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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
An interesting look at the issue, Harry.
I’m surprised you didn’t mention the simple temporal issue with waves: the writing of a book – at least of a good book – isn’t done overnight. And the publishing cycle is a year-plus in duration. As such, even taking today’s big new thing as impetus, by the time your book is written and published, it will be passé.
There is also another way of looking at this, one that gets a mention in the realm of speculative-fiction worldbuilding: second (and third) order consequences. Meyer made a splash with average girl + vampire. But, with that done, the hook is old. The next book needs to look at second-order consequences: what are the implications of such romances on the world? Those consequences need to be core to the story. Then, what are the implications of those consequences? In effect, the wave is created by a hook (paranormal romance) but maintained by people writing the depth of consequence into their stories.
Yes – but Rumaan Alam is writing right in the epicentre of the current wave. Which is great and – to be clear – it’s a good wave and an overdue one. But my focus in this post was a bit more, what do you do if you’re working outside the fashion du jour? What then?
Both points you make are spot on. And the temporal issue is worse than yuo think because editors are buying the manuscripts now that become hardbacks in 18 months and PBs in 2+ years. So by the time you’ve bought a “debut” PB in a bookshop, editors are two years ahead of you and you can’t know what they’re looking at. There ain’t no good solution to that problem, except just being abreast of the new wave yourself by real immersion in your genre
yes, there’s a certain trickiness. Not just about being suddenly unfashionable, but about the way in which you might be read. I have a book that’s about Australians in Vietnam in the 60s. They behave just as people of their class and background behaved in the 60s, and it’s important that they do. That’s because it’s very much about the times and what people were doing then, how they invested in the growing disaster that was the war for absolutely everyone, and what they were were laying down for posterity – kinda would be pointless to have them be specially woke folk of 2020, really. Yet, I have a sneaking feeling this may be a bit of a barrier for me (in the search for agents and publishers). It’s all in how you read things.
Anyway, I will carry on, if not regardless then at least with this in mind.
I agree with everything you say Judy, and empathise. In fact I confess that I am the person referred to in Harry’s blog who has the middle aged white man as the unfashionable protagonist. The editor who reviewed my book did a great job, incidentally, but his comments did open my eyes somewhat to the notion of literary trends and fashions. I am concerned, whilst as an unpublished author being powerless, if these trends mean that we can’t sensitively write ‘real life’ for risk of going against these. For example, very early in my draft the parents of one of my protagonists expressed concern that after a whirlwind romance she was to marry an Arab man she had met on holiday. It demonstrated a racist attitude typical of the time when they told her that “you do hear such things about Arab men”. I thought that the context was such that it would say something about the protagonist’s upbringing and background and in no way was I or my novel condoning the racism expressed. However, my Jericho reviewer suggested agents and publishers would stop reading at that point, and he advised that I should edit it out. I have done. Cowardice? Realism? Naivety? Would people (publishers or readers) really take against a book because it contained what was often said in real life, unpleasant though that might be? I don’t know. As a middle class, white male in his sixties I find the world quite confusing!
Personally I would have left it in but made very sure that the context made it clearly about the opinions of the ‘old fashioned parents’ and not the writer or anyone else. Look at Lucy’s chaperone (I forget her name) in Room with a view. She makes certain assumptions and comments about Italians which cleverly imply her view and build her character. Yet the reader is absolutely not inclined to link those to the views of EM Forster.
Ultimately think it’s all about ‘how’ this line is written in that gives it its implications.
On the “1960s Aussies in Vietnam” thing: I think it’s really fine to write about people who are of their generation. What you need to avoid is seeming to empathise too closely with their view. You need to be able to suggest to the reader a gap between the characters’ view of the world, and yours. It’s easy enough to do that in a non-crass way – one Vietnamese character will do it. A plot twist that lays bare the consquences of some of the Aussies’ blindspots / prejudices. Any of these will do it fine.
I quite agree, and that’s been my aim. It’s a bit of a tightrope walk though, between presenting people with all their 60s warts, making them at least a bit attractive, and persuading the reader (currently a number of very busy agents) to pick that I’m praising no-one here. Younger agents, I suspect, are hoping for a feisty, naughties’ style female protagonist – and in rewrites I have to be so careful not to have her swing too far in that direction, while making sure she has enough propulsion of her own. I don’t think anyone reading it would miss the underlying racism that made the war an even nastier schemozzle than the one it would otherwise have been.
I see literary fashions creating a double problem for the writer. If you follow it, you may be spot on and sell just because that’s what publishers want at the moment; or be rejected because the market is saturated. If you don’t follow the fashion and try to create something new, you may be happily accepted as the creator of something fresh and interesting; or be rejected because this is not what people want at the moment. A bit of a roulette.
There IS a bit of roulette there. The best formula? Same, but different. Take what’s on the front tables now and deliver that, but differently / freshly / better
Veering a bit to a different note, I love your graphic. Color, length, attitude, time, style – all aspects of what a good novel will offer up, first and foremost. Find the ‘dressing’ that makes what one wants to convey, i.e. write, the most appealing for the [author’s] desired audience as well as the exigencies of the publishing industry.
PS: Reading the newsletter, how cool is that white suit, shirt and hat!
I am Mr Cool himself. How could you have doubted me?
Never!
I don’t think it is advisable to “write to fashion trends” because there are so many variables and a non-static timeline. The target audience is also a moving target: always shifting opinion and taste.
Some professional writers try to write to trends, but how many do succeed? Most of the novels that have jumped on that bandwagon have missed the train completely or if they manage to get on it briefly, they don’t stay “fashionable” for long. They quickly fall off into the depths of oblivion.
On the order hand… some of those who dare to write the novel they absolutely want to write, and write it the best way they can and with all their passion, do tend to succeed. Even in this fiction-crowded world.
For me, writing to the “current trend” is not about creating a couple of characters from an ethnic background, giving them mental health problems and adding alcohol, drugs and sex to spice up a dull story. Writing is about making my characters relatable to the readers, no matter what the story and the ethnic background. And in doing so, surprising my readers with that relatability.
Humanity is one of the 4 pillars of good writing. And it is also what writers have in common with readers. I think this humanity “trend” is here to stay, don’t you?
I rest my case…
Yep. Write what you love, for sure. But within the stuff you want to write, there will be more and less marketable ideas. I suggest picking the more saleable ones!