“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?
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.
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.
Thought I'd actually weigh in, since I'd guess that most of your readers don't read much YA romantasy. It's not my preferred genre personally, but since I picked up a side gig reviewing YA speculative fiction, I've read about 30 recent releases in the past 2 years, including Tracy Wolff's newest release, Sweet Nightmare.
I didn't know about the copyright/plagiarism accusations when I read it, but I was definitely struck by the style of Wolff's writing. I'd previously read and reviewed a current YA romantasy darling (Powerless by Lauren Roberts), which is one of the few books that I genuinely despised reading. Oh, that book made me so mad. Roberts is a BookTok influencer who wrote the book that she wanted to read (honestly, good for her), but it was the most nonsensical, amateurish mash-up of plot contrivances in order to achieve specific tropes that I'd ever had the displeasure of reading.
I wouldn't say that Sweet Nightmare is better developed or deeper than Powerless. But the execution was buttery smooth. It read to me as a veteran writer hitting their mark as quickly and efficiently as possible, over and over again. Every chapter was extremely short (93 chapters in 493 pages!) and set a lightning-fast sequence of very loosely connected dramatic events that don't really make too much sense if you think about it for more than a minute, but you're never really given a chance to think about it for more than a minute. Reading that Wolff heavily collaborates in the process of writing for Entangled makes a lot of sense. Everyone involved knows that they're writing slop and is endeavoring to serve slop with maximum efficiency. It kind of reminds me of watching a good crew absolutely demolishing a lunch rush at McDonald's.
Ironically though, when I come back to thinking about why Powerless took off in spite of its painfully amateur execution, I keep coming back to those rough edges. My totally unsubstantiated take is that Roberts captured the market because while her tropes didn't fit together extremely well, they were just different enough, just provocative enough, to invite speculation and excitement. I've read a couple of other romantasy titles aiming for the same niche as Wolff and Roberts at varying levels of polish. None of them made me as angry as Roberts' book because Powerless had a few ideas that I *wanted* to be executed better and failed me, whereas all of the rest competently created something totally predictable.
Renee! I’m really glad you weighed in. I’m an editor, and your experience with this work was reminiscent of my experiences with manuscripts back when I worked for vanity presses and edited often YA fiction. I relate to the frustration of an occasional interesting / unique possibility that just isn’t executed.
And having not read either of these works, I appreciate your take on both. ;)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Discovery is an issue in all realms of publishing, where glut prevails. It's not like you can't find good self-published books because of all the weeds. It's much more a problem that the same authors are promoted endlessly so that we get a "1 percent takes 50 percent of the sales" problem-trad or self published. Amazon et al. promote what sells, not realizing that more would ultimately sell if they promoted the second tier.
Meanwhile, readers have a bad habit of assuming that "if it's good" it will be in the two 20 ranking. This keeps everyone eating Big Macs and never trying the boutique burger joint. So even if you're a big shot novelist, your books will still face a discovery issue once the media blitz dies down.
I don't see anything unique about self publishing because all the crap will sink as there's nothing to keep in afloat. And when it sinks, it essentially ceases to exist.
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?
“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?
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.
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.
Thought I'd actually weigh in, since I'd guess that most of your readers don't read much YA romantasy. It's not my preferred genre personally, but since I picked up a side gig reviewing YA speculative fiction, I've read about 30 recent releases in the past 2 years, including Tracy Wolff's newest release, Sweet Nightmare.
I didn't know about the copyright/plagiarism accusations when I read it, but I was definitely struck by the style of Wolff's writing. I'd previously read and reviewed a current YA romantasy darling (Powerless by Lauren Roberts), which is one of the few books that I genuinely despised reading. Oh, that book made me so mad. Roberts is a BookTok influencer who wrote the book that she wanted to read (honestly, good for her), but it was the most nonsensical, amateurish mash-up of plot contrivances in order to achieve specific tropes that I'd ever had the displeasure of reading.
I wouldn't say that Sweet Nightmare is better developed or deeper than Powerless. But the execution was buttery smooth. It read to me as a veteran writer hitting their mark as quickly and efficiently as possible, over and over again. Every chapter was extremely short (93 chapters in 493 pages!) and set a lightning-fast sequence of very loosely connected dramatic events that don't really make too much sense if you think about it for more than a minute, but you're never really given a chance to think about it for more than a minute. Reading that Wolff heavily collaborates in the process of writing for Entangled makes a lot of sense. Everyone involved knows that they're writing slop and is endeavoring to serve slop with maximum efficiency. It kind of reminds me of watching a good crew absolutely demolishing a lunch rush at McDonald's.
Ironically though, when I come back to thinking about why Powerless took off in spite of its painfully amateur execution, I keep coming back to those rough edges. My totally unsubstantiated take is that Roberts captured the market because while her tropes didn't fit together extremely well, they were just different enough, just provocative enough, to invite speculation and excitement. I've read a couple of other romantasy titles aiming for the same niche as Wolff and Roberts at varying levels of polish. None of them made me as angry as Roberts' book because Powerless had a few ideas that I *wanted* to be executed better and failed me, whereas all of the rest competently created something totally predictable.
Renee! I’m really glad you weighed in. I’m an editor, and your experience with this work was reminiscent of my experiences with manuscripts back when I worked for vanity presses and edited often YA fiction. I relate to the frustration of an occasional interesting / unique possibility that just isn’t executed.
And having not read either of these works, I appreciate your take on both. ;)
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.
Me too, Brenden. I really enjoyed coming to this very good reminder.
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.
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
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.
Great synthesis of where we currently are with human and non-human art. Great article!!
All monsters devour themselves in the end. I'm just curious how this monster age will end and when.
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.
Discovery is an issue in all realms of publishing, where glut prevails. It's not like you can't find good self-published books because of all the weeds. It's much more a problem that the same authors are promoted endlessly so that we get a "1 percent takes 50 percent of the sales" problem-trad or self published. Amazon et al. promote what sells, not realizing that more would ultimately sell if they promoted the second tier.
Meanwhile, readers have a bad habit of assuming that "if it's good" it will be in the two 20 ranking. This keeps everyone eating Big Macs and never trying the boutique burger joint. So even if you're a big shot novelist, your books will still face a discovery issue once the media blitz dies down.
I don't see anything unique about self publishing because all the crap will sink as there's nothing to keep in afloat. And when it sinks, it essentially ceases to exist.
Agree, the problems are similar in both realms: a few authors gobble up all the attention, and few readers pay attention beyond the top names.
"HumanGPT lit" is exactly right. Brilliant essay.
Thank you!
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?