2 Things Writers Should Know About the Future of the Novel
Author Simon Okotie shares two things writers should know about the future of the novel.
A friend of mine recently asked who The Future of the Novel was written for. My response now, having thought about it, is that I wrote the book for my mid-20s self, a young(ish) writer naively embarking on the task of writing a full-length work of fiction for the first time.
At the outset of my novel-writing, I went on a week-long residential writing retreat in rural Devon, here in the UK, led by two creative writing teachers: one a fiction editor and poet, the other a novelist, actress and activist. My own tastes in fiction tended to the experimental: Jack Kerouac’s James Joyce-inspired ‘spontaneous prose’ novel Visions of Cody had led me to the latter’s monumental Ulysses, and it was this that I was trying, at least, to read as I arrived on the retreat.
The advice from the second tutor—who I admired enormously—changed the course of my writing life: that I should write a conventional novel before trying to experiment.
Looking back now, I think this advice was based on a profound misconception: that one should train oneself in the ‘classical’ traditions of the form—mastering the intricacies of character, plot, setting, etc.—before embarking on anything more challenging, much as a musician should master their classical chord progressions and scales before even thinking about approaching the jazz repertory.
What, though, if the experimental is not actually a descendent of the conventional, but is more like a closely related sibling, even a twin? In other words, what if the novel and its unconventional sibling, the anti-novel, are different (but related) forms requiring quite different apprenticeships?
Here are a couple of ways in which this sibling rivalry might play out in the future: things I wish someone had said to my younger self.
Don’t worry too much about producing lifelike characters or settings
The novel no longer needs to begin ‘with an old lady in the corner opposite.’ That was how Virginia Woolf described an encounter with a woman on a London train (in her 1924 essay Character in Fiction). The woman’s character imposed itself so forcefully upon Woolf that she thought it sufficient to make ‘someone begin almost automatically to write a novel about her,’ with Woolf believing that ‘all novels’ begin in this way. A century on and it is unremarkable for the novelist Rachel Cusk to say she is no longer interested in character because it is no longer how living is being done.
A clue to a future trajectory for the novel is provided by the Norwegian author Jon Fosse in his seminal seven-novel sequence Septology. Here, capitalized common names (The Clinic, The Country Inn, The Lane, The Wharf…) are generalized to the extent that ‘we could be anywhere and with anyone’ (as Blake Morrison puts it in the London Review of Books). This nominal verisimilitude also extends to Fosse’s characters: his two protagonists share the same name (Asle), and one of them is married to someone whose name shares the same letters (Ales). It is in this way that Fosse fashions what he calls ‘mystical realism’ but which might simply be called reality. After all, as Virginia Woolf says in the same essay, to be ‘real’ as a character in a novel is not necessarily the same as being ‘lifelike.’
You can take character and plot straight off-the-peg to dress your protagonist
Much has been written about the theft of creative writers’ intellectual property to ‘train’ generative AI and large language models, less about how the novel itself has always been an appropriative technology. After all, from the moment Don Quixote loses his mind from reading too many tales of chivalry, adopting their plots, characters, and style for his own adventures, the modern novel has always been adept at using, exposing, parodying, and ironizing the conventions of fiction.
And if artificial intelligence is a misnomer for what is actually ‘applied statistics’ (as the sci-fi writer Ted Chiang said in his Lunch with the FT), then what AI provides is a direct, accelerated route to all that is most commonplace in the form. Rather than an abolishment of character or plot (as explored by E. M. Forster in his Aspects of the Novel), the future novel might use these outputs merely to ‘clothe’ its protagonists, much as Don Quixote adopts the rusting anachronistic armor of the knight errant to usher in a new world.
Conventional novels will, of course, continue to be written and read: There’s still plenty of good music to be written in the key of C Major (as the composer Schönberg is reported to have said). The future of the form will remain, though, with those restless souls who choose to experiment, to push boundaries, to break the mould.
Check out Simon Okotie's The Future of the Novel here:
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Simon Okotie is the author of The Future of the Novel and the Absalon novels: ‘Fiction as original as this deserves a long shelf life.’ (London Review of Books). He is a judge on this year’s Goldsmiths prize for ‘fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form.’ (Photo credit: Adïam Yemane)
