Blogger: Rachelle Gardner
Sometimes when I talk about the guidelines and conventions that are expected in today’s fiction—for example, don’t go overboard with description, or… show, don’t tell—I get writers pushing back with the classic “classics” argument.
They’ll say things like, “But what about Charlotte Bronte? What about F. Scott Fitzgerald? You’d probably reject THEM if they came across your desk, too.”
Yep, I just might. This is not 1925 nor is it 1847. This is 2015 and the trends today are different – readers want something different. Neither Bronte nor Fitzgerald were competing with television, video games, the world wide web, or great blogs like this. 🙂
How is a reader today different than a reader 100 years ago? Let us count the ways.
1. We are more worldly.
Typical educated people in the industrialized west have seen much of the world with their own eyes, whether through movies and television or by traveling. By contrast, the typical reader as little as 60 years ago may not have ventured beyond their own small corner of the world, and therefore when reading, enjoyed and even required long passages of description to understand the world in which a novel took place.
2. We’re more impatient and are easily bored.
Our lives seem to move at a faster pace than generations past. People’s brains are wired differently now, and most of us need the stimulation of a faster moving story or we’ll lose interest. Quick-cut movies and TV shows, fast-paced computer games, the point-click-instant-gratification of the Internet, and our generally overly-busy and fragmented lives have all contributed.
3. We’re conditioned for “show, don’t tell.”
We’ve grown up on movies and TV; without even realizing it, we expect to be “shown” a story as on a movie screen, rather than “told” as in a book. Even when we’re reading a book.
4. Language itself changes over time.
While it’s tempting to lament the decline of the English language and declare that nobody cares anymore, people have had this same complaint for hundreds of years. The novels of today aren’t going to read like the novels of 50, 100 or 500 years ago simply due to the evolution of language.
So resist the urge to compare today’s books to old classics! It won’t get you anywhere… least of all published.
What are some more reasons—cultural and psychological—that books and/or readers today are different from those 100+ years ago?
Would Tolstoy or Dickens get rejected if they queried an agent today? (Click to Tweet.)
Resist the urge to compare today’s books to old classics! (Click to Tweet.)
Four ways readers are different today than 100 years ago. (Click to Tweet.)
Hi Rachelle.
As always, I continue to learn from your post and those of your colleagues. Bless you and everyone there at Books and Such.
Thank you
Its like comparing Monet with Rembrandt. I actually love Monet’s more subtle impressionistic style, but find the former too heavy. I even put down a Le Carre not long ago, because descriptions were too heavy and distracting. Yes, I think Tolstoy might battle today, but not just for the reasons given. His story resonated with his time, but unless he could take us back to that time in a way that related to our time, he would fall flat. That said, he clearly could write so was probably informed by the expectations of his time and may well have just delivered differently today. So W&P in its current form might not have got through the door, but Tolstoy probably would have. I am often inspired by the way movies flow and add detail incidentally, along the way and with subtle brushstrokes, because as a family we love to work out where the plot is headed without it all being given us on a plate.
One of the things you have to consider in the comparison of Monet and Rembrandt was that while Monet painted as he liked, Rembrandt worked mainly to commission, and in an atelier system. His work was therefore constrained both by the taste of the time and by the clients’ wishes (which mirrored and sometimes exaggerated those constraints).
* Also, we don’t see Rembrandt’s work in its original form; we can’t, because chemical changes in the pigments have darkened them beyond hope of an accurate restoration that would not essentially destroy the original and replace it with a modern interpretation.
* I like Monet better, too, and positively love the even lighter, airier work or Signac.
*My son, then 8th grade I think, encountering Dickens for the first time: “Somebody should teach this guy how to write!”
*You’re right about faster moving stories, Rachelle. Part of the educational value of Dickens is the exposure to a different pace.
The first time I read Dickens, at 13, I was not impressed. When I picked him up again as a college freshman, I was enthralled, and marvelled over how he’d really learned to write well in five short years.
LOL! I’ve had that happen both ways. When I was 13 The Virginian was the be-all-end-all, and a mere five years later he was a cardboard hero full of histrionics.
Maybe in another five years I will finally see the light where Dickens is concerned? Actually, its not as much his writing I dislike, but his spineless heroes. :-p
So here’s a question: what’s a book that would sell just as well today as it did a century ago? Are there any, and what makes them so perennial?
RJ, you hit what I think is a really telling question – the way we define heroes, both fictional and real, says a lot about us as individuals, and as a society. It may be a workable metaphor for the changes in reading taste, as well.
* In fiction, there have been some clearly definable cycles; as an example, the John Wayne archetype of the 50s and early 60s was replaced by what Norman Vincent peale described as the ‘mewling Dustin-Hoffman-antihero’ of the late 60s and early 70s. This can probably be largely ascribed to the conflict over the Viet Nam War, but I suspect the roots go deeper, into the building mistrust of authority in general, and the need for changed societal paradigms implied in Benjamin Spock’s ‘Baby And Child Care.”
*The reaction against that really got its start with ‘Star Wars’; we needed the simple heroism of Luke Skywalker and princess Leia, and the flawed but genuine heroism of Han Solo. As a society, we were hungry for heroes, and George Lucas gave them to us.
* In the real world, there’s the example of Douglas Bader, the famed ‘legless ace’ of the Royal Air Force in WW2. He overcome great odds in regaining the right to fly in combat, and was a beloved though mercurial leader until he was shot down and captured in 1941.
* A postwar biographer, Paul Brickhill, nearly canonized Bader, but now the pendulum has swung the other way, and there has been recent vilification of both his character and his tactical acumen.
* The truth lies somewhere between; Bader (who died in 1982) was a nuanced human being, as we all are, but the desire to cut him down to size – and I use the image deliberately – when he’s no longer able to speak in his own defense says something about our culture, and it’s not good. We may be created equal, but there are those who rise higher than the rest…and there are those who really envy them.
* In terms of literature, my thought i that what we read today is not so much reflective of the ‘busy world we live in’, but perhaps more a sign of the importance we place on what we do. We don’t want to be bothered with long descriptive passages…NOT because we don’t have time to read them, but because we feel our time is being ‘wasted’.
*Reading is a leisure activity, after all; there are no extra points for reading more books than your neighbour. Granted, the amount of time we have may be less, but ‘reading is reading’, and the desire for quick action beginning in the first paragraph is more a function of how we choose to see ourselves, rather than the reality.
You’re right about heroes changing. In a critique group not long ago I was shocked that someones’ hero showed a lost his temper. In my mind a hero on the upward swing of his character arc can get angry, sad or lovelorn, but he must never, ever, lose control of his temper (unless it be an exception that proves the rule). But no one else in the critique group saw anything odd about a hero losing his cool and breaking things. It turned out that my idea of a hero has been so shaped by the 1880’s-1920’s fiction I read that it has become quite different from the heroes imagined by my critique partners, who mainly read contemporary fiction.
The modern movie hero is casual, “endearingly” or “hilariously” self-centered, and witty. Tony Stark would be a good example. I’m not a big fan.
RJ, the Tony Stark example is excellent – there is, by the bye, quite a bit that can be learned about character-building in the recent spate of ‘Marvel Comics’ films. Most are quite well-done, and instructive as well as entertaining.
* Great point about the modern view allowing a hero to lose his temper. I don’t write my heroes that way, because I find it quite unacceptable in myself.
Hi Rachelle,
I often see people multi-task while out eating and in their cars. People can’t sit still at a red light without checking their phone, and how many people check their phones during a meal?
I agree we are more impatient, and the reader wants to get to the good stuff without wading through too much description.
Thanks for sharing!
Jackie, you made my day! I like to read good description, but loathe writing it – I do dialogue and action (I was taught thus by my mentor, Marvin Mudrick). Maybe I DO have a chance…SnOoPyDaNcE!
I’m not sure how it affects writing, but we start from more of a place of safety than ever before. We don’t expect women to die in childbirth, nor children to be taken by illness in their first year. We don’t dread polio summers, and while influenza is still a threat, the great pandemics are largely a part of history.
* Who now fears bubonic plague? It’s all around us in the wild rodent population, but basic sanitary precautions and Orkin have driven them from our homes.
* For those who remain unconvinced, one word – penicillin.
* And we don’t carry nosegays any more…anyone wonder why?
* The safer and more wholesome world we have should not be casually derided; the needed derision should be honed and aimed. Sure, it’s more superficial, and less overtly religious…God has been pushed away not mainly by science, but by the fact that we don’t have to contemplate the eternal every waking moment. The eternal questions do await, however…just as they always have. One might say that safety has made us soft and spiritually stupid, and that may not be far from the truth.
* The beauty of today is that we can preserve the good parts of the past, and re-live them. I can write neo-Dickensian novels, and if I can find a coterie of fans of that period, self-publishing can allow me a tidy and worthwhile niche.
* And the ejection of God from the marketplace doesn’t mean He isn’t there. He’s just leaning against a shadowed wall, arms folded, whistling, and waiting for us to come to our senses. He’s patient, but not all THAT patient.
So true, Andrew. We only THINK God’s been ejected from the marketplace. He doesn’t come and go at man’s command.
I appreciate this post. Just wondering what your thoughts are on a book like All the Light We Cannot See. A very dense, descriptive, and lengthy novel. The chapters are written in short bursts, but there are many of them. Some people loved it, others hated it, but it did win the Pulitzer Prize and remain on the best seller list for a long time. I suppose books like it (and The Goldfinch, which was considered Dickensian) are the exception that proves the rule. I despised The Goldfinch and had a love-hate relationship with All the Light We Cannot See. Still, the success of both seems to show that there is a market for lengthy, literary fiction. A lot of people who like to read enjoy the experience of being immersed in language. Books that feel like they were written as a precursor to screenplays or teleplays seem self-defeating. Why not just watch the movie after all? I don’t disagree with your points. You know the market inside and out. I’m not planning on writing a novel with the size and scope of either Goldfinch or Light. Just wondering what you thought of their popular success.
Hmm, Jennie. I never met anyone who hated All the Light! One of my favorite books, for sure. Of course, there is a wide spectrum of writing styles today. Some are more popular than others. The award-winning “literary” tomes that also manage to reach bestseller status are the outliers. But they do exist!
Really interesting post, Rachelle. I absolutely love canonized literature…anything from Bronte to Fitzgerald, Dickens to Dostoevsky. The richness with which they write, the often denser syntax, the way my 21st century mind is required to slow its pace while devouring their pages. Yet, I cannot argue with your assessment of today’s reader.
Even with my affection for the classics, many of which aren’t really that old, I cannot argue that I also devour contemporary fiction with similar voraciousness — able to do so amidst my incredibly busy schedule thanks to just the style you’re speaking of. If I picked up, for instance, Crime and Punishment for the first time today there’s no way I’d be inclined to fit it in between volunteering on my lunch break at the school library, planning the next lesson for my daughter’s Daisy Troop, or meal prepping for the week ahead. No, the time for Crime and Punishment was 10 years ago lounging on my dorm room bed for an entire weekend, when there was ample time to read a passage four times if that’s what it took to understand it.
I believe many readers today are looking for stories that bring them quick (not necessarily instant) satisfaction. They want books that are at times intense and leave them curious or moved, but they are seeking resolution. Now, I understand my position here is coming from the perspective of a full-time working, author at night, mother of a young child with very little free time. But I believe I represent the climate of most readers today.
If our goal is to write books readers today will read (and, let’s face it, BUY) then this is just part of the formula for success. And I’m thankful that you, Rachelle, are in the business of helping us achieve that goal.
I LOVE the classics. I LOVE three page long descriptions. Which is why I LOVED Ivanhoe. Silly me. That doesn’t translate to today, does it? Teresa, let’s read classics together 🙂 🙂 (just not C&P, please)
Yes! Too early in the season for Wuthering Heights?
I totally lol’d at this post. My freelance editor just returned my manuscript and about halfway through, her comment was “sheesh! You’re not Dickens! Cut out the descriptions and show me the story! There’s a reason I don’t like Dickens”.
Great post, Rachelle
And now, I’m laughing at you. Haha. I would bet, if given the opportunity to let loose, we’d all be capable of filling pages upon pages with over-the-top descriptions. On days I feel like I have writer’s block, I’ll sit down and hammer out a wildly descriptive passage about something totally random. Unplugs the ducts!
I think that’s sad, Jaime. There have been many times when I have read modern authors’ books and thought, “I wish this book was longer. I feel like the author has been told to cut out lots of pages that should have been left in. Something is missing. This author writes wonderful, but I feel like I’m missing half of the book.” I agree with Andrew. The people that write in the style of Dickens and Co., should get editors that love that kind of work too. Then, if they have to, they should just self-publish. We can always use more description and scene setting in my opinion.
Jamie, if the freelance editor isn’t actually working for your publisher, I’d be inclined to take that advice with caution, especially if you are not writing YA. How do you know that particular editor is making exactly the right call? Is she a published author whose work you can read to see whether she really knows what works best? Many of the recent Christy winners I have been reading combine mostly “showing the story” with some beautiful descriptive sections whose removal would weaken the impact on my senses. You may be much closer to the right balance in your work than your editor recognizes. Some that she wants you to delete entirely might actually be important to retain, perhaps in a shortened version.
I have thought about this often. Thank you for explaining it to us. Great post. I am working on “show don’t tell.” That is a difficult one for me.
Interesting post, Rachelle. I think one huge change we live today that was true in a different way 100 years ago is our time. We have so much more going on. Moms are running kids to music, sports, youth group etc. Dads work outside the home a lot more than in decades past, even outside the country at times. There are lots of organized activities for everyone, so time spent at home, and leisure time for reading are at a premium. We don’t have the same amount of time at home, the same amount of time for relaxing that people took/chose 100 years ago. Reading is one of the casualties of this. We read to our boys, but on football or Boy Scout night, the kids get to bed too late to be read to. The same is true with personal reading.
*This is probably another reason writing has had to change. People want to get right into the story, not read through pages of description first. Like you mentioned, we have shorter attention spans, so we expect action to happen fast in the stories we read.
*I’m not saying all these changes are good, but they are reality for most of us.
I love the classical style of Jane Austen and Dickens, so that is how I wrote when I started writing novels a little over two years ago. Classics still sell well, and I hadn’t realized that new authors couldn’t expect to write that way and succeed. I had three completed for the Genesis contest last year. What I learned was that I had an archaic writing style that wouldn’t get to market for a new author today. Some judges recommended tremendously useful books for retraining myself from using omniscient narrator to limited 3rd person POV. I’m rewriting all my novels in the contemporary style before trying to take them to market. I’ve decided it’s actually more fun to write in the new style, but I still love reading the richer, more formal language of the classics.
I do have a question, Rachelle. How old (what publication year) is too old for comparison? Is it 2005? 1995? Something else? I’ve been reading Christy award winners as models of good contemporary writing, but I would like to know which are the oldest I should consider.
I miss the omniscient narrator; some of my favourite books would have been much the poorer if limited to a 3rd person POV (“The Caine Mutiny”, “Something of Value”, and “HMS Ulysses” come to mind).
I’m writing historicals that are now more than 95% 3rd person POV, but I’ve found some omniscient narrator is occasionally essential in this genre. I am trying to conceal my omniscience…an easy task as it turns out since I know I know much less than I think I know.
Andrew: it’s ironic. The first thing my editor did was make me change my first person narrative to omniscient third. It took ages to transpose from one voice to the other but now each book in my 3 book series is omniscient third 🙂
Carol, you just gave me a good laugh in concealing omniscience. Thank you!
Wow, Rachel…being able to go from first person to 3rd omni staggers the imagination…and is surely the mark of a Real Live Writer. Just fantastic! 🙂
Carol, I think if you read a variety of novels from the last 10-20 years, you’ll get a good feel. If you write historicals, then you can get away with a richer and more formal language.
I’m loath to write this, but it may provide illumination. Or something.
* When I could still do useful work, though ill, I found that I could best read (and smoke a large, cheap cigar, which helped the pain meds absorb) in the predawn hours.
* At the time, I could yet do some work upon aeroplanes, and would do that until the next medication/cigar break was due (about 10 am). But by that time, the activity had reset my internal dynamic; it was hard to focus on a book, so I would put on a DVD instead. (Now, I’m pretty well trashed from sunup, so it doesn’t really matter.)
* So there seems to be some connection between the kinetic aspects of life, and the enjoyment of reading. Would anyone care to theorize on this? I sure can’t.
Great post, as usual. As with most things, there has to be balance. You have to have enough description to set a scene or present a character, but not so much that you bore the reader or detract from the story. What’s the right balance? The one that works! Ha ha! It’s hard to say what the right balance is. It will be different for different genres, different readers, different agents. I read this advice as lean more towards story and moving it forward, and less detailed description.
Rachelle,
Thanks for this post. You bring up a compelling argument. We are such a fast-paced nation. Interestingly, Dickens got paid by the word. I think we’d all be more descriptive if that were the case!
I agree with most of what you say, except for point #2. Sure, computer games and the internet and rapid-fire movies and TV shows have contributed to a sense of haste and rush in today’s life, but I do not believe it extends to novel writing and reading. I suspect that is a false argument for writers to produce novels of rapid-fire beginnings and hectic pacing, a concept I reject totally and completely. That argument sounds to me like it’s true simply because enough people have repeated it over and over. If you go to a bookstore like B&N, the older novels of the Brontes, Cooper, Dickens, Tolstoy, Melville, etc, are still on the shelves, and are still selling. People are still reading novels. Novels still sell. I suspect there is a disconnect between today’s fast-paced lifestyle, and novel reading. I think people generally turn off the hectic lifestyle when they sit down to read a novel. I suspect most people who read a novel realize that this is something that has to be taken slowly and carefully. It isn’t something that can be rushed through. I know I do. People are still reading novels. If they weren’t, novelists like GRR Martin and Connie Willis wouldn’t be selling many books. They’d be dead and buried. Novels still sell, and a novelist has to write a novel that fits his story and not be concerned about the lifestyle in which he finds himself. I realize this may be blasphemy in today’s publishing world, but that’s how I feel. I’ve written three sci-fi novels, each coming in at around 120,000 words. Too many? I couldn’t care less.
I think globalization has allowed us to experience other cultures and countries in an unprecedented way. Because of this readers are able to find more common ground with people across the world, which leads to an expectation of greater universality in stories. No longer do we need an in-depth description every single time of the back alley of some large city. Tell us what happens in that alley and why we should care about it.
Also many of those authors wrote in omniscient POV, and when someone today mentions that they might try that POV method, you find that many are totally against it.
“People want to feel involved with a character.” “Omniscient is too distant.”
I’ve never felt that way, however, I transformed a WIP from omni to 3rd multi due to that advice.
And I will add this: it made it a lot better–brings the reader much closer to the characters–and also leaves many more surprises in store for the reader.
And we know how readers love surprises. …
I must be out of step with current trends because I am currently reading some novels published in the late 18th and early 19th century (Charlotte Mary Yonge and H. Rider Haggard, for example). And I am enjoying them. Sure, in an action/adventure novel, I want short pithy sentences, but in a normal novel (I am not good with genres) I can move at any pace and be satisfied. Marilynne Robinson is a contemporary author whose novels I like and you should not read hers quickly. I liked “All the Light You Cannot See” but enjoyed his memoir “Four Seasons in Rome” much more. We may be more worldly, but in what world? The people who live in the southern part of my state live in a vastly different world than I do. It is the job of the writer to translate the world of their characters to the writer’s intended audience. And that must be done with words that give both the appearance and the atmosphere of the unknown place or time. Karen Russell translated the world of southern Florida carnival operators to this relatively untraveled midwest middle-class attorney and computer consultant.
A few years ago I tried to read Ben Hur. After about 40 or 50 (I forget the number) pages of walking across the desert with nothing else happening I gave it up. And some of the books I loved as a kid, like the Heidi books, would never get published today because there’s not enough action. But I found that book comforting when I re-read it recently. I think there’s a balance between classic and modern styles of writing and, while the more traditional things might not sell well now, there’s possibly still a market for that sort of thing. The hard part would be finding it.
There has to be a balance between offering people what they want and offering them what they didn’t realize they wanted.
And then there is the exception to the rule…
They wouldn’t be rejected by an agent if they used the same skill level to write good contemporary novels. Dickens’ work was not instantly accepted in his day, and today he would have had a similar experience if he were an author among us! He wouldn’t have been rejected, however, if his writings encompassed the sentiments and realities of today’s world. What I think he would still retain is the freedom to infuse quality writing within his texts rather than casual, at times arrogant, cheap material to please the ordinary lot and then…nothing more, nothing really artistically valuable!
Dickens was relevant in his era. Likewise, we must be relevant in ours. It’s never enough to write well. Contrary to popular belief, many people can write. But, are we attuned to what’s going on in our culture and can we translate that into story? All the great writers were able to do just that. In fact, you can read their work today and get a glimpse of what was going on in their day. Thus, we live vicariously through their stories. We don’t need copycats of yesterday, but we do need writers who have a fresh take on things that are affecting us today.