If I can nitpick: Melville did indeed publish after Moby-Dick, including, rather ironically, a two-volume epic poem, Clarel, which has largely been forgotten; Pierre, an ambitious and awful novel that is (or at least feels) at least as long as Moby-Dick; and three recognized short masterpieces, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, and the unpublished Billy Budd. I think that Melville wrote almost compulsively. It's like he couldn't stop the words from coming out, and he certainly couldn't (or wouldn't) make them behave according to the dictates of the market.
Broadly, I agree with all of the points you raise here, though. The question, as you write in your conclusion, is the degree to which obeying the dictates of the market turns fiction writing into just another day job, a nifty but ultimately unfree form of drudgery. Certainly there are better-paying day jobs, and easier ones, too, and for some, perhaps it's better to imitate Emily Dickinson while working at the FedEx store or whatever.
(Also, how did you figure out the rules you listed? Do you just read a shit-ton of contemporary fiction while paying close attention to things like point of view? Do agents or editors really say stuff like "free indirect discourse is out this year"?)
Aghhh! Thank you, I knew I should've googled Melville before writing this post!
Mostly I learn them from running afoul of them ;) An early draft of the default world was in omniscient. It only got agented after rewriting it in a closer point of view. Agents allude very delicately to these things "wanted more immediacy". But mostly it's a vibes thing. This is the main thing an mfa gives you, a sense of what the vibes are for lit fic. For other genres, I do dip into what is popular, keep an ear out. Sometimes not reading books is helpful bc then you just go by what people say ABOUT the book. So you know what aspect of it has stuck in the public imagination. It is quite difficult though to figure these things out from the outside. You have to develop an instinct for how agents and editors think. In general it's good to assume that whatever is worst about a book is precisely why the industry liked it. So if it has a strange writing tic or is oddly structured or false in some way, that is probably the thing agents and editors and critics appreciated most about it. This flies in the face of reason, of course, since generally you would expect it to have sold in spite of those things.
Reading contemporary fiction is so dreary. If you needed to read it to sell a book, the cost would be too high! But one does need to be aware of it.
Re: experimental fiction, Proust, etc.: there are at least two mediating and overlapping institutions between that kind of writer and the market, which are academe and the metropolitan coteries of other experimental writers. If you want to be Proust, you don't write for the market-market, you write for the coteries and the professors (what Bourdieu in his sociology of literature calls the restricted market of producers who write for producers rather than the open market of producers who write for consumers) and then hope they can carry you over into the market-market before you die, the way Joyce and Stein were unpublished or self-published in their early careers and on the cover on Time by the end, the best-case scenario.
(I don't say this self-servingly, since my own fiction isn't experimental enough on its surface for these coteries, who respect me, insofar as they do, for my criticism, and tolerate my fiction-writing as some kind of foible.)
The internet complicates all this enormously, too, since, for example, you and I probably wouldn't be reading each other without it!
Yes but these too are markets, with their own tastes. That is why inevitably the prousts and steins are also quite socially connected well-connected. Without that, the coterie never hears of their work in the first place. But there are many many many people who do not realize this and write such fictions without possessing social connections. How many Prousts wrote their books but did not have the fortunes to have them printed at their own expense? How many of those books came out and were never read?
I get frustrated with some of the writing coaches on this platform who insist that it's somehow selling out to even consider the commercial angle, as if it's the sacred duty of the legitimate writer to turn up their nose at the marketplace. This essay is a sorely-needed corrective that hopefully reaches a bunch of those writers/readers!
Yeah I think it really leads ppl astray. Whenever I meet a writer I ask what they're working on and it's such a relief when it's not, like, a crime thriller set in ancient sumeria
Of course I disagree with you profoundly on this, Naomi, but instead of having that argument I find myself curious whether you're collecting the manuscripts of these unpublished great works that you've read.
Because one way that atypical, non-book-shaped books do occasionally get rescued from oblivion is that they're discovered and then promoted by a perceptive and influential editor or agent or publisher. It's not inconceivable that you could acquire such influence over time and then be in a position to begin publishing these books and giving them the marketing they deserve.
Not that this would overturn the dynamic you identify, if such a dynamic truly exists, but at least it would serve to remedy it in the case of a few authors and their books.
My best friend wrote a book at 25 so good that you ought to know her name. She ought to be the one torn apart by Andrea Long Chu instead of Moshfegh. Her book was so capacious, ambitious, and humane that it is scarcely believable. After it got rejected by editors I paid $2000 for her to get a consultation w Ira Silverberg, a legendary editor, in the hopes that he would be inspired and would do something. He got too busy and backed out and refunded my money, even after I told him that story.
Another friend's book when he got no agent I tried pretending to be his agent and pitching editors directly, but got no bites. A third person I have begged repeatedly for ten years to send her book to small presses, but she has accepted the industry's verdict that it was no good. I would give up one of my book deals to have any of these books published. If I ever have any influence to expend, you will read them. I fantasize about being Salman Rushdie famous and selling a book contingent on theirs being published. That is how strongly I believe that these are superior writers to almost all that you see and read about today
It is sad that there aren't more big deal writers who deploy their influence in this way. I don't have any manuscripts that I've seen that I feel that strongly about, but certainly writers who I know who are much better than the average book author who have been defeated or not yet embraced by the market.
I mean, sure, some of them, but aren't others, particularly those who didn't succeed young, carrying a big chip on their shoulder about the system that denied them their propers for so long. I mean, that's the resentment I'd be bringing to the table.
Totes! And lots of writers do put big money into helping other writers. Look at the Elizabeth George foundation and it's immense grants. Or the Michener center. Or Jonathan Franzen and the several writers he has resurrected, most notably Nell Zink.
One problem is probably that once you're in that influential position, you're really only going to be able to help promote the few people who came to your attention in the past. You won't have the time any more to encounter the new ones popping up. Like Franzen can't be reviewing unpublished manuscripts after a certain point.
Yes this!! I trust Naomi’s judgment and would love to see a curated selection by her. Reading this post, I was wishing I could read some of these lost masterpieces.
1. A lot of people on Reddit often want American novels that mimic anime (thematically) but these books dont exist. But people wont stop asking for books that are like Studio Ghibli films.
2. Marlon James said his book was rejected so many times because he refused to write to white women (who are the majority of readers and control the publishing houses). Apparently this was very controversial to say.
3. The types of books popular with the market haven't been very good. I haven't liked a single book that was widely praised online - particularly if white readers liked it a lot. I simply don't read new or recently published books.
4. There is a divisive romance fantasy out right now that is YA and only blew up because of tiktok. It's not good but white people hate being told they have bad taste (they very much do) but anyone who dislikes the book is harassed.
5. People want books that dont exist all the time. Dark romance is often about teens and young adults. There arent any dark romance books happening between 40 year olds but people want that. I see lots of people asking for "Japanese fantasy" and people just recommend manga or light novels. People want fantasy outside of England, and it exists, but perhaps not as widely.
5. My general opinion about writing is that a lot of it is bad but people make up excuses on why we should read it. And which books succeed is often very random. But I would say that people shouldn't expect to make a living from their work because so few authors do. So if you write, it shouldn't be to make money because everyone is reading the same books and it could take a lot for your book to break through that noise.
Do you feel that platforms like substack reduce the amount of unnoticed genius?
Tiktok seems to be a pretty efficient machine for identifying the good-looking or talented short-form video makers and rising them to the top quickly. Not sure if Twitter is necessarily the same but they seem to identify new talent (if shit-posting on twitter could be considered that). Books are just costly to evaluate so the capitalization is going to be worse.
This is a side point but I think of it sometimes: as you mention with Proust, many of the great books of the past were basically self-published. (I would count Virginia Woolf publishing her own books through Hogarth as self-publishing, but I dunno if that's controversial or just banally true.) And then my impression is that while it's still actually pretty normal to "self-publish" in other artistic spheres—like music—self-publishing writing now is mostly for the most commercial, market-driven kinds of work, like hyperspecific romance genres.
Anyway, I guess I have an intuition that the sort of atmosphere we might assume produces bad work (a cliquey situation in which work does not go through professional "gatekeeping" and evaluation and instead circulates among friends) actually does the opposite. This is almost certainly true in genre fiction, too, where through the seventies, for instance, the boundary between "fan" and "professional" in sci fi was pretty porous. This is very half-assed however and only orthogonally related to your bigger point.
A passage in DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, describes a middle-aged man sitting alone in the dark before an open window chain smoking cigarettes, narrating in his head the novel he will never write. As a young person, I was touched by this image, if only because of the hint of what middle-age might really be like.
I think I disagree. The main ideas here seem self-evident, yet it's too easy to think of counter-examples.
As was mentioned earlier, your example of Melville doesn't really fit. It might just be that Moby Dick was the only truly great novel he had in him (and, like, if any of us could be so lucky). I also have to think that working another job outside of writing is valuable and something more writers should consider. Writing doesn't come from nothing, and it can't only come from the things we read. Maybe Melville's time spent at another job bubbled up into his work. Tolkien was a professor of mythology, that's what he spent more of his time on, and it led to his works. Speaking of Tolkien, he and CS Lewis wrote their novels explicitly to write against the market -- they didn't like the fantastical literature being produced, and decided to do it their own way. Personally I find Lewis a bit overrated (Narnia is interesting if you're an evangelical Christian, while the space trilogy has some interesting stuff but is ultimately a mixed bag with a terribly dull 3rd/final book).
But what about more recent authors? Is Jeff Vandermeer writing to the market? Was Cormac McCarthy or Ursula Le Guin? What about Marlon James -- Black Leopard Red Wolf is pitched as "African Game of Thrones," but within two pages you know that's all marketing, the book itself is far weirder and more interesting than that. There are so many examples, and that's before you get into the weird stuff you can find from indie presses in small bookstores.
The basic premise (writing to the market will always give you higher chance of commercial success than writing against it) is plainly true, but it doesn't follow that writing against is impossible or, for that matter, that commercial success is going to safeguard your creativity. There's just too many examples the other way.
The Melville example is apt because with Moby-Dick he was finished as a writer of popular adventure romances; Moby-Dick was no Typee and reviewers and readers would not forgive him for that. As Melville wrote to Hawthorne, “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century I should die in the gutter.”
Tolkien probably did as much as anyone to shape the market for his future works with his Beowulf essay, so maybe writing critically is one way to find or germinate a market. Maybe.
That's interesting! I guess I'd have three follow up questions about Melville. 1) Should he have not written Moby Dick, then, if it ruined his professional reputation? I doubt many would say "yes," but in the end it's a matter of opinion and preference. 2) Did Melville want to keep writing popular adventure romances? In other words, why was he finished -- was it because no one would read his romances or because he had moved on? I'm genuinely asking as my Melville knowledge is not that deep! And 3) how would this play out today? I have to imagine that today's audiences/industry would be forgiving of a popular author taking a weird and experimental detour then returning. The market for their earlier stuff is still there.
That's a great point about Tolkien though! It offers me some encouragement to find time to work on my own literary criticism, not just my against-market fiction in progress...
The bigger point is that Moby Dick would never have been published if he hadn't already been a writer of popular adventure romances and if Moby Dick had not superficially resembled that type of book.
That's an interesting idea -- it's plausible (and certainly being a known entity helps) but "helped" doesn't mean "made possible." Even if he hadn't been writing adventure stories, other people were, so even submitted by a no-name author, it's possible that the editor would have recognized how Moby Dick took a familiar form and elevated it.
The flip side is, if you write fully to the market, your stuff may become indistinguishable from everything else being submitted, and that doesn't exactly help your chances of being published! Many unique and interesting things don't get published, but then a lot of garbage also doesn't get published. Just as a baseline, a lot of stuff written won't get published!
I guess I have to think about this as it relates to my own work. I'm currently writing a novel for which I really believe I can write a good pitch. The premise is easily understandable, unique but with enough familiarity to have a hook. I can write that proposal! I'm also writing it in the style I like to read (because why else would I spend so much of time on this?), which is not exactly in vogue right now. I'm pretty sure that if I pivoted to (for example) a multi-POV, first-person-present-tense, action-oriented style, I could improve my chances of being published. But how much? Are we talking an increase of 1% to 20%? 5% to 50%? I doubt it. My guess is something more like 0.5% to 1% chance, with is a substantial increase, but still so low overall that it's not worth it to me.
Of course, I'm totally making up numbers there. It would be interesting to see if anyone has reliably studied that.
Melville turned to poetry. I don’t know if that was out of some dissatisfaction with the novel form, or just frustration at being unable to support himself and his family through novel writing. Certainly poetry is all over Moby-Dick; there are many passages, if lineated, which would pass as poetry. But probably his biggest problem was that he got ahead of his market; as someone once said, Moby-Dick was written for the future.
Like Tolkien, some writers can anticipate and midwife their future work. For example, Truffaut wrote hundreds of essays on film in the early 50s, heralding the French New Wave, such that when he turned to writing/directing his own films, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, and many viewers were there waiting for him when he did.
But perhaps many more writers are not very articulate about their art. Would you want to read Faulkner on how to write a novel? Yeah, me neither. With these writers, at least part of their success is that they made a discovery early on that set them apart. For example, with Faulkner, it might be the “feelin’ of doom hangin’ over me,” as he put it in an interview, which was connected to the past that fed his literary imagination.
Or Chandler: “All I wanted when I began was to play with a fascinating new language.” He was 45 when he started writing, but he had made this one discovery, and he followed it to see where it might lead.
Some great points. However, I think the claim that the average published writer is not substantially superior to the average unpublished writer is a much more defensible claim than saying the writers that are generally considered exceptional are not.
But the average published author is quite a bit better than the average unpublished one. Slush piles are awful! Clearly improving as a writer helps ones chances to a point. But beyond that point it does not. The natural corrolary is that many exceptional writers do not get published, and some of these must be superior even to the best of those who did. And look at history: if proust hadn't been able to afford to get his novel printed, it wouldn't exist. Isn't it rather easy to think that the majority of the world's prousts have not been millionaires?
Yes, that was clumsily worded on my part. The average unpublished writer is unpublished for good reasons. I take your point that sometimes someone with great potential gets unlucky, gets discouraged and never becomes the great author they could have been. But the barriers to entry are a lot lower now than in Proust's time. Are there really scores of undiscovered Austen- or Tolstoy-level talents self-publishing on Amazon?
I was just thinking about how few writers’ names are known. A few dozen authors dominate just about any genre you could name. And so much modern fiction is *so dreary*, as you say (although a few months ago I stumbled across a good novel called “One’s Company” that I am *still* thinking about.)
I think for lit fiction the solution is almost always a small press and hoping for an awards nomination or cult novel status. That's why self pub is so marginal. There is really no small press economy for most commercial genres tho, with the exception of sci-fi and fantasy.
It's interesting bc commenter either come from lit fiction or commercial fiction backgrounds, and the same tendencies operate in both fields but in different ways. In lit fiction nothing is ever 100 percent out, but you need to convince ppl you are a world historical genius, or might be, and in practice the only way to do that is with social proof--fellowships, pre pub blurbs, fancy agents, etc. So the sales pitch relies on fashion and manufactured taste, but in a very subtle way that is hard to game.
In commercial fiction if something is out then it's out, Shakespeare himself couldn't sell, say, a proustian novel about a galactic federation. But if something is in, then it's salable even if you're nobody and (sometimes) even if you have a nobody agent
It would be really difficult. Very hard to write a lush, ornate, reflective book about things that aren't real, because if you describe, as proust does, going to a party where everyone is wearing white masks an s then eventually realizing those are just their aged faces, it won't be read as a metaphor but as some Sci fi thing! Of course you could just lean into those assumptions and create a fantastically surreal world!
If I can nitpick: Melville did indeed publish after Moby-Dick, including, rather ironically, a two-volume epic poem, Clarel, which has largely been forgotten; Pierre, an ambitious and awful novel that is (or at least feels) at least as long as Moby-Dick; and three recognized short masterpieces, Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cereno, and the unpublished Billy Budd. I think that Melville wrote almost compulsively. It's like he couldn't stop the words from coming out, and he certainly couldn't (or wouldn't) make them behave according to the dictates of the market.
Broadly, I agree with all of the points you raise here, though. The question, as you write in your conclusion, is the degree to which obeying the dictates of the market turns fiction writing into just another day job, a nifty but ultimately unfree form of drudgery. Certainly there are better-paying day jobs, and easier ones, too, and for some, perhaps it's better to imitate Emily Dickinson while working at the FedEx store or whatever.
(Also, how did you figure out the rules you listed? Do you just read a shit-ton of contemporary fiction while paying close attention to things like point of view? Do agents or editors really say stuff like "free indirect discourse is out this year"?)
Aghhh! Thank you, I knew I should've googled Melville before writing this post!
Mostly I learn them from running afoul of them ;) An early draft of the default world was in omniscient. It only got agented after rewriting it in a closer point of view. Agents allude very delicately to these things "wanted more immediacy". But mostly it's a vibes thing. This is the main thing an mfa gives you, a sense of what the vibes are for lit fic. For other genres, I do dip into what is popular, keep an ear out. Sometimes not reading books is helpful bc then you just go by what people say ABOUT the book. So you know what aspect of it has stuck in the public imagination. It is quite difficult though to figure these things out from the outside. You have to develop an instinct for how agents and editors think. In general it's good to assume that whatever is worst about a book is precisely why the industry liked it. So if it has a strange writing tic or is oddly structured or false in some way, that is probably the thing agents and editors and critics appreciated most about it. This flies in the face of reason, of course, since generally you would expect it to have sold in spite of those things.
Reading contemporary fiction is so dreary. If you needed to read it to sell a book, the cost would be too high! But one does need to be aware of it.
" In general it's good to assume that whatever is worst about a book is precisely why the industry liked it"
Oh désespoir
Re: experimental fiction, Proust, etc.: there are at least two mediating and overlapping institutions between that kind of writer and the market, which are academe and the metropolitan coteries of other experimental writers. If you want to be Proust, you don't write for the market-market, you write for the coteries and the professors (what Bourdieu in his sociology of literature calls the restricted market of producers who write for producers rather than the open market of producers who write for consumers) and then hope they can carry you over into the market-market before you die, the way Joyce and Stein were unpublished or self-published in their early careers and on the cover on Time by the end, the best-case scenario.
(I don't say this self-servingly, since my own fiction isn't experimental enough on its surface for these coteries, who respect me, insofar as they do, for my criticism, and tolerate my fiction-writing as some kind of foible.)
The internet complicates all this enormously, too, since, for example, you and I probably wouldn't be reading each other without it!
Yes but these too are markets, with their own tastes. That is why inevitably the prousts and steins are also quite socially connected well-connected. Without that, the coterie never hears of their work in the first place. But there are many many many people who do not realize this and write such fictions without possessing social connections. How many Prousts wrote their books but did not have the fortunes to have them printed at their own expense? How many of those books came out and were never read?
Right—I forgot to mention being well-connected and having money!
I get frustrated with some of the writing coaches on this platform who insist that it's somehow selling out to even consider the commercial angle, as if it's the sacred duty of the legitimate writer to turn up their nose at the marketplace. This essay is a sorely-needed corrective that hopefully reaches a bunch of those writers/readers!
Yeah I think it really leads ppl astray. Whenever I meet a writer I ask what they're working on and it's such a relief when it's not, like, a crime thriller set in ancient sumeria
Of course I disagree with you profoundly on this, Naomi, but instead of having that argument I find myself curious whether you're collecting the manuscripts of these unpublished great works that you've read.
Because one way that atypical, non-book-shaped books do occasionally get rescued from oblivion is that they're discovered and then promoted by a perceptive and influential editor or agent or publisher. It's not inconceivable that you could acquire such influence over time and then be in a position to begin publishing these books and giving them the marketing they deserve.
Not that this would overturn the dynamic you identify, if such a dynamic truly exists, but at least it would serve to remedy it in the case of a few authors and their books.
My best friend wrote a book at 25 so good that you ought to know her name. She ought to be the one torn apart by Andrea Long Chu instead of Moshfegh. Her book was so capacious, ambitious, and humane that it is scarcely believable. After it got rejected by editors I paid $2000 for her to get a consultation w Ira Silverberg, a legendary editor, in the hopes that he would be inspired and would do something. He got too busy and backed out and refunded my money, even after I told him that story.
Another friend's book when he got no agent I tried pretending to be his agent and pitching editors directly, but got no bites. A third person I have begged repeatedly for ten years to send her book to small presses, but she has accepted the industry's verdict that it was no good. I would give up one of my book deals to have any of these books published. If I ever have any influence to expend, you will read them. I fantasize about being Salman Rushdie famous and selling a book contingent on theirs being published. That is how strongly I believe that these are superior writers to almost all that you see and read about today
It is sad that there aren't more big deal writers who deploy their influence in this way. I don't have any manuscripts that I've seen that I feel that strongly about, but certainly writers who I know who are much better than the average book author who have been defeated or not yet embraced by the market.
Big deal authors have a vested psychological interest in affirming the taste of the system that selected them as being special
So cynical!
I mean, sure, some of them, but aren't others, particularly those who didn't succeed young, carrying a big chip on their shoulder about the system that denied them their propers for so long. I mean, that's the resentment I'd be bringing to the table.
Totes! And lots of writers do put big money into helping other writers. Look at the Elizabeth George foundation and it's immense grants. Or the Michener center. Or Jonathan Franzen and the several writers he has resurrected, most notably Nell Zink.
One problem is probably that once you're in that influential position, you're really only going to be able to help promote the few people who came to your attention in the past. You won't have the time any more to encounter the new ones popping up. Like Franzen can't be reviewing unpublished manuscripts after a certain point.
Yes this!! I trust Naomi’s judgment and would love to see a curated selection by her. Reading this post, I was wishing I could read some of these lost masterpieces.
This makes me think of several things:
1. A lot of people on Reddit often want American novels that mimic anime (thematically) but these books dont exist. But people wont stop asking for books that are like Studio Ghibli films.
2. Marlon James said his book was rejected so many times because he refused to write to white women (who are the majority of readers and control the publishing houses). Apparently this was very controversial to say.
3. The types of books popular with the market haven't been very good. I haven't liked a single book that was widely praised online - particularly if white readers liked it a lot. I simply don't read new or recently published books.
4. There is a divisive romance fantasy out right now that is YA and only blew up because of tiktok. It's not good but white people hate being told they have bad taste (they very much do) but anyone who dislikes the book is harassed.
5. People want books that dont exist all the time. Dark romance is often about teens and young adults. There arent any dark romance books happening between 40 year olds but people want that. I see lots of people asking for "Japanese fantasy" and people just recommend manga or light novels. People want fantasy outside of England, and it exists, but perhaps not as widely.
5. My general opinion about writing is that a lot of it is bad but people make up excuses on why we should read it. And which books succeed is often very random. But I would say that people shouldn't expect to make a living from their work because so few authors do. So if you write, it shouldn't be to make money because everyone is reading the same books and it could take a lot for your book to break through that noise.
Do you feel that platforms like substack reduce the amount of unnoticed genius?
Tiktok seems to be a pretty efficient machine for identifying the good-looking or talented short-form video makers and rising them to the top quickly. Not sure if Twitter is necessarily the same but they seem to identify new talent (if shit-posting on twitter could be considered that). Books are just costly to evaluate so the capitalization is going to be worse.
This is a side point but I think of it sometimes: as you mention with Proust, many of the great books of the past were basically self-published. (I would count Virginia Woolf publishing her own books through Hogarth as self-publishing, but I dunno if that's controversial or just banally true.) And then my impression is that while it's still actually pretty normal to "self-publish" in other artistic spheres—like music—self-publishing writing now is mostly for the most commercial, market-driven kinds of work, like hyperspecific romance genres.
Anyway, I guess I have an intuition that the sort of atmosphere we might assume produces bad work (a cliquey situation in which work does not go through professional "gatekeeping" and evaluation and instead circulates among friends) actually does the opposite. This is almost certainly true in genre fiction, too, where through the seventies, for instance, the boundary between "fan" and "professional" in sci fi was pretty porous. This is very half-assed however and only orthogonally related to your bigger point.
A passage in DeLillo’s first novel, Americana, describes a middle-aged man sitting alone in the dark before an open window chain smoking cigarettes, narrating in his head the novel he will never write. As a young person, I was touched by this image, if only because of the hint of what middle-age might really be like.
I think I disagree. The main ideas here seem self-evident, yet it's too easy to think of counter-examples.
As was mentioned earlier, your example of Melville doesn't really fit. It might just be that Moby Dick was the only truly great novel he had in him (and, like, if any of us could be so lucky). I also have to think that working another job outside of writing is valuable and something more writers should consider. Writing doesn't come from nothing, and it can't only come from the things we read. Maybe Melville's time spent at another job bubbled up into his work. Tolkien was a professor of mythology, that's what he spent more of his time on, and it led to his works. Speaking of Tolkien, he and CS Lewis wrote their novels explicitly to write against the market -- they didn't like the fantastical literature being produced, and decided to do it their own way. Personally I find Lewis a bit overrated (Narnia is interesting if you're an evangelical Christian, while the space trilogy has some interesting stuff but is ultimately a mixed bag with a terribly dull 3rd/final book).
But what about more recent authors? Is Jeff Vandermeer writing to the market? Was Cormac McCarthy or Ursula Le Guin? What about Marlon James -- Black Leopard Red Wolf is pitched as "African Game of Thrones," but within two pages you know that's all marketing, the book itself is far weirder and more interesting than that. There are so many examples, and that's before you get into the weird stuff you can find from indie presses in small bookstores.
The basic premise (writing to the market will always give you higher chance of commercial success than writing against it) is plainly true, but it doesn't follow that writing against is impossible or, for that matter, that commercial success is going to safeguard your creativity. There's just too many examples the other way.
The Melville example is apt because with Moby-Dick he was finished as a writer of popular adventure romances; Moby-Dick was no Typee and reviewers and readers would not forgive him for that. As Melville wrote to Hawthorne, “Though I wrote the Gospels in this century I should die in the gutter.”
Tolkien probably did as much as anyone to shape the market for his future works with his Beowulf essay, so maybe writing critically is one way to find or germinate a market. Maybe.
That's interesting! I guess I'd have three follow up questions about Melville. 1) Should he have not written Moby Dick, then, if it ruined his professional reputation? I doubt many would say "yes," but in the end it's a matter of opinion and preference. 2) Did Melville want to keep writing popular adventure romances? In other words, why was he finished -- was it because no one would read his romances or because he had moved on? I'm genuinely asking as my Melville knowledge is not that deep! And 3) how would this play out today? I have to imagine that today's audiences/industry would be forgiving of a popular author taking a weird and experimental detour then returning. The market for their earlier stuff is still there.
That's a great point about Tolkien though! It offers me some encouragement to find time to work on my own literary criticism, not just my against-market fiction in progress...
The bigger point is that Moby Dick would never have been published if he hadn't already been a writer of popular adventure romances and if Moby Dick had not superficially resembled that type of book.
That's an interesting idea -- it's plausible (and certainly being a known entity helps) but "helped" doesn't mean "made possible." Even if he hadn't been writing adventure stories, other people were, so even submitted by a no-name author, it's possible that the editor would have recognized how Moby Dick took a familiar form and elevated it.
The flip side is, if you write fully to the market, your stuff may become indistinguishable from everything else being submitted, and that doesn't exactly help your chances of being published! Many unique and interesting things don't get published, but then a lot of garbage also doesn't get published. Just as a baseline, a lot of stuff written won't get published!
I guess I have to think about this as it relates to my own work. I'm currently writing a novel for which I really believe I can write a good pitch. The premise is easily understandable, unique but with enough familiarity to have a hook. I can write that proposal! I'm also writing it in the style I like to read (because why else would I spend so much of time on this?), which is not exactly in vogue right now. I'm pretty sure that if I pivoted to (for example) a multi-POV, first-person-present-tense, action-oriented style, I could improve my chances of being published. But how much? Are we talking an increase of 1% to 20%? 5% to 50%? I doubt it. My guess is something more like 0.5% to 1% chance, with is a substantial increase, but still so low overall that it's not worth it to me.
Of course, I'm totally making up numbers there. It would be interesting to see if anyone has reliably studied that.
Melville turned to poetry. I don’t know if that was out of some dissatisfaction with the novel form, or just frustration at being unable to support himself and his family through novel writing. Certainly poetry is all over Moby-Dick; there are many passages, if lineated, which would pass as poetry. But probably his biggest problem was that he got ahead of his market; as someone once said, Moby-Dick was written for the future.
Like Tolkien, some writers can anticipate and midwife their future work. For example, Truffaut wrote hundreds of essays on film in the early 50s, heralding the French New Wave, such that when he turned to writing/directing his own films, he knew exactly what he wanted to do, and many viewers were there waiting for him when he did.
But perhaps many more writers are not very articulate about their art. Would you want to read Faulkner on how to write a novel? Yeah, me neither. With these writers, at least part of their success is that they made a discovery early on that set them apart. For example, with Faulkner, it might be the “feelin’ of doom hangin’ over me,” as he put it in an interview, which was connected to the past that fed his literary imagination.
Or Chandler: “All I wanted when I began was to play with a fascinating new language.” He was 45 when he started writing, but he had made this one discovery, and he followed it to see where it might lead.
Some great points. However, I think the claim that the average published writer is not substantially superior to the average unpublished writer is a much more defensible claim than saying the writers that are generally considered exceptional are not.
But the average published author is quite a bit better than the average unpublished one. Slush piles are awful! Clearly improving as a writer helps ones chances to a point. But beyond that point it does not. The natural corrolary is that many exceptional writers do not get published, and some of these must be superior even to the best of those who did. And look at history: if proust hadn't been able to afford to get his novel printed, it wouldn't exist. Isn't it rather easy to think that the majority of the world's prousts have not been millionaires?
Yes, that was clumsily worded on my part. The average unpublished writer is unpublished for good reasons. I take your point that sometimes someone with great potential gets unlucky, gets discouraged and never becomes the great author they could have been. But the barriers to entry are a lot lower now than in Proust's time. Are there really scores of undiscovered Austen- or Tolstoy-level talents self-publishing on Amazon?
I was just thinking about how few writers’ names are known. A few dozen authors dominate just about any genre you could name. And so much modern fiction is *so dreary*, as you say (although a few months ago I stumbled across a good novel called “One’s Company” that I am *still* thinking about.)
Mostly I just read older stuff.
It depends on who you write for. For example, Jane Austen did not know the marketplace. She sank out of sight. She also wrote great novels.
I think for lit fiction the solution is almost always a small press and hoping for an awards nomination or cult novel status. That's why self pub is so marginal. There is really no small press economy for most commercial genres tho, with the exception of sci-fi and fantasy.
It's interesting bc commenter either come from lit fiction or commercial fiction backgrounds, and the same tendencies operate in both fields but in different ways. In lit fiction nothing is ever 100 percent out, but you need to convince ppl you are a world historical genius, or might be, and in practice the only way to do that is with social proof--fellowships, pre pub blurbs, fancy agents, etc. So the sales pitch relies on fashion and manufactured taste, but in a very subtle way that is hard to game.
In commercial fiction if something is out then it's out, Shakespeare himself couldn't sell, say, a proustian novel about a galactic federation. But if something is in, then it's salable even if you're nobody and (sometimes) even if you have a nobody agent
It would be really difficult. Very hard to write a lush, ornate, reflective book about things that aren't real, because if you describe, as proust does, going to a party where everyone is wearing white masks an s then eventually realizing those are just their aged faces, it won't be read as a metaphor but as some Sci fi thing! Of course you could just lean into those assumptions and create a fantastically surreal world!