Great Expectations and an Update on a Very Different Classic
What is the hardest kind of book to write? And our first whale "sighting."
Editor Breakdown: Expectations
In this reoccurring segment we embrace the double meaning
Last week we talked about comp titles in publishing and the pitfalls but also the real value there is in comparing books to each other. This week while reading many, many submissions, I have been thinking about the idea of expectations and the role they play in the day-to-day job of an editor. Quality is of course the single most important component when choosing books to acquire and authors to work with (at least to me). But in publishing we also have to think about the trickier matter of where art meets business, how many people will want to buy and read this book—that’s where expectations come into play. If a category of book is likely to be read by a lot of people no matter what, the bar of quality we are willing to accept goes down. If it’s in a category that’s more difficult or less desirable, then the bar for the quality of that book has to go up. Simple, right?
A few weeks ago, I wrote about book flaws in shapes. Today I’m breaking down the idea of expectations in the form of a tree (or a reversed bracket of sorts, if you’re into the March Madness kind of thing), starting from the very, very top of the tree and working our way down. This is kind of a loose hierarchy I already mentally employ, because quality doesn’t get to live in a vacuum without an audience. Every time a manuscript crosses my desk, I have to answer the question: how good does this have to be in order for me to try and publish it?
Part I, The Top Level: FICTION VS. NONFICTION
What’s more difficult to set out to write, what has greater expectations in terms of quality: a book of fiction or nonfiction? The choice is made on a razor’s edge because they are so fundamentally different in what is easy about them and what is difficult. Not surprising, given these are two highly generic terms encompassing a myriad of types of books.
From a simple writing perspective, fiction is pretty clearly harder to write well than nonfiction is. The reason, I think, is that nonfiction writing is fundamentally far closer to how we’ve been trained to write in school and practice in other places in life. Even composing a long email is writing nonfiction on some level: laying out an argument, asking some questions, maybe including some research, and buttoning it all up at the end. Stretching this out to the length of a book while keeping it coherent is no joke, but at least it bears passing resemblance to something you might have done before, especially on the sentence level. Again, it's not easy, and not just for reasons of length; you might write in your day job—academia, law, marketing—but writing a book for a general audience is a different beast and one that requires an added layer of skills: to choose information wisely, to communicate in a way that’s understandable (and interesting) to readers of varying familiarity of the subject and reading levels, to arrange facts and arguments in an engaging way. I’m sorry to say, but prodigious texting isn’t going to be good training for your memoirs.
At a base level, nonfiction asks writers to adapt their language into a different form, while writing fiction asks writers to learn an entirely separate language. Storytelling is pretty natural, but it isn’t drilled into most of us in school (unlike, say, an argumentative essay, where we know the drill by heart: hook, thesis statement, transition, restate the thesis, etc.). Writing fiction is like learning a new language that almost no one speaks, and one in which the grammar rules are updated randomly on a rolling basis (now you don’t have to use quotes to indicate dialogue—thanks, Sally Rooney). The sheer possibility in writing fiction is daunting: stylistic choices, vocabulary, structure, and on and on and on. As hard as we try, there’s basically no formal set of rules for how to do it—and if there were and you followed them, then you’d probably be called a hack. In nonfiction you usually get plenty of points for saying something straightforwardly and clearly even if it isn’t said in an entirely original way. In fiction, they call that boring or cliché. Writing in a nonfiction book can be just as original, voice-driven, and lyrical as fiction, but these things are not a requirement for a work of nonfiction to be great. Look at Bob Woodward’s famously fact-driven, plain style—and still the facts, reporting, and organization carry his work to fantastic heights. For fiction, good writing is simply a base line for making something readable let alone enjoyable, and it would be nearly impossible to write a great book without great prose.
This head-to-head gets more complicated once you bring in a bit more of the publishing business side of the equation. For nonfiction, there are concrete requirements that raise the bar for what is expected of writers to secure a book deal: special knowledge or experiences, authority, notoriety (“a platform”). As I have neither any knowledge on the subject nor a scientific degree, I can’t just go write a book about biology and expect that it will see the light of day (unless, of course, I up the quality by doing a bunch of research and write so well about a subject that it can’t be denied. See: Queen Mary Roach). Whereas in fiction, it’s more possible, as we talked about on Tuesday, to simply pick up a pen, start writing, and if it’s really good it will find an audience. As mentioned above, actually writing a good novel is much harder, but at least from a publishing business perspective you don’t have to come from a special background, have authority, or notoriety to do it and be successful at it. Look at celebrities or politicians (those who don’t work with co-writers, that is) who write fiction as an example of how much more level the playing field is. Celebrity fiction, from the likes of Jack Tapper, Tom Hanks, Jim Carrey, typically sells well— people still want to know what these notable people have to say, even if it’s fictional, and they have the megaphone to tell people about their books—but the bestselling novelists each year aren’t celebrities. You wouldn’t recognize some of the most bestselling novelists if you passed them on the street, but they still outsell people who are on television everyday by a lot because the expectation is it doesn’t matter what your specialty, authority, notoriety, or background is. If you can write, you can write.
The Verdict
Expectations associated with fiction ,and thus the degree of difficulty in succeeding, is greater than with nonfiction. There are two reasons. One is that the aforementioned “platform” required for nonfiction can be an off-the-page factor that actually lowers expectations for the quality. If a world leader wants to write a really boring, nonsense book, they can and people will still buy it and read it, and so some editor and publisher somewhere will pay that world leader to write and publish it. The second reason fiction ultimately takes the victory by a small margin is that fiction is compared to everything that came before it. Readers are still reading novels from hundreds of years ago that have stood the test of time right alongside novels that were published last year. Shakespeare will never write a book on cryptocurrency, but every single novelist who writes a tragedy has to compete with him for all time. That’s some unfair expectations.
This lines up with an editor’s practical reality of decision making. It’s ten times easier to read a nonfiction proposal or manuscript and know if it’s something relatively quickly (topic, quality, authority of the author) than it is for a novel where you have to keep weighing seriously the quality, personal taste, and the imagined taste of the fiction reading public. When expectations are high, decision making gets difficult, too.
Part II: The Branches
Next Thursday in Part II of the Tree of Expectations we’ll dive into the subcategories of fiction (genre, literary, poetry, stories) and nonfiction (narrative, memoir, prescriptive, history) to determine what is the hardest kind of book to attempt to write, what type of book has the highest difficulty score.
A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic
Progress: Days 35, Pages 181
Don’t do the math
181 pages in and we still don’t know where we are or where we’re headed*. Unfortunately, this week it dawned that there are 135 chapters and an epilogue in Moby-Dick, meaning about 100 chapters are still left to go. That means 14 more weeks until we find out if Ahab gets his whale. It will be hot outside again by the time this quest is finished. When reading it’s always a bad idea to count (the Kindle percentage tracker has been personally detrimental to my health), but starting this week by reading a chapter that was one page was a real reminder how slow this one-chapter-a-day scheme is. What started as a upside to picking Moby-Dick for the first inaugural daunting read is becoming a real burden.
Research
Then you get a chapter that’s a four-part series on the types of whales according to Melville’s personal research and it makes you immediately change your mind about speeding up to two chapters a day. I was fairly warned about the capital “r” Research in Moby-Dick. No one loves whaling culture more than this guy. A theme that’s come up again and again is his archaic, unique style of riffing on one piece of the story at a time per chapter—a character, a place, a plot point—rather than blending these elements together. The research chapters kind of work for him in his own idiosyncratic, unintentionally funny, sort of way. This would almost be a parody explaining how not to put research into a novel in a modern context. Ismael starts his own explanation of his personal classification system of whales with an actual list, laying out the entire list, and then he just goes through it—as in, Folio 1 of 4, Chapter 1 of 5, Part 1 of 17. Thankfully for readers, over time novelists have learned how to submerge their research in a more natural way. Writers have gotten good at making these type of information-heavy elements come in the form of showing an aspect of a character or a necessary action they take in the story. If a surgeon has to save another character’s life by performing a procedure, it allows the writer more natural entry into adding details without reading like a deranged, fanboy technical manual. Maybe Ishmael could have had a reason to explain the different types of whales to a fellow crewmate or how he arrived at the fascination of whale classification and why. Instead, you get a big old list of whales, and that’s the way it’s going to be.
*White Whale
The saving grace of this week is the final chapter of reading. With nearly a third of the book behind us, we finally set our eyes on where it gets its title. Ahab comes out on deck and informs the crew that they are not there for simple commercial whaling but rather a revenge mission, offering up stiff drinks and one cold-hard doubloon to make up for getting everyone far out to sea—we presume, we still haven’t been told where we are or where we’re going—on false pretenses. He’s after the white whale, Mr. Moby, swimming-around-with-harpoons-in-my-skin-from-all-the-whalers-that-have-failed-to-kill-me Dick (zero clue as to why Moby Dick is hyphenated in the title and not in the text; as I understand it, Melville is pretty fast and loose with the standards of grammar). It’s going to be a while until we get there—100 days—but the chase is on.