Classic vs Modern fiction, part 3

A conversation between two writers

You’re reading part 3 of an ongoing series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5.

If you haven’t already, take a moment to read my initial essay and then G.M. Baker’s response. He brought up some excellent points which I will endeavor to address.

But first, we need to confront something which reader Ruben Bix pointed out: neither of us has committed to a timeline for Classic or Modern fiction.

This was partly by design. I’m not interested in squabbling over which year marks the beginning of modern fiction, nor am I well-read enough to definitively say that everything before some time was classic and everything after was modern. I don’t think such a moment exists; you can find novels published today that feel out of place because they’re different than other contemporary stories, and for some of these it’s because they’re classics at heart.

The other challenge is that I don’t entirely know what I mean by these two concepts. For me, there’s a sense that something is missing nowadays, in the modern world of writing. How do you put that feeling into words?

But I do have this clarity: the more I think about it, the more I believe we’re really talking about two separate elements. Form and content. Form is the mechanical choice of how the story is told; the technique, the literary devices. Content is the story itself; the plot, the characters, the theme.

I’m confident in saying that Baker and I agree about content. We both think the old wine is better than the new. So this discussion, when it comes right down to it, is about the form of storytelling in use today. In this area, I don’t think something is missing. I’ve been inundated with modern storytelling, and it works for me. I want to spend some time extolling its virtues in the remainder of this essay, responding to Baker’s specific criticisms.

But to stop beating around the bush: what is modern fiction? Or perhaps: when is modern fiction?

I would say it’s the last forty years or so, when genres stratified, when TV entered its golden age, when indie publishing took off, allowing anyone with an idea to publish their book. That’s when it became valuable to look for patterns, to document the techniques that seemed to work, to develop what increasingly amounts to a formula for story.

Is there anything to this formula, or is it killing the art form?

Baker claims that modern writing can be identified because it’s cinematic. It appeals to the senses, whereas classic fiction appeals to memory. I’m intrigued by this idea, but I need more clarification.

Isn’t this a continuum? It seems like all books describe some parts of the scene and leave others to the imagination. I would say that many classic novels are fastidious about relating the clothing, manner, and appearance of the characters, helping you visualize places and people even if you’ve never been there. It’s true that we might have more restrictions now on when it’s appropriate to jump through space and time, or whose internal thoughts you can show, but this is hardly an iron-clad rule.

Is it really fair to say that classic stories don’t rely on sensory information? Or that modern stories never use memory? No—so that brings up the question of where the tipping point is, and how we know when we’re doing one versus the other. I would be interested to hear Baker’s thoughts on this.

On the other hand, the debate between telling and showing is admittedly a modern invention, brought on by movies and TV. But I believe that showing is less catastrophic than Baker implies. In movies, where this distinction was born, showing is about making use of the eyes, which are the main organ of ingesting movies. But in books it serves a different purpose: it conveys that things are happening without making them explicit. It allows for interpretation, guesswork, and deductive reasoning. It engages the mystery-solving part of the reader’s mind, since they must intuit what is being felt from what is occurring on stage. And that mental exercise is a pleasant feeling for the reader.

This might be the reason that older writing included more moralizing and philosophizing about life. The actions of the story were told in an overt way, requiring less interpretation, so the concepts were where the complexity and depth had to reside. And to be clear: I mourn the loss of thoughtful, deep stories. But it’s a fact of art that there can only be so much complexity before the reader will feel lost and give up, so if modern writing has greater interpretive friction (which is in some ways a good thing) then there must be less conceptual friction.

There’s another factor to consider, which is the emotions of the experience. I love some good telling when handling backstory, history, context—things that may already be dry. In the words of K.M. Weiland, telling means summarizing. But showing works better for creating an emotional connection, for the very simple reason that we experience stories the same way we experience life. Both light up the same neural pathways in our brain. When we see something happen (even in our imagination), there will always be a stronger visceral reaction than if we were merely told that it occurred.

Baker also brought up the point that pacing in modern fiction really just means greater sound and fury—and in this instance, he’s spot on. Hitting the audience with sensations at a ruthless frequency seems to be the goal of many contemporary stories (particularly in genres like dystopian YA), and it’s sloppy writing.

I love his admonition that we should focus on sustained tension, not sustained speed. Sustained tension is much harder to achieve, but means the elements of the story are working in concert. We care about the characters, we care about the conflict, and we have a sense of empathetic suspense as we wait to find out what happens. To be quite honest, I also find it more comfortable to read because it’s less stressful.

Donald Maass is a well-known agent and author, and he puts forth an idea called “Micro tension.” This is his explanation for why a book grips us page-by-page. It’s not the plot, the villain, the action, violence, or sex, but rather an awareness that things are unresolved, and we need to keep reading to find out how they resolve. Building a story this way is hard work, but it creates a satisfying experience and gives the author leeway to head into the traditionally low-stakes regions of backstory or emotions or introspection, all while keeping readers engaged.

I will add that mindless, break-neck pacing also fails to call our audience to a higher standard. Part of the value of books (as opposed to TV and video games) is that books require greater cognitive investment, and for this reason they utilize a larger number of synapses, forge new pathways, and literally expand our minds. This benefit is lost if books erase all the challenges of reading a book.

Perhaps the place I feel more confident about the benefits of modern writing is in the area of genres. Baker derides genres as overly simplistic and categorical, serving to limit reader’s appetites and curtail writer freedom. There’s some truth to this, but I also think he misses the ways in which genres arise naturally and make good sense.

Even if our current conception of genre is relatively new, haven’t many classic authors repeatedly written the same type of novel? Jules Verne had a “brand” as we would call it today, and you knew what you were getting into with each of his books. Writers often made a name for themselves as the person who told stories of such a type. Jane Austen (romance), George Orwell (dystopian), Ray Bradbury (speculative)—all of these had recognition for their excellence in a particular form of story.

I know I dislike certain things: journey stories and surrealism, for example. I’m pretty lukewarm on romance as well. Baker must have types of stories he dislikes. Aren’t there patterns? Aren’t there whole categories he’s generally tepid about, which he’d be happy avoiding? Just like that, we have genres.

I, too, have felt the loss of the pure variety we used to see, that sky’s-the-limit mindset of writers who didn’t feel bound to write within the strictures of genre. But here I think we get ourselves into a subtle yet significant paradox. To quote Baker:

What Harris calls inconsistency in classic literary forms, I call variety, and I rejoice in it. Consistency, as Emerson observed, is the hobgoblin of little minds. Give me the riot of those who wrote by genius, not by formula.

If I’m understanding correctly, Baker desires novels that surprise and delight him with the unexpected, with new and artful connections and digressions, with the full panoply of human experience. So far so good—except that this desire precludes other desires. He wants novels to be vehicles for novelty. But the desire for surprise and for new experiences is different than the desire for stories.

Do these unexpected stories have to be good? What does that even mean? What are the criteria? How do you define good if you’re seeing this technique for the first time? In this way, having well-defined genres and expectations can actually aid us in evaluating a work.

And perhaps Baker and I have differing goals. I do enjoy novelty and creative connections, but I also enjoy the pursuit of perfection, of seeing a concept polished to its ideal form. I enjoy watching a new technique invented by Author A, modified by Author B, and brought to its full potential by Author C.

Is this overly technical? Am I bastardizing the art by looking at it this way? Maybe according to some. But I’m a nerd, a computer programmer by vocation, a worldbuilder when I write, a pianist who reads music, a video gamer. Mechanics, deconstruction, and analysis help me understand the world, and they are a key part of my joy in life.

This marks the end of my rebuttal. Thank you to G.M. Baker for bringing up such compelling points, and I look forward to his responses in the next essay.

You’re reading part 3 of an ongoing series. Part 1, Part 2, Part 4, Part 5.