From Shakespeare to Skinny Jeans: Novel Writing and the Evolution of Style
Dialogue tags and adverbs… if you've been part of any writer's group or perused online writing forums, you know these are the stuff of heated debate. It makes sense because, let's face it, once we latch onto a writing rule, it's hard to let it go. What's considered "good" or "bad" writing often hinges on these rules we've internalized.
Fashioning Literary Trends
But hold on a moment! When it comes to writing literature, perhaps our notion of "good" and "bad" is more relatable to another heated debate, the skinny jeans vs. wide-leg jeans debate, than it might first appear? Or even the crew socks vs ankle socks debate.
Language, like fashion, changes over time. Anyone who has ever tried to read Chaucer in Old English or even Shakespeare will attest to just how radical developments in language are over time.
In addition to the formal changes in the language, each one of us will also develop a writing style or even styles. Whether it is what we wear or how we write, our sense of style is multifaceted. They are shaped by not just by our individual taste but also by our culture, ethnicity, age, when in history we live, what socioeconomic group we belong to, our access to resources, how we experience the world and maybe even a bit of "just for the hell of it" attitude.
A small stack of booksReassessing Value Judgements
To decide whether that style is “good” or “bad” is a different question. It is to make a value judgement and “[v]alue is a transitive term: it means whatever is valued by certain people in specific situations, according to particular criteria and in the light of given purposes” notes the literary critic Terry Eagleton.[1]
The frequency with which the good writing vs bad writing debate pops up on my social media feeds also reminds me of the debate in academia about what is or is not “Literature.” I have never been more certain of the answer to this question than I was before I embarked on a decades long career studying it because, as I quickly discovered, “literature is a notably unstable affair.”[2]
Dispelling Literary Illusions: Challenging Common Misconceptions
I’m not suggesting that you should start littering your writing with adverbs or employing excessive dialogue tags. Far from it. The point is simply that not everything is as cut and dried as it might first seem and by investigating our own assumptions we can grow as writers in all sorts of ways we never imagined.
To that end, let’s engage in a little classic mythbusting about the literary world.
Myth 1: "Good" or even “great” novels are timeless.
Think again. Trends in writing evolve just like fashion trends. Remember the dominance of the third-person omniscient narrator? Yeah, that's so last century. In fact, it’s not even last century, it’s 19th-century.
The novel form itself is a testament to literary innovation, always seeking new ways to capture human experience. The clue is in fact in the name, lest we forget – novel, meaning new, original, unconventional.[3]
So, though it is true that there can be emotional resonances that might be universal or transcend time and place, both the content of our stories and how we tell them is not a constant. Different ways of telling stories emerge at different times, in different places as writers seek ways to capture the full range of their human experience.
A unicorn knocking over a stack of books Myth 2: But the catalogue of “Great Literary Works” survived because they are the best, right?
Actually, no. In literary criticism we call this the question of canon creation, and contemporary scholars are constantly questioning the canon. What has been included and what has been excluded from the canon has more to do with social power than it has to do with great art. Today it is widely recognized that though the “canon came to look harmonious rather than contentious […] it was always artificial.”[4]
Put aside for a minute the fact that in order to write, one doesn’t just need a room of one’s own (space, time, and autonomy), but also access to resources (from education to writing materials), in order to write. Instead, focus instead on the works that were written. Out of all the works ever written, the category of “great works” is dependent on value judgements that are informed and influenced by certain ideologies, power structures, and conscious and unconscious biases.
One of the biggest projects of early literary feminism was to go back through the archives to discover and reinstate lost works by women writers. An ongoing project is to make us all more aware of the ideologies at play when we make certain value judgements.
Myth 3: Novels can be divided into highbrow “literary fiction” and lowbrow “commercial fiction.”
This one is a little tricky. Publishers today might make this distinction, but it hasn’t always been the case. Many works that we now perceive to belong to the category of great novels were in fact first published in serialized form, including works by Dickens, Thackeray, and Gaskell. Serializing publication was a way to build suspense, engage readers, and engender popularity… which kind of reminds me of today’s TV soap operas.
In the days of yesteryear, the battlelines between high- and lowbrow literature were drawn between poetry and novels. It was in poetry that had all the cultural capital and novel writing was seen as “less intellectually or spiritually valuable than verse-writing.”[5] In short, all novels were considered “lowbrow” making our distinction between literary fiction and commercial fiction completely irrelevant.
Myth 4: Male writers have always dominated the novel form
If you associate the novel form with writers like Dickens, Joyce, Faulkner, and Franzen then it’s not surprising that you might consider it a literary form dominated by white male writers. But the novel form has always been a literary genre where women writers’ have thrived. As Watts notes, “[t]he majority of eighteenth-century novels were actually written by women” (p.298). A trend that has continued.
This might seem groundbreaking from gender equity, except as Gilbert and Gubar note, it probably has more to do with the fact that in centuries past novel writing was “‘lesser’ and therefore a more suitably female occupation.”[6] [Sigh.]
Myth 5: Literature as great art is divorced from social commentary
The stories we tell and how we tell them provide give us a glimpse into the world we live in. These glimpses also provide us with insights into social relations and expectations. What exactly each novel says and to whom is a different story altogether and this is the reason there are so many literary critics out there and so many books about books!
Myth 6: There is no room for genre fiction to be innovative
Writing in a particular genre doesn’t have to be prescriptive. Writers can and have used their knowledge of genre to great creative effect. There is scope to play with genre conventions to create fresh stories that subvert expectations and challenge inequity. Read more about how genre can help you in your writing here.
Join the Novel Revolution
Innovation in writing often challenges the status quo, blurring the lines between "good" and "bad." We can embrace the diversity of writing styles and challenge the myths that constrain our creativity. After all, one person's innovation is another's game-changer. Let's keep pushing the boundaries of novel writing and rewrite the rules together!
Ready to challenge writing myths and embrace innovation?
[1] Eagleton, Terry. “Literature and the Rise of English.” Cited in Dennis Walder (ed.), Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990, pp. 21-26: p.22. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu conducted a study on how taste is a social phenomenon. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, Trans. Richard Nice, London: Routledge, (1979) 1984.
[2] Eagleton cited in Walder, p.23.
[3] Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson and Fielding. London: Chatto and Windus, 1957.
[4] Butler, Marilyn. Repossessing the Past: The Case for an Open Literary History.” Cited in Dennis Walder (ed.), Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1990, pp.9-17, p.13.
[5] Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Shakespeare’s Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1979, p. xx.
[6] p.xxi
