Festivals, debuts, syntax, and Kafka

Three rants and a celebration

Summer Sale! Get 15% off is you subscribe before 12th June!

Everyone now has access to the GPTs I made for free. One gives advice on reading great literature (based on this blog). One you can ask all about Second Act. One gives you writing advice. And one gives life advice from Samuel Johnson. Try them out and let me know what you think!

My Western Canon salon series with Interintellect starts on 6th June. First, Shakespeare’s Inadequate Kings, but then Emma, and on to Goethe, Turgenev, Wilde.

My thanks to all of you who are reading Second Act and telling me how much you are enjoying it. It makes a good Father’s Day present… Amazon US. | Amazon UK.

---

Fossil fuels or fossil ideas?

The novelists who have participated in the effort to have the Baillie Gifford investment fund disassociated with the literary festivals in Hay and Edinburgh have achieved two things: a diminishment of the arts in this country and some ill-earned publicity for themselves. They clearly don’t realise the importance of the fact that Baillie Gifford was an early investor in green energy, supporting Tesla when others were sceptical. Nor do they seem to care that this country’s problem is not that some people still invest in non-renewable energy, but that our planning system is so restrictive that Ukraine has built more wind-turbines than we have since the Russian invasion began. It has long been the case that novelists have a far higher opinion of their intellectual importance than is warranted, but this episode puts them squarely on the level of footballers and actors when it comes to having shallow political opinions. What a shame that media attention was given to these people instead of Hannah Ritchie or Sam Dumitriu, who have much more to say about how we can mitigate climate change. I admire several of these writers and have promoted their work, but they are fiction writers, not political or economic thinkers, and until they know what they are talking about they should mind their business. There are no renewably produced books. There is no such thing as a modern society—one that has the resources to conduct such debates as these—that can divest rather than transition from fossil fuel. I knew we weren’t living in the age of George Eliot anymore, but I was truly appalled by this episode. If literature is losing its significance in modern society, the sometimes it only has itself to blame.

---

If you write On The Road, you will break out too.

From the recent Esquire piece about the difficulty of “breaking out” with a debut novel.

The vast majority of titles sell fewer than five thousand copies, but across the entire industry, book sales are up. In 2004, there were at least 648 million books sold in the United States, and in 2013, 620 million; last year, there were at least 767,360,000 books sold—a significant increase. If that’s the case, then why does it seem like it’s harder now for a debut writer to “break out”?

This is what is called a power law market, or a long tail distribution. Very few books account for most of the sales. That is one reason why it “seems like it’s harder” for a debut novelist to “break out”. (Though don’t you think other novelists were grumpy about the sales numbers of Dickens and William Ainsworth…?) Another is that people read a lot of things that aren’t literary fiction, always have, always will.

Much is made of the old media system and the fact that a good review could make a book, little is said about the fact that very few of those reviews were available and the internet gives writers many more routes to market. But that doesn’t change the fact that only a few novels ever prosper. We get a small number of great works.

Also, the piece never actually shows that it is harder to breakout today. It’s all vibes. Where’s the comparative data? The comparison with Jack Kerouac is absurd because while Kerouac did benefit from lots of publicity he also wrote On the Road. (His debut didn’t break out.) Nowhere was it claimed that a modern author who had written a book of comparable quality had failed to “breakout”. If you write On The Road, you’ll break out too. As Christian Lorentzen said, maybe the solution is to write better books and stop worrying about the marketing plan.

There is a lot to be said about the changing professional demands on authors in modern times, but none of it was contained in this article. I note from her website that the author of this piece is working on her own debut novel.

Oh what a waste of time this all is! The fact that this paragraph was printed—being little more than a series of non-sequiturs, showing little understanding of the economics of books—is yet another example of the lack of what literary people might call “critical thinking skills”.

---

Bad writing advice. Bad, bad, bad.

Every now and again this piece of writing advice goes round the internet.

At first glance this has some appeal, but it is in fact bad advice. It is wrong. Plain wrong. Flat wrong. Wrong like you did your sums and forgot to carry the one wrong. As wrong as wrong can be. You won’t find this nonsense exhibited in major works like the King James Bible or Shakespeare. You won’t find it in bestselling thrillers either. This is not a rule of writing. It’s just one little trick, rather like those puffs of smoke magicians use when they turn a silk handkerchief into a dove. If you are going to write like this you need to be able to produce a dove at the end.

The error is to treat this as some sort of writing hack. Vary your sentence length to make music! But grammar is logic: sentences are constructed to make sense of thought. The euphony of prose is a result of its harmony between sound and sense, of its ability to pair rhetorical technique with logical intent, and of its ability to control the stresses, assonances, and regularities of tone, and so on.

This writing style is much loved of advertising copywriters and a certain brand of non-fiction writer, but it’s not much of a trick when used for its own sake. If you want to really understand how these things work, read Syntax as Style by Virginia Tufte.

For a good exercise, try re-punctuating the example paragraph. It can be done in several ways, each yielding good results. For an even better exercise, whenever you see it keep scrolling.

---

Kafka. It’s too good.

Today it is one hundred years since the death of Kafka, perhaps the greatest fiction writer of the twentieth century. What else is there to say? Read, if you have not, the short fiction, especially works like The Burrow, The Hunter Gracchus, Metamorphosis, Aeroplanes in Bresica. You will rarely be bored by his Notebooks either, which came out in an extended edition last year, edited and translated by Ross Benjamin. Kafka was a huge influence on Borges who wrote a wonderful preface to his short fiction.

Two ideas—or rather two obsessions—pervade the work of Franz Kafka. The first is subordination, the second infinity. In almost all his stories we find hierarchies, and those hierarchies tend to be infinite.

Borges then notes that the “pathos” of Kafka’s three unfinished novels,

arises precisely out of the infinity of the obstacles that repeatedly hinder their identical heroes. Franz Kafka did not complete his novels because it was essential they be incomplete.

As Borges says, plot and atmosphere are the essential features of Kafka’s work, “not the convolutions of the story nor the psychological portrait of the hero.” That’s what enabled Kafka to become so much greater than his inspiration, Dostoevsky, and it’s what makes the short fiction superior to the novels, as Borges says.

The other great tribute to Kafka, of course, occurs in The Producers.