StoryTelling

"Today more novels are published in one week than Samuel Johnson had to deal with in a decade."

The quote is from John Sutherland, the chairman of last year’s Man Booker Prize Committee, in his new book - HOW TO READ A NOVEL.

And it's just one more nice statistic to drive you crazy if you are an author, publisher, or bookseller.

In today's NYT: Learning How To Read Slowly Again, William Grimes reviews several news books on how to read books including the aforementioned tome by Sutherland.

One can't help but ponder what it means that so many books are being published about how to read fiction.

Is it a last gasp? A desperate appeal to reintroduce a lost art to a public who has moved on to electronic entertainment in leisure time?

Romantic manifestos hoping to slow down a world that is spinning too fast?

Or is it a note of caution to our industry that output in itself guarantees nothing?

We can't just keep producing more books and more books and more books- we need to create more ways to navigate those books, more ways to get those books into the hands of readers.

I think that the human need for storytelling will never go away. And I think if we remind readers that's what we are doing -- storytelling -- we'll keep them coming back. It was out of fashion for a while. A phrase we didn't use or hear or think about. Then Harry Potter arrived. Storytelling started creeping back into the lexicon. Now it’s having a renaissance. And it might just save our asses if we don't ignore what it means.

An interesting page at Amazon - I'll link but it may change by the time you visit it - shows what people who bought The Thirteenth Tale - one of this fall's big debuts also bought. When I looked, it listed The Meaning of Night, The Interpretation of Murder, The Keep, The Ruins, The Glass Books of Dream Eaters, The Emperor's Children, The Stolen Child, Water for Elephants and Special Topics in Calamity Physics.

More than half of these are debuts. All but one had a huge promotional budget. Not one is a "find". Clearly readers are responding to advertising and reviews and the full court press. No surprises there. But what I think is worth noting and underling are the common themes in those ads and reviews and author interviews. And in the books themselves. (I’ve read at least half of more than half of these books.)

I was struck by how many of them are compared to classics by their publishers and reviewers - Dickens, Bronte, DuMaurier, etc. I noticed the push on the “storytelling” aspects of the novels. And while I don't know if any of them will become classics or I was aware of a certain "old fashioned" quality to the books.  That's not a put down or a complaint. I'm commenting on the tone, the style, the sense that you are entering a big fictive world, that's not part of our present (even when the book does take place in the present) – a world where you’re going to linger for a long time.

In each of these books the author is storytelling. In the most classic sense. Even when the stories didn't hold up or keep me interested in the end, there is an attempt at storytelling in each of these books that hasn't been there for me in a lot of modern fiction for a long time.

It’s an interesting zeitgeist at work. So many different publishers all at the same time promoting the ability of a book to tell a story.

Sounds obvious when I put it that way. But for a long time it hasn't been the way we've been selling fiction.

Maybe selling storytelling will save storytelling.

How novel that would be.

Comments

[Susanne Dunlap]

Lovely post. Very heartening, in a nostalgic sort of way. And the eternal appeal of storytelling is certainly something that waxes and wanes, in film as in books.

[T]

Wonderful post, MJ.

[Terry Weyna]

Perhaps it points up not only the need for publicizing a book, but also the need for good reviewers. At least, that's what a reviewer like me wants to think!

[Lynne W. Scanlon]

William Grimes' article is excellent. I do think you have to slow down for some books, but NOT all books. There are books that are meant to be just fluffy entertainment.

One of the reasons kids don't test well on books they are assigned is that the kids DON'T know they should slow down, put the book down, and think about what they have read or, gasp, periodically stop and recap, in writing, the important elements of the story as it is unfolding.

I disagree strongly with John Sutherland's contention that the reader needs to know a "fair amount about the world that a writer describes to appreciate a novel." While I do think that rereading a book after having more life experience than you had when you first read the book is a great idea and, certainly, you will have a different perspective, I think the books I read as a child or young adult prepared me for more life experience. Don't some novels broaden your horizons and expand your life experience vicariously? "I haven't been there or done that, but I have a sense of what to do or not to do because I read about a similar experience in a novel."

Lynne AKA The Wicked Witch of Publishing.

[JT Ellison]

One of the reasons I read your blog is the reasoning behind your brilliant observations. Thank you for reminding me what I'm trying to do -- and giving me an idea in the process.

[Lisa Guidarini]

Reviewers (of which I am one!) so often use these references to heavyweight classic authors in order to give the perception of seriousness and complexity to the modern work they're reviewing. What frustrates me is I read and love these classic authors and there's usually no comparison between the original and the modern writer. If a writer writes using a London setting, he'll be called Dickensian. If there's a moor anywhere in the vicinity, she's Bronte-esque, etc. Humbug!

But it is all just marketing, and a way to find a "hook" that will appeal to a more serious reader. Usually the more serious reader doesn't have the time or patience for the classic book, but will find his/her guilt assuaged if he/she can read the modern book that's "like" the classic ones. At least that's my theory...