How the listicle killed literature and why it’s not all your fault
Tags: Writing, Reading, Medium

How the listicle killed literature and why it’s not all your fault

The aporetics of contemporary writing

What explains our fascination with the expository memoir (sometimes in the list format) and what does it say about the state of literature? It has been the subject of plenty argumentation, all entirely subjective in their defense with little authority over studied trends that the question remains open. I freely admit that I’d gone from being a novel reader in my teens to having not read a single novel in the first decade of the 21st century that I clearly should not be taken as a subject-matter expert on literature. I have also not read any of the classics to which my friends often refer to. Nor have I contributed in any significant manner to the advancement of literary arts, aside from some thoughtful jabs at thought leaders—which I consider self serving. At best I’d read some good writing and almost all of it was the selfie memoir in the form of a journalistic essay, of which I consider listicles to be short-form derivative. From this over supply of expository porn in prose I’d for some time believed this to be representative of contemporary writing, 2 million of which have been published on Medium.

Our fascination then with web writing in all its forms is paralleled in the decreasing number of books we read each year. Between 2010 & 2014, the share of Americans that read zero books a year nearly doubled from 9% to 16% that I’m sure were are nearer to 20% by now. I would have fallen in this category for five years running, or possibly two books a year if you summed the many books business and social psychology books that sit up front at most bookstores, the kind that in some way offer advice on how to get rich—either spiritually and/or financially as they are said to be synergetic. Also between those years, the share of Americans that read 11–20 books a year dropped from 21% to 15%. I should interrupt myself to echo what will be the responses to follow, that the number and quality of books is a poor measure for the digital age, that literacy is higher today than in history, that there is more written each day than ever before, and of course all of these statements would be true. There is no better testament to this than myself who accidentally entered the writing world not much more than a year ago and has seen their name trend a few times in the past year. For all that and the ease with which I type out this half baked short essay, I am grateful.

Now if it were my ambition to be a writer on topical subjects with a nimble voice and some modicum of internet fame than I would have succeeded there while also proving that technology works. Please pause for a moment, scroll down then up, and press the recommend button as it appears. You would have helped my ambitious ego as a writer in doing so. Yet the immediacy of the notification that you have in fact recommended my ideas so far does not go far enough in assessing contemporary writing today. What better way to begin than by actually reading novels then, of which I have already read six since the start of this year, with the intention to read another 24 more—because I am an obsessive type that must know where I rank on the literary scale and how I might myself surpass my own work. Between the lyrical poignancy of Jeet Thayil’s Nacropolis and experimental philosophy of Valeria Luiselli’s The Story of My Teeth, I have been exposed to visions of literature that keep me at home most evenings with an assured joy of missing out on internet writing. What I am expressing is the wish to be confounded by an author with an experience that extends my capacity. Reading Mark de Silva Putdownable Prose and the State of the Art-Novel I am left wondering if the purpose of contemporary writing is only to be of interest and to inform? It is entirely possible that the speed with which writing is moving that we might in our efficiencies shed other styles and converge on contemporary narrative journalism as the standard form with its rewards of “immediacy, a conversational tone, swift absorption, topicality.” So Silva asks if our appetite for profoundly transformative art fiction has waned?

I think to ask if reader’s appetite for less-than-immediate writing has waned is to misunderstand the reader within supply-demand economics. I don’t think readers know what they want until they see it, myself included. Just some months ago I was certain that I wanted to be a creative non-fiction essayist as there is at least some immediate financial prospect in being one. My tastes or demands as a consumer are very much dictated by the supply on offer and to ask whether my interest in the experimental literature had waned overlooks the conditions of whether within my noisy world, I had ever even consumed such. I am not making a passioned case for you to stop reading in itself a narrative journalist essay and take to obscure but visionary fiction, at least not yet, nor am I in any way suggesting that you abandon like I have, your hopes of being a narrative essayist. The contemporary writing, at least as defined by who is paying for writing, has been building monetary momentum in the direction of the creative non-fiction essay and it is likely to remain that way for sometime. We are awash in it as there seems to no shortage of the subjective essay today, post modern life interpreted and then reinterpreted as a listicle. And so long as the market pays for narrative journalism content and all its derivatives, in all its formats, we can extrapolate that the reader’s interest or perhaps attention to diverging literary forms is in fact waning. Consider Maggie Doherty’s Who Pays Writers, an essay which addresses the historical patronage of avant-garde literature that made for America’s great 20th century cultural exports only to see the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities diminish, and how it might be more insightful to ask today, who pays writers for what? In asking that, knowing that the answer to the supply side is so clearly narrative journalism, we would have also answered what reader’s demands are, which is that of whatever is in supply. Which is why the convergence of contemporary writing on the content marketing listicle is not at all the fault of the consumer but the supplier. That there is so much critique on the cultural value of listicles when in fact the market value of such is what has created the demand leads me to the conclusion that if a taste for divergent writing is to emerge, it’s supply will first need to be funded.