The Great American Novel is Unpublishable
… at least not in print. The print market demands high sales volume, and
this isn’t amenable to good writing techniques.
Artificial devices that boost sales by making exciting page turners hinder
good form.
The opening hook is a must for selling a novel to a publisher. It makes good
sales sense. The modern reader expects immediate gratification. The digital
age offers fast stimuli and something that slows the mind may bore the
reader. With so many books available for the reader to choose from, each
book competes for attention. If the reader isn’t hooked in the first line or
two, the reader may move on to the next book. However, the great American
novel may need development of scene or character or plot. Pasternak,
Tolstoy, Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Goethe, et cetera (okay, those aren't
American examples) didn’t always
start off with murder or mayhem in the first line. They didn’t try to build
suspense in the first paragraph. If a modern writer wrote as the great
authors of the past, the first novel would unlikely get published.
The chapter’s demise helps sell a novel to a publisher. Dean Koontz is a
great novelist. I love his Odd Thomas books. And he knows how to write books that sell.
He is a master of the new technique of chapter murder. Once upon a time: a
phrase was a succinct thought, a sentence was a thought, a paragraph was a
collection of thoughts with a theme, and a chapter was a collection of
thoughts and themes organized into a coherent group. Novels were divided
into chapters which set apart scenes, time periods, actions, or events. The
reader knew to read to the end of the chapter and that would be where to
place the book mark at the end of a night’s reading. Not so today. Look at a
Koontz chapter which ends at an exciting point in action … a hook. The next
chapter begins with the next sentence. This device keeps the reader turning
pages. But I do not think it will work for long because as readers lose the
concept of chapter, they will then learn to put the bookmark at the end of
scenes within a chapter. In the long run, this device may be
counterproductive. “In the olden days” of proper chapter organization, a
reader would continue through the boring parts because they knew the end of
the chapter was coming. Today, the reader sticks the bookmark wherever
scenes change or the pace slows down.