What if I Dont Like Reading Fiction

I've gone from writing a regular cavalcade on scifi books for The Guardian, to a twelvemonth without reading novels. What happened?

I keep having the same chat nearly novels. I tell people that I don't recollect anybody is reading novels whatsoever more. Usually, the response is outraged. I have a lot of writer friends. Clearly, none of united states like the idea that the readers are drying upward. And then I dig a bit and information technology becomes clear – they haven't actually read a novel themselves in years.

My principal evidence for the death of the reader is the expiry of my own reading. Information technology's been a yr since I've read a novel. "Well you lot must but exist 1 of those dumbasses who doesn't read!" I hear some folks thinking. That would be less worrying, wouldn't it? But the truth is that, until quite recently, I was a professional person reader.

While I was writing my regular column on sci-fi books for The Guardian I was getting through 5 or 6 full books a month, and looking at maybe two dozen in function. Plus reading for reviews with SFX magazine and elsewhere. I would trawl through the new releases looking for anything promising. And while doing that, something happened.

I was finding less and less I wanted to read.

How the novel lost its magic.

I remember as a child spending afternoons at the local library, selecting books as though I was selecting magical portals to step through. Then I would rush home and lose myself in the magic for hours, days at a fourth dimension.

Of grade we all grow up. We can't spend our whole alive teleporting to other realms. But, at every new stage of my life, new kinds of book would open upwardly new kinds of magic for me. I institute The Wind Upward Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami when I was twenty-eight. A whole decade of new reading experiences began there, authors like Michael Chabon and Alice Munro came along and reading stayed electric.

But now in my early forties, I haven't found equivalent new voices. The last novel that actually caught me was Noah Hawley'south Before The Fall. Beautiful storytelling from the show-runner of Fargo, a real talent. Maybe I oasis't looked difficult plenty. Maybe it'southward out in that location waiting to be found. The new seam of novelistic dazzler but waiting for me, the reader, to mine it.

But I don't think it's me. I think, dear novel, that it's you.

Then…what happened?

In that location's no dubiousness the novel is facing some stiff competition for our attention. Hands up who doesn't spend 100% more time on social media than they did 20 years ago when it didn't exist? The smartphone is engineered to consume as much of your eyeball time as it can. Which, oftentimes, is all of it.

Just I don't believe the novel is as vulnerable to digital distractions as some might say. We're all HUNGRY for deeper experiences that terminate every bit from paddling in the shallows of social media. When high quality telly drama of moving-picture show releases come up along, we're there for them. But not, it seems, for novels.

No, I think a more serious disquiet is afflicting the novel. And I fear it'southward a cocky inflicted malady, that information technology'south going to accept quite some time and care to care get over. But that healing process can't even begin until the novel admits it has a problem. Mayhap at a kind of metaphysical AA meeting for dying art forms.

"Hello. I'm The Novel. And I've been arrogantly over certain of myself as the natural home of loftier quality storytelling."

The novel was always where people who valued real high quality storytelling went to find information technology. Films and telly had their moments, but they were largely packed with junk. But over the last couple of decades the tables accept turned. Prestige goggle box shows are where we go now for the all-time storytelling. Novels seems more and more junky. Call information technology the Dan Dark-brown or Fifty Shades event. However it happened, I just don't expect to find good storytelling in novels anymore.

Ebooks aren't helping (but they could)

As a author, I discover NaNoWriMo inspiring. Yep new writers, yous go for information technology!

As a reader, I discover the thought of having to read anything written as part of NaNoWriMo truly horrifying. My time is precious, and your 50,000 word novel written in a month ain't getting a second of it.

Increasingly, this is my feeling about the entire field of digital publishing. Information technology'south hard to observe anything polite to say about the Amazon Kindle self-publishing scene, the writerly equivalent of America'due south Got Talent, except without the talent.

If anything killed the magic of the novel, it's seeing the novel utterly degraded and disrespected past the fevered egos who crank out junk and self publish it on the Kindle. I really wish this didn't effect how I come across the novel, but inevitably, it does.

And mainstream publishing isn't all that much meliorate. They don't seem to invest anywhere near enough into developing talented new writers. New writers are published too early, and so disappear before they have a adventure to develop, which rarely happens earlier half a dozen lesser novels have been published.

All of which is actually a bully shame. Considering ebooks and digital publishing could so easily unleash a renaissance in novel writing, as a infinite for experimentation and the development of new talent. But instead nosotros just get endless cash in genre novels, all with their core of simulated reviews.

Tin the novel redeem itself?

2019 has been my worst year as a reader. Merely I'm hopeful, and excited, that 2020 volition be amend.

Everything has a cycle. The novel has produced incredible richness of storytelling and works of art over the centuries. I'grand certain it will again. Correct now we're at the lesser of the cycle for the novel. It'due south swamped past really awful work, packed full of imitative genre fiction. But it's when an fine art form is at its worst that you might kickoff to encounter green shoots of renewal popping up.

If the novel's going to win me dorsum as a reader, it will have to tear down and rebuild how it does the art of storytelling. As the tv show went through a complete revolution to give us Mad Men or Breaking Bad, I can encounter signs of the novel inbound a similarly revolutionary period.

I suspect it won't be Kindle self publishers OR authors with traditional publishing deals showing us the way. The net is so rich with unexplored publishing opportunities, I suspect the novels that grab my attention back as a reader will exist quite untraditional in how they are published.

Have you spotted authors re-inventing the storytelling of the novel? Give me a pb, I'd love to read them.

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Source: https://damiengwalter.com/2019/11/17/i-stopped-reading-novels-last-year-i-think-you-did-too/

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