while it was. It's not now. Books were a great thing to have in common and a way to find people who were really just interesting. They were a social glue. Now, authors remind me of those old soviet olympians propped up as representatives of their ideological system to be proof their system could produce peers to western athletes whose talent was the effect of freedom and desire. I think the literary novel had its moment. It was a couple of centuries, but I think it will become what victorian cameos and shadow drawings are to photos. Art assumes a level of mystery that I don't think can exist in a homogenized culture like we have online, as without an apprehension of something greater than the concrete and material, it's just another picture or inpspirational quote on a wrapper for something cheap.

tticvs 3y ago
Very well put, I will remember your words. Sometimes I go for a while without reading any books and I can feel the difference in myself. Yet, I spend almost all my waking life reading text. I think the difference is that this is all just information. There is profound loneliness in only reading information, I compare it to the flattening of human interaction to zoom calls in the pandemic. Practical, but qualitatively worse. The culture that produced the novel as its primary information artifact is gone forever, tragic that our cultures artifacts do reach its heights.
coldtea 3y ago
>I think the literary novel had its moment. Imagine a large table in a big hall. There are hundreds of people in the room. In the far left side of the table, there's a plate with fine pieces of sushi. Masterly prepared. Freshest of fish. Rice cooked to perfection. It took a long time for the chef to learn to make it, having studied with older cooks for decades as an apprentice. On the rest of the table, taking most of its over a hundred feet of length, there are microwaved Hot Pockets. They have been left out, and reheated a second time. Some have flies on them. Some drunk guy has puked all over many of the others. The sushi is left on the plate. Nobody touches it. Perhaps 3-4 persons savour a few pieces. The Hot Pockets, meanwhile, get eaten like there's no tomorrow. Hundreds of people wait in huge queues to stuff their plates with as many as they can. Some even fight for one. Now, few will even entertain the idea that they're missing anything by not going for the sushi. Many would even go philosophical, about taste being a personal matter, and how "they like what they like". But, when all is said and done, it's their loss.

SeenNotHeard 3y ago

One striking thing about pointing the finger at high tech for the death of literary fiction is that literary fiction has survived so many other technological advances. Why is this the one that topples it? While I'm sure Blythe would sneer at manga in Japan, that country has adopted high tech just as much as this country has, and yet reading paper-based stories remains as popular as ever. He would probably sniff that manga is not "literary"—and that's probably closer to the heart of the matter. Could it be that literary fiction today is not producing the stories Blythe claims it's producing—stories of memory, stories of "average" people working through the contradictions of life? Like NPR and PBS, so much literary fiction today is geared toward a rather narrow slice of American culture, a culture that implicitly agrees on a particular set of politics and cultural mores as beyond debate. If you don't agree with those mores, contemporary literary fiction reads like entering a slightly "off" world. I'm not sure Updike's short stories in the 1950s really were for "everyone" in America, but I am certain that the stories being published today in Best American Short Stories are not.