Yes, Michael. I've been pitching one for two years now. I haven't given up. But I likely will have to self-publish because what I've written is true to its time, its protagonist, who, by the way, is white and male, and true to human nature, as it was engineered.
When I go to press, I will let everyone know. Maybe someone on here will buy a copy.
Thanks for asking. I would call it Mainstream Literary. Sometimes I call it 'aspires-to-literary.' Some might call it autofiction (which I note the MFA cult now looks down upon). I would call it 'fictionalized memoir.' It is highly realistic with an engaging, but not smarmy or pretentious POV character.
The death of reading and the death of publishing go hand-in-hand. The solve is not likely to happen inside institutions – by which I mean the overly consolidated publishing industry, and the education industrial complex, where a young person can spend 16 years in school and never read a book. The solve has to be grassroots, and ground up. It has to start in homes, with parents modeling and encouraging reading in children. It has to get traction in social reading – by which I mean lone wolf individual readers, which most readers are, coming together to read together, either in person or online. Substack is a beautiful place for that. The co-reading that happens here, hosted by amazing people like Simon Haisell, not to mention the potential to reinvent the kind of serial publication that made the novel the dominant art form of the nineteenth century, are, I hope and believe, signs of a quiet revolution that is no less urgent for being peaceful.
Why aren't young people reading? I blame the teachers. Yes, the teachers, along with the; MFA crap pushers. You have to wipe the slate clean so that you can imbue the youth with the shiny new ideas. I blame teachers and teachers' unions.
Alright, I’ll start this response off by saying Happy MLK Day, Liza! Also, please ignore Echo Tracer’s very rude and profanity-laced comment with no point to it. You are 1000% right. The publishing industry is gradually dying precisely because everything about books has become uniform and sterile. The publishing industry has only a few big publishers which is a monopoly and monopolies are never good in a capitalist society. All books have basically the same recycled plot, all are written in the same style, all have similar types of characters with noting distinct or interesting about them, all have similar ugly modern art designs on the cover, and all are so dumbed down a third grader could understand them. No thinking required with modern mainstream literature. No author is allowed to be unique. When you wrote Blue Snow ❄️ you did all you could to slowly build up to the protagonist’s main conflict. You sought to tease it out and leave people guessing what it could be.
This by the way, is how someone with mental health issues would talk to their therapist in real life. That’s how us humans talk you know, we get distracted, go off on tangents, don’t get to the point, take time to explain things, need space to think things through and talk things out, etc. It also makes the story much more intriguing and gets you interested in finding out what happens next. But literary agents complained it was too long, not clear enough and that they couldn’t follow it (probably because they have the attention span of a Goldfish). So you had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and start all over again.
When it was more in line with what for them, fit the mold of a great novel then all of a sudden a literary agent was begging for you send them their manuscript. That is just absolutely pathetic! Hey guys! The whole point of literature is to give people complex stories that make them think and view life differently. Why shouldn’t the industry showcase different styles of writing, tone and storytelling? Most people do want complex, interesting stories! Which is why you aren’t making any money off the garbage you’re selling now. You are actively shooting yourself in the foot by publishing generic trash. Books like Where the Crawdads Sing, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Gray, The Hate U Give, The Underground Railroad, and American Dirt suck because they utilize concepts that we’ve all seen in novels a hundred times.
They are literally just a carbon copy of something that came before. MFA has indeed ruined everything. Outside of small MFA circles, who reads this garbage? No one. You wanna know why Lost Paradise, Romeo and Juliet, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Sherlock Holmes stories, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1984, The Master and the Margarita, Crime and Punishment, All Quiet on the Western Front, and War and Peace are still widely read today and no one will remember trash like The Hunger Games series or Normal People is because the former all have characteristics that make them special and thoughtful ingenious really, stories with universal overarching narratives we can all relate to and important moral lessons we can all benefit from. You wanna start earning money again Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster? Then take risks! Take a gamble on a book like The Lilac Room, The Leverkuhn Quartet or Blue Snow!
Excellent piece! Thank you so much for this! I am myself a writer unattached to the MFA industry and I had to immigrate for the second time in my life--I left America because I had become unpublishable. And unfortunately, the publishing industry was not destroyed by money-driven capitalists, as American academics would want us believe, but rather by them and their uncreative, unintelligent, unoriginal vision of "writing". A "writing" uprooted from any tradition and from life itself.
“MFA Slop” is the perfect descriptor. A few years ago, I decided to not read any authors with MFA in their bio. Simply pick up a book and you see those three letters, put it back down.
I am just not so sure if this is the issue, not sure that people are just learning a new taste. I think the greater problem is that people do not live their own lives anymore. Young people live vicariously through other people because of the internet and the little of their lives they do live, it is still processed to a sterile state for social media. MFA or not, it doesn't change the fact that we cannot write well what we do not understand in depth. "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." — François de La Rochefoucauld
That quote is priceless. It definitely sums up the world we're living in. And as someone who worked full-time as a sportswriter under my real name until recently for a large global corporation, I doubt most people realize just how accustomed to disguise so many people are. I felt like I was working for a cult half the time of painted smiles and scripted language. I'm so glad that I left.
This explains a lot, but perhaps there is more to the story. We still have the question: why don't publishers do what they need to do in order to make money? Which, as you say, is to innovate and fill a market gap. It might be that they are run by executives pushing a different agenda, or who can't see outside the MFA box -- but sooner or later the market should push such executive out. If people do still want true literature, you would expect some innovator to find a way to deliver it. This is how traditional media is being disrupted.
But perhaps people are losing the ability to consume true literature because attention spans are shortening? I read that TV series and Netflix movies now all tend to have simple storylines, with the actors forced to constantly spell out what they're doing and repeatedly broadcast the plot, because the audience is all scrolling their smartphones. If that is the case, the reflexive response of the publishing industry would indeed be to push a few standard tropes with simple dialogues and something new happening every few lines - they're competing with social media feeds. Still a dead-end, because it means encouraging a trend that would inevitably lead to the end of literature and publishing.
In short, what if people do still want literature but are losing the ability to read?
I don’t doubt that some people want “true” literature - but honestly, most of the people I know barely read, and the ones who do read, absolutely love the types of books that are popular today, ie, Freida McFadden, romantasy, etc. My reading taste aligns with Liza’s, but I think in this low attention-span, salacious world we live in, books that read like the classics are simply not in demand.
And honestly, “true literature” can often be intellectually demanding - I imagine that most people, after a hard day of work, simply want to read something light and easy. And there’s nothing wrong with that!
I empathize with agents. They’re operating with real constraints: limited bandwidth, imperfect information, and a need to anticipate what editors are currently buying, not what might matter ten years from now.
That said, I agree with much of this critique. If you want to survive the traditional route, the incentives quietly nudge you toward sanding down whatever doesn’t fit the existing template. Over time, that selection pressure doesn’t just filter manuscripts - it reshapes writers themselves.
The result isn’t malicious gatekeeping so much as an ecosystem that slowly trains originality out of the system.
One reason I refuse to submit my work anywhere and just publish independently instead is that I break all the rules. Genre-fusion, tossing tropes I don't like, keeping tropes that I like, and even borrowing tropes from other genres that I don't fuse together highlight my work.
My intuition also tells me how to write. Sometimes, it's minimalist, but most of the time, I dig deeper, highlighting my works' themes and putting them front and center. The absolute last thing I want, though, is for my work to sound soulless. And if that's what the publishing industry wants, I'll refrain from submitting until it comes to its senses.
As a side note: Under my real name, I used to work full-time as a tabloid sportswriter, and I encountered the same issues. My directors would sanitize my voice until it was basically their work with my byline. I felt like I was writing for them as opposed to writing for sports fans. After a few months of that nonsense, I said, "I'm outta here."
I wasn't about to let anyone else water down my writing. At the end of the day, it's their loss, not mine.
Another big problem is that all the people in publishing under 45 or so were taught that The Joy Luck Club was every bit as good as Pale Fire or The House of Mirth, that it was illegitimate to suggest that there might be different levels of quality and that some books might really be better than others.
Schools started teaching The House on Mango Street more often than To the Lighthouse because it was easier to read and more “relatable” for the kids.
Colleges required fewer and fewer great books—fewer and fewer books period—even for English majors.
Which isn’t to pick on Amy Tan or Sandra Cisneros specifically. Those books are a lot better than most of the stuff appearing now. And it’s not to say schools shouldn’t include recent books, even “popular” books. But they should have cultivated a conversation among students about the possible differences, about what might make a classic last, a more complex book more rewarding than something easily digested. Or vice versa—argue for the superiority of the new stuff if you like, but have an argument based on familiarity with other kinds of books, not just “I liked this better because it didn’t have weird words in it” or whatever.
Instead they said everything is as good as everything else, judgments of quality are problematic, and maybe we should watch more movies and TV shows in our classes.
So you got a generation of editors who may never have read much outside of contemporary fiction and were encouraged to see no difference between the pleasures of the novel and those of “prestige” TV shows. It’s no wonder they’ve no taste for anything else.
Coda: Some TV shows are excellent. No blanket shade intended. But are they excellent in the same ways as an excellent novel? Should both function the same way, with the same narrative approaches and techniques? I think not. But that kind of analysis hasn’t been encouraged.
Oh shut the fuck up, how many books about WW2 exist? How many detective novels?
Like for fucks sake, would I read any of this shit? No. But the mainstream is always crap, you just loved it when it was your flavour of crap because at heart you don’t have any fucking taste, just a victim complex.
You were never entitled to succeed and you probably don’t deserve to. I’m not gonna read the shit of a midwit who’s mad that other midwits are getting published, none of you are worth reading.
Having taught MFA for 25+ years and having heard this complaint many times I do not find it convincing,
my students had a wide array of styles and aesthetics, including digressive, expansive work
A more authentic charge is when the writer becomes so invested in craft the work lacks heart, or soul if you prefer
- work that does not matter
I will agree that big digressive novels don’t sell like they used to, but that’s a cultural trend because reading has been devalued
and current generations have been trained by media. They don’t want a lot of words, they want you to get to the point and move on, and that will be even more so for future generations of readers.
I also agree that the industry has consolidated itself and commercial work is valued over literary work
I have not sold a work to the industry so long that it embarrasses me to tell you
But I don’t sit around, whining about how unfair it is, I am a writer and the literary life has always been a hard row to how
I don’t sit around whining when it comes to time to pay the freight for being a stylist
I’m the one chose to be a stylist and if I had to start over again, I’d make the same choices,
There’s a reason why most of my book spending over the past few years has been rebuilding my adolescent shelves, which includes Bradbury, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Percy, and Tolkien.
Although I have given up on the notion of being traditionally published, I would like someone to read the material. This means someone will have to approve of what I've done.
And isn't that a sticky proposition? Well, at least I've sold more than 12 books, and three out of five artificial intelligence writing coaches say the current manuscript is pretty good.
It is somewhat ironic that Google Gemini rates the story 8.5 in publication readiness, needing only a few touches to make the grade.
Put the book in front of beta readers, the robot says, but I think it needs more emotional depth.
This is spot on Liza. I had so many “suggestions” for my novel Time Enough: “you can’t have two protagonists;” “too many characters,” “use AI book cover” (mine is by a fine artist) and the list went on! I finally found a small US publisher Oprelle, who said, “You had me at hello.” I find I can’t even read most of the so-called award-winning books! I wrote a book I’d want to read. I agree with everything you said, and my sales, mostly in person, confirm it!
Exactly. Jesus: Can we finally get some novels that represent real people? How about male novels that show mens' real experiences?
Yes, Michael. I've been pitching one for two years now. I haven't given up. But I likely will have to self-publish because what I've written is true to its time, its protagonist, who, by the way, is white and male, and true to human nature, as it was engineered.
When I go to press, I will let everyone know. Maybe someone on here will buy a copy.
Best!
In what genre are you writing? Interested.
Thanks for asking. I would call it Mainstream Literary. Sometimes I call it 'aspires-to-literary.' Some might call it autofiction (which I note the MFA cult now looks down upon). I would call it 'fictionalized memoir.' It is highly realistic with an engaging, but not smarmy or pretentious POV character.
We definitely need more of them, and you'd have a reader right here.
The death of reading and the death of publishing go hand-in-hand. The solve is not likely to happen inside institutions – by which I mean the overly consolidated publishing industry, and the education industrial complex, where a young person can spend 16 years in school and never read a book. The solve has to be grassroots, and ground up. It has to start in homes, with parents modeling and encouraging reading in children. It has to get traction in social reading – by which I mean lone wolf individual readers, which most readers are, coming together to read together, either in person or online. Substack is a beautiful place for that. The co-reading that happens here, hosted by amazing people like Simon Haisell, not to mention the potential to reinvent the kind of serial publication that made the novel the dominant art form of the nineteenth century, are, I hope and believe, signs of a quiet revolution that is no less urgent for being peaceful.
Why aren't young people reading? I blame the teachers. Yes, the teachers, along with the; MFA crap pushers. You have to wipe the slate clean so that you can imbue the youth with the shiny new ideas. I blame teachers and teachers' unions.
Alright, I’ll start this response off by saying Happy MLK Day, Liza! Also, please ignore Echo Tracer’s very rude and profanity-laced comment with no point to it. You are 1000% right. The publishing industry is gradually dying precisely because everything about books has become uniform and sterile. The publishing industry has only a few big publishers which is a monopoly and monopolies are never good in a capitalist society. All books have basically the same recycled plot, all are written in the same style, all have similar types of characters with noting distinct or interesting about them, all have similar ugly modern art designs on the cover, and all are so dumbed down a third grader could understand them. No thinking required with modern mainstream literature. No author is allowed to be unique. When you wrote Blue Snow ❄️ you did all you could to slowly build up to the protagonist’s main conflict. You sought to tease it out and leave people guessing what it could be.
This by the way, is how someone with mental health issues would talk to their therapist in real life. That’s how us humans talk you know, we get distracted, go off on tangents, don’t get to the point, take time to explain things, need space to think things through and talk things out, etc. It also makes the story much more intriguing and gets you interested in finding out what happens next. But literary agents complained it was too long, not clear enough and that they couldn’t follow it (probably because they have the attention span of a Goldfish). So you had to rewrite the whole thing from scratch and start all over again.
When it was more in line with what for them, fit the mold of a great novel then all of a sudden a literary agent was begging for you send them their manuscript. That is just absolutely pathetic! Hey guys! The whole point of literature is to give people complex stories that make them think and view life differently. Why shouldn’t the industry showcase different styles of writing, tone and storytelling? Most people do want complex, interesting stories! Which is why you aren’t making any money off the garbage you’re selling now. You are actively shooting yourself in the foot by publishing generic trash. Books like Where the Crawdads Sing, The Fault in Our Stars, Twilight, Fifty Shades of Gray, The Hate U Give, The Underground Railroad, and American Dirt suck because they utilize concepts that we’ve all seen in novels a hundred times.
They are literally just a carbon copy of something that came before. MFA has indeed ruined everything. Outside of small MFA circles, who reads this garbage? No one. You wanna know why Lost Paradise, Romeo and Juliet, Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, The Sherlock Holmes stories, A Farewell to Arms, The Grapes of Wrath, Frankenstein, Dracula, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1984, The Master and the Margarita, Crime and Punishment, All Quiet on the Western Front, and War and Peace are still widely read today and no one will remember trash like The Hunger Games series or Normal People is because the former all have characteristics that make them special and thoughtful ingenious really, stories with universal overarching narratives we can all relate to and important moral lessons we can all benefit from. You wanna start earning money again Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster? Then take risks! Take a gamble on a book like The Lilac Room, The Leverkuhn Quartet or Blue Snow!
Excellent piece! Thank you so much for this! I am myself a writer unattached to the MFA industry and I had to immigrate for the second time in my life--I left America because I had become unpublishable. And unfortunately, the publishing industry was not destroyed by money-driven capitalists, as American academics would want us believe, but rather by them and their uncreative, unintelligent, unoriginal vision of "writing". A "writing" uprooted from any tradition and from life itself.
“MFA Slop” is the perfect descriptor. A few years ago, I decided to not read any authors with MFA in their bio. Simply pick up a book and you see those three letters, put it back down.
Guess you're too good for Flannery O'Connor, huh?
Yes! 🙌
I am just not so sure if this is the issue, not sure that people are just learning a new taste. I think the greater problem is that people do not live their own lives anymore. Young people live vicariously through other people because of the internet and the little of their lives they do live, it is still processed to a sterile state for social media. MFA or not, it doesn't change the fact that we cannot write well what we do not understand in depth. "We are so accustomed to disguise ourselves to others, that in the end, we become disguised to ourselves." — François de La Rochefoucauld
That quote is priceless. It definitely sums up the world we're living in. And as someone who worked full-time as a sportswriter under my real name until recently for a large global corporation, I doubt most people realize just how accustomed to disguise so many people are. I felt like I was working for a cult half the time of painted smiles and scripted language. I'm so glad that I left.
This explains a lot, but perhaps there is more to the story. We still have the question: why don't publishers do what they need to do in order to make money? Which, as you say, is to innovate and fill a market gap. It might be that they are run by executives pushing a different agenda, or who can't see outside the MFA box -- but sooner or later the market should push such executive out. If people do still want true literature, you would expect some innovator to find a way to deliver it. This is how traditional media is being disrupted.
But perhaps people are losing the ability to consume true literature because attention spans are shortening? I read that TV series and Netflix movies now all tend to have simple storylines, with the actors forced to constantly spell out what they're doing and repeatedly broadcast the plot, because the audience is all scrolling their smartphones. If that is the case, the reflexive response of the publishing industry would indeed be to push a few standard tropes with simple dialogues and something new happening every few lines - they're competing with social media feeds. Still a dead-end, because it means encouraging a trend that would inevitably lead to the end of literature and publishing.
In short, what if people do still want literature but are losing the ability to read?
I don’t doubt that some people want “true” literature - but honestly, most of the people I know barely read, and the ones who do read, absolutely love the types of books that are popular today, ie, Freida McFadden, romantasy, etc. My reading taste aligns with Liza’s, but I think in this low attention-span, salacious world we live in, books that read like the classics are simply not in demand.
And honestly, “true literature” can often be intellectually demanding - I imagine that most people, after a hard day of work, simply want to read something light and easy. And there’s nothing wrong with that!
I empathize with agents. They’re operating with real constraints: limited bandwidth, imperfect information, and a need to anticipate what editors are currently buying, not what might matter ten years from now.
That said, I agree with much of this critique. If you want to survive the traditional route, the incentives quietly nudge you toward sanding down whatever doesn’t fit the existing template. Over time, that selection pressure doesn’t just filter manuscripts - it reshapes writers themselves.
The result isn’t malicious gatekeeping so much as an ecosystem that slowly trains originality out of the system.
One reason I refuse to submit my work anywhere and just publish independently instead is that I break all the rules. Genre-fusion, tossing tropes I don't like, keeping tropes that I like, and even borrowing tropes from other genres that I don't fuse together highlight my work.
My intuition also tells me how to write. Sometimes, it's minimalist, but most of the time, I dig deeper, highlighting my works' themes and putting them front and center. The absolute last thing I want, though, is for my work to sound soulless. And if that's what the publishing industry wants, I'll refrain from submitting until it comes to its senses.
As a side note: Under my real name, I used to work full-time as a tabloid sportswriter, and I encountered the same issues. My directors would sanitize my voice until it was basically their work with my byline. I felt like I was writing for them as opposed to writing for sports fans. After a few months of that nonsense, I said, "I'm outta here."
I wasn't about to let anyone else water down my writing. At the end of the day, it's their loss, not mine.
Another big problem is that all the people in publishing under 45 or so were taught that The Joy Luck Club was every bit as good as Pale Fire or The House of Mirth, that it was illegitimate to suggest that there might be different levels of quality and that some books might really be better than others.
Schools started teaching The House on Mango Street more often than To the Lighthouse because it was easier to read and more “relatable” for the kids.
Colleges required fewer and fewer great books—fewer and fewer books period—even for English majors.
Which isn’t to pick on Amy Tan or Sandra Cisneros specifically. Those books are a lot better than most of the stuff appearing now. And it’s not to say schools shouldn’t include recent books, even “popular” books. But they should have cultivated a conversation among students about the possible differences, about what might make a classic last, a more complex book more rewarding than something easily digested. Or vice versa—argue for the superiority of the new stuff if you like, but have an argument based on familiarity with other kinds of books, not just “I liked this better because it didn’t have weird words in it” or whatever.
Instead they said everything is as good as everything else, judgments of quality are problematic, and maybe we should watch more movies and TV shows in our classes.
So you got a generation of editors who may never have read much outside of contemporary fiction and were encouraged to see no difference between the pleasures of the novel and those of “prestige” TV shows. It’s no wonder they’ve no taste for anything else.
Coda: Some TV shows are excellent. No blanket shade intended. But are they excellent in the same ways as an excellent novel? Should both function the same way, with the same narrative approaches and techniques? I think not. But that kind of analysis hasn’t been encouraged.
Oh shut the fuck up, how many books about WW2 exist? How many detective novels?
Like for fucks sake, would I read any of this shit? No. But the mainstream is always crap, you just loved it when it was your flavour of crap because at heart you don’t have any fucking taste, just a victim complex.
You were never entitled to succeed and you probably don’t deserve to. I’m not gonna read the shit of a midwit who’s mad that other midwits are getting published, none of you are worth reading.
Having taught MFA for 25+ years and having heard this complaint many times I do not find it convincing,
my students had a wide array of styles and aesthetics, including digressive, expansive work
A more authentic charge is when the writer becomes so invested in craft the work lacks heart, or soul if you prefer
- work that does not matter
I will agree that big digressive novels don’t sell like they used to, but that’s a cultural trend because reading has been devalued
and current generations have been trained by media. They don’t want a lot of words, they want you to get to the point and move on, and that will be even more so for future generations of readers.
I also agree that the industry has consolidated itself and commercial work is valued over literary work
I have not sold a work to the industry so long that it embarrasses me to tell you
But I don’t sit around, whining about how unfair it is, I am a writer and the literary life has always been a hard row to how
I don’t sit around whining when it comes to time to pay the freight for being a stylist
I’m the one chose to be a stylist and if I had to start over again, I’d make the same choices,
And pay my dues without whimpering
Well said all counts.
There’s a reason why most of my book spending over the past few years has been rebuilding my adolescent shelves, which includes Bradbury, Dostoyevsky, Eliot, C.S. Lewis, Percy, and Tolkien.
Although I have given up on the notion of being traditionally published, I would like someone to read the material. This means someone will have to approve of what I've done.
And isn't that a sticky proposition? Well, at least I've sold more than 12 books, and three out of five artificial intelligence writing coaches say the current manuscript is pretty good.
It is somewhat ironic that Google Gemini rates the story 8.5 in publication readiness, needing only a few touches to make the grade.
Put the book in front of beta readers, the robot says, but I think it needs more emotional depth.
This is spot on Liza. I had so many “suggestions” for my novel Time Enough: “you can’t have two protagonists;” “too many characters,” “use AI book cover” (mine is by a fine artist) and the list went on! I finally found a small US publisher Oprelle, who said, “You had me at hello.” I find I can’t even read most of the so-called award-winning books! I wrote a book I’d want to read. I agree with everything you said, and my sales, mostly in person, confirm it!
What an insightful and beautiful piece! I see where you are coming from. I really do. I think I am largely on the same page tbh.