contemporary issues in fiction

I’m reading a book right now that’s due to be published by the end of next month. Now, I’m not sure if this is a genre issue, but I notice a lot of online/social media speech in today’s books. And I’m not saying I don’t enjoy contemporary literature, or that I dislike when our current reality enters the books being written right now.

But if you want to set your book in today’s world, don’t drag everything over there with you. If you want to talk about contemporary issues (whether through allegory or direct reference to a real fact), that’s great. Applaudable. But let the books be the escape they have always presented to the audience who reads them.

Why am I putting down my phone and choosing your book instead of scrolling on social media, only for the book to reference it or communicate in social media fashion so much that I can’t even tell the difference between the two anymore?

And again, it’s not to say that the art of writing is lost, or that no more good books are being published today. But I’m also not wrong to say the market is saturated with books that need better editorial advice. Knowing your audience is a good first step, too.

For a lot of the books that go through my hands (one I had to DNF recently because of it), I feel like they try to appeal to that narrow pocket on social media where they have 7 seconds to catch a “reader’s” attention, and their work is filled with one-liners that serve as crowd-pleasers.  

When book marketing started gaining traction on social media, authors were trying to see what works and how to break through to their target audience. But now it has become too accessible. Publishing a book has never been easier. And this might sound controversial, but it feels like before you would use social media to promote a book, and today, books have become just another product to profit from social media.

Maybe you’ve noticed it if you’re on social media, but the same goes for music. You have a few lines – maybe a chorus or a bridge that are catchy and appeal to listeners, and it creates hype about that music, but when it’s finally out, you realize that this whole time, you’ve already heard the best part. By then, the engagement has already paid off, and since that system works, it’s become a rinse-and-repeat process.

So the bottom line here is that art today – literature, for example, since I started with it – is turning into soulless commercialism, and you can tell when you read it. It’s not about language, which, as we all know, is a living system prone to constant change, so literature (the art of words) is also affected. Then if social media and our current reality shape our language, they’re going to shape literature as well.

The issue is a bit more complex. But also, it can just be named: capitalism.

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