Must Popular Fiction Stand Alone?

In our fractured culture, is it possible?

I recently agreed to review a novel for another writer, but as soon as I got into it, I realized that I couldn’t review it fairly because it was a worldbuilding type of novel, and while I can appreciate that worldbuilding has become an important modern art form, it does nothing for me. So instead I wrote a piece examining my personal reaction to it, trying to make it clear that I did not feel qualified to comment on how it would suit its intended audience. I did so because I am interested in how this new use of the novel form works and what the rise of worldbuilding means as a cultural phenomenon. But the piece said enough about the novel itself that it could easily be taken for a review, so I sent the author a draft copy and said I would not publish it if she did not want me to.

As we discussed it, she said that what she objected to was that I did not give her full credit for her faithfulness to the entire legendarium behind the character, a once-popular folk hero whose legendarium I know nothing about.

I responded by saying,

Understood. But a work of popular fiction has to stand on its own.

Her response was,

Ummm no lol. It is a work which rises or falls on its research and authenticity to the source material.

I knew then that we were coming from very different places and were not likely to agree. But was I right? Does a work of popular fiction have to stand alone?

Let’s start with the name of this newsletter, Stories All the Way Down. It refers to the idea that all stories, and ultimately language itself, are built out of references to other stories. To give a simple example, suppose I begin a story like this:

The man walked through the swinging doors, dusted the desert sand off his hat, and approached the bar, his spurs jingling slightly as he walked.

What kind of story would you think this was? Probably a Western, right? And I bet your mind’s eye has already added the gunbelt and the bandana, the piano player, the saloon girl, and the table of cowboys playing cards. I bet you have already seen the bartender watching the new entrant nervously and waiting to pour him a whisky.

All of this is because I have built my story with references to other stories that you already know. By referencing common Western tropes, I can put you in a Western setting with a single sentence. I don’t have to build a world. I can borrow one. But in this sense, at least, my story does not stand alone. If you have never seen or read a Western in your life, the references in my opening paragraph are not going to bring that scene to life for you in the same way.

Herein lies the problem for the storyteller today. If stories are based on stories, then the writer needs to tell their story using references to commonly shared stories. But that base of commonly shared stories has been shrinking over the last hundred years. A century ago, you could safely assume that every reasonably educated person in the West — everyone likely to have the means and the interest to read a novel — was familiar with the Bible, with Shakespeare, with the history of their own country, and had at least a passing acquaintance with the history of ancient Greece and Rome and the main movements of European history. And you could add in at least some general knowledge of the Iliad, the Odyssey, Greek, Roman, and Norse mythology, the Arthurian cycle, the classic fairy tales and legends, and maybe even The Divine Comedy. That gave you a pretty broad base of shared stories on which to build your own.

That’s all gone now. You can’t rely on the general reader today to be familiar with any of that. Some still are, to one extent or another, but it is not a reliable trait of the general novel-reading public. This doesn’t mean that you can’t allude to any of it, but it does mean that such allusions need to be decorative rather than structural in nature. If you write a story that will make no sense if the reader does not recognize a reference to Cordelia for instance, or if they think you are alluding to Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather than King Lear, you are going to seriously limit your audience.

I wrote a story last year that made little sense if the reader did not recognize multiple references to T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi. Needless to say, most people didn’t get it. Perhaps it was clever, but it was not a successful attempt at serious popular fiction. It did not stand alone for a modern popular audience.

Perhaps this is why worldbuilding has become so popular as a literary form. If there is no broad shared culture on which to build stories, perhaps it becomes necessary to create worlds with their own stock of stories to build new stories on. Perhaps it is also one of the reasons that readers increasingly limit themselves to a single genre. Within a genre, as within an invented world, there is a stock of allusions and tropes that most readers reliably recognize, which provide a base on which a new story can be told.

Perhaps, then, it is reasonable to say that a work of popular fiction should stand alone within its genre, but need not do so for the general reading audience. Certainly, if one were to pick up Book 23 of the World of Zugzwang series¹ and complain that the book made no sense because it made numerous unexplained references to the Crown of Lasker, most World of Zugzwang fans would dismiss your criticism as stupid and irrelevant to true fans of the World of Zugzwang. And rightly so. Zugzwang is a world and a culture unto itself, and you should no more expect to understand everything reading Book 23 in isolation than you would expect to understand the entire language and culture five minutes after your plane landed in Ulan Bator. Stories belong to cultures, and a story within a created world belongs to the culture of that created world, (though also to the culture in which that world was created).

But by the same token, Book 23 of the World of Zugzwang series is not a book that is likely to appeal to a general reader who picks it up in an airport bookstore. It does not belong to the general culture. It belongs to the Zugzwang culture. The series needs to be 23 books long to justify the reader’s investment in learning Zugzwang culture, but if you want to enter into the World of Zugzwang, you should probably start with Book 1. Book 23 does not stand alone.

There is something important to note here about worldbuilding fiction. I frequently say that a novel creates an experience. By this I mean the kind of experience typically found at the heart of a novel, such as the experience of being forced to choose between competing values and living with the consequences. Such experiences usually change the character in some way that means you cannot tell the same story about them again. There is something fundamentally singular about them.

Worldbuilding fiction also creates an experience, but of a different kind. It is a much broader experience, encompassing a world and its history. Unlike an ordinary novel, it is not a singular peak experience, but an ongoing experience of exploration and discovery, over the course of which there may be many high points akin to the peak experience of a regular novel, though with not usually quite the finality of a regular novel, since the world and its stories must go on.² The point here is that these are two different arts. They use the same long narrative form but they are distinct arts and may therefore answer to very different standards of judgment.

Historical fiction also takes place in a “world.” It is this world, but the past of this world, either its real past or its mythic past. (Westerns are simply historical fiction set in a particular mythic past.) These worlds are sufficiently different from the modern world as to constitute, for literary purposes, a world as strange and separate as the world of Zugzwang. As I have argued elsewhere, historical fiction tends to be set in fairytale worlds that just happen to be times and places from our own past, times and places such as the court of Henry VIII or Nelson’s navy. In this respect, they are strikingly similar to a fantasy legendarium.

The difference is, there are independent sources of information for these worlds. The reader may come to your Tudor or Napoleonic era novel knowing a lot about those periods, perhaps more than you do. Which raises an interesting question for the authors of stories set in those times. Do they write them for the substantial specialized audience that knows those times and places better than the Zugzwang fandom knows the World of Zugzwang? Or do they write them for an audience that does not necessarily know Nelson’s Navy or the court of Henry VIII very well and is really just looking for a good story in the classic novel form?

For the latter audience, the book needs to stand alone, since that audience is not going to want to do extra research just to read a novel. However, the former audience is going to praise or condemn the novel based on the quality of its research and its authenticity to its source material.

Hollywood has amply demonstrated that the audience that just wants a good story will neither know nor care if the research is sloppy or the story is inauthentic to its source material, whether that is by intention or by accident. The more interesting question is whether the worldbuilding audience will praise and enjoy the book for its research and authenticity even if the story is dull. After all, worldbuilding novels provide a different kind of experience from regular novels, so why should the peak experience of a regular novel be necessary to the enjoyment of a worldbuilding novel?

I have seen many posts in Facebook historical fiction groups by people asking for suggestions for novels about a particular period or a particular historical person, because, as the poster explains, they want to learn about that period. Now, I contend that you cannot learn history from historical fiction, but I cannot help feeling that for people who think you can, and who want to, the actual quality of the story as a story may count for little in comparison to its research and authenticity to the source material. What they want is worldbuilding and a kind of worldbuilding that the study of history from non-fiction sources, with all its tentative conclusions and missing pieces of evidence, generally cannot provide.

There is a question I like to ask historical fiction fans when they become particularly incensed about inaccuracies in historical novels: Suppose that new research proved that Hillary Mantel had some aspect of Thomas Cromwell’s career badly wrong in Wolf Hall, should the Booker committee rescind its award? I’m not sure how many worldbuilding fans there are on the Booker committee, but the lover of worldbuilding might give a different answer to this question than the lover of the traditional novel. If the book’s merits are classically literary, then its merits remain, just as the merits of Shakespeare’s history plays remain. But if the book’s merits are historical and academic, then the new research renders it as obsolete as yesterday’s textbooks. It rises, and thus it falls, on its research and authenticity to the source material.

So, have I persuaded myself that I was wrong to say that a popular novel must stand alone? Not quite. Because in the end, you can’t impose conditions on an audience. You can’t demand that they know something or appreciate something before they read your book or comment on it. (Try reading the one-star reviews of the great classics of literature on Goodreads and you will see what I mean.) You can’t set a prequalifying exam for readership. Or, rather, I suppose you can if you want to, but don’t expect to attract a wide readership if you do. (Though who knows these days. It might work once. On the Internet, every gimmick seems to work once.)

And I don’t think we can safely conclude that a novel need only stand alone within the particular genre or subgenre or the invented, historical, or mythic world to which it belongs. After all, without new readers, all these separated markets will die. Even such minute and fragmented cultures need to enculturate new recruits or the culture, and interest in its literature, will die.

Which poses an interesting question for an author. Can you write a Western that stands alone for both Western fans and for the general reader? I suppose that, to a certain extent, there would be books that Western fans would recommend to new readers and that there are probably Westerns that are so specialized in their allusions that the general reader would be utterly lost. But it seems to me that most popular Westerns should be giving enough to the new reader to keep them engaged while they begin to learn the conventions of the Western genre, without seeming tedious to the dedicated Western fan. There might be things that the new reader misses, but the story can still stand alone.

How does this work? Stories are rich in allusions to other stories. But some of them are less critical than others to your understanding of the story. A reader who had never read a Western before, or ever seen a Western film, might still work their way into the story and its setting, just like the pretty young schoolteacher getting off the train from Philadelphia in Tombstone Arizona. She may be naive and inexperienced to begin with, but by the end of the third reel, she will have learned to play poker and shoot a rifle, and have the handsome cowboy wrapped around her little finger.

Human beings are actually quite adept at landing in new places and learning their way around. Given a little kindness here and there, they can generally figure out how to live in their new surroundings. Given a little kindness here and there, a new reader can generally figure out how things work in a new genre. But it is incumbent on the writer to show that kindness, at least if they want to expand their audience.

In what does that kindness consist? For me, it’s a good story, a story I can follow even if I don’t get every allusion the book is making. But for a worldbuilding fan, it may be something quite different. An author who understands both tastes may perhaps be able to cater to both.

Where does this leave us? Every novel has two audiences, the genre fan who knows every trope and allusion of its particular part of our fractured culture, and the newbie, fresh off the train from a different genre and a different culture, wet behind the ears and eager to learn. The writer who wishes to do well, especially if they hope to begin bridging or repairing the fractures in our culture, should figure out how to serve them both.

Or am I wrong? Comment below.

1. As far as I know, there is no World of Zugzwang series, but Amazon is vast, and if one indeed exists, I do hope that it includes a Crown (or ring, or sword) of Lasker, because homage is due.

2. Are serials inherently world-building? It’s a fair question, to which I do not yet have a thought-out answer.