Right now, aspiring novelists around the world are sending each other links to last weekend’s article in The Guardian, Ten Rules For Writing Fiction. Riffing on Elmore Leonard’s notoriously slim book 10 Rules of Writing, the British newspaper simply asked a dozen famous authors – including Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen and Richard Ford – to submit a few lines of advice on how to make a novel. Leonard’s own list is also included.
The answers were largely predictable (cut off your Internet connection, easy on the similes, minimize your descriptions) and then partly contradictory (listen to your trusted readers, don’t listen to anyone; write your way through a blank, take a break if you are blank), so they are unlikely to be of great practical use to the unpublished.
Their repeated compilation does point, however, to a paradox often noted in literary circles. The market for fiction shrinks every year, the attention paid to novels by the media diminishes monthly, booksellers demand ever-lower prices, everybody in the industry says it’s the worst it’s ever been.
And yet more academic or private creative-writing programs are created every year, and the demand for advice on becoming a novelist remains furiously high.
Indeed, the selling of advice on writing has become a self-supporting industry: I know young writers who are doing masters of fine arts in creative writing so that they can in turn become creative-writing teachers in similar programs. Any magazine article like this one generates Internet responses as lengthy as any novella. The discussion of creative writing seems more popular than creative writing itself.I'm certainly not going to comment at novella length about this column, but Smith certainly has a point. It's more of a point about "mainstream" literary fiction than about "genre" fiction: plenty of people are devouring vampire novels, fantasy, romances, and thrillers.
The mainstream writers have effectively framed the debate by defining their work as "creative" writing, leaving the genre writers out in the cold. That may give the mainstream a sense of prestige, but it doesn't guarantee a readership.
This is not to say that vampire novels are "just as good as" artsy novels about angst-ridden academics. The libraries in my neighbourhood buy a lot of genre fiction (most of it in hardback, purchased with my tax dollars), and when I scan the new-fiction shelf I rarely find anything remotely interesting. If anything, all those goddam dragons and vampires and detectives drive me straight to the nonfiction section.
Sure, Margaret Atwood and Cormac McCarthy go slumming in science fiction now and then, but SF with literary pretensions is just pretentious SF.
Nevertheless, this blog is part of the writing-advice industry, so here's some advice for the genre writers:
1. Love your genre, but stand back from it. Ask yourself what its conventions are, and why you respond to them. Know your genre and you'll know yourself.
2. Read outside your genre. Study the conventions of other genres: How are they different, and how are they similar?
3. Read nonfiction—lots of it, on all kinds of different subjects. It will give you more interesting ideas for your fiction, not to mention a wider outlook on life.
4. Write outside the genre box. By the time a genre is as successful as the hard-boiled detective story, or the teenage vampire novel, it's effectively dead and good for nothing but satirizing itself. But if you can transform the genre, even create a new genre, you will also transform your readers. You may have gone into writing because you wanted to be the next Robert Heinlein or Anne Rice. Better to be yourself, and have other writers want to be the next you.
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