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Reading

Good Arguments by Bo Seo.

This book is part argument guide, part competition memoir, and part reflection on the place of arguments in the world.

The author, Bo Seo, is a debate world champion in both World Schools and British Parliamentary, and is generally regarded as the GOAT in the debate community. Most of the people I debated with considered his 2016 finals speech (which you can watchhere if that sounds interesting) to be something like a religious event, and many of them, myself included, were cringily able to recite the opening word for word.

As a result, I’ve found Good Arguments to be pure gravy. I’ve also found it incredibly useful for my coaching work. But it may be most broadly interesting for Seo’s underlying argument – that competitive debate offers a framework for productive disagreement which is more actionable and more accessible than something like formal logic.

Debate grows less out of philosophy than out of rhetoric – which is distinguished from the pure truth stuff by being a form of tekhne, a practical craft.

Dancing in the Dark by Karl Ove Knausgaard.

This is the 4th book in My Struggle. It follows on from the childhood-centred material of Boyhood Island, to a recounting of Knausgaard’s late adolescence and his first year out of school, during which he worked as a form teacher in a remote town in Northern Norway.

This is probably my favourite in the series so far. There’s all the usual Knausgaard stuff, like a wonderful treatment of mundane detail etc., but what he does especially well here, is to capture the frenzied, hormonal energy of the relevant life stage – where every social interaction takes on paramount importance and everything is about sex.

A few weeks ago, I saw a clip from a Joyce scholar who stated that there have been few writers in history as concerned with the loss of their virginity as Joyce. To this end, Dancing in the Dark comes close to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, if in different ways. Knausgaard’s concern is not with sex as symbolic correlative for the biblical fall, but for sex as sex, sex as a teenage boy longs for it.

It also differs from Portrait because the actual loss of virginity happens earlier than the reader might expect. The problem here is not a lack of ‘opportunities;’ in fact, there are many, and the young Knausgaard seems far from unwanted. Rather, the problem is to do with, shall we say, duration – which is pretty ironic in the context of a six-volume novel.

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Reflection and question

For a while now, commentators have been banging on about the changing nature of the publishing industry – how the modern writer is becoming increasingly multi-hyphenate and that the industry itself is less concentrated in traditional publishers. Read: Substack is a made out to be a big deal.

These changes are spun both positively and negatively. On the one hand, the need for a ‘platform’ is generally loathed by writers because a) posting on social media is gross; b) it is a distraction from writing; c) it is something that we writers may reasonably (if naively) expect a publisher to do for us; d) it is a consequence of an increasingly competitive industry. On the other hand, Substack and Medium and the great big internet promise writers more autonomy, more agency, and a closer relationship with their readers. No doubt, there is some truth to both of these positions.

But the big splash this week (reported by The Bookseller) was that the folks at Substack hosted a breakfast for literary agents. Of course, there have already been a spate of Substack-driven book deals, and the rise of the so-called ‘Substack novel,’ but this breakfast, it seems, has been taken as watershed evidence of the role Substack is/will be playing in the publishing industry.

This could turn out well, or poorly. Poorly, if a successful Substack becomes a precondition for publication beyond the way a platform is already considered a precondition by many agents and editors. Well, if it means there are expanded opportunities available to writers, e.g. with publishers backing serialised novels in the way they used to in their house magazines (Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, for instance, was serialised by Scribner’s).

However, for all the apparent speed and excitement of these changes, there’s a more obvious and boring question which I’m still stuck on: how can we expect anyone to read fiction on their smartphone?

I say fiction, because, vis-à-vis Substack, this is where the real question marks are. For a while, the norm for fiction writers who succeed on Substack has been to write non-fiction, especially in the form of craft pieces. But this strategy has at least three major flaws:

1. Writing non-fiction at the consistency and volume necessary for platform growth limits the capacity to write fiction;
2. A writer following this strategy builds an audience for a different kind of writing than the one they want to promote. The fact that I like a writer’s non-fiction does not mean that I will buy their fiction. For example, James Wood is probably the most read living literary critic, and yet is hardly a well-known novelist.
3. Because most writers on Substack follow this strategy, craft writing on the platform is dramatically oversaturated.

This, of course, begs the question: why not write fiction on there? When Substack first launched, this was one of the things which most excited fiction writers – the possibility of serialising novels, or posting short stories.

And yet, most attempts to publish fiction on Substack have gained minimal traction.

For serialised novels, the platform simply isn’t amenable to it. In the first place, discoverability (which, ultimately, is why writers are on Substack) becomes a huge problem – i.e. only people who have read chapters one-through-six will read chapter seven; meaning chapter seven won’t rank high on the algorithm. In the second place, even when chapter seven is encountered, it becomes cumbersome for readers to go back to chapter one, as the platform gives you minimal control over layout.

Possibly, the case is better for short stories. There is, for example, the case of Ben Sims – a writer who has posted a short story every month and has managed to leverage his platform into a book deal with Conduit. Or, at least, that’s how the trajectory appears from the outside.

However, two things jump out to me about Sims: 1) He’s the most successful writer I’ve seen make use of this strategy and yet only has two-thousand-something subscribers; and 2) more importantly, while what I’ve read of his work is very very good, I haven’t finished a single one of his stories. Why?

Because to read fiction, you need to focus intensely for a prolonged period, and this is incredibly difficult to do when you are within an app that has bright buttons and a recommendation algorithm which is constantly promising a newer, shiner thing to read. This problem is compounded by other reading-on-a-phone-app stuff, such as the fact that the screen is harsh and verifiably produces less retention and engagement than a page (in this case, un-remediated by the ink-like display of a Kindle), and when we read things on our phones, our actual reading pattern is different by habit, to skim, to read in a Z-pattern, etc. This is okay if we’re reading for information but not if we’re reading fiction.

So, if I’m a representative data point of Ben Sims subscribers, this amounts to the following problem: very few of those two-thousand+ people are actually reading his stories beyond a few paragraphs.

This produces an ironic situation in which fiction published digitally becomes a hollow credibility mechanism for publishing fiction in print. (This is especially ironic for the people who write non-fiction books as a credibility builder for their businesses).

As far as I can see, digital writing platforms have still failed to answer the simple and essential question of phone-app reading, and they won’t be the ‘disruptors’ they think are, until they do.

See you in two weeks,
Blake