In Praise of Brevity

I am not a fan of long books. It isn't that I have no attention span; I can stare at a wall like a mental patient of lithium, I love to watch paint dry. Hell, My general rule for movies is that if it's under 2 hours, it's probably a waste of time. I believe, whole-heartedly, in brevity.

Sure, there are some really good books out there that clock in on the obnoxious side of word-count. But odds are that if you your name is not Tolstoy or Joyce, you flat-out do not have to the talent to justify anything over 100,000 words. Maybe talent isn't the word.

Purpose is. There is no purpose in much of anything over 100k words. If it takes you 100k words or more to get to your point, you are probably wasting the time of your reader. And Saint Vonnegut says that you shouldn't do that.

Probably the only thing I've ever agreed with Vonnegut on, even though I never met the man and do not like 95% of his output. Ol' Kurt ain't my cup of tea. Shit. I'm a JG Ballard man (may he Rest In Peace).

There really isn't a good reason for any novel being published to be over 80k words long, and IMHO, that is me being generous. JG Ballard has this book called Concrete Island. It's about this guy who stuck on a highway median with crazy person and her mentally-handicapable foil. It's one of the best books I have ever read, and I have read a lot. There are MFA and English Grad Students who haven't read as much as me. Concrete Island clocks in at (rough back-of-envelope claculation) 55k words. Perfect novel length, I must say.

Brevity gives you, of course, conciseness. This is an important thing. After all, a novel is essentially a very long metaphor. Metaphors are best kept short, else they grow roots and become tangled with the sewer lines of the author's subconscious. You spread a work that is essentially about suburban ennui over the course of 576 pages (Freedom by Jonathan Franzen) and you loose the tension needed in that kind of story*. Tension is the core of story telling.

People will tell you that the core of story telling is the transference of the universality of human experience, or some-such highfaluting nonsense that they learned in college. This is a silly conceit and worth none of your time. the reason being that human experience is very rarely told in the telling of a story. Human experience is a very boring, banal thing. think about it. The vast majority of the people that you know are spending the lions-share of their day in a cubicle staring a screens. The 21st century version of the human experience is essentially that of an automaton. This does not make good drama. Drama is tension. Tension is best kept taught, ergo: short.

Brevity. Brief . Short. To the point. The kind of thing that if you blink, you'll miss it. The most profound things you will ever come across in your life are brief things. The moment sunlight catches dew-laden leaves in springs. The contented look on the face of a lover. A well-made hamburger. All short, brief, transitory things. Wind on your face, the first sip of a well pulled pint of Guinness. Things that are in your hand one moment, gone the next.

My general scale, from best length to worst for writing goes something along the lines of : Novella, Short Story, Novel.

But, Nick, you say, Novellas are longer than Short stories, and you obviously have the attention span of a cat that just ate your little brother's Adderall.

Well, no, and no.

The reasons: 1.) I do not have a younger brother, in fact, I am the little brother and have never been prescribed Adderall, let alone diagnosed with ADHD, and 2.) The Novella is the supreme expression of the art of literature.

I came to this conclusion when I read Jim Harrison's Novella Revenge. Maybe you saw the movie it was made into, with Kevin Costner. Doesn't do it justice. Same with another of Jim Harrison's novellas, Legends of the Fall. Revenge is the kind of work that requires you to read it in one sitting, and it's also of the length that means that sitting isn't going to be on the toilet. It is between short and long, in that goldilocks area. It has just enough mass to say something, and to say something in a not-nebulous manner, and without having the kind of digressions and subplots that plague novels. I'm not going to give a blow-by-blow, but I am going to encourage you to go pick up a copy (it is in the 3 novella collection called Legends of the Fall).

The novella, in its length gives both the author and the reader enough space to explore the idea or dilemma, the drama, of the story, without either the faux-profundity of the short story or the annoying, pointless digressions and girth of the novel. The ideas are allowed to be formed, explored, and not driven into the ground or forgotten in a myriad of subplots. Characters are given room to breath, but not allowed to crash on the reader's couch for long; they never outstay their welcome. Plots are not allowed to go off the track, subplots, while sometimes present, do not take over. The point is come to, not after 400 pages, but 100. You can read it in a night, have something to think about, and not be thrown off by an extended reading period.

Brevity is where it is at.

Which isn't to say novels are bad. Some novels are good. the vast majority that are published every year are absolute crap and should be ignored. The downside of this is that novellas are hard to publish, harder even that short stories, and are ignored by both the book buying public and the critics. The incentive for the working writer to write what a novella is small. There is no money there. Absolutely none. Even though the days of working short story writers are over, the odds of a writer making a living on the short story is massively higher than the novella writer. The novella writer has to either cut his creations by a third, or bloat them out to gargantuan proportions to get the m published.

All of this is why literature, specifically American literature, at the moment, is more or less in the shitter and shows very few signs of getting out.

You'd think that the internet would open up publishing and literature, to expand markets and make room for experimentation, but it doesn't. What the internet has done is fragmented the markets into fetishistic sub-markets, where things that do not fit into very small niches get thrown into the shredder, whether or not it is good. I have had better luck placing work with dead-tree publishers that I have getting it on the web**.

So where does this leave me?

I don't know. I have a back log of stories and novellas that are unable to find homes with publishers, both hard- and soft- copy. I've been working on a novel for the past 14 months and the with the current draft, I suspect it will shrink back down to novella length, which will damn it to a life spent on my harddrive.

I have no way of summing this all up without sounding like a neurotic writer.

So, here is a lecture by Ray Bradbury:

(*Suburban Ennui is best kept short anyway, preferably in the form of a pop song, which is another example of brevity being better than sprawl. Who, after all, can say that feelings are expressed better in Beethoven's Symphony # 1 than, say, 1979 by The Smashing Pumpkins. This, you may say is comparing apples to oranges, but in reality, they are both musical works meant to elicit an emotional response. The 3.5 minute pop song is the short story of the music world, and the symphony the sprawling Russin novel. Of course, Franzen's Freedom is essentailly a re-write of Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates (or perhaps White Noise by Don Delillo), which itself is a rewrite of The Beautiful and Damned by Fitzgerald. Shit, lets just face facts. Freedom isn't a novel about the tenor of our times. It is about the tenor of the 1970s, the most recent decade that the American Suburban ennui novel has been stuck in. If you want to read a novel that is really about NOW, read William Gibson's Zero History. That book will blow your hair back. Franzen is 30 years, at least, behind the times, and he's a hack of a writer to boot.)

(**the less said of online markets, the better***)

(*** the internet killed the short story and the novella, deal with it)

Science Fiction

The social ramifications of technological advancements are the bread and butter of the SF, but the tendency for SF authors to leave out a large amount of the political ramifications, is the current and most disturbing short coming. I am referring here to singularity fiction.

Not only is the political aspects of the singularity virtually ignored in the process, but when it comes to the post-human trend (personality uploads, etc.) the ubiquitous nature of this advancement is what is usually played up. The problem with this is the shirking class. The majority of the world is poor, and thus, the majority of the world would be unable to make the transition from human to post-human. Much like the current trends in life-extension and cryogenics being the playground of the rich and powerful, the post-human experience will be one undertaken by the elite of society, not the rank-and-file.

All new concepts and technology bering with them the specter of abuse by the powerful. In this aspect of the singularity, you would have the rich and powerful--as computer uploaded, computer-based beings--doing what they always do: rule over the common man with an iron fist.

Just as newsreels, movies, print, and the internet itself found themselves to be tools used by the powerful to propagandize the masses, the post-human era would be the first true era complete, permanent despotic, fascist rule. The elite leaders of the world would not fear assassination, revolution or dissent. They would be the first true totalitarians who would live in impenetrable castles.

Nero, Franco, Hitler and Stalin had much more to fear from the world around them than, say, an uploaded personality structure of Dick Cheney, ruling the country from a harddrive in an undisclosed location (Greenbrier Hotel).

This is were dystopian literature can enlighten the current trend of post-singularity SF as being rather benign. Because SF should be used as a warning to the present, and not an optimistic-technology-can-save-us-all cure-all, SF authors should look beyond the singularity, beyond the obscure economic theory, and show their readership what can happen when new technology is taken by governments who feel their grip on power being taken away and decentralized. In the age of RFID-traced passports, gps-enabled cellular phones, traffic cameras, hard-to-get driver's licenses, etc. the only thing we have to fear is the technology that surrounds us, and its misuse by the powers that be.

Because of the lack of universality in current SF fiction, these problems are not being addressed. The government is an organ of society that is ignored, derided and treated as if it is a non-issue. This should not be the case. We are living in a Cyberpunk 1984, surrounded by high tech trappings that ensconce us in a datastream that is traceable by the panopticon of government. As corporations, through lobbying and special-interest groups, think tanks, etc. gain more and more favor in the halls of the governmental system, they will become power hungry, and in this hunger, they will not be satisfied with staying independent money-making entities; they will eventually enfranchise themselves into the very system of government that controls us all. The cyberpunk ideal of corporations as entities that are more powerful than governments is mostly a short-sighted cold war concept; soon enough the governments will become corporations. Democracy brought to you by Coca Cola and Sony. And in this money-drenched dystopia, the human element becomes one or corporate commodity; society as a giant company town. We are but a few generations away from West Virginia Coal Wars part 2, but on a global scale, and with much more at stake than getting paid in actual money and an 8-hour work day.

The very freedom and liberty that is the basis of the modern (western) world will soon be trumped by the almighty dollar, much in the way science trumped faith in the age of enlightenment.

The economics of the future will be in the trading of control, much in the way it is now, but we will be embedded in world of state capitalism. Stalinesque Sovietism the sequel, but instead of the overlying dogma of the empowered masses, it will be the covenant of the corporate state--everything in its right place for the advancement of the societal credit rating. When ever action a citizen/employee takes has ramifications upon their overall credit rating (cash economies gone the way of the dodo bird), there can be no freedom of conscience, no freedom of speech, no freedom at all except to pursue credit for the sake of the state. If all the gears in an engine put power to the wheel,s then the engine is working. Do not worry about the current international crisis, just go buy stuff--but don't buy the WRONG stuff. Nothing used, nothing imported independently. Do not date outside your socio-economic strata, do not move out of the subburbs.

If you must imagine the future, imagine a quarterly credit report stamping on a human face forever.