The Inescapable Choice

( Originally Published 1944 )

Am sure of nought but the uncertain thing;

LOOSELY, new authors think that damned near everybody in the country reads either the Saturday Evening Post, or the biggest of the Best Seller novels.

The number of people who read the Saturday Evening Post is negligible compared to the number of people who listen to Superman on the radio. The number of people who read the very top Best Seller novels is negligible compared to the number of people who read newspaper serials.

The next mistake the beginning author makes, if he discovers these two depressing facts, is to decide that he will then write novels like newspaper serials, or short stories that smack of Superman. The mistake lies, of course, in presuming that those who listen to Superman, or those who read newspaper serials, are the same people who read the Saturday Evening Post or the Best Seller novels. They are, of course, hardly ever the same people. In any country, in any clime, or any time, minds grade themselves like oranges .. . a sad fact but a true one; and as you are going to have to contend with innumerable sad facts before establishing yourself successfully as a writer, please begin by contending with this sad fact right now. So, actually, there is no Average Reader. Most of the people in the United States read practically nothing. I make that statement without fear of contradiction.

The largest group of readers is among those who read practical things having to do with their immediate concerns. They are a group with which the writer of prose in fiction form has no traffic whatsoever .. . even the article writer has no brisk trade with them.

No writer, of anything, can think about any sort of Average Reader. Readers of the New Yorker Magazine, for instance, sneer at people who read the Saturday Evening Post and the other slicks; readers of the slicks sneer at the readers of the pulps; and the readers of the pulps sneer at those who read Best Seller novels. Eternally the newly-burgeoning writer conceives the idea of bridging all these groups by writing a book or short story that will appeal to all the groups. It cannot be done. That is, it cannot be done and keep out of jail. I can give you a title for a "How To" book which, if it could be used, and the book illustrated, and sold openly, would probably sell to practically everybody in the world but since we are being practical ...!

The best that any writer can do is to write for a given group of potential readers; and the best way for you to decide upon this is to attempt to write for the type of person you best understand, and have, during your lifetime, been most frequently associated with. This is a clean-cut commercial writing trick that most successful writers avail themselves of from the start.

The new writer thus can orient himself readily for the short story market; but it is not so easily done by the novelist. In the novel an entirely different element enters. Book publishers, East, have, for years, adopted a peculiar form of snob publicity that has built up synthetic readers for Best Seller novels, especially those uttered through book clubs. This has, amazingly enough, forced a lot of bewildered dolts to read through books they do not understand, don't like, and wouldn't read but for the publicity ... just as millions of dithery donkeys in human form yearly swallow, gargle, and rub upon themselves nostrums of no value, because of advertising.

I hesitate to say it, but the way to approach this curious group of Culture Complexed readers is through sheer dullness . . . usually fostered by lengthiness. Recently a young lady wrote me from Maryland saying that she had four completed novels. All four of them had been rejected by several prominent publishing houses. In describing them she gave me a wild hunch. She had written all of them about Maryland, and various things that had happened there over a long period of time. Each of her separate novels was around the conventional length: seventy-five thousand words. Each of them dealt with approximately the same sort of characters. From the young lady's letter I could somehow feel that she had some-thing on the ball. I suggested to her that instead of having separate sets of characters she relate all the characters in one family, and combine the four novels in one lengthy nightmare of a novel. This she did without too much difficulty. She sold this abortion the first time out after it had been retyped and combined in one horrifying tome. I did not read any of the four novels, and I shall not read the combination of them when it is published; but I can easily see what happened. Publishers, even during the paper shortage times, despite everything against the project, still continued to go for a great mass of material, in imposing form, with a certain amount of dullness making it look cultural. I am not, by the way, advising anyone to perform this feat. It just happened to work that time; it probably wouldn't another time. I have every expectation that some book club will take up this novel and promulgate it with slaverings about its cultural content. I have no doubt that it will be a Best Seller, bore the living hell out of thousands of readers, but get by because of the fact that to read it is a mental feat causing extreme agony. I feel that the movies will buy it, cast it big, and spend a couple of million dollars making it. Now in speaking of the non-existent Average Readers and of course I am speaking of average American readers it is well to take into consideration a curious fact about us Americans. We distrust pleasure, as a device of the devil. Many of us are coming out of this madness; but more of us remain in it. Many of us still feel that to practice masochism upon oneself constitutes a sort of cleanliness toward Godliness. There are still millions of Americans who will pick up a long book highly recommended by snobbish critics and, in essence, say to themselves: "I'll read the God-damn thing even if it kills me." Don't think you can attract people like that with a lively narrative, even if you spice it to hell and gone with sex. It can't be done.

A good, rollicking short novel, full of espieglerie, spicy and succinct, will be bought and read by the few people left in the country who read because they like to. But it will not be read by the Culture complexed hordes of the book clubs because they will suspect you for not boring them. So forget the Average Reader. There is not any such paragon. There are groups of readers, and you must pick and choose between them. Your best group, needless to say, although I admit I have already said it (and it would not be necessary even to hint at the fact if only I could be sure that among my readers there were no dumb, pitiful idiots but there are!), is the group you were born into, or have married into, or have been put into: maybe your folks were farmers and you were, therefore, raised among pigs, and are familiar with their habits; or maybe you married a body-odor heiress and dine each night under a crystal chandelier with a brace of English butlers pouring the mint sauce over your shoulder onto your roast lamb; in which case write about body-odor heiresses and what goes with them. Maybe, to conclude, you've been put in jail a couple of times and know about life encircled with stripes and eked out behind bars. Write about convicts.

But don't be a farmer's son, attempting cash-and-carry prose on a basis of your detailed knowledge of Manhattan whorehouses.