| Happy Sunday, folks. Why is fiction so hard to write? Good fiction, I mean. The majority of new fiction I encounter just isn't very good. I feel bad because I want to read great fiction. I feel bad because those authors are pouring their heart and soul into the pages. What's happening? I consider myself a decent writer, but fiction is another beast entirely. It never sounds right when I try it, and I bet others feel the same way. I loved Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential, his autobiographical account of his early cooking days. Read like fiction. I couldn't get through Bourdain's Bone in the Throat, his novel, which was actually fiction. Humans are storytellers. There's an argument to be made that language evolved into the complex system it is because it made telling complex, engrossing stories around the campfire possible. It was around the fire that we truly became human, where we recounted past exploits and laughed and told jokes and solidified bonds. That was all due to storytelling. It's in our blood. If we're such profligate storytellers, and have been for hundreds of thousands of years, why is fiction so hard to do right? Is it because we are obligate storytellers and story-consumers and our standards are just too high? One other hypothesis I have is that previous eras had a lot more acute pain to go around. Wars. Famines. Total economic crashes. Terrible to those experiencing it but great fodder for artists and writers. These days it's all low-level, simmering chronic pain. Bearable, comfortable pain you don't really feel or notice. Another hypothesis is that reading fiction set in the current day always feels off. It feels too much like fiction. But when you're fifty years in the future reading an author from 50 years ago writing fiction set 50 years ago, it feels realer because you don't know any better. You weren't there and can't spot the inconsistencies. I mean, can you imagine reading "COVID fiction"? Sounds awful. These hypotheses don't offer much hope. We don't want a sudden uptick in major disasters and acute generational pain just to generate better art. If true, the second hypothesis is totally hopeless. Lately, the only contemporary fiction I've been able to enjoy has been genre fiction. Don Winslow's series about the Mexican cartels has been great. James Elroy and Bernard Cornwell, too, both of whom I've spoken of in previous Sundays with Sisson. But that's almost "cheating" because the setting is either two hundred years ago or it's set in a well-established world. To finish, I have two questions. First, why do you think fiction is so hard to do right? Second, am I missing some? What's the best recent piece of fiction you've read? Give me your answers and your recommendations in the comment section of Weekly Link Love. | 