Observatio

The reality of it is that books -- novels, I mean -- are competing with all other “entertainment” media, including You Tube, Twitter, video games, pop music, movies, television, and a few things I’m sure I haven’t heard of yet. And if this really is the case, novels probably don’t stand much of a chance against these more visual, more interactive, and less time-intensive activities (though in the aggregate, people spend much more time, or waste it, doing these things than they do reading novels). The question is, can writers find a way to refashion the novel so that it would appeal on a more visual level, or an interactive one, and pump up its competitive chops in the almighty marketplace?

I’m skeptical, to a great degree, because there’s no getting past the fact that consuming a novel is to read, not to view. And to insert, say in an ebook, video clips, musical excerpts, other sounds and images, or even the voices of characters, would be to push the novel beyond its own “novelness” and into the realm of performance.

One quintessential thing about the novel is that it is writtten by a single person; it’s not a collaborative effort. Introducing video and sound would involve other participants in the creation of the book -- directors, videographers, designers, actors -- and that would make it more of a hybrid thing, multimedia. Novels would need a production budget to get completed, and that would be a shame since writing a novel is probably the cheapest creative endeavor anyone can undertake. I happen to appreciate art that comes from the mind of a single person as opposed to a committee. Collaboration is often an avenue toward dilution, corruption (in the “less than it could be” sense), and sacrifice of quality in favor of marketability.

But it occurred to me, while reading a sample of David Mitchell’s The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, that well-placed and relevant graphics can enhance a novel in a way that might attract more readers. A hundred years ago, many novels were illustrated, a practice that probably ended because of the expense of an illustrator, but I wonder now if there isn’t such an enormous stock of public domain images available that a novel could easily be illustrated with them for next to nothing. Authors could also create their own illustrations with photography or drawing, with collage, or even their own handwriting. From what I can tell, Mitchell uses illustrations to depict certain actual things or events in the book, such as what appears to be a seventeenth or eighteenth century drawing of a breech birth. In many ways, it supports his already vivid description by showing the reader how accurate his description is.

I remember the Griffin & Sabine books of the early ‘90s, when I was impressed by the tactile experience and the vivid detail and color of the materials Neil Bantock used to accompany his words. Not every illustrated novel could be that lush.

Nor could the illustrated novel approach the comic-style graphic novel -- an entirely different beast. The idea wouldn’t be to show every moment in images, only to highlight, enhance, pique, and lead, surprising the reader every now and then with something visual to contemplate.

For instance, I’ve written a novel that takes place in California in the late 1800s, and while working on it I came across a number of photos, maps, drawings, and portraits that enabled me to visualize scenes and locations much more clearly. It would be interesting to include some of them in the book, if it ever gets published (unlikely, it seems), not so much to show a reader what a particular character looks like or to dramatize a moment but to evoke a mood and subtly guide the reader toward a certain way of interpreting the language. W. G. Sebald famously used photographs in his novels for this purpose, and one of the best examples I can recall is Kurt Vonnegut’s drawings in Breakfast of Champions. There were times when his simple Magic Marker artwork made me laugh harder than his brilliantly funny writing.

It’s been a tough task for me to admit that today’s reader is largely different from the reader I was taught to be thirty years ago. Whereas I was encouraged to use my imagination taking in a novel, readers today, especially younger ones, seem to need visual cues because they are less attuned to (or less impressed with) the language. Raised on movies, TV, music videos, and the Web, they appreciate a more literal kind of stimulation. Books, and sentences, are getting shorter. Authors are putting promo clips on You Tube, as if seeing the author is more important to readers than hearing about a book from friends or reviews. And nothing sells books like a movie version, with a major star or two. These days, the experience of a novel has to encompass things beyond the novel itself -- how it came to be written, the author’s life story, how the book relates to the reader’s life. These are elements that weren’t much of a consideration before, or at least the lack of detail in these areas didn’t prevent readers from picking up any given novel. J.D. Salinger would have died in obscurity if he’d come of writing age today.

As I acquaint myself with the Nook, and compare it to the iPad’s bling factor, I can see that the publishing industry will be forced into a more aggressively multimedia approach in the future. The image has displaced the word as our primary unit of communication, though I’m not convinced that means the novel will become obsolete. As long as there is a demand for storytelling, or I should say sophisticated storytelling (and it’s debatable that there is such a demand), there will be a pool of readers for novelists to reach.

The problem will be how to reach a larger audience that will make the novel economically viable in the competitive media marketplace. Appealing to the visual might be one way novelists can evolve with the culture.

All of this is not to say that tossing a few illustrations between a novel’s covers will bring about a renaissance of the written word. Novelists will have to be as careful with the images they use as they are with words. But when the audience has changed, and the survival of the genre itself is at stake, it seems logical and even necessary to adapt.

I don’t mean to say that all novels must have images in them from now on. Only that, sometimes, and maybe more often than we’d like to think, readers will have to be drawn in and compelled to buy a book not because the prose of the opening page is so riveting and lucent but because a picture catches their eye and speaks to them in a way -- subliminally, subtly -- that words don’t achieve on first pass anymore.

Consternatio

Being told by my agent that I’m more or less blacklisted among editors because my first novel didn’t sell well enough to give me a second chance. This is like sending a rookie up to the plate and taking him out of the game after he fouls off the first pitch. In publishing, there’s no such thing as three strikes you’re out. Now it’s one strike and you’re finished -- for good.

I’m livid. It flies in the face of the perseverance instinct every writer is supposed to have. I’d never have gotten the first book published if I’d been inclined to give up after a hundred rejections. Make that a thousand. And so my inclination now is to fight this apparent fact of life and keep going. All of us who have struggled at any kind of serious art don’t like to think that there’s no point in carrying on, and yet, the older I get, the more obvious it is that editors don’t judge a work on its merits. They judge the writer. A seven-year-old “track record” is more meaningful to them than the quality of the book in front of them and whatever potential it might have.

I’m thinking a lot of that old Woody Allen movie, The Front, lately. He plays the public face of some blacklisted writers in the 1950s, during the McCarthy purges, helping them continue to write and earn their livings. It might be time for something like that for me. If I have to outsmart the publishing industry in order to persevere (as I’ve been taught and encouraged to do all my writing life), then, what the hell, I’ll do it. And I’m not thinking of a pseudonym either, because, for one thing, my agent seems cool to the idea. For another, there’s something ironically pathetic about assuming a fictional identity to publish fiction.

No, instead I’m thinking about my wife as my front. She’d be terrific. She’s my best editor and my best reader. She gets my slant, my approach, my style, and my intentions. And to be completely honest about it, she’d be a much better public persona than I am (was). I hated readings and appearances, radio interviews, the constant BS of marketing. She was an aspiring actress when she was younger. Now’s her chance.

I suppose there are potential legal issues that could get me in trouble. I don’t care at this point. It’s the make-or-break moment when I either dig a way around the system’s obstacles or I quit. I’m not quite ready to quit.

In fact, there’s a new idea I want to start writing notes for today...

Opinatio

Laura Miller at Salon has written a piece about the coming revolution in publishing, which will make it possible -- and already has, to a great extent -- for anyone to publish a book. She likens this to a colossal slush pile, that mountain of unsolicited writing that only agents and editors (or their interns, more likely) have had to contend with till now. It’s not a pretty thing, the pile of slush.

As a writer, I’ve always respected the publishing professionals who sift through all that gravel to find a shining nugget. I’ve always hoped they’d see the value in the nuggets I send in, but the more I’ve participated in this game the more I’ve come to realize it’s essentially a lottery. Now and then a talented writer gets lucky, but not very often. Miller’s point is that, if anyone can publish using e-books or print-on-demand self-publishing outlets, it will be the hapless reader who has to do her own slush pile sifting. There is no reasonable way to judge the quality of millions of potential titles -- even the professionals don’t receive millions of submissions -- so the reader will have to dip randomly into the swamp or rely on trusted blogs or other book enthusiasts to figure out what’s worth reading, worth paying for. As Miller makes clear, not much in a traditional slush pile meets either description. “Crapola” is a polite word to use to refer to these brain droppings.

I promised myself a long time ago I’d never self-publish. Even when it became easier and cheaper to do it, I turned my back to that option because the odds of being read are just as astronomical via that approach as through the old system, plus there’s a tinge of pathos surrounding the whole thing. Especially after I had a book published through the old system, I decided that I would live or die as a traditionalist and let others try out the new way. So far, it doesn’t look to me as if self-publishers have found a way to overcome the real obstacle between them and literary recognition: anonymity.

People buy books by authors they’re familiar with. Or that their friends have liked. Or that repetitive ads or cultural references have thrown into their view. They can’t buy books that they don’t know exist, nor do they often drop twenty-five on a title by a complete unknown. As long as these are the facts of life, self-publishing is going to be an exercise in futility, even if, for a little while, you get a buzz over seeing your words in print and an ISBN code with your name on it.

Miller thinks not very much will change with this new model. I’m not so sure. I have a feeling that traditional publishers will find a way to exploit the seemingly universal American desire to publish. For a fee, and not a comfortably small one, they’ll take your .doc file and park it on a server somewhere in New Jersey, and you’ll get to say that your book is available through HarperCollins. Nobody who doesn’t know you will ever be able to find it, and you’ll never get a dime of your investment back, but by Jove you’ll have had a book “published.”

The sad thing is that there’s never been a shortage of people who think they can write, nor of companies that will be delighted to take their money no matter how lousy the writing is. The technology is changing, but I’m afraid the natural dynamics of writing and publishing will always be the same.