I have an issue with literary fiction.
I must be careful because my gripe strikes a deep nerve with the great literary masters, the self-proclaimed wise-above-all pedagogues who delight in reeling from their pious tongues the sanctimonious idiom:
“Literary fiction is about people.
Commercial fiction is about events.”
It's known in the fiction writing business that the majority of international awards go to the literary fiction authors, while the majority of book sale revenues go to the commercial fiction authors. This is easy to understand because giving awards to what few people can read is good job security.
Literary fiction
What is literary fiction? In the art world, that would be the room at the exhibition hall with the abstract paintings. They’re pretty, but require considerable effort to glean anything from.
Those who enjoy literary fiction do it for the artful arrangement of voluminous words and the immersive effect of page-long paragraphs. Whether there's plot to be found anywhere in the work is inconsequential. Literary fiction is poetry without the rhyming.
If you’re a hundred pages into a novel when you realize nothing has happened, you're reading a literary novel. Or a very bad commercial one. If you sit down to write a novel that starts with the main character too stressed to eat breakfast so she heads out for a morning jog, and three hundred pages later she returns from her jog, you're writing a literary novel. What's at the heart of literary fiction? I believe it's the expert use of a mechanism I've named the meander. It's a way of turning a ten-word sentence into a fifteen-page rumination without having to write a participle of storyline. I shall demonstrate the technique here. Our new friend, the jogger, stumbles over a crack in the sidewalk. A commercial fiction writer would describe the event with some variation of the following:
“Damn,” she said, scowling and gripping her leg for a few steps. “Why don’t they fix the sidewalks?”
A literary writer would write the event thusly:
“Damn,” she said, scowling and gripping her leg for a few steps. This was the third time that week she had tripped. Her ex-boyfriend, Vaughn, used to complain about the high taxes going to the wrong people until she got sick of hearing about that from him, so she let him go. Her father used to say the same thing, but his comments didn't seem to disturb her. Maybe it was time to give Vaughn a call. Besides, after dumping him she had dated Frederick and Gerald. They were attractive enough but didn't keep her interest even though Gerald’s cat, Spinkles, was a hoot. Mrs. Rather, her social studies teacher back in the tenth grade, used to tell her she could judge her boyfriends’ worth by how creatively they named their pets. This advice worked well until Marcos came along, who had named his dog Oblivion because the dog’s mind always seemed to be somewhere else. And Marcos used to play the electronic video game called Oblivion, which she didn't understand but thought the game’s male characters were cute. This surprised her because they looked like they hadn’t bathed in weeks, and she liked neat men. Not perfect specimens, but how could they take care of others if they let themselves go? [Five pages later...]
“Why don’t they fix the sidewalks?”
I'm not exaggerating! In fact, literary fiction fans would read this passage and say, “What’s wrong with that?”
Real examples of meandering
To substantiate my point, I provide several real-life examples below. I feature only famous novels that have won prestigious awards. Because of copyright laws, I cannot show any text from the novels to support my case. I don't provide these examples to criticize because actual, living people enjoy these successful novels. My only intent is to demonstrate a word-count-expansion technique they all use in common. People who love the effects of this technique enjoy reading literary fiction. There's nothing wrong with this so long as you have an immense amount of spare time in your life. Moby Dick (Herman Melville) – Listed here are the names of the first few chapters: 1) Loomings, 2) The Carpet-Bag, 3) The Spouter-Inn, 4) The Counterpane, 5) Breakfast, 6) The Street, 7) The Chapel, 8) The Pulpit, 9) The Sermon. These chapters comprise the first forty-two pages of the novel. Chapter 68 is entitled The Blanket, Chapter 80, The Nut, Chapter 97 is The Lamp, and Chapter 127, The Deck. Little content in these chapters is storyline. Rather, they are description, scene, character development, mood, and theme. What an extraordinary setup! The main character doesn't set foot on a sailing ship until around page fifty-eight. Housekeeping (Marilynne Robinson) – On page 49, two sisters walk down the stairs to find their Aunt Sylvie sitting at the kitchen table. Five and a half pages later, Sylvie asks the girls, “What would you like for breakfast?” That's right! And you thought my jogging example was an exaggeration. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley) – I began reading this novel with great interest because I had heard so much about it all my life. By page four, I became confused. The point of view passed from person to person, sometimes paragraphs at a time. There seemed to be nothing going on. I “got” the message by about page six. When I reached about page sixty, I realized I had no idea what was going on, if anything. I wondered if I hadn’t purchased the actual novel but instead had come across a documentary or a follow-up dissertation about the story. So, I fired the book. A year later, I picked it up again and, with increased determination, started again from the beginning. It was tough, but I made it through until the end this time. There are a lot of words for such a short story. Hyperion (Dan Simmons) – I had multiple friends and relatives tell me I was nobody until I read Hyperion. I bought the book and started reading. The story soon divided into seven massive, unrelated stories, one for each of the seven central characters of the novel. Instead of the author organically weaving his characters into a single storyline, one at a time, he created whole chapters (seven of them)--the majority of the book--in the form of supermassive infodumps. (If I add even a single paragraph of “backstory” about a character in my stories, my fans write scathing criticisms about how I’ve “artificially filled in” a character.) In fact, when I read Hyperion, I became progressively bitter as the pages turned, feeling that the author had in reality written seven unrelated short stories and then got the nefarious idea to paste them into a single story and call it a novel.
When is meandering desired?
The link here directs you to a delightful video created by Wendover Productions. The video masterfully employs the meander technique to provide information about each of the 50 United States.
The meander technique is also used constructively in music. Chordal resolutions are sometimes delayed--or more dramatically--resolved to the wrong chord to increase and lengthen listening tension. A good example of postponing relief is during the musical score of the recent Wonder Woman (2017) movie during the No Man's Land scene. Listen to the link here. Full relief doesn't come until after two minutes and twenty-one seconds when the French horn is expertly employed. This is a long time to wait! In the movie, the poor woman is out on a battlefield getting shot at all by herself. If she must experience great tension, then you should, too.
How much meandering is appropriate?
All this begs the question: What level of description and introspection is appropriate in a story? Answer: only that which forwards the storyline. Let me repeat the phrase: "forwards the storyline." It's as simple as that. But what if there is no storyline (a la literary fiction)? Now my head hurts. I could go on with more examples, but then I'd be accused of meandering. And I must first finish reading War and Peace (1,296 pages). That will take me another three months.