The Great Works of Literature Would Not Be Published Today

Arbitrary Submission Rules Are Killing Literature

The very people who claim to protect literature are killing it.

I’m back in the querying trenches for my latest novel, THE LEVERKÜHN QUARTET, and I thought that I would spend some time researching what the hell literary agents actually want to see in their inboxes. The result not only disappointed me but also disgusted me—so many agents have no idea what makes a book great!

It turns out that the very group—the far left—who has spent the past several years carping about bans on graphic depictions of anal sex from third-grade libraries does not actually care about freedom of expression in literature. The same agents who retweet every post about banned books under the sun are, in fact, the very people policing art with a set of arbitrary rules—under which zero great works of classic literature would have been published today.

In researching “who gets past the slush pile,” I found these common “rules” that agents use to assess the quality of a given submission. Here are some of the most nonsensical prescriptions—and why they should be ritually burned and overhauled so that we can bring great literature back into the world again.

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Your Book Must Be Fewer Than 100,000 Words

Right off the bat, 50% of all great literature flies off the shelf. No more Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, David Copperfield, Middlemarch, Ulysses, Don Quixote, etc. etc. etc. The book mustn’t be too long. One literary agent outlines prescriptions for each genre, insisting that “word count matters.” She then goes on to write one of the most false claims ever known to man:

As much as we would like to think we will happily read 250,000-word books or plunk down $16 for a 25,000-word book (really a novella), the truth is we tend not to. We, as readers, feel most comfortable reading books within the range we’re used to–the length of time it takes to read 80,000-100,000 words.

Really? We feel most comfortable reading books within the range that we’re used to? Well, sorry to burst your bubble, but I am used to reading Victorian literature and the Russian greats. That must mean that we should only publish books that are 300,000 words or longer!

Listen, I get it. It costs money to print long books. But at least make that argument rather than claiming that no one would read long books—because I know for a fact that they absolutely would! In fact, I prefer longer literary works—we get to experience the soul of every character and grow with them throughout their journeys. There is a time and place for a book like The Great Gatsby, but a work like The Brothers Karamazov will always be infinitely more rewarding because its sheer length allows us to plunge the depths of, say, Ivan’s psyche as we join him for his long, philosophical digressions. In fact, I would go so far as to say that I would read more contemporary works of literature were they longer—and were the author truly given space to build out his ideas.

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Your Book Must Introduce the Stakes Right Away

The more I learn about what literary agents want in submissions, the more I am convinced that, contrary to what their title suggests, many literary agents have never actually read literature.

In a wildly popular post, one literary agent states that only books that introduce stakes right away have a shot at publication:

I’m not talking about having that killer first line, it’s great it you have one, but it’s not a deal breaker if you don’t. You just need to pull the agent in. Get them caring about what’s happening, and wanting to know more.

Let’s put aside that a literary agent cannot punctuate a sentence for the life of her and does not even bother to proofread her posts before posting. What this agent points out here reveals a bigger flaw in the literary agent psyche. It’s the drive for action over ideas.

She continues:

The first pages are not the place for slow build-ups. Make sure you’re starting the story where the conflict or emotional tension begins. Place your character in the middle of an action or conversation that reveals something important about them.

Your first 10 pages need to introduce compelling characters, hint at conflict or establish the tone and stakes—what the protagonist stands to lose, which will compel the reader to keep turning pages.

Let’s imagine if The Great Gatsby started in medias res with the car accident or at a Gatsby party instead of with Nick’s introspective “In my younger and more vulnerable days.” Let’s imagine if Anna Karenina began with Anna’s train accident or her affair with Vronsky instead of Tolstoy’s meditation on the unhappy family and the exposition on the Oblonsky family. Let’s imagine if Holden Caulfield immediately began his crusade around New York without telling us about “David Copperfield kind of crap.”

She goes on:

If your real hook happens on page 20, see if you can cut any excess before it. Or, at the very least, plant hints of that conflict in the opening scene to intrigue readers.

What her post, in essence, tells us, is that literary agents do not want to see any sort of exposition before the “hook”—or the inciting incident of the plot. This prescription alone defies the standards of all great literature: any serious reader will know that the vast majority of classic novels begin with backstory, which makes characters come alive. There is nothing wrong with the hook of a story coming on page twenty! Hell—the inciting incident of Gatsby does not come until several chapters into the story!

Based on this agent’s insistence on introducing stakes right away, Anna Karenina certainly would not have been published today.

In the opening chapter of Anna Karenina, Anna’s stakes are not clear at all because she does not even exist for the reader this early on in the novel. In fact, the book starts off rather slowly—with a dense descriptive paragraph before we reach any plot elements. But such slow build-ups are precisely what makes great literature so good. As a reader, I don’t want to be told what the “stakes” are on the first page—that would be boring, after all! I want to be pulled into a world rife with ideas. And while there is nothing wrong with starting in medias res, slow build-ups have been the cornerstone of great literature for centuries. By forcing writers to introduce an immediate conflict, we are stripping literature of its introspective qualities and uniqueness, thrusting all great minds into a tiny box.

Slow openings are memorable precisely because they contain no immediate conflict, emotional tension, or “stakes.” Rather than to react, they compel us to think. And this seems to be the great plague that has set over the literary machine of the present day—literary agents do not want to think.

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No Extraneous Details Permitted

But the arbitrary regulations don’t stop there!

In the same article, this agent tells us the following:

Many writers begin with long-winded backstory or world building, leading to a slow build up that postpones the real action and slows the pace, overwhelming readers with unproductive information.

Tip: Kick things off by introducing the main character in action or giving us a hint of the inciting incident. You can ground the reader without providing every single detail up front. Provide info at the time it’s needed, as the story unfolds.

In many ways, this arbitrary rule builds off the previous one. It is clear that this agent likes action and cannot appreciate a slow opening replete with setting and description. She considers any sort of extraneous information as “unproductive,” which makes it sound like we are reading an IKEA furniture assembly guide. Again, there is a time and place to assemble IKEA furniture. But when I go to a bookstore, I am not looking to furnish my apartment with wood but to furnish my mind with ideas.

Must all information given to us in a novel be productive? It is clear, for one, that this agent has never read John Steinbeck’s East of Eden—one of the most beautiful novels ever written that contains a deluge of so-called “unproductive” information.

According to this agent, such an opening would go immediately into the “slush pile” of literary rejects because there is no action! There are no stakes! Steinbeck simply gives us a beautiful description of the Salinas Valley, which will serve as a character of its own the deeper we get into the story of the Trask brothers and the tragic Cathy Ames.

And it is also tragic that East of Eden would not have been published today—or, at least, not this beautiful exposition on the Salinas Valley that has gone down in history as one of the most literary places on planet Earth thanks to these very opening pages—ones that would not have gone through the query pile today.

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Flowery Writing is Bad

Of all terrible literary agent offenses, this one might be my least favorite. The same agent tells us that writing must not contain "poetic prose and metaphors.” She elaborates:

Often times the writers will focus on sounding “literary” and write meandering, prosy or metaphor laden sentences. While it is a style choice, it’s not usually a successful one.

Tip: Flowery prose and metaphor often detract from your writing. You can often make more impact using fewer, but stronger words.

Again, I will attempt to ignore the blatant grammatical errors in her writing (though I struggle to do so because my English major brain is sounding off alarm bells that someone who does not even understand grammar has the gall to tell other writers that flowery writing is bad). What the hell does she know about metaphors or literary writing?

Let’s take a look at the master of flowery prose, Vladimir Nabokov, in some of the opening pages of Lolita:

“Elderly American ladies leaning on their canes listed towards me like towers of Pisa.”

The world changed with the introduction of this sentence. Under the draconian regime of this literary agent, however, it would not have seen the light of day.

Tell me one more time that you don’t want to see metaphor-laden sentences, and I will personally summon the ghost of Vladimir Nabokov to haunt you for the rest of eternity.

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Your Book Can’t Introduce Too Many Characters in the First Chapter

Let’s travel to another blog.

This writer tells us that it is a faux pas for an author to introduce too many characters in a novel’s opening chapter:

Twelve characters isn’t an opening chapter—it’s a party! And it’s overwhelming. No reader can keep that many new characters straight, especially when two thirds of them are just names. That’s a clear sign you’ve fallen victim to backstory, where you explain your protagonist’s life or describe her predicament in full. Don’t do that. Chapter One should focus on the protagonist, revealing her main concern and hinting at the journey or challenges ahead of her. You may do this with the help of a secondary character or two, but keep the number small, and have them acting upon or reacting to the protagonist, keeping the spotlight on her. There’s no official number of characters for the first chapter, but ‘fewer is better’ is a good rule of thumb.

By now you should know that I am about an hour into writing this piece, and I have put on a hat to avoid the temptation of ripping all of my hair out. We have already demonstrated that in great literature, the opening chapter does not necessarily need to focus on the protagonist—in fact, in Anna Karenina, the protagonist is fully absent. But this writer seems to fixate on the presence of the protagonist, claiming that no reader can keep track of many characters all at once.

I can tell you for a fact that that is completely false. In fact, I am currently reading Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, in which we are introduced to the following characters over the course of a seven-page first chapter:

1. Consul Jean Buddenbrook – the patriarch

2. Elisabeth Buddenbrook (née Kröger) – his wife

3. Antonie (Tony) Buddenbrook – their young daughter

4. Thomas (Tom) Buddenbrook (the younger) – their son

5. Christian Buddenbrook – the youngest son

6. Johann Buddenbrook Sr. – Jean's father

7. Madame Antoinette Buddenbrook (née Duchamps) – his wife

8. Klothilde (Thilda) Buddenbrook – niece of the family

9. Ida Jungmann – the governess

10. Jean Jacques Hoffstede – a poet

11. Dr. Grabow – the family physician

I was hoping that we would get to twelve so that I could obliterate this writer’s point that “twelve characters isn’t an opening chapter” with precision, but eleven is good enough. And I, as a reader, was, in fact, expected to keep track of these characters, and I did so quite naturally because–guess what—they resurface later on in the story, and you get to know most of them much better!

I am starting to see a pattern among these literary agent prescriptions. One agent tells us that “we tend not to” read long books. Another has decided that we cannot keep track of twelve characters in an opening chapter, as if we all must suffer from amnesia after closing the first chapter of a book. These literary agents are presuming that the reader is a lot stupider than he actually is! Given that readers are intellectuals by default—or readers of great literature, at the very least—why denigrate our minds and assume that we possess the literary aptitude of fifth graders?

It is not good practice to condescend to those you hope to appeal to. When I attempt to sell college consulting packages to parents, for instance, my first assumption is not that my clients are dumb as shit—rather, I always give them the benefit of the doubt. Why, then, make this assumption about the very demographic you attempt to cater to? Why not give them the benefit of the doubt? The human mind can process much more information than these agents seem to give us credit for! And we could probably process even more information should we be entrusted with more intellectually sophisticated books!

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Sentences Must Not Be Longer Than 15–20 words

I’ve seen this claim floating around Reddit and Instagram and recently made a reaction video that inspired this very piece. It seems that, according to literary professionals, the maximum word count for a sentence in a novel is 25 words. And that’s the maximum—and the average should be kept to 15-20 words. Anything longer is apparently fundamentally unreadable. In fact, in keeping with my previous theory that literary professionals believe that readers are dumb as shit, one blog writer even tells us that reading a 38-word sentence forces us to “concentrate too hard.”

Wow! God forbid that I concentrate while reading a great work of literature!

Read any work of great literature, and it will abound with 25+ or even 40+ word sentences—many of which are very readable! The problem is that you have to be a great writer to pull off consistently readable long sentences. The solution, then, is not to police sentence length but to strive to become a better writer.

I refuse to live in a world where all books are just a conglomeration of short sentences without subclauses so that books can be more “readable.” Great writing is readable. Bad writing is not. None of this has anything to do with sentence length.

Here are the opening two paragraphs of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady, a novel rife with long sentences.

James’s average sentence length in this excerpt is 38 words! And contrary to popular belief, his prose is very readable.

Similarly, the average sentence length from the first chapter of my novel is 32 words. Not quite Jamesian, but respectable. And I will not be told to destroy my beautiful sentences so that you can concentrate “less hard.”

If concentrating while reading is too much to ask, may I suggest that you put your book down and watch a TV show. Seriously. And make sure it’s the new kind where Netflix assumes that you are so out of it that the characters will now dictate everything they’re doing to you so that you really don’t have to pay attention.

God, please save me from modern civilization.

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Well. Now that we have demonstrated that zero great books of classic literature would have been published today, can we please stop policing literature?

There is a reason that publishing is dying and that no one reads literary fiction these days. The literary fiction being published with these standards is simply not… good. It’s the same formula over and over again. And no one wants to read it.

The death of great literature will be at the hands of literary agents and the publishing world—if it hasn’t happened already. As writers of the great literature of the future, we must make sure that we are not complicit in its death by resisting these arbitrary writing standards. Great works of literature, after all, always outlive the reductive trends of the times. And if we continue to create great art, these agents have no choice but to amend their ideas of “good writing”—and maybe pick up a real book, for once.

Great literature comes in all shapes and sizes. Let’s stop imposing arbitrary rules on what literature should and should not be and let our imaginations run free. After all, great literature has never followed the rules—it has always broken them.

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