An excellent essay! You are basically describing how literary fiction is becoming YA. If you read YA fantasy and SF, which is the most commercially successful genre today, you see everything you list here: the present tense, emphasis on character and action, in medias res. The only difference is that YA SF has to play more attention to the setting simply because of its nature (it takes place in secondary worlds), but even so, it minimizes description. This is a terrible development because it means infantilization of the reading public. People of any age can read YA fantasy (I do). But it does not mean that all literature should be geared toward teens and tweens. I think you should collect these essays into a book, as another comment suggested.
The Hungarian Sociologist, Frank Furedi, places the trend he calls ‘presentism’ in a broader sociological and geopolitical context. He just published a new book called ‘The War against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History.
He argues that the past has been delegitimized, vilified and now erased and all that remains is reactivity to the present.
A very interesting thesis. Certainly much here I agree with. I rarely write in present tense.
But I suggest we all live-and-let-live with regard to those who work toward MFAs. Trying to teach artists how to work or perform in any medium is likely to create some uniformity of process that robs the art of its essential creativity. But there is much to be gained from creative writing classes and workshops: inspiration, collaboration, opening one's mind to the aspects of writing craft, sparking rabbit-holes of curiosity, discipline, how to give and receive criticism, experimentation, etc.
Had I never taken a creative writing class, I may never have attemped short fiction. I certainly would never have written a short story in the second-person. Lucky for me I guess, I have not succumbed to the tantalizing appeal of the letters M-F-A. I'm not saying some adverse affects don't result but I think its unfair to assume there is some sort of standardized curiculum that is systematically training writers away from the past tense. I find creative writing professors tend to encourage all forms of written expression, often completing avoiding applying dogmatic craft to student work. Many published authors simply enjoy teaching, find it inspiring for their own work. Jhumpa Lahiri taught at Barnard College, part of Columbia Univ. Seamus Heaney taught at Harvard and Oxford almost until he died in 2013. Mark Doty teaches at Rutgers. Alice McDermott teaches at Johns Hopkins Univ. Daniel Mason who is a practicing psychologist, also teaches literature at Stanford. Toni Morrison retired from Princeton in 2006. Junot Diaz teaches creative writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Barbara Kingsolver is the 24th Appalachian writer-in-resident teaching at Shepherd University. Anne Sexton taught at Boston U and Colgate. Min Jin Lee teaches Essay writing at Amherst College; and Ocean Vuong teaches poetics in the MFA program at NYU, where he previously earned his own MFA. The impressive list of writers who teach kind of debunks the idea that failed writers are ruining literature via "the MFA."
More likely, it's ruination is coming from the destructive affects of unbridled capitalism. The publishers want books that sell, ie page turners. With literacy plummeting across the globe, present tense is more accessible, and by your own description, plottier and more engaging. Literary agents, many of whom are quite young and not yet widely-read themselves, are tasked with selling manuscripts to those cautious, profit-motivated publishers. So the agents who will read our manuscripts have been trained by experience and their own financial-motivation to pick winners to choose books that publishers think will sell. Of course, if our attention spans weren't shrinking, readers would still relish 655,458-word books, like Les Miserables, and literary agents wouldn't tell us to not bother to submit anything over 80,000!
Its a shame that publishers believe consumers prefer present-tense stories. It may not accurately reflect what will and won't sell. But my guess is that publishers have analyzed the data and know that short, plotty, voicy, engaging books SELL. Personally, I feel a heartbreaking loss too. I love setting. I lounging in the cushion of a paragraph and rolling around in its perfume for a while. But just as we no longer are presented with well-researched investigative journalism on any television news show, its a profit-motivated response to audience demand.
...and George Saunders at Syracuse. It's such an impressive list it begs the question whether great writers do make great teachers. It is the case that really good writers emerged from the classes of Toni Morrison or Seamus Heaney?
I ask genuinely, not rhetorically. I don't know the answer.
I've read an account by Mike Pride, former Editor at the Concord Monitor, who took classes with Heaney at Dartmouth and at least, based on his account, Heaney's lectures sounded very valuable.
But creative writing classes are not like math classes where someone tells you how to stack the figures and what steps must be taken in order to obtain a correct and precise result. In writing classes, having someone read a poem they pulled from the depths of their soul 30 years earlier can spark something in a student and set them off on their own creative or research journey. It requires a different kind of teaching. Sometimes a teacher who listens well is enormously helpful. Sometimes the best teacher will act as a moderator for lively debate amongst the students themselves. I don't have an expectation that an MFA student will be the best writer in any given roomful of writers, but I do expect they'll have confidence, they'll be able to constructively offer insightful criticism, they will have some published work to show for their scholarly effort, and depending on their college, they may have an advantage for finding a paying writing job. Beyond that, MFA-people are just like anyone else. And each student arrives at a different place in their own writing journey and each teacher needs to try and give each student what will help the student progress. Footnote, "Northern Voices" by Mike Pride is a book about the New Hampshire poets, Pride interviewed, knew and befriended (all of whom worked beneath the enormous shadow cast by Robert Frost. Its a book I highly recommend. In it, he talks about his drives to Cambridge to attend Heaney lectures.
Very very interesting, Liza. Not necessarily your thing, but this could be turned into a slightly more distanced/cultural historical text, even a book. What the hell happened to literature, in a long generation or maybe two in the US, is really worth thinking through. You're pointing up some important aspects. Anyway, Kudos.
I am actually working on a non-fiction book right now about literary theory and how it ruined literature. I could see some of that fitting into the book as well.
In my next book, now in copy editing (Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party) I put much of the argument in the form of a memoir, because (i) interlocutors and I had such arguments over many years, but more importantly (ii) I think the past tense will help the reader reflect, consider -- precisely as you say in this essay. So good point!
One argument against literary theory is that most great writers have no knowledge of it... You rarely hear of great scientists who never learned what an atom was.
I have always disliked present tense. It just felt obnoxious to me. It was only after thinking about it I realized that it, by nature, minimizes two things I love in good writing: setting and reflection. I don't claim to be an all-time great literary giant, but here's a bit of my own writing that just doesn't lend itself to present tense.
"Here, the moonlight danced. Shifting with the evening wind, rocking with the branches as they swayed in the nighttime breeze, the shadows quivered.
For a moment the red oak leaves glowed in the silver moonlight, hushing the world with beauty and wonder. And then the shadows shifted, and the same oak grove was blanketed with darkness. As if nameless terrors were there, just out of sight.
Back and forth, they danced, the moonlight and the darkness, their cold waltz. Beauty. Menace. Splendor. Cruelty. Grace. Savagery. And as Elizabeth wandered through the small grove, she enjoyed the danger most of all. There was something about the darkness that made her feel alive, as though it let her find a part of herself was hidden in the daylight."
It's a passage I enjoyed writing, and its emphasis on setting and reflection is something present tense wouldn't get at, I think.
Bravo! And thank you for this. Like you, I too have written a novel lately, and like you I have had no success finding an agent or a house for the book. I wrote my novel in about nine months and have spent the last 16 months flogging it to various agencies and independent houses that will look at un-agented manuscripts, most of them at a price, $15.00 to $30.00.
Yes, the MFA-mindset has taken over. MFA schools and MFA acquisition editors and MFA literary agents. I haven't read any of the newer 'literary novels,' nor do I want to. I describe my latest novel as 'aspires to literary,' because I've always had a modest feeling about my own writing and also a reverential feeling about literary fiction.
All the rejection has taken a toll on me. I have sold four books to commercial houses. The first novel I wrote, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, was one of twelve finalists at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, along with works by David McCullough (John Adams), Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless), Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace), and Alan Furst (The Kingdom of Shadows)... BUT... I can't get the time of day from modern agents. It's as if they see my name, intuit my age and background and decide that I am not worth a look.
I know they're wrong and I am not revealing this for sympathy, but only to show the reality of literature and its modern day curators. I love that you're pointing out the particulars: Brooklyn, MFA, present tense. I would add, feminist, LGBQ, and political and world POV, only one allowed.
I hope you find a publisher for your work. And I hope that there will soon be a 'righting' of the once-beautiful clipper ship of literature currently listing dangerously to the Left (or should I say port.)
Thank you for your analysis of this unfair and dangerous trend.
I'm seriously thinking all of you old white guy writers need to team up and produce your own little imprint and pitch it to conservative publishing houses. I was just reading a book of short stories, Night Moves, by Jared Dillian, a finance bro who wrote fiction. It was fun!
Thanks, Anonymous Dude. I agree and I think us old dudes should stick together and help each other. And any old dudes out there who read this, get in touch with me. We can dialogue.
Perhaps this feeling is unique to me (though I doubt it), but contrary to what the MFA profs you cite here might teach, the present tense eventually mutes reading. Beyond some threshold of pages, events and perceptions and everything in between enjoy no apparent priority and nothing feels final. As a result I care much less about all of that and experience the story as a dream, a haze of ephemeral impressions that as they flare, fade.
But in small doses or by proper administration this doesn't happen: intermittent scenes in present tense provide color, and anecdotes' natural dip into historical present absolutely brings the listener in. Crucially, though, a listener is not a reader. Has present tense writing exploded in worship of the audiobook?
As you wrote, certainly there is money in the repeatable, the easily consumed and quickly forgotten, and the comfortably predictable. We dig fast food and microwaves. Why not their literary counterparts? Easier to track along with a story while I'm jogging if it sounds like my friend telling it to me. I don't have time for subordinate clauses while I'm monitoring my heart rate and avoiding that one guy's German Shepherd on the footpath. If I have to rewind it a bunch of times, it's not a good distraction.
And maybe it doesn't matter that less wonderful writing has "taken over," because it isn't a new lament that quality literature should be less popular than the trite. Of course the original and meaningful must abide in a niche somewhere, until enough stumble upon it that it becomes more widely exposed. Art is an ore we must mine, and mining is the business of prospectors. You find what you look for.
I have grown to really detest present tense, unless it's in some of the greatest classics and examples of how it's done correctly. All my own novels are past tense.
I didn't say they were many. Just that they exist. Though Dickens also used present tense some in the 19th century. I don't even care for present tense in general. Just made the point that I do enjoy some classics in the style, and 20th century novels are still classics. My point was that the book has to be the level of a classic for me to enjoy it in that tense.
You don't need a degree. You would be better off spending 4 years reading 3 classic books a week. That's over 450 books, a fair chunk of the Western canon.
I wouldn't know if modern writing is too in the present, for the simple reason that I don't read modern fiction. Too many classics to get through.
I could not agree with you more, Liza! I have been complaining about this for years, and have DNF on every book I've tried that's written in present tense. You explain the motivation behind it so well. How do good stories begin? What made me want to write "a tale," from the time I was a little girl, reading Heidi? "Once upon a time" are four of my favourite words. Best sellers follow the same formula; it's so obvious. Why not just go AI? What's the point of developing a unique voice, if no one accepts your work? A historical fiction novel takes years to complete. My new book took a decade. It's in past tense, because that's the way I feel it, like a film reel from the early 1900's. I finally found a publisher in 2024, after so many rejections I almost hit delete. My books appeal to mature readers of literary fiction. My novel is deliberately old-school, to evoke a by-gone era. That's not in vogue. I'm 67 years old, so I'm lucky: I can always re-read classics like Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby, which inspired me too. I devoured them as a young person. Now there's no way of making a living writing books, anyway. After everyone takes a cut, some more than 55%, the author is left with less than $1.00 per copy. The industry wins. Art loses. There is no desire for critical thought, just sales. It's sad for young people, who, like I once did, have the dream of being a published author. Thank you for this brave piece. It feels good to know someone has recognized that the emperor has no clothes. Such a well-written essay, too.
A friend and I have been getting together for the past month to discuss stories we've been reading in one of the "Best Short Stories of 2024" anthologies. While most of them are technically well crafted, they read a bit like police reports. Same cadence, little variation in sentence structure, and exceedingly readable. I haven't reached for a dictionary or had to reread a sentence or paragraph once.
It's like, sure, an IKEA chair is a perfectly serviceable piece of furniture for sitting at my kitchen table, but where did all the gorgeously turned handmade chairs go?
The oddest choice was in one of the stories we discussed tonight: it was set in 1919 but written in present tense. Incidentally, I had no emotional connection to the character or the outcome of the story. Tense isn't everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is also in my essay pipeline—a piece called "Stop calling it literary fiction. It’s literature" about how genre categories completely destroyed how we think about literature.
I'd argue (and I don't have a degree in this field, but maybe that's a good thing now?) there's sort of a particular type of fiction that's defined both in terms of its internal attributes (complexity of characterization, strong focus on language frequently at the expense of plot) and its sociological attributes (audience among graduates of elite schools with humanities degrees, in the past cultural influence) that you could call 'literary'. It's whatever Sally Rooney and Henry James had in common. This is separate from genre fiction that's usually defined by its setting (science fiction, fantasy), overall plot (romance, crime fiction) or the emotion it seeks to evoke (horror). Of course you can be in more than one genre--there's a huge romance-fantasy ('romantasy') boom now, writers like Lovecraft mixed horror and science fiction, and some genre fiction has attained literary approval.
You're the expert here, so I'll wait for the essay. ;)
An excellent essay! You are basically describing how literary fiction is becoming YA. If you read YA fantasy and SF, which is the most commercially successful genre today, you see everything you list here: the present tense, emphasis on character and action, in medias res. The only difference is that YA SF has to play more attention to the setting simply because of its nature (it takes place in secondary worlds), but even so, it minimizes description. This is a terrible development because it means infantilization of the reading public. People of any age can read YA fantasy (I do). But it does not mean that all literature should be geared toward teens and tweens. I think you should collect these essays into a book, as another comment suggested.
Excellent post Lisa.
The Hungarian Sociologist, Frank Furedi, places the trend he calls ‘presentism’ in a broader sociological and geopolitical context. He just published a new book called ‘The War against the Past: Why the West Must Fight for its History.
He argues that the past has been delegitimized, vilified and now erased and all that remains is reactivity to the present.
To be fair, CS Lewis noticed that and described it as Chronological Snobbery way back in the 40s. :)
interesting.
Wow, have not heard of him! I will check him out—this sounds fascinating.
A very interesting thesis. Certainly much here I agree with. I rarely write in present tense.
But I suggest we all live-and-let-live with regard to those who work toward MFAs. Trying to teach artists how to work or perform in any medium is likely to create some uniformity of process that robs the art of its essential creativity. But there is much to be gained from creative writing classes and workshops: inspiration, collaboration, opening one's mind to the aspects of writing craft, sparking rabbit-holes of curiosity, discipline, how to give and receive criticism, experimentation, etc.
Had I never taken a creative writing class, I may never have attemped short fiction. I certainly would never have written a short story in the second-person. Lucky for me I guess, I have not succumbed to the tantalizing appeal of the letters M-F-A. I'm not saying some adverse affects don't result but I think its unfair to assume there is some sort of standardized curiculum that is systematically training writers away from the past tense. I find creative writing professors tend to encourage all forms of written expression, often completing avoiding applying dogmatic craft to student work. Many published authors simply enjoy teaching, find it inspiring for their own work. Jhumpa Lahiri taught at Barnard College, part of Columbia Univ. Seamus Heaney taught at Harvard and Oxford almost until he died in 2013. Mark Doty teaches at Rutgers. Alice McDermott teaches at Johns Hopkins Univ. Daniel Mason who is a practicing psychologist, also teaches literature at Stanford. Toni Morrison retired from Princeton in 2006. Junot Diaz teaches creative writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Barbara Kingsolver is the 24th Appalachian writer-in-resident teaching at Shepherd University. Anne Sexton taught at Boston U and Colgate. Min Jin Lee teaches Essay writing at Amherst College; and Ocean Vuong teaches poetics in the MFA program at NYU, where he previously earned his own MFA. The impressive list of writers who teach kind of debunks the idea that failed writers are ruining literature via "the MFA."
More likely, it's ruination is coming from the destructive affects of unbridled capitalism. The publishers want books that sell, ie page turners. With literacy plummeting across the globe, present tense is more accessible, and by your own description, plottier and more engaging. Literary agents, many of whom are quite young and not yet widely-read themselves, are tasked with selling manuscripts to those cautious, profit-motivated publishers. So the agents who will read our manuscripts have been trained by experience and their own financial-motivation to pick winners to choose books that publishers think will sell. Of course, if our attention spans weren't shrinking, readers would still relish 655,458-word books, like Les Miserables, and literary agents wouldn't tell us to not bother to submit anything over 80,000!
Its a shame that publishers believe consumers prefer present-tense stories. It may not accurately reflect what will and won't sell. But my guess is that publishers have analyzed the data and know that short, plotty, voicy, engaging books SELL. Personally, I feel a heartbreaking loss too. I love setting. I lounging in the cushion of a paragraph and rolling around in its perfume for a while. But just as we no longer are presented with well-researched investigative journalism on any television news show, its a profit-motivated response to audience demand.
well put. the mfa is too simple and easy of a target - behind that, and many other things, the market moves
...and George Saunders at Syracuse. It's such an impressive list it begs the question whether great writers do make great teachers. It is the case that really good writers emerged from the classes of Toni Morrison or Seamus Heaney?
I ask genuinely, not rhetorically. I don't know the answer.
I've read an account by Mike Pride, former Editor at the Concord Monitor, who took classes with Heaney at Dartmouth and at least, based on his account, Heaney's lectures sounded very valuable.
But creative writing classes are not like math classes where someone tells you how to stack the figures and what steps must be taken in order to obtain a correct and precise result. In writing classes, having someone read a poem they pulled from the depths of their soul 30 years earlier can spark something in a student and set them off on their own creative or research journey. It requires a different kind of teaching. Sometimes a teacher who listens well is enormously helpful. Sometimes the best teacher will act as a moderator for lively debate amongst the students themselves. I don't have an expectation that an MFA student will be the best writer in any given roomful of writers, but I do expect they'll have confidence, they'll be able to constructively offer insightful criticism, they will have some published work to show for their scholarly effort, and depending on their college, they may have an advantage for finding a paying writing job. Beyond that, MFA-people are just like anyone else. And each student arrives at a different place in their own writing journey and each teacher needs to try and give each student what will help the student progress. Footnote, "Northern Voices" by Mike Pride is a book about the New Hampshire poets, Pride interviewed, knew and befriended (all of whom worked beneath the enormous shadow cast by Robert Frost. Its a book I highly recommend. In it, he talks about his drives to Cambridge to attend Heaney lectures.
Thank you for the thoughtful reply
Very very interesting, Liza. Not necessarily your thing, but this could be turned into a slightly more distanced/cultural historical text, even a book. What the hell happened to literature, in a long generation or maybe two in the US, is really worth thinking through. You're pointing up some important aspects. Anyway, Kudos.
I am actually working on a non-fiction book right now about literary theory and how it ruined literature. I could see some of that fitting into the book as well.
In my next book, now in copy editing (Social Thought From the Ruins: Quixote's Dinner Party) I put much of the argument in the form of a memoir, because (i) interlocutors and I had such arguments over many years, but more importantly (ii) I think the past tense will help the reader reflect, consider -- precisely as you say in this essay. So good point!
That sounds like exactly the sort of book I’ve been waiting for. I can’t stand literary theory.
One argument against literary theory is that most great writers have no knowledge of it... You rarely hear of great scientists who never learned what an atom was.
I have always disliked present tense. It just felt obnoxious to me. It was only after thinking about it I realized that it, by nature, minimizes two things I love in good writing: setting and reflection. I don't claim to be an all-time great literary giant, but here's a bit of my own writing that just doesn't lend itself to present tense.
"Here, the moonlight danced. Shifting with the evening wind, rocking with the branches as they swayed in the nighttime breeze, the shadows quivered.
For a moment the red oak leaves glowed in the silver moonlight, hushing the world with beauty and wonder. And then the shadows shifted, and the same oak grove was blanketed with darkness. As if nameless terrors were there, just out of sight.
Back and forth, they danced, the moonlight and the darkness, their cold waltz. Beauty. Menace. Splendor. Cruelty. Grace. Savagery. And as Elizabeth wandered through the small grove, she enjoyed the danger most of all. There was something about the darkness that made her feel alive, as though it let her find a part of herself was hidden in the daylight."
It's a passage I enjoyed writing, and its emphasis on setting and reflection is something present tense wouldn't get at, I think.
Bravo! And thank you for this. Like you, I too have written a novel lately, and like you I have had no success finding an agent or a house for the book. I wrote my novel in about nine months and have spent the last 16 months flogging it to various agencies and independent houses that will look at un-agented manuscripts, most of them at a price, $15.00 to $30.00.
Yes, the MFA-mindset has taken over. MFA schools and MFA acquisition editors and MFA literary agents. I haven't read any of the newer 'literary novels,' nor do I want to. I describe my latest novel as 'aspires to literary,' because I've always had a modest feeling about my own writing and also a reverential feeling about literary fiction.
All the rejection has taken a toll on me. I have sold four books to commercial houses. The first novel I wrote, Carl Melcher Goes to Vietnam, was one of twelve finalists at the 2001 Frankfurt eBook Awards, along with works by David McCullough (John Adams), Joyce Carol Oates (Faithless), Amitav Ghosh (The Glass Palace), and Alan Furst (The Kingdom of Shadows)... BUT... I can't get the time of day from modern agents. It's as if they see my name, intuit my age and background and decide that I am not worth a look.
I know they're wrong and I am not revealing this for sympathy, but only to show the reality of literature and its modern day curators. I love that you're pointing out the particulars: Brooklyn, MFA, present tense. I would add, feminist, LGBQ, and political and world POV, only one allowed.
I hope you find a publisher for your work. And I hope that there will soon be a 'righting' of the once-beautiful clipper ship of literature currently listing dangerously to the Left (or should I say port.)
Thank you for your analysis of this unfair and dangerous trend.
I'm seriously thinking all of you old white guy writers need to team up and produce your own little imprint and pitch it to conservative publishing houses. I was just reading a book of short stories, Night Moves, by Jared Dillian, a finance bro who wrote fiction. It was fun!
Thanks, Anonymous Dude. I agree and I think us old dudes should stick together and help each other. And any old dudes out there who read this, get in touch with me. We can dialogue.
Viva La Liza Libes Con Libres!
Sería, <<¡Viva los libros de Liza Libes!>> Tenemos una caesura en la aliteración, pero así es la vida.
I was thinking more like “chili con carne.”
Perhaps this feeling is unique to me (though I doubt it), but contrary to what the MFA profs you cite here might teach, the present tense eventually mutes reading. Beyond some threshold of pages, events and perceptions and everything in between enjoy no apparent priority and nothing feels final. As a result I care much less about all of that and experience the story as a dream, a haze of ephemeral impressions that as they flare, fade.
But in small doses or by proper administration this doesn't happen: intermittent scenes in present tense provide color, and anecdotes' natural dip into historical present absolutely brings the listener in. Crucially, though, a listener is not a reader. Has present tense writing exploded in worship of the audiobook?
As you wrote, certainly there is money in the repeatable, the easily consumed and quickly forgotten, and the comfortably predictable. We dig fast food and microwaves. Why not their literary counterparts? Easier to track along with a story while I'm jogging if it sounds like my friend telling it to me. I don't have time for subordinate clauses while I'm monitoring my heart rate and avoiding that one guy's German Shepherd on the footpath. If I have to rewind it a bunch of times, it's not a good distraction.
And maybe it doesn't matter that less wonderful writing has "taken over," because it isn't a new lament that quality literature should be less popular than the trite. Of course the original and meaningful must abide in a niche somewhere, until enough stumble upon it that it becomes more widely exposed. Art is an ore we must mine, and mining is the business of prospectors. You find what you look for.
Could not agree more. This has been a huge disappointment for me in reading modern fiction.
You can generally detect the MFA style on the first page—and go find something else to read instead.
I have grown to really detest present tense, unless it's in some of the greatest classics and examples of how it's done correctly. All my own novels are past tense.
It's not in any of the great classics though—that's how you know lol
I disagree with that. "All Quiet on the Western Front" is written in first person, present tense.
Sure—so is One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. There are some very rare exceptions, of course, and it did not appear until well into the 20th century.
I didn't say they were many. Just that they exist. Though Dickens also used present tense some in the 19th century. I don't even care for present tense in general. Just made the point that I do enjoy some classics in the style, and 20th century novels are still classics. My point was that the book has to be the level of a classic for me to enjoy it in that tense.
You don't need a degree. You would be better off spending 4 years reading 3 classic books a week. That's over 450 books, a fair chunk of the Western canon.
I wouldn't know if modern writing is too in the present, for the simple reason that I don't read modern fiction. Too many classics to get through.
So refreshing to see someone write something interesting like this on Substack. This is what I want to see on this app. Thanks for sharing!
I could not agree with you more, Liza! I have been complaining about this for years, and have DNF on every book I've tried that's written in present tense. You explain the motivation behind it so well. How do good stories begin? What made me want to write "a tale," from the time I was a little girl, reading Heidi? "Once upon a time" are four of my favourite words. Best sellers follow the same formula; it's so obvious. Why not just go AI? What's the point of developing a unique voice, if no one accepts your work? A historical fiction novel takes years to complete. My new book took a decade. It's in past tense, because that's the way I feel it, like a film reel from the early 1900's. I finally found a publisher in 2024, after so many rejections I almost hit delete. My books appeal to mature readers of literary fiction. My novel is deliberately old-school, to evoke a by-gone era. That's not in vogue. I'm 67 years old, so I'm lucky: I can always re-read classics like Anna Karenina and The Great Gatsby, which inspired me too. I devoured them as a young person. Now there's no way of making a living writing books, anyway. After everyone takes a cut, some more than 55%, the author is left with less than $1.00 per copy. The industry wins. Art loses. There is no desire for critical thought, just sales. It's sad for young people, who, like I once did, have the dream of being a published author. Thank you for this brave piece. It feels good to know someone has recognized that the emperor has no clothes. Such a well-written essay, too.
A friend and I have been getting together for the past month to discuss stories we've been reading in one of the "Best Short Stories of 2024" anthologies. While most of them are technically well crafted, they read a bit like police reports. Same cadence, little variation in sentence structure, and exceedingly readable. I haven't reached for a dictionary or had to reread a sentence or paragraph once.
It's like, sure, an IKEA chair is a perfectly serviceable piece of furniture for sitting at my kitchen table, but where did all the gorgeously turned handmade chairs go?
The oddest choice was in one of the stories we discussed tonight: it was set in 1919 but written in present tense. Incidentally, I had no emotional connection to the character or the outcome of the story. Tense isn't everything. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Fantastic assessment. Many writers of today are great writers—but their writing is all one style. Yes, we live in a world of IKEA writing.
Now, me, I avoided creative writing because I've heard horror stories about *genre restrictions*.
This is also in my essay pipeline—a piece called "Stop calling it literary fiction. It’s literature" about how genre categories completely destroyed how we think about literature.
I'd argue (and I don't have a degree in this field, but maybe that's a good thing now?) there's sort of a particular type of fiction that's defined both in terms of its internal attributes (complexity of characterization, strong focus on language frequently at the expense of plot) and its sociological attributes (audience among graduates of elite schools with humanities degrees, in the past cultural influence) that you could call 'literary'. It's whatever Sally Rooney and Henry James had in common. This is separate from genre fiction that's usually defined by its setting (science fiction, fantasy), overall plot (romance, crime fiction) or the emotion it seeks to evoke (horror). Of course you can be in more than one genre--there's a huge romance-fantasy ('romantasy') boom now, writers like Lovecraft mixed horror and science fiction, and some genre fiction has attained literary approval.
You're the expert here, so I'll wait for the essay. ;)