I had a conversation with a young friend this summer, and since so many other young writers face the same concerns I thought it would be interesting to share this with a wider audience. She asked me to change her name. And since this is my last “On Prose” column, it seems fitting to reflect on the changes I’ve seen in the literary landscape over the last 50 years.
Dear Lisa,
Your parents have been our friends for over 40 years now, and your family trips up to New Hampshire were always a highlight of our summers. I remember one visit — were you 10 or 11? — when it rained, so I fetched my old manual Smith Corona from the attic, and the kids spent the whole afternoon typing out silly poems and haiku. You were best at this; I remember thinking, “If limerick writing ever comes back into fashion, Lisa’s fortune is made.”
But I’m teasing here — and procrastinating. Your dad called last week, said that after your recent successes (congratulations!) you were seriously thinking of making a career out of writing, and could benefit from hearing from someone who’s done just that. He sent along your first published stories, which I’ve just finished, so even though it’s been a while since you and I have seen each other, I feel semi-qualified to offer you some advice.
Let’s start with a disclaimer — two disclaimers. People my age should feel perfectly free to give people your age suggestions, as long as people your age feel totally free to reject them. And while I’d like nothing better than to write a ringing peroration on literature’s future, your own personal future concerns me here much more.
You write exceptionally well — and not just for a person who’s recently turned 24. You have compassion for your characters, originality, imagination, a maturity and ease with matters of craft.
Best of all is the style, your language. There’s not a single lazy sentence here, none of those cliches, half-cliches, and ready-made phrases that pollute so much work. You never settle for an almost-right word, but always find the absolutely right word, and I can’t praise a writer more than that.
I notice a weakness for gratuitous adverbs, but it’s nothing you won’t grow out of!
If a pro had looked at my work when I was your age — if she or he was honest — they would have grimaced and told me to quit. Luckily, I didn’t have anyone to look at my work then, and so here I am 50 years later in a position to tell you that you’re gifted with genuine talent. I suspect you have the character, too, from all I’m hearing — and a career in any art soon becomes a test of character, endurance and resolve.
There’s a pertinent quote from Willa Cather where she talks about those who can write as well as you: “And their exceptionalness comes not only from a superior endowment, but from a deeper purpose, and a willingness to pay the cost.”
You have the exceptionalness. You’re developing that deeper purpose. What you have to decide is whether you’re willing to pay the cost.
Here’s where my hesitation comes in. It has nothing to do with your talent, but with the future of what may turn out to be your calling. When I was your age, wanting to write, I had all the traditional worries — Do I have the ability? Will I ever get published? Will I be able to support myself? — but not for one second did I worry about the future of literature, books and language, which of course at the time seemed eternal.
But are they? Writers have worried and whined about the future of literature for at least 100 years; literary angst may even be a sign of literary health. But just as hypochondriacs can catch a fatal illness, authors who worry that serious writing will soon be extinct may at long last be right.
Even the most ardent defender of literature would admit that over the last 50 years there’s been considerable slippage in the state of the art.
In the 1960s, you could mention Cheever, Bellow or Welty at a party and be reasonably sure whoever you were chatting with would understand the reference. Writers commanded enough respect that Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer were given prominent positions in the 1967 anti-war March on the Pentagon. The Kennedys hosted a famous party for America’s most revered writers — Robert Frost read a poem at the inauguration. Towns of any size had a bookstore on Main Street. Cheap paperbacks made serious novels accessible to all; carrying a copy of Camus around was de rigueur for anyone aspiring to be cool.
Cracks may have been showing, but literature still enjoyed an afterglow following its long dominance in Western culture.
(I experienced this in my own family, where a great-uncle of mine, his two sisters who lived with him, with little formal education among them, bequeathed to me a library that included well-thumbed copies of Hardy, Conrad and Chekhov, bought new in the 1920s.)
Today?
It would be a rare party where you could talk about a contemporary literary novelist and the other guests would have heard of them, much less read them. Critics analyze the latest Star Wars like they once analyzed Gabriel Garcia Marquez — mass culture has conquered all. Writers leading any kind of political demonstration would look around and find no one marching behind them. With the death of Toni Morrison, there is no accepted great novelist left to inspire young ones. The Nobel Prize in Literature committee, knowing it was an American’s turn to receive the prize in 2016, finding no novelist, playwright or poet worthy enough, gave the prize to a singer-songwriter.
Our current president, no John Kennedy, brags about never reading a book and rules the country through misspelled tweets — the antichrist of literacy, let alone literature.
Institutions with either direct or indirect connections to literature are rapidly flickering out. Personal letters written with care and thought have been replaced by emails tossed off in seconds. Newspapers and magazines are going out of business. And if any great-aunts or -uncles are bequeathing cultural treasures to their nephews, it’s likely a treasure from our visual age, the complete series of Hill Street Blues on VHS cassettes.
There’s precious little to set against this. The rise of book groups? The fact that independent bookstores are making a modest comeback? The flatlining of e-book sales, readers stubbornly preferring, at least for the time being, traditional printed versions? Kids loving books, at least until they get to middle school and score a cell phone? The fact that a young person like you, against all the cultural odds, can still find her way to literature? We’re hungry for signs of hope.
I’ve said nothing yet about the publishing business; I wish I didn’t have to. For false promises, hedging of bets, timidity, outright chicanery, no industry can match it, unless it’s Hollywood. I can’t help sounding cynical, trying to talk honestly about a cynical business, but let me do my best to explain what awaits you.
Your first novel, when you finish, will be snapped up by one of the few major publishers left. You’ll get the kind of modest advance that a literary first novel usually commands, but you will be expected to hire an expensive publicist in order to gain the book even a small amount of attention — and so right away you’ll get a lesson in the realities of publishing economics.
Of course you can be your own publicist — self-promotion, rather than being the very last skill a writer would be expected to be good at, is now at the forefront of the literary virtues. And, in this regards, your looks, your camera presence, your social media profile will all be discussed when an editorial board decides whether to offer you a contract.
True, your novel might become an immediate bestseller, in which case you’ll have to deal with celebrity, or at least 15 minutes worth. If the book doesn’t sell well or get much attention, when you send the publisher the manuscript of your second novel it will be immediately rejected, forcing you to find a small, penniless publisher if you want your book to appear. Your alternatives are fame or obscurity; as with so much else in American life, the middle ground is fast disappearing.
So you probably won’t be able to make a living from your work. There are options that might make it possible to continue writing, if you’re willing to compromise.
Teaching creative writing is the obvious possibility. You would have to get an MFA degree first, and since you already write better than 99% of writing professors, attending workshops and classes can only mess up your style.
Then, too, anyone planning to make a career in the creative writing biz should understand it’s riding a bubble right now, with many more students studying to be writers than there are opportunities to publish. The bubble will burst, and by the time you reach your 40s, creative writing programs will probably be extinct, maybe, in smaller colleges, even the English departments that host them.
(Something deep is going on here. Over the years, readers have asked novelists for many things — to entertain, enlighten, delight, console, inspire, instruct — but now, with self-publishing and creative writing programs, the demand’s become “Let us be writers ourselves!”)
Some writers find side hustles, writing for soap operas, Netflix series or the movies, but the side hustle, lucrative as it can be, will soon take over as your main occupation, and you may not have the patience for the vexations of a collaborative art. But if you can’t beat mass culture, maybe you have to join it.
One possibility, probably the most realistic, is to find a day job that brings you a livable income and adequate health benefits, while allowing you time to write on weekends and vacations. Make writing, in other words, your avocation.
I know amateur actors and musicians who do just that; they have careers in some unrelated field, but the most important part of their lives is all involved with their acting or their music. The problem is, most part-timers who have made a literary reputation are poets, and the majority of novelists devote all their energies to their writing.
By this point I’m sure I’ve said something that’s totally infuriated you. I remember feeling that way when I was your age, reading a prediction by a famous editor that the fatal problem literature was going to face in the future was the oversupply of writers and the undersupply of readers. Around the same time, another celebrity New York editor liked to go around saying that there were only 5,000 people interested in serious literature in the whole country, using this as justification for not publishing any fiction that was demanding and/or experimental.
(It would take many paragraphs to define “serious” literature, but for now let’s remember Kafka’s famous dictum: “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”)
It made me furious, reading these kinds of warnings — but I have to admit now that both editors were right. We do suffer from a surfeit of books, a deficit of readers. Every year more than 300,000 books are published in this country (nearing 1,000 a day!), with another 1 million self-published — this at a time when almost 30% of American adults admit to not reading a single book during the course of the year. As one publishing website puts it, “No other industry has so many product introductions,” before putting the average sales of a new book at 250 copies.
“Too many writers and not enough readers!” Andre Gide lamented — in 1905! What would he think of the situation today?
This points to literature’s dilemma in the 21st century: how can the good be noticed in the flood of mediocrity? And as for the claim that there are only 5,000 readers in this country interested in serious literature, I think there are probably somewhat more than that — but not enough to fill even a mid-sized NBA arena.
So if you go on to pursue a career, you can’t say you weren’t warned; a writing life should be hard, but it shouldn’t be impossible, and I don’t want you to become a martyr to an atrophying art.
But that’s the last depressing paragraph I’ll write. You have to factor in the age and scar tissue of the Cassandra writing you this letter. Anyone, laboring long enough in any field, will get to the point where their profession’s future seems bleak. The truth is, when I started writing at your age, the publishing world, the overall state of literature, were just a blur to me; I hardly paid them any attention, concentrated only on my own work — the ideas demanding that I tackle them, plus the torture, the happy torture, of how to work them out on the page.
Here near the end of my career I feel exactly the same way. The world is undergoing the biggest, fastest, most complete revolution in communications it’s ever experienced; what might happen to literature in the next few decades is all a bewildering blur to me.
But I know two things: that the world will always need stories and that your own writing will flourish only if you can convince yourself, when you sit down at your desk, that we’re living in a golden age of literature. You must care deeply for your work, have faith in your inspiration; you must feel like our best writers have felt for centuries — that literature is the finest, most satisfying, proudest vocation a man or woman could ever choose.
If you and others like you write in defiance of the odds, American literature does indeed have a future. If you accept reality and find another passion to absorb your brain, talent and drive, literature will suffer, but the world will surely benefit in other ways — we need smart and passionate people like you to save the world we oldsters have messed up.
That’s the best, most honest advice I can offer. The only thing left to say is this: You have the gift, Lisa; you write like few writers can — and it will either be the making of you or will someday break your heart.
After five years of “On Prose” columns, I’ll now be turning my attention to other projects. I want to thank Sydney Lea for giving me the idea in the first place, Alex Hanson for his acute editorial eye and steadfast support and the Valley News for giving me the space to have my semi-monthly say on writers, books and literature.
W.D. Wetherell is a novelist, short story writer and essayist who lives in Lyme.