Shortcut Fiction
A Quick and Easy Way to Not Write a Very Good Novel
To an editor who is always looking for new and exciting novels, “experimentation” is one of those attractive words on its surface. A word that promises something you haven’t read before. In practice, it is a designation that often means a writer trying an idea that doesn’t quite work. Increasingly novels published by big publishers play with form or take some unique point of view that isn’t conventional (many, for instance, have been written from the perspective of animals in the last few years). While it’s always encouraging to see more creative risk taking in mainstream fiction, there has also been an uptick in using experimentation as a sort of shortcut. A shortcut in the sense of word count, usually—it’s funny how all of the new forms tend to have lots of convenient space breaks and other airy formatting; a 40,000-word manuscript magically becomes a 300-page novel. Or, it might be even more accurate to say that novelists are using experimental form to avoid the messy difficult work of careful constructing a traditional narrative (scenes, conflict, resolutions, etc.). It has led to a rise in what I would call, lovingly, shortcut fiction.
Experimentation does not de facto mean cutting corners. Lincoln Michel, a fantastic writer whom I edit, wrote about and compiled a list of great novels that use wild structural conceits. For a lot of the writers Lincoln mentions — and it goes for his own fiction writing as well — these experimentations in structure flat-out just work. In many ways, when experimentation is done right, it is far more difficult than more conventional forms to pull off (i.e. there are far fewer examples to follow or take inspiration from). That’s where the excitement lies.
The trick is that the great writers don’t lean on the concept or their experimental structure to do the work for them. Two novels written as oral histories that came out in the mid-2000s, Rant by Chuck Palahniuk and World War Z by Max Brooks, are strong examples of novels that were effectively able to use a new form. These novelists adapted a popular new structure in nonfiction — oral history — and gave their fiction an exciting frame into which fit the timeless conventions of good storytelling— conflict, steady character development, tension.
Other writers like, say, Nabokov definitely don’t do anything conventionally, but neither does he use an experimental form as a reason to abandon what they he does well. Pale Fire, a novel that is an epic poem and a scholar’s endnotes to said epic poem, is a notoriously difficult read. But while Pale Fire may require two bookmarks and some Advil to get through, it is about as erudite and hard to unpack as any of Nabokov’s other works. A lot of what is compelling about Pale Fire, if you like this sort of thing, is not, primarily, the structure. Put another way: Pale Fire has all of the Nabokov rigor just in a different, epic-poem-and-endnote package.
More recently, writers seem to make the mistake that the new possibilities of formal experimentation brought about by the new ways we communicate (texts, videos, emojis) don’t require any more attention or thoughtfulness than they do in real life. When arguably these new forms of communication, so fleeting and inherently casual, require much more work to make them interesting as storytelling devices. Take a text message conversation for instance: it doesn’t take a lot of effort to write a fictional one, or to read one, but it’s very difficult to tell a compelling story through this medium. Autofiction — where the narrator is understood to be a stand-in for the author who is pulling heavily from their own life — is like a half sibling to formal experimentation and is often combined with these new structures. Autofiction can be a common culprit for young writers, especially ones with talent for writing smart, funny, voicey sentences, as this historically bold point of view choice can quickly devolve into the cataloging thoughts rather than writing a cohesive novel.
Let’s take one of the most famous examples of both experimentation in form and Autofiction—Bright Lights, Big City, a novel that is talked a lot about in English classes because it is the Ur example of fiction that uses second person point of view. The real trick of the novel however is that McInerney hardly leans on this unique form to do anything in and of itself. The pronouns may have switched, but the eye of the novel is constantly focused on observation and action, progressing a scene and the story. Take a few random sentences from the first section of the novel:
“At a little after noon the Druid tiptoes past the office on his way to lunch. Because you happen to be staring out the door at nothing in particular you catch his eyes, famously nearsighted. He bows formally. The Druid is elusive; one has to look very closely, and know what to look for, to see him at all. While you have never actually seen a Victorian clerk, you believe this is what one would look like."
Novelists have been taking the wrong lesson from Bright Lights, Big City for going on 40 years now, and tend to fixate on the speechifying short passages. If you ever read a story that starts with something like “You walk into the room. You look around a see two people by the bar. You feel the sweat on your palms…” run for the hills, it only gets more exhausting and tedious from there. However, if you look more closely and you’ll see that McInerney’s magic is to easily synthesize this bold choice of form by constantly counter-balancing the oddity of that choice with conventional storytelling. He’ll take the reader away from “you,” often in the very next sentence, with something more traditionally declarative that brings the reader’s attention away from the formal choice rather than towards it. Two quick, and random, examples:
“You sleep through the first ten hours. God only knows what happened to Sunday.”
“At the subway station you wait fifteen minutes on the platform for a train. Finally a local, enervated by graffiti, shuffles into the station.”
For an example of experimentation gone wrong, let’s pick on a writer who is a favorite and can withstand some criticism: Cormac McCarthy. His final novel Stella Maris (and let’s be generous because it was written, most likely in haste near the end of his life), uses a lot of transcripts between the titled character and her therapist. At 208 pages the “novel” mostly goes something like this:
You dont talk to other mathematicians?
Not anymore. Well. Some.
Why is that?
It's a long story.
Are you still working at mathematics?
No. Not what you'd call mathematics.
What sort of mathematics were you doing?
Topology. Topos theory.
But you're not doing that anymore.
No. I got distracted.
What was it that distracted you?
Topology. Topos theory.
The labor of working through Stella Maris felt much more tiresome even though it took far less time to read than Cormac’s “real” final novel The Passenger. Even for a legend, the form of Stella Maris felt more like notes for a novel (and maybe they were) rather than a fully finished project. It provides a good lesson that form can devolve into shortcut fiction, and you can easily find examples of Stella Maris-like novels from much younger writers who don’t have as compelling of reasons as Cormac to rush out a book.
Experimentation with form can be a wonderful thing. When you read a lot, more and more of the delight comes from any kind of surprise. A good plot turn. A funny piece of dialogue. A clever way to blend timelines. Abnormal form — experimentation — is a kind of surprise that needs to be earned like any other, it must force us to consider the new possibilities these structures and perspectives add to storytelling rather than expecting that doing the unusual is a stand-in for being interesting.
Definitely check out Lincoln’s list in the link above, but here are some other novels that use experimental forms well:
Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid (oral history)
Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (second person)
A Horse Walks Into a Bar by David Grossman (a novel as one comic’s standup act)
Set My Heart to Five by Simon Stephenson (a robot’s chat log as it gets increasingly more sentient)
Erasure by Percival Everett (novel within a novel)
People From My Neighborhood by Hiromi Kawakami (interlinking magical realist short stories from different perspectives in one neighborhood)
Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple (mixed media: emails, message boards, etc.)