“If a novel is not an entertainment, I don’t think it’s a successful book.”
—Stephen King
If the subject of style is controversial among the experts, the subject of storytelling is even hotter. Countless plot critics have weighed in over the years, providing their own foolproof guidelines for a great story. But why haven’t any followed their own formulas and written a bestseller?
As with style experts, story experts disagree on many issues. There’s only one consensus rule among them. It dates back to Beowulf: Don’t bore me. But as novelist and lit professor Sandra Newman points out, this can be particularly challenging for the serious artist: “Paradoxically, the most interesting works of literature are often also the most boring.”1
Today’s reader bores more quickly than yesterday’s. He warns the author: You’ve got thirty seconds to terrify me, thrill me, break my heart, or give me enlightenment or an orgasm.
The late David Foster Wallace is among the few who have challenged the ultimatum. In his foreword to The Pale King, he warned: “The very last thing this book is is some kind of a clever metafictional titty-pincher.” Indeed, the unfinished, heavily footnoted 548-page novel (which he worked on for almost a decade and wearily referred to as “the long thing”) is all about boredom: Its characters are Midwestern IRS auditors. Calling Wallace’s swan song “breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull,” The Times’ Michiko Kakutani wondered if his intent were to “test the reader’s tolerance for tedium.” But Entertainment Weekly found the boredom study “entertaining, not-at-all-boring,” Publisher’s Weekly called it “one hell of a document,” and it became a finalist for the controversial 2012 no-win Pulitzer. Before abandoning the work and reaching the end of his rope on the patio, Wallace told his wife that he was considering retiring and opening a dog shelter.2
But the Infinite Jest author was the exception, not the rule. When an editor or agent rejects a manuscript saying—Where are the plot points? What’s so-and-so’s motivation? Where is the character arc? What is the message here?—what they mean is: You’re boring me.
South to north, a good story engages: the groin, the heart, the head, the soul. Yesterday’s titles focused on the last pair. Today’s tend to stimulate the first. But, if the head is targeted, it must be the prefrontal lobe, or what scientists call the “medulla oblongata.”
In addressing the reptilian brain, the sensible writer chooses a genre—Creeper (Horror, Fantasy), Jeeper (Sci-Fi, Thriller), Reaper (Murder Mystery), Peeper (Romance), or Bleeper (Erotic).
Most storytelling experts agree that the engaging novel, regardless of genre, contains three elements: jeopardy, conflict, and surprise. For this reason, some call popular fiction “formulaic.” But not all jeopardy, conflict, and surprise are created equally. What is conflict for one reader is catatonia for another; what is surprise to one is a snore to another. Two writers tell their stories around the campfire: the facts are the same, but one bores, the other grips. Which brings us back to the How. The delivery. The voice. The je ne sais quoi.
“Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back,” wrote Raymond Chandler, the pioneer of hard-boiled pulp fiction, in the introduction to his 1950 story collection, Trouble Is My Business. “To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every writer.”
As with the stylists, there are two schools of storytellers: the Less-is-Mores, and the More-is-Mores. The first are born of the Just-the-Facts, Jack, Dragnet school. Elmore Leonard’s anti-writing writing school, popularized by Hemingway. They are trompe l’oeil realists, not impressionists or expressionists. They hide brush marks. They cut all words that call attention to themselves, that fog up the story or weigh down the action. Sentence by sentence, they bulldoze plot speed bumps—whatever seems clever, thoughtful, or ornamental.
Many literary editors now prefer the anti-writers. Algonquin’s Chuck Adams told Poets & Writers that he joked about putting a sign above his desk that read, “Quit writing and tell me a story.”
Style comes from the head, a story from the heart. So, for popular fiction: Give heart, not head. Feel, don’t think. Then pray that the implacable captains of publishing will be persuaded that the fickle reader will be moved beyond words.
The decisive battle of the shit detectors was waged in 1998: Three pedigreed but aging stylists versus one feisty storyteller with a bastard style.
Swords had crossed ten years before when Tom Wolfe made millions on The Bonfire of the Vanities, but Mailer, Updike, and Irving called the novel “populist shit.” Wolfe counter-attacked with his 1989 Harper’s essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” about a fictional Old Guard too fossilized to appreciate his revolutionary “fictional nonfiction”.3
Resentments seethed for a decade and erupted again with Wolfe’s bestseller, A Man in Full.
“Entertainment, not literature,” sniped Updike in his New Yorker review,4 “even literature in a modest aspirant form.”
“At certain points, reading the work can even be said to resemble the act of making love to a three-hundred-pound woman: Once she gets on top, it’s over. Fall in love, or be asphyxiated,”5 argued Norman Mailer, speaking from the experience of tackling his own 1,200-page Amazon, Harlot’s Ghost. A Man in Full tipped the scales at a mere 742. Mailer went on to coronate his colleague as “the most gifted bestseller writer … since Margaret Mitchell.”
Wolfe dismissed the creators of Rabbit and The Dear Park as “two piles of bones.”6 Their comrade-in-arms John Irving flew over the ropes and spelled the hyperventilating tag team. “I can’t read him,” he said of Wolfe, “because he’s such a bad writer.”
Now it was three against one—the hoopster, the headbutter, and the wrestler—against the diminutive dandy in full. “I think of the three of them now—because there are now three—as Larry, Curly, and Moe,” he said. “It must gall them a bit that everyone—even them—is talking about me.”
“If I were teaching freshman English,” Irving fumed, “I couldn’t read a sentence [of his] and not just carve it up.” When the Canadian TV Hot Type host asked if he was at war with the little man in white, Garp’s creator bristled, “I don’t think it’s a war because you can’t have a war between a pawn and a king, can you?”
But in the end the southern gentleman had the last word, aware that Irving and his stooges were the best PR reps he’d ever had. “Why does he sputter and foam so?” Wolfe wondered.7
In the mid-’60s, the thirty-four-year-old heretic published The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. The title, a collection of his pieces from The Washington Post and elsewhere, replete with exclamations, ellipses, and neo-street speak, spawned The New Journalism. To create a buzz by tossing a Molotov cocktail over the battlements of the Bastille, he strode into his editor’s office at the Herald-Tribune one morning and asked, “How about blowing up The New Yorker, Clay?”
So the Tribune ran “Tiny Mummies! The True Story of the Ruler of 43rd Street’s Land of the Walking Dead,” Wolfe’s assault on the alma mater of his Moriartys—Larry, Curly, and Moe. It featured a portrait of The New Yorker editor William Shawn as head funeral director, surrounded by his dutiful retainers and embalmed guardians of literature, the Tiny Mummies. The satire had been inspired by The New Yorker’s invitation-only fortieth anniversary party at the St. Regis, which the stooges had attended and Wolfe crashed.
Shawn, who received an advance copy, fired a letter off to the Tribune’s owner, Jock Whitney. He called the article “murderous and certainly libelous,” and demanded that it be pulled from Sunday’s upcoming edition. Jock declined.
The magazine called in its cavalry. The Tribune was barraged with diatribes from Muriel Spark to J.D. Salinger to Strunk’s Sancho Panza, E.B. himself. Then the magazine’s enforcer, Dwight Macdonald, fired off a 13,000-word polemic, “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe & His Magic Writing Machine,” for its sister publication, The New York Review of Books. MacDonald called Wolfe’s style “a bastard form, having it both ways, exploiting the factual authority of journalism and the atmospheric license of fiction.”8
When the smoke cleared, the magazine had a shiner, and Wolfe’s new Streamline Baby was a sensation.
From this the gonzo provocateur learned an important lesson in not boring an audience, which he revealed in his “The New Yorker Affair” essay. “You can be denounced from the heavens,” he wrote,” and it only makes people interested.”
But years before, the best-selling nonfiction novelist had learned the greatest lesson about the postmodern elements of bile and Hemingway’s built-in, shock-proof, shit detector.
“Bullshit reigns!” he proclaimed in Bonfire of the Vanities.
1 Sandra Newman, The Western Lit Survival Kit: An Irreverent Guide to the Classics From Homer to Faulkner (New York: Gotham, 2012).
2 D.T. Max, “The Unfinished (David Foster Wallace’s Struggle to Surpass Infinite Jest),” The New Yorker, March 9, 2009.
3 David Foster Wallace and Sven Birkerts reinforced Wolfe with their 1997 New York Observer “Twilight of the Phallocrats” denouncing “our arts-bemedaled senior novelists [Updike, Mailer, Bellow, and Roth]… as Great Male Narcissists.” In turn, the Observer’s Anne Roiphe denounced the young literary guns for “urinating” on G.M.N.S.’s out of their own “primitive” male competitiveness. (“Literary Dogs Snap Savagely at Top Dogs,” New York Observer, October 27, 1997).
4 John Updike, “AWRIIIIIGHHHHHHHHH!” The New Yorker magazine, November 9, 1998.
5 Norman Mailer, “A Man Half Full” The New York Review of Books. December 17, 1998.
6 The Charlotte Observer, November 1999 interview.
7 Jim Windolf, “It’s Tom Wolfe Versus the ‘Three Stooges,” New York Observer, February 7, 2000.
8 Dwight Macdonald, “Parajournalism, or Tom Wolfe & His Magic Writing Machine,”The New York Review of Books, August 26, 1965.