05 Mar Fashion in Fiction Writing

Over recent weeks I’ve been editing several crime novels from new fiction writers and the comment I’m making most is: this style of writing would have been fine some decades ago, but not now. It’s not the fashion and publishers don’t like it.

If anyone had told me before I started in the industry that an ephemeral, essentially unimportant thing like fashion could dictate how a piece of writing was judged, I would have scoffed in disbelief quickly turning to outrage. Fashion is that important in writing style? Really?

Yes, I’m afraid so, as I’ve come to learn and as I now impart to other writers. And the aspect fashion affects most is viewpoint.

Consider the books published in the Golden Age of crime fiction between the wars, and even a couple of decades later, and you might remember that an event taking place could be regaled to us, not by a character experiencing that event, but from the perspective of an all-seeing anonymous entity. Something like this:

Margaret turned the corner of the mountain path to find a boulder hulking in her way. As she tried to find a way around, she didn’t observe the man on the hillside above her, arm extended, about to push a second, bigger boulder right down onto the very spot a puzzled Margaret occupied. Only the rumbling of the stone hurtling down the steep slope above made Margaret look up, and two seconds after that, it was too late! Margaret was no more.

Nowadays, a publisher, and indeed at times an editor like me, would write alongside such a passage: Omniscient narrator. No place in modern fiction. Rewrite from a character’s viewpoint.

An instruction awkward for the writer, because there are only two candidates for the viewpoint of that exciting event; Margaret herself and the murderer. Margaret’s viewpoint would be interesting and convey her bafflement and then her terror, but if she’s only a minor character, and given her demise that seems her likely role, then the editor might find the writer guilty of another modern no-no: using a point of view of someone whom we see only briefly.

So the writer is stuck. I venture to argue this is why more novels these days are written from the point of view of the villain! But that’s not for everyone, or every crime novel.

Looked at in this way, fashions in fiction can be seen to limit a writer’s options. However, if this is the price we pay to lose a writing style so remotely third-person that the reader is completely disengaged after the first couple of paragraphs, or alternatively where the novel is told in so many different viewpoints that we can’t get involved, perhaps we shouldn’t worry too much at not being present when Margaret buys it.

Personally, I think omniscience clearly has its advantages and if an author wanted to write a standalone scene such as the one above, I wouldn’t strike it out. However, if the entire novel were narrated in that way, I’d be less happy. I want readers to enjoy the satisfaction that only novels can afford of getting into people’s heads. Similarly, while I’m a great fan of multiple narrators (having read Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone at an impressionable age), if I were to edit a novel where almost every character got a turn at telling the story, there would be a veritable cat’s cradle of red lines.

So fashion in fiction writing turns out to be – at least for me – similar to the one that dictates what clothes we can find in the shops and what we wear. While some people go the whole hog and ensure they’ll have risible photos of themselves to look back on in a few years’ time, others are more moderate and find a way through the clothes racks that suits them while not alarming the fashion police unduly. My advice is to follow fashion as far as it suits your style and the style of the story you want to tell. Where it doesn’t, feel free to deviate – but find a sympathetic editor if you’re publishing independently, and if you’re looking for a traditional contract, well, be prepared to have your work greeted with disapprobation.

On that subject, one final point. I’m sometimes approached by writers who tell me that because they are intending to self-publish, they feel free to write whatever they want, however they want: break all the rules, ignore the fashion diktats. That’s fine, of course. But for one thing: readers who read traditionally published novels will expect a certain style of narration from everything they read, and if the fashion rules are broken too flagrantly, they’ll rear up in horror and your book will be put down. Sometimes it makes sense to at least pay lip service to the fashion rules.