Is this the end for stories?
A knock-back by a literary agent this week got me thinking...Here's something we all know to be true: unless you're a successful crime writer with a massive audience or a cricket biographer, you're not selling many books right now. The publishing industry is trying to understand HOW TO REMAKE ITSELF to suit the needs of a changing market.To quote Mr T, pity the fool (me, that is) who's trying to hock a first literary fiction novel to publishers who:
- quiver at the idea of first time authors anyway, since you don't bring a coterie of loyal readers with you
- aren't even sure there IS a literary fiction market these days.
I've started to wonder whether people even WANT to read novels these days. We're too busy; we're used to a flick-flick-click style of reading online, where we browse, select, change pathways, cross back ... So here's the question me and my friends have been debating all week: is the novel a dying form?I'm talking about the real possibility that the novel as a form may be DRAWING ITS LAST GASP ...I'm not the first person to say it ('Death of the novel' even has its own Wikipedia page, for heaven's sake) and I won't be the last. My own thoughts on the subject this week strayed into a ramble about form in music, to illustrate the point that form is related to the taste of the time. Let's not forget novels haven't been around forever: the first true modern novel, so some pundits reckon, was Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, written in 1719 (OK, there are heaps of different opinions on what the first novel was, but I'm going with Defoe).Let's think about Western music for a minute (with apologies to the historians for my mongrel historical summary): in the medieval period, music began to flourish in secular life. It was enjoyed in public ways outside of the churches and new forms developed in the Renaissance (like the sung madrigal) to suit these new purposes. During the Baroque period, composers were busy laying down the fundamentals of the tonal system of notes, keys and chords composers use today and in doing so, driving the development of new musical forms (concerti, sonata, opera and so on). In the Classical period, structure was king and the composers perfected forms which demonstrated the power and virtuosity of the new larger orchestras.Then along came the twentieth century and the moderns, who heaped on a bunch of new forms, structures and tonal systems. They invented forms to suit their new purposes; they composed across art platforms (such as for the ballet).At every stage of change, forms fell out of fashion or became IRRELEVANT. Forms evolved to tell stories in new ways. It's the job of artists to burn the old to make way for the new, right?So, fellow knights of the book-loving realm: are we prepared to give up long and satisfying stories? Is the novel an irrelevant form? And WHAT WILL TAKE THE NOVEL'S PLACE?