Literary/Not Literary

In which I learn something new that I've probably known for a long time

This morning Substack served me up a nice article: The 3 Mandates of the Literary Sentence by Devon Halliday. Good food for thought—what makes writing literary? What slots someone’s craft in the “literary” category (admittedly a pretty nebulous and subjective thing to begin with) while someone else’s approach to writing might be dubbed “commercial?”

I had never given the question any real thought before, which is how I approach most creative things. For better or worse, my m.o. is to just do something, to respond emotionally in the moment to my subject, to a sentence or a paragraph or a painting or the transplanting of a perennial in my garden, whatever I’m up to my elbows in at the moment. Despite my lack of conscious and deliberate thought on the topic (no doubt a knock-on effect of my having grown up too fucking poor to get any kind of education, let alone an MFA), I do believe Devon is right about this, as they boldly proclaim at the end of the article’s preamble. (Sorry, Devon, I don’t know your pronouns so I’m going with “they” here to be safe.)

And I think Devon hit the nail on the head here because there’s one thing I am very sure of, and that’s the fact that The Ended World is the best book I’ve ever written, by miles and miles, by leaps and bounds, by every metric one might use to adjudicate the bestness of a writer’s body of work.

This is something to proclaim, because despite nobody knowing who the hell I am (a fact that continues to haunt me and probably will for the rest of my life), I’ve achieved a few things with my career that are worthy of note. Here comes the part of the blog entry that will come across as bragging to others, and will probably instigate more snarky bullshit responses from other writers (not the first time this has happened, and I guess none of us should be surprised that Substack is as full of petty, angry people as the rest of the internet) but understand, I don’t say all of this to brag. I say it to establish the fact that I have actually achieved some noteworthy things and yet I still remain a total unknown in the publishing world. I’ve written a few bestselling novels that, a propos to Devon’s article, fall somewhere in that “literary” space. I’ve shortlisted for a few awards and hope I might win one someday. I’m able to support myself and my husband as a full-time writer of fiction. And I wrote one of Dolly Parton’s favorite books, a fact that still surprises me and an achievement I expect I will never be able to top even if a few more of my career goals come true. So I’m not a stranger to “literary writing” or the literary side of the publishing industry, despite the fact that you might be a literary afficionado and yet you 100% for sure have no clue who the hell I am.

YET! Despite my experience as a literary novelist, I was surprised and enlightened by Devon’s article! And it’s my feelings about The Ended World that made me see the truth in what they said.

You ought to go read the article linked above, but in case you’re in a hurry or something, here’s the Reader’s Digest version: The three features that make a sentence “literary” (in Devon’s astute estimation) are 1) an element of surprise, 2) trueness to life, and 3) directness.

I wrote The Ended World in a two-year haze of utter surprise. Everything about its inception and creation was a shock to me, from the way the idea came to me to the way it demanded that I set aside whatever I thought I knew about story, narrative, character, and prose. It was very much one of those spooky situations where the book was coming from something outside of me, some other place or some other mind, and I was merely the material channel for the story. It didn’t feel like it was coming from someplace else; it did come from beyond me, and I just had to be okay with that. The novel was very demanding and very insistent that I must stop trying to control it or dictate what “should” happen. I was there to translate image, feeling, and idea into words so that other people could access them accurately and correctly. Every time I tried to impose my own logic onto The Ended World, every time I tried to put my own twist on it or even write in the kind of big, juicy, wordy voice I typically use, I was rebuked and directed back onto the proper path, sometimes in uncomfortable ways.

The end result was a tight, direct, painfully true-to-life novel, the shortest I’d yet written (though I tried five or six different drafts before I knew I’d gotten it right) and without a doubt the most surprising. As long as I live, I will never forget what it was like to put down that opening chapter (the only part of the book that never changed from one draft to the next), watching words spool onto the screen, my fingers moving as fast as they could go on the keys and yet I was still unable to keep up with the bizarre string of images rushing through my mind. I had no idea how the hell that opening was going to relate to the rest of the story. I only knew that it had to look exactly the way it did, and the story required me to trust that I would eventually surprise myself by tying it all together at the end. Reader, I did.

When I finished the final version of this book (and when I knew it was the final version), I also knew I’d taken a huge leap forward with my craft. I have always been a great fan of yummy, gooey, rich prose. All my favorite writers are those who lay it on with a trowel. But until I read Devon’s article, I never understood why I love some prosemeisters while others who deploy lots of flowery words strike me as banal or overdone. (The sentence Devon uses to illustrate overdone, non-literary prose is “In the gauzy dark of the bedroom closet, she lifted the trembling web of her fingertips to her wincing temples, behind which a headache cracked and unspooled.”) Those lush users of prose whom I so admire are still, always, as Devon points out, deploying surprising context or syntax, creating imagery that feels true to life, and are cutting straight to the point where it really matters. In looking back over the manuscript I’d finally finished after wrestling with it for two years, I could see all three of those critical elements plainly, and the work left me with a greater sense of satisfaction than I’ve derived from anything I’ve written in all my life so far.

Of course, whether anybody else finds any merit in The Ended World remains to be seen. Its publishers, at least, are enthusiastic about it. And out of the 80+ agents I queried with the ms, one (aside from the one I signed with) liked it enough to offer representation and even made an outrageously flattering comparison between my work and a much better (and infinitely better-known) author’s. I don’t know how accurate his comparison was, realistically, but it was nice to know that at least one other person out there agreed with me that it was a work that had some real merit.

I’m back cracking away again on a new manuscript, and I’m trying to incorporate everything I learned from writing The Ended World into the next one. That has been a tall order, since TEW was such an external experience and everything I’ve written since then has demanded that I should be in control, not the idea. I was floundering a tad on how exactly I ought to follow up a work like TEW, but thanks to Devon’s clarity and insight, I’m beginning to believe I might be able to pull it off, after all.

P.s. We have a cover for The Ended World and I am absolutely in love with it. My favorite cover yet. I’m not showing it just yet… waiting on the green light from the publisher. But I’ll blast it all over the place as soon as I can because it’s freakin’ cool.

Actual footage of The Ended World making me write it