This afternoon, I visited the list of Amazon.ca Bestsellers. Out of the top 25, seven were books by Stephenie Meyer in the Twilight series.
While I'm delighted for her success, I'm a bit discouraged for the rest of us. It's impressive that a young writer can revive the century-old genre of the vampire novel. But success on this scale does not advance the cause of fiction.
Instead, it's like clearing vast swathes of the Amazon rainforest to raise cattle destined to become hamburgers: For the sake of a totally predictable product, we sacrifice a treasure house of diversity.
Success on this scale teaches publishers the wrong lesson: When readers show they like something, give them lots and lots more of it. As long as they keep buying it, don't publish anything else—it'll probably lose money, and it might make readers less interested in teenage vampires.
Imagine a restaurant that can create wonderful dishes in any of a dozen distinctive Chinese cuisines. But because sweet-and-sour pork is more popular than anything else, that's all you can get. It's not worth it to the restaurant to stock the materials for ginger chicken or inside-out fish or mapu dofu.
Or imagine the café in Monty Python where Spam is part of every item on the menu. Replace "Spam" with "vampires" and that café is 21st-century popular literature.
So we're replacing the rainforest diversity of early 20th-century fiction with a dreary monoculture, and then we're grateful (as with Harry Potter) that "at least the kids are reading something."
That's like saying, "At least the anorexics will eat Spam."
One of the great glories of fiction is that it enables an individual to express his or her uniquely personal vision, and make it part of the vision of others—maybe even centuries later. And one of the universal messages of good fiction is: "This is my vision. Tell me yours."
For monoculture fiction, the message is "This is part of my vision. Wait for the sequel."
For apprentices and for old hacks like me, these are hard times. The apprentices can barely find anything really worth reading and emulating. They're like would-be chefs who've never had a chance to taste anything but Quarter-Pounders, so they dream of being really great hamburger flippers.
And the old hacks, with their own visions, find it hard even to get a publisher's attention: "Interesting proposal for a Beef Stroganoff, but unfortunately all our customers want Quarter-Pounders."
So what should we do? In two words: Keep writing. In three more: Your own stuff.
Don't worry about getting published. Worry about getting to be a good writer.
The top book on the Amazon.com list is by Malcolm Gladwell, another monoculture writer with one interesting idea: It takes luck plus hard work to succeed in anything. The hard work boils down, in his view, to 10,000 hours of practice before you're good at anything—playing the piano, playing hockey, whatever.
It's not a new idea. When I was a kid, the saying was that you needed to write a million words before you could gain real skill as a writer. At 250 words per hour, you could write 2.5 million words in 10,000 hours.
My point is not to work just for the sake of getting published and becoming as rich as Stephenie Meyer or Malcolm Gladwell. Write for the sake of writing, for the sake of shaping your own brain into a writer's brain so you can see the world as a writer sees it. Even if you never publish a word, you'll be a wiser and more perceptive person.
And since we will always have a market (however small) for wisdom and perception, by the time you're into your second million words you will likely have an audience. Who wouldn't want to be read by seekers after wisdom and perception?
I wish you every success as a writer in the new year. But you will achieve success not by wishes, but by putting three words together, cutting one of them, and putting down another three words. Over and over again.
Keep at it.
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