Literary hemlines – a fashion review

I got an email recently from someone who had come to us for an editorial review. He found the report helpful and full of insight, but he was worried by his editor’s opinion that:

“my protagonist is currently ‘unfashionable’ in the publishing world. This character is, like me, a guilt ridden white, middle class, middle aged to elderly man, recently retired from a very successful but dull career.”

Literary fashions come in a lot of forms and we’ll talk all about that in a second, but first:

It turns out that some people missed their Black Friday bonanza last week because they didn’t open their emails, or were being chased by crocodiles up the Zambezi, or were being targeted by mobsters in a Volgograd crack den. So, for today only, and with no more exceptions (stern glance in the direction of the Volgograd people), we’re reopening the Black Friday discount. Just use the BLACKPASS code at checkout. The membership signup page is right here.

Okiedoke. Fashions.

The chap emailing me raised one kind of fashion issue, but there are plenty of others you can think of:

1. Misery memoirs. There was a time when misery memoirs were massive. Then that market pretty much burned itself out. They still sell, a bit, but aren’t the automatic bestsellers that they used to be.
2. Vampires. Once didn’t particularly exist as a category of fiction. Then were Twilighted into being huge, and a whole ‘paranormal romance’ category was born. Vampires are still a thing, but the category has expanded and morphed and branched out. Vampires are just one amongst a whole medley of possibilities.
3. Bullying. Used to be the thing in children’s fiction, a burning issue that had to be explored. Then it suddenly seemed overdone. So it became hard to sell books on bullying.
4. Unreliable narrators / psych thrillers / domestic noir. Gone Girl made this category huge. Then Girl on a Train overextended it. The category is still huge, but it’s become complicated and competitive. Girl on a Train wouldn’t really make much of a mark today (and never really deserved to.)

And so on.

Writers are left feeling like they don’t know what they ought to write about. And if you are pale, male and stale – like me and like my correspondent – what are you to do? You can change your story; you can’t easily change your skin.

Well.

What we really notice here – give or take a bit of temporary overreaction in both directions – is that something comes along which gives the literary market a good kick in the pants. Sometimes that kick has been an unambiguously good thing (eg: a greater awareness of diversity amongst writers and readers. For an industry based in the multicultural cities of London and New York that awareness was decades late in arriving.) Other times – vampires, misery memoirs – the change seems a bit more random, a bit more happenstance.

But then fashions gradually sort themselves out. The literary world moves in the direction of something more subtle and more interesting.

So today, for example, you couldn’t sell a teenage love story simply by marrying up an ordinary teenaged girl with a handsome vampire. You have to address more interesting questions of worldbuilding and purpose and storyline. Do all those things in an interesting way and, yes, the basic girl + vampire model can still work. But it works because you’ve created something more interesting and more shaded than that simple formula suggests.

Indeed, it’s worth asking whether Stephanie Meyer could even sell Twilight today, assuming she was an unknown debut author? Well, possibly. The book was capably written and its basic hook still works. But that same book, released today, wouldn’t cause much of a splash. It would be just one more contribution to an overstuffed genre. No one would particularly notice it. It wouldn’t even deserve to be noticed much.

Same with the pale, male and stale protagonist. Of course, there are still stories about such people. People still buy them. Publishers still sell them.

But thirty or forty years ago, it was possible to sell that kind of book in a world where the underlying assumption was this book is being published by people like us for people like us and we don’t really need to address the fact that there are other sorts of people in the world. That view has, thankfully, collapsed. And about time too.

One strategy that evades this trap is the one I’ve adopted. I write in the voice of a young woman with mental health challenges. She’s not remotely like me. Nothing in my books makes people think that the author has a closed or exclusionary world-view.

But maybe the book you want to write does have a protagonist who is pale, male and stale. Fine. You just need to avoid the feeling that your world is all there is, or all that matters. You need to address the upheaval that is taking place in literary awareness and respond. So for example Amazon Prime has a thriller series, Jack Ryan, in which a white, clean-cut, Ivy League analyst is teamed with his boss – a black, Muslim, grizzled CIA guy, played by Wendell Pierce.

If everyone in Jack Ryan’s world had been white Ivy Leaguers like him, the show would have felt utterly removed from the reality of the world we live in. It would have felt exclusionary and hard to love. As it is, the show feels modern, complicated, dramatic, realistic. Yes, the show is more diverse. But it’s also just plain better.

Literary upheavals have their sillinesses, of course. But the silliness tends to happen in the year or two after a new wave has broken. (So it’s either “no books on bullying” or “buy anything with vampires”. Both of those approaches were too crude and didn’t last.) Longer term, upheavals simply force fiction to become better – more interesting, more subtle, more responsive, more inclusive.

So you can’t just write about vampires, you have to justify your use of them. You have to figure out the metaphorical structure of your universe, and why it matters and what it’s for.

Equally, you can’t just write about heroines-who-are-unreliable-narrators. You actually have to craft an interesting and coherent book that just happens to use that as a technique.

And in the end, the only way to get ahead of the next fashion wave is to read the books that are being published today. To stay abreast of contemporary fiction. That way, you’re part of the wave. Your writing will respond to the changes that are happening right now.

And that means, your writing will be better than it otherwise would be. It also means more likely to sell.

Can’t beat that combination, huh?

Let me know what you think below. I promise to comment on your comments. I’ll comment on your comments on my comments on your comments. I’ll comment on your comments on my comments on your comments on my comments on your comments. I will not be outdone.