Somewhere in my files I’ve got an old New Yorker cartoon of a doctor breaking the news to a patient on the examination table. The doctor tells him: “I’m afraid you’ve got a novel in you that has to come out.”
This patient’s obviously suffering from the need to write. Let’s use the commonly accepted medical term—gottawrite syndrome. You’re probably familiar with the symptoms: When writing, you feel fine. When not writing, you experience a variety of uncomfortable sensations, ranging from a general lassitude to raging despair. Oh—and self-loathing. Don’t forget self-loathing.
If you’re one of the millions of Americans suffering from gottawrite syndrome, you know it’s chronic and incurable. As another doctor tells another patient in another New Yorker cartoon: “There’s not only no cure for your disease, Wilson. There’s not even a race for the cure!”
Meanwhile, we’re encountering articles all the time with titles like “The Death of Fiction?” That particular one (which Ras pointed out a couple of Sundays ago in Good Reads, Cool Views) was written by Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He bemoans the near-disappearance of a commercial market for literary writers, and the fact that the alterative venues—the literary magazines such as his—are suffering from negligible readerships and declining support from the colleges and universities that sponsor them.
But Genoways also says this:
Back in the 1930’s, magazines like the Yale Review or [the Virginia Quarterly Review] saw maybe 500 submissions in a year; today, we receive more like 15,000. This is due partly to a shift in our culture from a society that believed in hierarchy to one that believes in a level playing field. This is good—to a point. The reality is that not everyone can be a doctor, not everyone can be a professional athlete, and not everyone can be a writer. You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can’t express your individuality in sterling prose, I don’t want to read about it.
My goodness. He really said that. As if an unpublished writer isn’t a writer. As if having a gatekeeper like Ted Genoways put you in print means you’re okay, but if he doesn’t, then you’re just another forlorn sufferer of gottawrite syndrome—one of his 15,000 yearly losers—and you can go eat worms.
Now, as for me, I can’t tell you whether, in the future, many people will make a living writing fiction. After all, very few do now. Nor can I tell you whether books made out of paper will still be published or whether we’ll only be reading books on an iPad or listening to them in our cars or perhaps having them wired directly into our brains. But I do know for sure that there will be books. Encountering the community of literature is one of the perks of being a human being. Gottawrite syndrome is, I’ll bet you, not just chronic and incurable…it’s ineradicable.
Would you want it any other way?
Ted the Cat (1994-present) is a domestic shorthair blogger and vers libre poet. He also enjoys sleeping, eating, and lurking. Ted the Cat co-habits with Kaze,
also a blogger at 317am.net.
Three points of note.
1. Mother Jones' headline writer suggested that it was "the death of fiction," not Genoways. He doesn't say that anywhere in the essay. Nor does he suggest that books will cease to exist (as you write) or that literary will cease to exist (as your quote from Yoder—a former VQR contributor, incidentally—implies).
2. Genoways doesn't write that fiction is in trouble, he writes that literary journals like VQR are in trouble, and says that the substantial evaporation of the short story market is a result of that.
3. Short stories are an invention of lit mags. They did not exist prior to lit mags, their shape and structure a result of the limitations of page length of lit mags, which provide enough room for a 4,000-8,000 word short story: longer than a standard publication, but shorter than a book. The question is whether short stories will exist afterwards, or whether their purpose has been exhausted.
So, what do you think? Will short stories cease to exist in a recognizable form once their vessel is shattered? Or will we continue to write and read them for the foreseeable future, simply out of habit?
Thanks, Waldo, for you provocative and thoughtful response. Let me respond to a few of your thoughts and add one or two of my own.
(1) Let's assume Genoways didn't write his own headline, and that he didn't equate the decline of the literary mags with "The Death of Fiction." Still, he sure seems to assign the literary mags with the resposibility for a lot, don't you think? Here's what he thinks reviving them would accomplish: "To pull out of this tailspin, writers and their patrons both will have to make some necessary changes—and quick. With so many newspapers and magazines closing, with so many commercial publishers looking to nonprofit models, a few bold university presidents could save American literature, reshape journalism, and maybe even rescue public discourse from the cable shout shows and the blogosphere."
Save American literature? Wow. By putting some money into university-based literary mags and informing editors like Genoways that they have to print more widely attractive and accessible fiction and nonfiction?–meaning, stuff more people would want to read? Does he really believe what appears in the Yale Review or the VQR could draw attention from other, newly ascendent popular media?
(2) The "substantial evaporation of the short story" is something I simply don't believe is occurring. What has occurred is, first, the evaporation of the commercial market, which corresponded with the advent and eventual wide reach of television, and then, the saturation of the literary market when more than 800 creative writing program emerged, producting countless stories aimed not at entertaining readers but at impressing academic editors enough to get into print and qualify on the writers' curriculum vitae, so they could earn a living not by writing but by teaching writing. It's a closed system–academics running credentializing programs to create more academics. This is not to say some extraordinary stories don't get published, merely that they're produced for an audience of editors that is not the same as the audiences Scott Fitzgerald and kin once wrote for, and by whose commerically-based standards they made a writerly living.
(3) You and I are conversing online. No paper required, unless we want to print out what's here and read it in bed. No paper, no gatekeepers like Genoways, no requirement that what we write get the Good Housekeeping seal before our readers decide to read it. Literary journals have made the mistake of not producing what regular readers–to whose decline in numbers they have contributed–want to read. Everyone, I would argue, has to right to put their stories up in front of an audience, and the audience then has the right to read them or not. The very fact that the subscriber rolls of the literary mags are so small–and, as Genoways admits, their actual readerships are even smaller–shows how irrelevent they are becoming. You can't get a teaching job without getting published somewhere by the certifiers, but you can write, write, write, and put your work out there on your own or through the burgeoning number of online outlets.
People keep writing–many of them, like the adults I meet all the time in my night-time short story classes–because they want and need to. The urge for storytelling has always been there and ain't going anywhere. I don't think it's "simply out of habit," Waldo, but in response to a real and compelling and endearing human impulse.
I see that you have written on Twitter that this discussion is a "debate" that pits "Kaze vs. VA Q REV." I speak only for myself, having written my comment during a morning break, and do not understand how a friendly discussion became a "debate"; your implication that I speak for VQR is wholly inaccurate and, as such, I think it is best for myself and my employer that I cease writing further on this topic.
As a suggestion, perhaps if you google my name, you will learn how significantly inaccurate that your assumptions are regarding my beliefs about print publications, blogs, and the role of editors.
Have a nice day.
Waldo, your third point is problematic. However something may originate, it can and does evolve to fit new circumstances and new needs. The recognisable form of the literary short story may change, and probably will – all other artistic forms do so – but so what? We don't paint like Rembrandt any more either.
Waldo – Sorry you took that twitter so to heart. Many a friendly discussion gets called a "debate" when twitter demands concision. And I did google your name. And I did, in fact, friend you on facebook because you sound like a interesting guy and one worth talking to. It's why I wrote an extended response to your comments in the first place. I hope you'll come back, but it you don't, best wishes to you.
I have to agree with the idea that literature, or at least the urge for story-telling, is an incurable part of the human condition. Through the writing and reading of fiction (however vaguely or explicitly autobiographical or contemporary), human beings come to know the world they live in and the worlds they have missed. In the movie The History Boys, the character of Hector explains that the greatest moments in literature are those when you come across a thought or an image or an emotion that you had thought was unique to you, and finding that someone, in your generation or writing 400 years earlier, has had that same thought. "It is like a hand reaching out and taking yours," he says. Story telling will never die because it serves as a hand-grasp of the mind, needed by humans as deeply and as physically as the grasping of actual hands.
Boy, Victoria, I agree! There's a scene in the Iliad when Hector, the greatest of the Trojan warriors, picks up his infant son and the boy is just panicked by the fierceness of his father's appearance. I've often thought of that…that little domestic moment no different 2800 years ago than it would be today.
Victoria: And BTW, "hand-grasp of the mind" is an apt and lovely phrase.
Lee: Intrigued by your thoughtful comment, I checked out your website at http://lleelowe.com. It's a model of online self-publishing–something I'm all for–and on first glance the prose looks great, too! I'll visit there again.
More concisely, literary mags might indeed die but that has to do with a poor business model that failed to adjust to the world of blogs and the like. This is no different than what happened to the music industry, and I think that's the analogy to make. Imagine if record labels embraced Napster instead of trying to kill it. There's more music available now than ever before. Yes, some of it isn't too good. Then again, some of the music put out by record labels isn't too good either. It's all consumer driven, and the artists, not the labels, have figured out how to make money in this new environment.
Why should someone pay subscription fees for arguably similar quality fiction that a reader might get from a self-published manuscript available for free over the internet? This isn't a story about the decline of fiction. It's a story of the decline of a business model.
Great point, Wheels. The literary publishing gatekeepers are going down. It's a funny culture they've got going, as if thinking in a business-oriented way were somehow dirtying their hands. And that applies to the broader leadership of academe as well. Do you agree?
I certainly don't have as educated an opinion as the rest of you. I can only say that I just finished reading a national book award winner and found it hard to get through. So disappointed in it. If it's the best, then what does it say about the rest? Fiction will live, but only if the writers have good stories to tell. And heroes that touch our hearts.
Kaze, I totally agree with you about the odd culture and that it does say something about leadership.
I have seen this in the larger academe, and it seems to me (on the average) to be a generatioanl issues. Many within the academe became used to the absolute control of ideas afforded them. The internet rewards direct democracy; there is no gatekeeper.
That is a hard pill to swallow for many. In the end, though, shouldn't all of this be about ideas? The cream still rises to the top. That a failing literary mag received 15k submissions in a year should tell anyone that there is still great interest in fiction. Again, it might not be as good and might take more sifting through to find the good ones; but readers still like good stories. Always have, always will.