What is the hardest kind of book to write?

Expectation March Madness and Super Whales

Editor Breakdown: Expectations Part III, The Championship

In this reoccurring segment we embrace the double meaning

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The Bracket and Seeding: Fiction

1 Literary

The runaway, pre-tournament favorite.

2 Mystery/Thriller

A long and storied history, probably the most popular and considered the most elevated of genre fiction.

3 Short Stories

Literary adjacent and the proving ground for many writers.

4 Poetry

Very high-brow, an association with capital “A” art.

5 Science Fiction/Fantasy

Sneaky high on the list, but there is a lot of tradition in this category and the current rise of speculative fiction also means it flirts more with heady ideas and literary fiction. There are lots of classics in fantasy as well, although it is probably a mixed bag in terms of critic and reader perception, as there are a lot of low lows alongside these highs.

6 Action/Adventure

Bang bang. The days of Westerns are in the past, but even still these categories are associated a little more with pulp.

7 Romance

Probably an unfairly low ranking considering the meteoric rise of rom-coms in the past few years, but bawdy romance has a formulaic and low-brow reputation.

8 Horror

Horror is ranked low simply because so often other categories take precedent when horror elements are a feature (a lot of mystery/suspense/thriller/sci fi/fantasy contains elements of horror). It ends up being a rather small sliver of a category without a lot of consistent mainstream recognition.

ROUND 1

4 Poetry vs. 5 Science Fiction / Fantasy

Look, there is some bias at play for sure. As an editor, I don’t edit poetry and am a very occasional reader of poetry at best. But in thinking about expectations, it has to be said that the ones for poetry aren’t extremely high, especially by the general public. If the range of opinion is wide from novel to novel, the range for opinion on poems is an endless void that spans multiple universes. Who knows what readers really expect from their poetry? The rise of maudlin Internet poetry certainly doesn’t help the category’s case. Plus, basically no one, excluding social media poets, makes a living off of the art form. Which, in a way, is super freeing artistically—the expectations are much more explicitly lower with poetry. The goal is more often to create something for yourself or that other people might connect with on an emotional, artistic plane without letting commerce get in the way. Finally, we have to mention length. It can take a few seconds to write a poem and even though we are talking about a book of poetry, it still can be done much more quickly than a full novel. I’m not saying it will be good, it will probably be very bad, but that tips the scale and makes the question of expectation and difficulty an easier one to decide; whereas creating a whole universe from scratch in a science fiction or fantasy novel opens up a lot of reader scrutiny. If you write a few decent poems in a collection, a reader might say “cool” flip to the next one and say “I didn’t really get it,” but probably they will not be too put out either way.

ROUND 2

1 Literary vs. 5 Science Fiction / Fantasy

Literary novels aren’t just hard to write because of their high-brow status. Largely what raises the bar of the literary novel over genres like science fiction and fantasy is that there are no guardrails—it can be any type or mix of genres, or, as the label “literary” traditionally meant, the genre of stories that center around relationships. The implicit stakes are also the highest when it comes to literary novels: tell us something unique about the human condition. And there’s actually no expectation (like there is with genre) that the story be interesting or entertaining as part of that essential goal. Yeah, this can get writers in trouble. The writing and language also has to be compelling. The expectation here is that writers write with an engaging style about relationships and say something unique and profound about the human condition. Good luck figuring out what the hell that means.

Let’s be clear, any of the genres we are talking about can also be considered literary novels (you can’t tell me Margret Atwood or Ursula K. Le Guin’s novels or Marlon James’ Fantasy series The Dark Star Trilogy aren’t literary). But there is also plenty of room in science fiction and fantasy, and all genres, for novels that can be successful without having to clear the same bar of originality or existential meaning as literary fiction. Entertainment is the trap door for the expectations of genre writers, and it also makes the decent or above average books infinitely more readable and consumable than the average literary novel. This grand-scheme-of-things win for literary fiction should not take away from genre writers. The lack of parameters in literary fiction also means that it’s far easier to at least attempt writing a literary novel—it can be anything!—than the difficult work it can take to learn the expectations and rules of a genre. But when literature goes wrong, it doesn’t miss the mark by inches. Prestige aside, literary novels come with a much bigger set of expectations and thus a whole lot less margin for error.

2 Mystery/Thriller vs.  3 Short Stories

It’s two narrow losses for our two biggest genre categories in the second round. And largely this comes down to the same reasoning that made sci fi/fantasy lose to literary—short stories simply have a wider set of possibilities. The other advantage genre has over these forms is that the writer has a far better sense of what their reader expects. Meanwhile, literary novels and short stories are nebulous, competing against everything under the sun. At least a mystery writer can sit down knowing their reader expects a crime, some suspects, and a resolution; they can twist these elements in a myriad of ways, but at least the set of rules and expectations are identifiable, learnable.

FINAL

1 Literary vs. 3 Short Stories

Like in the nonfiction bracket we have another upset in the final. I’m here to make the case that the short story is actually the most difficult type of fiction to write and comes with the highest set of expectations. A point of order: this should actually read “short story collection,” not just “short stories.” What we’re talking here is a full 200-300 pages worth of stories, about a dozen individual stories.

Think about the number of famous short stories verses the number of famous, beloved novels? Although theoretically there should be more great stories because they are quicker to write, there are many more literary fiction novels that have stood the test of time with readers. Following this logic, it is easier to write a transcendent literary novel than it is to write a transcendent short story. Look at the list of LitHub’s most iconic stories of all time. If you know a dozen of these then you’re probably either a writer or very well read, or both.

A second factor that makes short stories particularly fraught comes down to psychology. We talked about the shape of a novel a few weeks ago and how quality can fluctuate over the course of a novel: start strong and fizzle, meander in the middle, slowly burn until it becomes something good. Some novels that follow these flawed patterns of quality are still considered classics. Even if they have the second highest standard and expectations in all of fiction, readers are more forgiving when it comes to literary novels in comparison to a short story. In a novel you can always continue reading and move past something you don’t like until you find something that you do. Great parts tend to patch over the so-so parts in your impression. So that if the novel was a C+ you’ll still probably rate it as a good book if you thought 70% of it was great. In contrast each story in a collection is discreet—if you hate half of a story collection and love the other half, you’re going to give the collection 50% in your brain, a failing grade, even if it contains one transcendent 20-page story. The only short story published in my lifetime to have broken through to a mainstream cultural relevance is “Cat Person”, one of The New Yorker’s most viewed articles of the year. The author’s collection of stories, published later, sold decently well  but didn’t light the world on fire like “Cat Person” did. The difficulty in selling story collections to readers is also evidence that the expectations are so high. Most people simply aren’t willing to give most short stories a chance. To finish out this analogy: short stories are pass/fail, while novels, even literary ones, are graded on a curve.

Only six collections of short stories have ever won the Pulitzer (they compete head-to-head with novels). It may seem simpler and less time consuming to write stories, but beware, this is an illusion. When I see a collection cross my desk as an editor, it better be darn near perfect.

LOSERS BRAKET

6 Action/Adventure vs. 8 Horror

7th runner-up (last place) in the end is action/adventure. Of all the genre categories in this tournament, this one has evolved the least over the years. There are still plenty of things to appreciate about a good gun fight, double cross, hunt for hidden treasure, or deep-sea exploration, but the same thrills and pleasures of these novels doesn’t seem to have changed as much as they have with, say, horror, its head-to-head competitor here, or romance, the maybe unfairly ranked 7^th seed given the massive resurgence and new creative energy in the romantic comedy space. Expectations are pretty set in stone and as straightforward as the genre’s name: give me action, give me adventure.

A Page at a Time: Moby-Dick by Herman Melville, or The Reading of a Daunting Classic

Progress: Days 48, Pages 253

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Does Melville Believe in Super Whales?

Last week I speculated that Moby Dick—the white whale—one of the most famous metaphors in all of English literature, might not have been written intentionally as a metaphor by its author. This week we have further primary evidence of that notion. Continuing the ongoing trend of Melville’s not-so-subtle chapter titles, we have “The Affidavit” in which he makes the legal style case that Moby Dick is no legend but a very plausible human-killing, super whale:

“So ignorant are most landsman of some of the plainest and most palpable wonders of the world, that without some hints touching plain facts, historical and otherwise, of the fishery, they might scout at Moby Dick as a monstrous fable, or still worse and more detestable, a hideous and intolerable allegory.” (pg. 223) [emphasis mine]

Nearing the halfway mark of Moby-Dick, my impression is that the author is writing more of an  an adventure novel than the book’s reputation as a literary work might have you believe. The chapter, which contains passages like the above, is a fairly old-school, this-really-happened style of adventure story technique. Maybe Melville did mean for this to be a grand literary novel about nature, interpersonal struggles, and the corrosive effect of vengeance. It seems as likely a possibility, if not more so, that Melville was obsessed with whaling and thought it was the height of manliness and wanted to write an epic story about a quest to go take out the most infamous whale in the ocean. It might be fiction, but Melville is pretty gung-ho in making the case that a man-hunting, tough-as-nails whale could reasonably exist.

The beauty of fiction, especially classics, is that intentions of the author cease to matter as much as time goes on. Moby-Dick, as metaphor, has life of its own. I’ve cherry-picked some parts of the novel that run counter to the idea of the novel as purely literary work that probes the depths of the soul. I’ve done this largely out of surprise—so much of what has stood out in my reading experience is the exuberance and distinct lack of bitterness that you might expect for a novel that’s often used for its metaphors of futility and anguish (most recently the Oscar winning movie The Whale). One can, and many certainly have, done the opposite as I have and pulled the right parts of this 600-page book to illustrate dark, more traditionally literary themes. Old texts, long texts, are very good at fitting into the eye of the beholder. But for me, halfway through it’s more the strangeness of Melville’s phrasing, his juvenile wonder of whales, and his oddball observations of his characters that have stuck with me more than his probing of the human condition has.