Why I No Longer Read Fiction

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

I keep having the same conversation most novels. I tell people that I don't think anybody is reading novels any more. Ordinarily, the response is outraged. I have a lot of author friends. Conspicuously, none of united states like the idea that the readers are drying up. So I dig a bit and it becomes clear – they haven't really read a novel themselves in years.

My primary show for the death of the reader is the death of my ain reading. Information technology'due south been a year since I've read a novel. "Well you must but be one of those dumbasses who doesn't read!" I hear some folks thinking. That would be less worrying, wouldn't information technology? But the truth is that, until quite recently, I was a professional reader.

While I was writing my regular column on sci-fi books for The Guardian I was getting through five or six full books a month, and looking at maybe two dozen in part. Plus reading for reviews with SFX mag 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 every bit a kid spending afternoons at the local library, selecting books as though I was selecting magical portals to footstep through. Then I would rush habitation and lose myself in the magic for hours, days at a time.

Of course we all grow up. We can't spend our whole live teleporting to other realms. But, at every new stage of my life, new kinds of volume would open up new kinds of magic for me. I plant The Wind Up 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 electrical.

But at present in my early forties, I haven't found equivalent new voices. The last novel that really caught me was Noah Hawley's Before The Fall. Beautiful storytelling from the show-runner of Fargo, a real talent. Maybe I oasis't looked hard enough. Mayhap it'southward out there waiting to be found. The new seam of novelistic dazzler just waiting for me, the reader, to mine it.

But I don't recall it's me. I think, dear novel, that information technology's y'all.

So…what happened?

There's no uncertainty the novel is facing some stiff competition for our attention. Easily up who doesn't spend 100% more fourth dimension on social media than they did 20 years ago when it didn't exist? The smartphone is engineered to swallow equally much of your eyeball time as it tin. Which, oft, is all of it.

Only I don't believe the novel is as vulnerable to digital distractions equally some might say. We're all HUNGRY for deeper experiences that finish every bit from paddling in the shallows of social media. When high quality tv drama of film releases come forth, we're there for them. Simply not, information technology seems, for novels.

No, I recollect a more serious ailment is afflicting the novel. And I fearfulness it's a self inflicted malady, that it'south going to take quite some time and care to care become over. But that healing procedure tin't fifty-fifty begin until the novel admits information technology has a problem. Maybe at a kind of metaphysical AA coming together for dying art forms.

"Hi. I'1000 The Novel. And I've been arrogantly over certain of myself as the natural habitation of high quality storytelling."

The novel was ever where people who valued real high quality storytelling went to find information technology. Films and tv had their moments, simply they were largely packed with junk. But over the terminal couple of decades the tables have turned. Prestige tv shows are where we get now for the all-time storytelling. Novels seems more than and more than junky. Call information technology the Dan Brown or Fifty Shades effect. Even so 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 find NaNoWriMo inspiring. Yeah new writers, you go for it!

As a reader, I discover the idea of having to read anything written as part of NaNoWriMo truly horrifying. My time is precious, and your l,000 word novel written in a month own't getting a second of information technology.

Increasingly, this is my feeling about the entire field of digital publishing. It's hard to notice annihilation polite to say virtually the Amazon Kindle self-publishing scene, the writerly equivalent of America'south Got Talent, except without the talent.

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

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

All of which is really a great shame. Because ebooks and digital publishing could and then easily unleash a renaissance in novel writing, as a space for experimentation and the development of new talent. But instead we just become endless greenbacks in genre novels, all with their cadre of imitation reviews.

Can the novel redeem itself?

2019 has been my worst twelvemonth equally a reader. Merely I'1000 hopeful, and excited, that 2020 will be better.

Everything has a cycle. The novel has produced incredible richness of storytelling and works of fine art over the centuries. I'g sure information technology will again. Correct now we're at the bottom of the cycle for the novel. It's swamped by really awful work, packed full of imitative genre fiction. But information technology's when an art grade is at its worst that you might start to see green shoots of renewal popping upwards.

If the novel'due south going to win me back as a reader, it will take to tear down and rebuild how it does the art of storytelling. As the boob tube show went through a consummate revolution to give u.s. Mad Men or Breaking Bad, I tin can see signs of the novel entering a similarly revolutionary period.

I suspect it won't exist Kindle cocky publishers OR authors with traditional publishing deals showing usa the way. The cyberspace is so rich with unexplored publishing opportunities, I suspect the novels that take hold of my attention back every bit 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 lead, 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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