A blogger at The Guardian wonders whether the decline of interest in reading could be slowed by reversing the trend for bigger longer books. [Via SF Signal] [image from stock.xchng]
“Readable in a couple of hours, a novella demands far less time than a full-length novel: you can get through them in the same amount of time it takes to watch a film or two reality television programmes. If you read one in bed you can actually finish it in one go, as opposed to reading the same few chapters repeatedly because you keep forgetting what you covered the night before.”
Perhaps she has a point; she also mentions that writing novellas forces the writer to be more concise and economical with words in much the same way as the short story form.
I guess this is a reiteration of the “burst culture” argument – the idea that as our culture speeds up, we only have the attention span to deal with shorter works. But will a change of format reverse the trend, or is the reading decline a generational phenomenon with more complex roots than simple attention span?
How would you “save the novel”? Does the novel need saving?
Fail.
People who have to reread a chapter more than once shouldn’t be reading novels to begin with. This might financially save fiction but it would ultimately lead to fiction no real enthusiast would want to touch. Maybe the way to save the novel is to release it in the same format as that new radiohead album… Though that might never happen for mainstreamers, people like stephenson, gibson, vinge, and the like who publish cyberpunk and scifi might benefit from this.
I for one would mourn the loss of novels, I enjoy the long plots and have no problem remembering what I read the night before, or even weeks earlier. Fuck popular culture.
I’ve often wondered about this, but then I remember that short story collections never sell very well. Isn’t the short story the logical result of this reductionism?
The end state?
Three panel comics =P
> Fail. People who have to reread a chapter more than once shouldn’t be reading novels to begin with.
I disagree. Sometimes I have to read a chapter more than once, but it’s not because I watch too much TV or otherwise because of popular culture. It’s because I work a fulltime job to support a family including a young toddler, I have a social life, and I have lots of responsibilities before bedtime. So I object to your comment.
I’d want to graph the data before I said anything conclusively, but my general impression is that the decline of reading coincides with the increased dominance of thick “airline books” and phone-book trilogies — and the decline of the market for novellas and short stories. Longer doesn’t mean better — most of the three-inch-thick paperback monstrosities with endless sequels are crammed full of padding, and barely edited.
Reviving shorter forms of fiction isn’t some devious assault on the foundations of literacy, nor is it pandering to the lowest common denominator. When I look the fifty years of paperbacks spanning my bookshelf, there’s a definite increase in average size over time — but no corresponding increase in depth, complexity, or sophistication of the contents.
“If you read one in bed you can actually finish it in one go, as opposed to reading the same few chapters repeatedly because you keep forgetting what you covered the night before.” = plz to put down teh book and watch ur show cuz u r stoopud
Serpent:
Very true; I have a copy of Bruce Sterling’s first novel on my shelf. Thirty years old, and about a third as thick as the average modern sf novel with a similar type size. However, I think quality was at least as variable in the 70s (and certainly before) as it is now … perhaps the economics of printing has something to do with it? I’m sure I’ve read authors mentioning that there are certain ‘brackets’ of book length based on sweet-spots of production price.
UR Momma: Play nice, please. Hypocrisy and insults might be better suited to MySpace, perhaps?
And then there are those those 3-4-5-…-part editions. Maybe publishers think that when you bought nr 1, you’re bound to want to find out how it finishes. I have stopped buying anything new and SF/Fantasy that can’t finish in one volume. I am however visiting flea markets looking for those books from the 60’s, 70’s or 80’s, filled with short stories.
I think the article is right in its premise but its solution is wrong. Short fiction has always been enjoyed but the market factors about the affordability of short fiction magazines and novellas in the publishing world mean they just aren’t cost-effective to make.
I think the appropriate solution is a new business model for magazines and anthologies – something the internet is already doing. As soon as someone designs a good ebook reader or ebook program for ipods, that new market will come alive, I suspect. If you don’t have to pay by the page for your production cost, it becomes a lot easier to put shorter work out there.
I agree with this.
Looking at my bookshelf, most of the books written before the advent of the electronic typewriter are short, easy-to-read and very exciting ones. I got addicted to SF reading Heinlein, Asimov and Moorcock’s short little novels. These days you can hardly buy a book that’s shorter than 500 pages, some are arriving in 1k pages or more.
You have to go through hundreds of pages of things not happening, things not-exactly-related-to-the-plot etc.
I’d prefer shorter books, it would also enable me to sample more writers much quicker.
And please don’t get me started about multiple-tome series, totalling around a couple of tens of thousands pages… Please…
I’ve been reading Ursula Le Guin’s “A Wizard of Earthsea” pub. 1968. Just over 200 pages. It looks almost frail, like the last Harry Potter doorstop could beat it up and take its lunch money. Yet, it has good prose, evocative details, just enough world building, _and_ the plot moves along briskly.
The growth of what’s been called “fat fantasy” is, I think, bad for the genres of both science fiction and fantasy. It’s the “more is more” mentality that hurts sales (making the book itself intimidating to potential new readers), writing quality (whatever happened to concise language and tight plots?) and diversity of the field (every 1000-page novel takes up the time that could be spent reading three 300-page novels).
I think it has something to do with the “more of the same” assumption, that people prefer familiarity and don’t want to deal with new characters and settings. (Hence the related growth of media franchise books for Star Wars, Star Trek, Halo, et al.) For better or worse, readers get invested in the setting, and the “clomping foot of nerdism” comes crashing down.
Flash fiction is one antidote.
“If you read one in bed you can actually finish it in one go, as opposed to reading the same few chapters repeatedly because you keep forgetting what you covered the night before.”
If you’re going to forget what you read the night before, then changing to novellas will hardly help – you’ll just forget the whole story the next day. 🙂