So much to comment on here. I think you've nailed this depressing trend perfectly. But I hope I'm not being a Pollyanna when I say I think people will get tired of literary slop, just as they're getting tired of formulaic superhero movies.
Writing to market, i.e. to the lowest common denominator, can be lucrative when you hit the beginning of these trends. There are just more people hungry for those types of books. But a living can still be made writing niche, or quasi-niche, as I do. I write genre fiction, and I write relatively quickly.
However, I've come to realize that I will never stand out from the crowd by following the crowd. I've got to do my own thing, my own way. Some (most?) people won't like it. But enough do appreciate my stories for me to make a living as a writer, and for those people, I am tremendously grateful.
"I think people will get tired of literary slop, just as they're getting tired of formulaic superhero movies."
I agree, and I hold hope to this. It's been a quiet comfort to see Marvel starting to stagnate after pumping out three billion films that I have zero interest in.
Give me interesting/unique cinema and give me interesting/unique books.
“The question the age of slop prompts is whether there is any point in trying to create original work with care, attention, and intention?” - worth reading for this sentence alone. And it's a question as a mid-life author with 2 published books (and working on a third) I seriously ask myself most days. With limited time on this earth, is this how I should be spending mine?
Thanks for this excellent post. "Yet if your odds of failure are high no matter what, wouldn’t you rather make something that you are proud of? Something unique or at least unique to you? Something you wrote following your own interests and by your own hand that no one else could have produced?" I have decided that the answer to these questions is "yes": one slow, carefully pondered word at a time. Guess that's the best we can do right now.
What a beautiful ode to hand-crafted writing, Lincoln. I'm already tired of generative AI and try to steer clear of it. I don't like how it makes us lazy in our thoughts and words.
This slop literature you talk about - I don't get it. It sounds like a ton of work churning out those dozens of books, but why bother? Most probably there will be no financial payoff anyhow. Wouldn't you be better off taking a job at that point, and writing for pleasure in your time off, with the off chance you manage to create something you're truly proud of instead? It must be a game for people of a very peculiar psychological persuasion.
I enjoyed your post. As an old and retired art teacher I can relate. While reading your article I kept mentally applying it to visual arts. The most important part, for me, is the realization that for any artist there must be something that marks the work as being done by someone and is quite personal and that delivers a personal product that only that someone can deliver. Thanks for that.
Huzzah for originality! I spent my paid writing career in technical documentation. Now, I get to write what I believe, about places and people I care about, not repackage whatever message my corporate or tech guru overlords wanted to convey. Even as a child, though I occasionally read the ghost-written Carolyn Keene Nancy Drew series my friends loved, my true heroines were Louisa May Alcott and her fictionalized family, Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family, Elizabeth George Speare's Witch of Blackbird Pond. Decades later, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth McCracken, Kate Atkinson, and many others proved to me you can write something that's true and meaningful and still entertaining.
Points in this post I find most inspiring: 1) people have different tastes (which seems like a permanent mechanism keeping the slop at bay), and 2) writers exist who write for themselves — and, ironically, there’s an evergreen audience for those writers.
If we are interested in “original” content, we should be more open minded about indie publishing. Whatever you might say about it, if a truly original author could not get traditionally published, which is very likely, the indie route provides the solution — it does not toss out every circle because it’s not a square.
The club known as traditional publishing has several terminal illnesses, as your piece suggests, or at least hints
I definitely don't dismiss self-publishing (I still prefer that term than "indie publishing" since that term at least used to refer to small independent presses as opposed to large corporate Big 5 presses) and have self-published before myself. There's good and interesting stuff there.
The problem with self-publishing is mostly discovery. There's just an infinite amount of self-publishing work out there, most of it rather generic hashtag-lit type stuff and a lot of it also straight up bot-scrapped plagiarism or now GenAI gunk. I have no idea how you solve that.
The comparison of background TV to romantasy/commercial fantasy is accurate. I’ve asked colleagues in the space about why romantasy books repeat information/quotes/exposition and why paragraphs are 1-3 sentences tops. They’ve told me that many of these books are constructed with skimming, not reading, in mind. Readers are increasingly not following the sentences; many are moving their eyes down the page/screen from indent to indent. The prose adapts to fit the readers
From my post: "(Many writers) have ideas, plots, surprises. Big glorious ones, often intensely original." Beware, writers. None of this is subject to copyright.
Why spend hours - or even minutes - of a finite lifespan on creating something that can conveniently be ignored, likely has zero shelf-life, and easily swapped out? Are the financial rewards for #hashtag work that abundant, durable, and wide-spread?
Great points all around, from the threat of AI to the glut of cookie-cutter novels and trend-chasers in the industry. Writing is not a commodity. And when it's treated as such, it always suffers. Art should be crafted with care, and it should always be true to the author. Thanks for the great post!!!
I’ve written “fast” books and “slow” books, which is how I think about genre. Though I still want my commercial work to feel emotionally complex.
The publishers wanting to make that market grab is even pervasive at publishers who only did serious sff or lit fic before this moment. The new pipeline is KU to traditional, when it used to be Tumblr or Wattpad. But I will add that Fourth Wing has been on the NYT list for 78 weeks, not 15 as you said. I understand trying to replicate that, even if I am convinced publishers barely know what works in the first place.
This was fantastic, thank you! Do you really think that readers who want unique, challenging, human work are dwindling overall? I guess maybe that's true, but it gives me hope to think otherwise lol.
I don't really think they are dwindling in number, but I do fear that they have less time to read because they spend more time on all the other myriad distractions we have (social media, youtube, streaming TV, etc.). I include myself there! I'm pretty sure I read less than I did a decade ago, sadly.
So much to comment on here. I think you've nailed this depressing trend perfectly. But I hope I'm not being a Pollyanna when I say I think people will get tired of literary slop, just as they're getting tired of formulaic superhero movies.
Writing to market, i.e. to the lowest common denominator, can be lucrative when you hit the beginning of these trends. There are just more people hungry for those types of books. But a living can still be made writing niche, or quasi-niche, as I do. I write genre fiction, and I write relatively quickly.
However, I've come to realize that I will never stand out from the crowd by following the crowd. I've got to do my own thing, my own way. Some (most?) people won't like it. But enough do appreciate my stories for me to make a living as a writer, and for those people, I am tremendously grateful.
In short, keep the faith.
"I think people will get tired of literary slop, just as they're getting tired of formulaic superhero movies."
I agree, and I hold hope to this. It's been a quiet comfort to see Marvel starting to stagnate after pumping out three billion films that I have zero interest in.
Give me interesting/unique cinema and give me interesting/unique books.
“The question the age of slop prompts is whether there is any point in trying to create original work with care, attention, and intention?” - worth reading for this sentence alone. And it's a question as a mid-life author with 2 published books (and working on a third) I seriously ask myself most days. With limited time on this earth, is this how I should be spending mine?
Thanks for this excellent post. "Yet if your odds of failure are high no matter what, wouldn’t you rather make something that you are proud of? Something unique or at least unique to you? Something you wrote following your own interests and by your own hand that no one else could have produced?" I have decided that the answer to these questions is "yes": one slow, carefully pondered word at a time. Guess that's the best we can do right now.
What a beautiful ode to hand-crafted writing, Lincoln. I'm already tired of generative AI and try to steer clear of it. I don't like how it makes us lazy in our thoughts and words.
This slop literature you talk about - I don't get it. It sounds like a ton of work churning out those dozens of books, but why bother? Most probably there will be no financial payoff anyhow. Wouldn't you be better off taking a job at that point, and writing for pleasure in your time off, with the off chance you manage to create something you're truly proud of instead? It must be a game for people of a very peculiar psychological persuasion.
899723
I enjoyed your post. As an old and retired art teacher I can relate. While reading your article I kept mentally applying it to visual arts. The most important part, for me, is the realization that for any artist there must be something that marks the work as being done by someone and is quite personal and that delivers a personal product that only that someone can deliver. Thanks for that.
Huzzah for originality! I spent my paid writing career in technical documentation. Now, I get to write what I believe, about places and people I care about, not repackage whatever message my corporate or tech guru overlords wanted to convey. Even as a child, though I occasionally read the ghost-written Carolyn Keene Nancy Drew series my friends loved, my true heroines were Louisa May Alcott and her fictionalized family, Sydney Taylor's All-of-a-Kind Family, Elizabeth George Speare's Witch of Blackbird Pond. Decades later, Barbara Kingsolver, Elizabeth McCracken, Kate Atkinson, and many others proved to me you can write something that's true and meaningful and still entertaining.
Points in this post I find most inspiring: 1) people have different tastes (which seems like a permanent mechanism keeping the slop at bay), and 2) writers exist who write for themselves — and, ironically, there’s an evergreen audience for those writers.
If we are interested in “original” content, we should be more open minded about indie publishing. Whatever you might say about it, if a truly original author could not get traditionally published, which is very likely, the indie route provides the solution — it does not toss out every circle because it’s not a square.
The club known as traditional publishing has several terminal illnesses, as your piece suggests, or at least hints
I definitely don't dismiss self-publishing (I still prefer that term than "indie publishing" since that term at least used to refer to small independent presses as opposed to large corporate Big 5 presses) and have self-published before myself. There's good and interesting stuff there.
The problem with self-publishing is mostly discovery. There's just an infinite amount of self-publishing work out there, most of it rather generic hashtag-lit type stuff and a lot of it also straight up bot-scrapped plagiarism or now GenAI gunk. I have no idea how you solve that.
The comparison of background TV to romantasy/commercial fantasy is accurate. I’ve asked colleagues in the space about why romantasy books repeat information/quotes/exposition and why paragraphs are 1-3 sentences tops. They’ve told me that many of these books are constructed with skimming, not reading, in mind. Readers are increasingly not following the sentences; many are moving their eyes down the page/screen from indent to indent. The prose adapts to fit the readers
Thanks Lincoln. I write about copyright here https://richarddonnelly.substack.com/p/authors-own-it
From my post: "(Many writers) have ideas, plots, surprises. Big glorious ones, often intensely original." Beware, writers. None of this is subject to copyright.
Why spend hours - or even minutes - of a finite lifespan on creating something that can conveniently be ignored, likely has zero shelf-life, and easily swapped out? Are the financial rewards for #hashtag work that abundant, durable, and wide-spread?
Has there ever been a good outcome when the business people made a creative decision?
Preach brother, preach.
Great points all around, from the threat of AI to the glut of cookie-cutter novels and trend-chasers in the industry. Writing is not a commodity. And when it's treated as such, it always suffers. Art should be crafted with care, and it should always be true to the author. Thanks for the great post!!!
I’ve written “fast” books and “slow” books, which is how I think about genre. Though I still want my commercial work to feel emotionally complex.
The publishers wanting to make that market grab is even pervasive at publishers who only did serious sff or lit fic before this moment. The new pipeline is KU to traditional, when it used to be Tumblr or Wattpad. But I will add that Fourth Wing has been on the NYT list for 78 weeks, not 15 as you said. I understand trying to replicate that, even if I am convinced publishers barely know what works in the first place.
I like fast and slow as concepts! (Fourth Wing was at the #1 spot for 15 weeks, but yes on the list in general for much longer)
Ah yes misread the #1 part!
This was fantastic, thank you! Do you really think that readers who want unique, challenging, human work are dwindling overall? I guess maybe that's true, but it gives me hope to think otherwise lol.
I don't really think they are dwindling in number, but I do fear that they have less time to read because they spend more time on all the other myriad distractions we have (social media, youtube, streaming TV, etc.). I include myself there! I'm pretty sure I read less than I did a decade ago, sadly.