Serious Popular Fiction
I want to begin to discus serious popular fiction. It is a concept that defines my ambition as a writer and also my beef with the current state of publishing. The market neither values nor seeks serious popular fiction today. It may slip by, but it is not, as it once was, the heart of the literary market. I want to write serious popular fiction. I want to write it because I want to read it, and there is not much of it about these days. At least, not much that I can find.
But first let me define my terms, since different people will legitimately understand both “serious” and “popular” in different ways.
By serious fiction, I mean fiction that finds the truth of the human condition. That’s a weighty way of putting it, but “the human condition” simply means life as we actually experience it and reflect on it.
The “reflect on it” part is important. It is reflection that separates animal experience from human experience. There are all kinds of things in life that we experience without thinking about them much. And then there are those experiences that make us pause and wonder, and which perhaps change how we think and live going forward. Those are the moments when we confront the truth of the human condition. They are what serious fiction is about.
But fiction is not about philosophical reflection on life. Rather, it is about creating the experiences which lead us to reflection. The reason so many books are written about great works of fiction is precisely that thy provoke such reflection. We value these books not because they contain philosophical reflections but because they create the kind of experiences that provoke these reflections.
The ordinary course of life may not produce many such moments, and it may not produce them in the full variety that human life is capable of. Fiction gives us the opportunity to have those experiences that ordinary life would deny us, and to do so without the privation, danger, and expense that is involved in having many of them in the flesh.
All fiction is about producing experiences, but different classes of fiction can produce experiences for different purposes and to serve different needs. I love to say that fiction is a lens, not a window. It exists to focus our attention. Focus heightens experience and separates it from the humdrum of everyday life. One of the reasons we love stories is because they can take us out of the humdrum on demand. Ordinary life has a lot of humdrum in it, and its nice to have a safe and inexpensive way to escape it from time to time.
Not all such escapes lead us to the truth of human experience. Some lead to a fancy of what we wish the human condition could be. In some respects, the truths of the human condition are too much with us and it is nice to have a break from them for a while, to visit Neverland or the Big Rock Candy Mountain. If only I could be as gallant a captain, as ardent a lover, as bold an adventurer, as cunning a spy, as the people in the book, wouldn’t life be grand?
In some sense, such flights of fancy are actually an acknowledgement of the truths of the human condition, a kind of wistful sigh that life is not simpler, bolder, brighter than it actually is. We enjoy such fanciful tales not because we imagine that life is really like that but because, in some ways at least, we wish it could be.
I’m going to call such works fanciful fiction, to distinguish them from serious fiction. Serious fiction is an escape from the humdrum into an intense experience of the real. Fanciful fiction is an escape from the humdrum into an intense experience of the fanciful.
That is what I mean by serious fiction. What do I mean by popular fiction? I simply mean fiction in the popular form: stories that revel in action, adventure, romance, and even magic, and expressed in accessible prose; fiction that, in its style, form, and structure, seeks to make itself accessible to the widest possible range of readers.
This does not mean that all such works are commercial successes. The Pareto principle applies to literature. A few works, and a few authors, are widely and wildly popular, there are a few more in the middle, and there is a vast collection of writers who are read by very few people. All of these may be writing in a popular style. Some of them may be better at it than others. Some of them may be writing about currently popular subjects or expressing currently popular opinions and others not. Some of them may have a gift for promotion and others not. Some of them may just get lucky and put the right manuscript on the right desk at the right time, but most won’t. They are all writing popular literature, as a matter of style, even if most of it is not known well enough to be commercially popular.
In short, it is popular style that I am talking about: accessible language and an emphasis on story. These tools can be used to write about less popular subjects that will attract fewer readers. The point is not to be as commercially popular as possible, but to find the truth of the human condition in the most accessible manner possible.
Putting these together, this is what I mean by serious popular fiction: fiction that finds the truth of the human condition in stories of action, adventure, romance, and even magic and expresses them in a popular style using accessible prose.
The literary greats of the past wrote serious popular fiction. Not all of them, but most.
Let’s start with Jane Austen. Widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists of all time, Austen is inarguably serious. She is also widely popular, even today, two centuries after her death. She is so popular, in fact, that she spawns hundreds of imitators, though admittedly they are far less serious than she, if any of them are serious at all. Austen tells stories full of incident and sharp conversation. Her language is so accessible that, remarkably, it is still an easy read two centuries after its composition.
Charles Dickens was the most popular novelist of his day, and undoubtedly serious. More recently we could count Steinbeck, Waugh, Greene, and Fitzgerald among novelists who were both serious and popular. I have a number of other candidates as well that I will discuss in future posts.
Not every classic writer of the past would qualify. James Joyce is considered a great serious novelist by many, but no one would call his work popular. (Personally, I am not sold on either his greatness or his seriousness, but I am not interested enough in him to want to argue the case.)
It is not just serious fiction that survives from the past, though. Some fanciful popular novelists from the past remain popular today. Arthur Conan Doyle is the first example that springs to mind. C. S. Forrester is another, though, unlike Conan Doyle, he is less popular than his imitators today.
I should make it clear that when I talk about fanciful fiction, I am not talking about fantasy. Fantasy, as a genre, is perfectly capable of producing serious popular literature. Fantasy means stories set in a world where the rules are different. We might call this an external fantasy: the world is different, but people may still be the same.
Fanciful fiction is more of an internal fantasy: the world may be perfectly normal, but the people are different. A typical romance or military adventure novel would fall into this category. A lot of fantasy is also fanciful in this sense: neither the world nor the people are real. On the other hand, there are many works that are externally fantasy but internally serious. I would include The Lord of the Rings (mostly), and The Wind in the Willows (entirely) in this category.
To be clear, I don’t mean “fanciful fiction” to be taken as a negative. I love fanciful fiction. Fanciful fiction serves a different function from serious fiction. It is a distinction of type, not of propriety. A fanciful story is generally an innocent thing. Fancifulness only becomes a problem when it fancies something malignant or when it pretends to be, or is mistaken for, something serious.
Alas, human beings do often seek to deceive themselves and others. We can sometimes feel happier when we deceive ourselves or allow ourselves to be deceived, and we can often find advantage in deceiving others. In such cases, as when we indulge in malignant fancies (such as pornography) or mistake fancy for truth, a fanciful story can do real harm.
A typical romance novel, for instance, is not designed to get at the truth of married love. Rather, it is meant to present a pleasant picture of romantic love as we might wish it to be. It is the literature of perpetual courtship. There is no harm in that, as long as we don’t start to imagine that the picture it presents is a true one. If we make that mistake, though, we are likely to become bitterly disappointed in our real romantic relationships, and that can only lead to unhappiness.
Similarly, novels of dashing sea captains and military officers present fanciful visions of soldiering that is all glory and gallantry. Like romances, they provide a pleasant diversion, and again this can only be harmful if we come to believe that the picture it paints is true. A reader who starts to find all the things of their ordinary life too dull or who begins to see enemies everywhere, who imagines that the violence of their literary heroes should be carried over into the real world, can do real harm.
But this is one of the reasons why serious popular fiction is important. It is the antidote to malignant fancies. It can help keep us grounded in our reading of fanciful stories It can keep us from believing fancies to be true, and thus keep us from the misery that is certain to result from that delusion.
But there is more to serious popular fiction than that. Serious fiction gets to the truth of the human condition through experience. We believe what we see and feel and endure far more deeply and more firmly than what we are merely told. Serious fiction extends our experience of life, and in this way makes us wiser, more sympathetic, more sensitive, more aware, more moderate, and more forgiving. Serious popular fiction extends these graces to a wider audience.
That is why I want to write serious popular fiction, and why I want to read it, and to encourage more of it to be written and published. Not instead of fanciful fiction, for it too plays a role in our development and our contentment, but as well as, and as a complement to fanciful fiction, because we need both.
Yes, fanciful fiction is easier to write and easier to sell, but serious popular fiction has an important role to play in our society and our culture. We need writers and publishers who are willing to do the work and take the risks to produce it.
My own attempt to write serious popular fiction is The Wistful and the Good, which I have been serializing here. It is also available in ebook and paperback forms here: http://mybook.to/thewistfulandthegood and here: https://books2read.com/u/mqEKEe. I would appreciate if you would buy a copy and leave a review. Thanks!
One downside of the competitive market we're in is that writers are always looking for new tricks to hold readers' attention, which means we end up weaponizing things like fanciful fiction because it sells. Art evolves just like science and technology: usually faster than the ethics can evolve to tell us whether we're heading in the right direction. In some ways, the struggle to write good, healthy fiction is the same as the struggle to not build an AI that destroys the world.
Part of me wonders if people won't accept serious fiction until their lives become more serious. The Lord of the Rings films (which are some of the most serious that exist in the fantasy genre) became popular partly because Fellowship released just a few months after 9/11. People needed something that mirrored their depth of fear and emotion. Whereas fanciful fiction tends to have very little to say about death and loss and the hard questions of life. What we seem to get when fanciful fiction attempts to take on serious subject matter is a gruesome pantomime, a la Game of Thrones, with plenty of shock value but very few answers.
I wish we could educate and inspire people into wanting serious fiction, but I'm not sure if we can. My current approach is to meet them halfway: write a book that has some of both, and hope that over time they grow attached to the stories I write and decide to follow even if I start delving into something more serious than they would've normally grabbed from the bookshelf. In other words, we have to be tricksy. That's part of the evolution of art.
"Fiction that finds the truth of the human condition in stories of action, adventure, romance, and even magic and expresses them in a popular style using accessible prose."
I have been looking for this everywhere, and thus far have only found it in hundred-year-old books!!!! Where are the modern novels that use the fiction form to speak to a greater human truth? If they do exist, they are all decidedly dystopian 🥺