Essay: "The Future of the Novel - Part 2"

A reminder: I'm only discussing the survival of the novel as an art form, not as a business. My concern is not that Steve King or Random House will be poor. My concern is whether, in thirty years, people will read novels at all.


Digital distribution will be very important. Live theatre has suffered as an art form because by definition, to see a "live" performance, you have to leave your house and go to it. This is both difficult and expensive compared to just watching it on TV. Of course, proponents of the theatre will tell you about intimacy of the theatre and of the spontaneous magic of being there, or whatever, and no doubt there's something to that, but the undeniable fact is that for most people it's just not worth it.

Books, on the other hand, stand to gain, and not lose, from digital distribution. Soon everyone will have a smartphone or a tablet or an eReader or some combination of those things. In other words - they will carry a whole library of novels with them wherever they go! If rampant book piracy gets going, well, that might be bad for business, but it isn't bad for the survival of the art form.

I think, as eReaders and iPads grow in popularity, and screens get easier to read and more convenient, people may well read more novels. But that will only happen if people use those devices to read novels instead of snippets of Internet bullshit (like this blog) or other sundries. And that is where we came in.

I should say from the outset that I simply do not believe that people are becoming less interested in fiction and more interested in "reality" entertainment (i.e. news, opinion, sports, celebrity). People still love fiction, whether it comes in a television show, a video game, or a short story. Might the market for fiction get compressed a bit because of the firehose of shitty "infotainment"  we're getting sprayed with these days? Sure, people only have so many hours in a day. But most of that ground seems to be being ceded by garbagey television sitcoms, which have been replaced by garbagey reality TV.

Yes, people are probably reading more "blog posts" and Internet stuff than novels these days, but once novels are delivered more seamlessly over the Internet it'll be a fairer fight.  People still have, in my experience, a huge appetite for fiction in all its forms.

This brings us to our final question: will the novel survive as a purveyor of "fiction" versus other mediums?

The novel is the simplest, purest form of storytelling (other than spoken word, of course, but a novel is really just an oral story transcribed).  The author has absolute freedom. He or she has no constraints, whether budgetary or artistic. There's no need to worry about whether the special effects department can handle it. There's no worry about whether it's too short or too long (no need to cram it into a 24 page format like a comic book, or a two hour movie slot). You don't need to depend on actors or make-up artists, you don't need to collaborate with other individuals.

It can be delivered to any device due to its small size. It can be an audio file or a word file. It's designed to be consumed in short, convenient bursts. There is no barrier to entry except literacy (and in some cases not even that; many of Dickens' fans were illiterate and had his stories read to them).  The novel, in my opinion, is still the most powerful and adaptable art form concievable.

But these are practical, business matters. They don't answer the question of what a novel can do that another art form can't. Put differently: is the novel anything other than a movie pitch? Should I be trying to be a novelist or should I be trying to be a screenwriter, a graphic novelist, a video game designer? What does a novel do better than other mediums?

This question is at the heart of the future of the novel.

I do believe that novels have certain advantages over other forms of art. The advantages of film are its swiftness, its relentless movement, and its ability to supply everything for the viewer, ready made, requiring no imagination, no work. But those strengths are also its weaknesses. It can't ever slow down, and it can only show, it can't tell.

The novel can be experimental in ways that film simply cannot.  It can divert, take its time, explore feelings and subjects in great deal. It doesn't just have to show people . It can delve inside them and represent their feelings and explain them in ways that film just can't.

Not every book does this. My own fiction, I don't think, really offers many advantages over a well-made movie following the same story. You could say the same about a lot of "popular" fiction which does much of the  heavy-lifting for the novel as an art form.  I don't mean to rag on popular novels. Reviled fiction series like "Twilight" and "Harry Potter" serve two important purposes. They prop up the book industry, providing its revenues, and they also as a good entry point for young readers. So there's nothing wrong with them.

But were they more successful as books or films? As an author, I have to acknowledge that most people will choose to watch a film instead of read a novel unless the writer gives them a strong reason to choose otherwise. If all there is, in the literary world, are the Harry Potters and the Twilights, we're basically admitting that we can't do anything in particular better than movies.

And that brings me the final point: even though the novel is not threatened by technology the way radio and stage plays were, no one involved with novels can afford to be complacent.  Every writer should ask, why ought my reader read this book instead of watching a film with the same story? What am I, in my humble way, doing for the art form I love? Because, if we, as writers, start treating books as a way to get into movies, then that's all they'll be. The novel won't die, but it will wither.

Of course, the other danger, not much discussed here, is that the novel will become too esoteric and inaccessible, enjoyed only by a privileged few, instead of something accessible to all. That's where more popular writers come in. But even the popular writers should be trying to do something, in their humble way, that can't be done better in a different medium. We can't all be David Foster Wallace or Jonathan Franzen, but we can all ask ourselves: what am I really doing here? Is this book anything more than a movie pitch? Or am I, in my small way, doing something with language and story, that needs to be done in this form?

The art of novel writing is in the same situation the art of painting was in after the development of photography. The point of art, now, isn't to try to out-camera the camera. That's impossible. The point is to see things that the camera can't, and to represent them visually. Not every piece of art has to be as abstract as the "Voice of Fire" but everyone drawing a picture has to think: "why am I drawing this instead of just taking a picture?"

Digital distribution is going to change everything for writers. No more sending your work to publishers, no more sucking up to agents. You'll get your stuff out there and anyone can read it. The question is whether they will, considering all the other stuff they're being bombarded with. The answer is, sure they will. If we make it worth their while.