The 2 Non-Artistic Professions Running
the Artistic World of Contemporary Fiction

MY ANNUAL RANT

I promised last week that I’d explain this week why almost all of what’s widely publicized as contemporary fiction these days falls into the lowest-quality categories that exist: Telling really badly, Telling mediocrely-to-competently, and Showing really badly.

I’ll tell you straight off it’s a goddamn artistic crime, is what it is, but this is what we have and what we have had in the U.S. gradually more and more since the 1980s.

Why?

Well, it was actually all clarified rather succinctly, if accidentally, last week in an article I’m not going to link to. The reason I’m not going to link to it is because almost everything in that article is incorrect. But the reason it’s incorrect is that it was written about the publishing industry by someone who doesn’t understand the artistic product sold by the publishing industry—fiction—not even enough to be able to tell that if you compare a Pulitzer Prize-winner of 2009 to a piece of throwaway pulp fiction of 1945 and find that the pulp fiction is vastly better written—more vividly presented, more powerfully plotted, more closely characterized, more detailed, more telling, simply all-around more engaging to the average reader—then something is truly, seriously, devastatingly wrong with your contemporary artistic product.

And through being so wildly mistaken about the art of fiction, that article clarified for me what’s happened to the American publishing industry in the past thirty years, how we got to a place where the fiction that’s allotted the most publisher support is chosen for its anxious reading public by the most non-artistic people involved in its production.

That’s right—what is brought to the reading public’s attention from all directions and therefore bought by the reading public in all directions is not the very best contemporary fiction being published today, but the fiction most attractive to non-artistic people.

People who don’t know fiction. Who don’t know why we read it, what we get out of it, or how great writers of the past became the great writers we all agree are great today. People who look at a novel that a consumer desperately wants to fall in love with (a novel the creator desperately wants the consumer to fall in love with) and ask themselves, “How many zeros?”

And just who are the most non-artistic professional people in publishing today? Well, of course, that would be:

  1. business managers, and
  2. marketers

Because those people have brains, they have strengths, and they have specialties. . .diametrically-opposed to the arts. They think incredibly logically. They value quantity over quality. They emphasize, above all else, their enormous facility with money.

And they do have facility managing money! At least I’m willing to believe they do. They manage multi-multi-million-dollar corporations, oversee the buying and selling of more than 50 million dollars’ worth of product every year, shuffle through the chute literally thousands of individually-designed products from the creators—many of them endearingly hapless in their desperation to supply these products for little or no monetary reward of their own—through many internal layers of money-changing hands, to the consumers who, again, fall over themselves to get their hard-earned bucks into those money-changing hands.

I sure couldn’t do that stuff. My brain doesn’t work that way. I don’t have their strengths. My strengths lie in the creation of the artistic product.

Of course, like many overly-eager applicants of the glories of capitalism, the business managers and marketers are finding that, after a certain amount of time, this numbers-based business model to which they’ve transferred the fiction publishing industry is FAILING DRASTICALLY—partly due to economic conditions way beyond their control and partly due to the fact that if you don’t understand your product you have absolutely no grounds on which to base predictions of its success or failure.

Seriously, folks. “What is it?” “I don’t know. But maybe people will buy it from us.”

This is what Jonathan Galassi, president and publisher of Farrar, Straus and Giroux (and one of the last standing pillars dedicated to art in the industry), calls, “throwing it at the wall to see what sticks.” (P&W interview)

Business managers. And marketers. Non-artistic people.

But how did this happen? It hasn’t always been this way, has it? How did non-artistic people come to run the world of a thriving contemporary art?

There was a time when publishers’ editors—the people who both acquired fiction and polished it artistically for publication—were more artists than business- or salespeople. William Abrahams. Robert Gottlieb. Pat Covici. Malcolm Cowley. They held their jobs based on their ability to make an artistic product the very best artistic product it could possibly be. (Not, as Gottlieb proved, because they were cutthroat competitors or even, as Covici proved, because they were just that wildly successful at managing a business.)

But that is simply no longer true—even more than ever since Black Wednesday of December, 2008.

And how that happened is what the author of this article, who likes to describe himself as having been in the publishing industry for 25 years (yes, since the 1980s), calls turning publishing into a “business” rather than a “rich man’s hobby.”

In 1979 an IRS loophole was closed to prevent a tools manufacturer from working the system to avoid paying annual tax on warehoused product, effectively making it a financial catastrophe for publishing houses to warehouse backlists. And in the mid-1980s economic conditions conspired to create a climate in which many small-but-reputable American publishing houses were bought up by large (sometimes overseas) corporations as financial investments. And some people who were the long-time creative pillars of the publishing industry, who had overseen decades of such fiction as The Thin Man, The Big Sleep, Wise Blood, The Lord of the Rings, Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Tortilla Flat, Ship of Fools, Portnoy’s Complaint, all the great novels of the twentieth century, et cetera, et cetera. . .moved around. Some, honestly, just retired.

But this author is saying that, before the 1980s, publishing was simply not a business. It was only—so sad!—a rich people’s hobby.

Think about that for a minute. Fiction publishing was not a business when it was run for the purpose of creating an artistic product. Not only that! But here’s the unspoken insinuation: a rich people’s hobby is no kind of intelligent model for an artistic industry.

Because, without an economic system in which the arts were supported by rich hobbyists who just felt like supporting them, we would have no Leonard Da Vinci or Michelangelo, no Raphael or Titian or Botticelli, no Beethoven or Mozart or Bach, no ballet or opera or symphony or theater, no Chaucer or Shakespeare or Ben Jonson or John Donne. . .in fact, no great history of English literature.

But we would have McDonald’s!


The Art and Craft of Fiction:
A Practitioner’s Manual

by Victoria Mixon

“The freshest and most relevant advice you’ll find.”
—Helen Gallagher, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“Wonderfully useful, bracing and humorous. . .it demystifies the essential aspects of the craft while paying homage to the art.”
Millicent Dillon, five time O.Henry Award winner and author of the PEN/Faulkner-nominated Harry Gold

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KM Weiland, author of Outlining Your Novel


The Art and Craft of Story: 2nd Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

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Roz Morris, best selling ghostwriter and author of Nail Your Novel

“As much a gift to writers as an indispensible resource. . .in a never-done-before manner that inspires while it teaches. Highly recommended.”
Larry Brooks, author of four bestselling thrillers and Story Engineering

“I wish I’d had The Art & Craft of Story when I began work on my first novel.”
Lucia Orth, author of the critically-acclaimed Baby Jesus Pawn Shop


8 thoughts on “The 2 Non-Artistic Professions Running
the Artistic World of Contemporary Fiction

  1. Great post, Victoria. I think you succinctly summarized the dilemma facing all art and artists today: Do I create to make a living,or do I create to fully express my artistic vision and make my art as great as I am able? I think most artists have answered with a resounding, ‘Yes! I need to eat.’
    I see a similar parallel in the music business, starting in the 1980s when videos became popular and easily accessible. All of a sudden, musical talent was relegated to the back seat, and visual image became everything. Dancing, sexy clothing, lurid, suggestive lyrics (or downright crude), and camera presence became the most important ingredients for a successful album or CD.
    Nowadays, anyone who can create basic rhymes, has a minimal amount of rhythmic coordination, knows a few guitar chords, can pound a rudimentary beat on a drum, and/or scream lyrics at maximum volume, can be a ‘rock star’. Sheesh, Gimme a break! How many songs produced in the 90s, 00s, 10s and beyond will become classics in the next 50 years? How many current number one hits will be remembered five years from now? My prediction: none and none.
    I feel the same about literature. I doubt we’ll see many, if any classics produced unless those rich benefactors get back into the ‘art for art’s sake’ mode.
    All that said, I’m writing a suspense novel with the intent that it becomes a big seller and gets turned into a major motion picture starring George Clooney, Stanley Tucci, and Sandra Bullock! 😉
    I discovered your blog through Jane Friedman’s “There are no Rules’ blog and will become a regular reader of yours from now on. Keep up the quality posting.

    Cheers,
    Chris

  2. Chris says:

    Oops, sorry for the smiley face goof up. That’s ‘Jane Friedman’. (And no slur on her intended.)

    Chris

  3. Kathryn says:

    Yes, I do believe we’ve smart business practiced ourselves about as far down as we can go. People are getting wiser, I think, thanks in part to the Internet and certain ranting bloggers, 🙂 (BTW, didn’t you have an annual rant last month?) but also because our souls eventually need to be fed more than sizzle.

    I do love the idea of a rich patron swooping in. I’ll try to have my manuscript ready when the next de’ Medici shows up.

  4. Victoria says:

    (BTW, didn’t you have an annual rant last month?)

    Did I? I guess I’d better cop to it and start calling them my monthly rants. But it would eventually become clear that ALL my posts are rants.

  5. Thanks for posting your rant – it very well captured the inner struggle in my head right now. I am just starting to get the motivation to write a book, but it is very hard to break away from a stable job doing what my boss says to doing my hobby/passion but having to mold that to what the industry says makes money. All of a sudden, I’m not sure which option is really better. I have both ideas for fiction and non fiction books, and am in the middle of researching for the non fiction book. I just completed NaNo, which was a great feeling…

    I’ve been reading up on a lot of blogs and I’ve heard that a lot of publishers would prefer to sign a new author if the manuscript is already completed and if there is potential for a series of books. In your opinion, how true is this? And also, how different are the rules for fiction vs non fiction? The majority of what I’ve read is concerning fiction.

    Last thought, do you feel that self publishing helps preserve the art of fiction? Maybe if you do have a well established following, you can still eat and create works of art?

    Thanks for the rant and listening to mine and helping to answer my newbie questions.

  6. Errrgg, I’m struggling with this now. I write fiction, but it’s all about branding, and various income streams, and platforms, and series (honestly, I wouldn’t mind turning my police book into a series, but I’d like to write some OTHER things too!). The mind reels and it’s hard to focus. Then there’s the whole paying-the-bills thing, in an economy that has turned all artistic pursuits into hobbies.

    Tell me again why I want to do this?

  7. I agree with you, Victoria, and I’m tired of buying a highly touted book only to find that it’s lacklustre. People read about books selling in a few days for a few million, but what they don’t realize is that those books contained elements that made them easy to market. In some cases, they were able to ride on the coattails of previous bestsellers. They, and the previous bestsellers, aren’t necessarily “good” literature, never mind “great.”

    I think book buyers need to write to the publishers and tell them they’re tired of poorly written books. When I’ve found some books terribly disappointing, I’ve even sent them back to the publisher with a detailed letter as to why I don’t care for them. The key probably lies in early education of what makes certain books great and why others fail to attain greatness. The professor I sometimes write with has told me that students will sometimes come into his college classroom thinking “The Da Vinci Code” is “great” literature and leave loving “The Sound and the Fury” or “The Great Gatsby.” That’s when he says he knows his teachings have gotten through. The success of poorly written books shows the public needs educating. I don’t mean to sound condescending, but the teaching of great literature has suffered in the last decade or two, there’s no doubt about that.

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