Where is the novel headed?

Where is the novel is headed?

I wonder, and not just because I’ve published eight of them and have written maybe another eight that are still unpublished. Because it takes a big commitment to finish a novel, writers are forced into a cost/benefit mode that will provide the motivational force behind the project. In other words, given all the variables, including the state of modern publishing, you might decide it’s not worth it to finish that book.

It's not necessarily a recent thing. I have dozens of half-novels lying around from years past that lost their mojo midstream. Or, once or twice, a similar book hit the market before I could finish mine. Usually, though, I do that cost/benefit calc and realize the final product isn’t likely to have wings.

Some of the factors I think about include, at the top of the list, the truth of the market in the 2020s, that literary fiction just isn’t very popular. (This 2017 headline from The Guardian says it all: “Literary fiction in crisis as sales drop dramatically, Arts Council England reports.”) Sure, the big newspapers and higher-brow magazines come up with their end-of-the-year recommendations, which must help move a few copies of the literary titles, especially national prize nominees, but more and more it’s genre fiction that people are cozying up with.

Next on the list is the difficulty any novelist will have finding an agent in this environment. Twenty years ago I could land an agent for any new project (not that they’d be able to sell it), but over the last five to ten years the response has been dismal. Fewer requests for full manuscripts, no takers on at least four of my completed novels after hundreds of queries.

But sometimes I throw the cost/benefit thing out the window and work my ass off on a novel, regardless of its chances in the world. These are the books that force you to write them. They won’t leave you alone, even while you sleep. Subconsciously, you’re working on solving their problems as you go about your days, and things slowly begin to gel.

Mercy Beach, which you can read for free if you subscribe to Disce Pati, was in that category. The pandemic was on. I felt driven to work, if only to stay busy during the shutdowns. Each day I found myself entering this little fictional town and seeing its inmates do things that ought to be recorded. The idea occurred to me to do it as novellas set in different decades, and that made for a fascinating look at how places have character, personalities, and maybe even fates. A few families dominate as well, and the book features multiple generations of some of Mercy Beach’s clans. Then there’s the geological consistency of a place, represented here by the granite peak overlooking the town, Old Charlie.

I doubt that I’ll ever publish Mercy Beach, though, because of where the novel is headed, how publishing has evolved, and my sense that a novella collection won’t be attractive to a lot of readers. It’s hard to jump into the competitive marketplace without at least a little optimism.

Often I think my timing was bad for wanting to be a novelist (coming of age in the 1980s), but nobody can choose the times they’re plopped into. All you can do is be true to your talent and adapt as you can. Unlike earlier eras, though, today it’s not the novelists who decide where the novel is headed. It’s the readers, and they know what they want … and don’t want.