Why do some writers stay in fashion and others don’t?

Jeffrey's answer

Writers come in and out of fashion. It is the saddest pattern in publishing — and one of the most unavoidable.

Wilkie Collins, who in his own day rivalled Dickens for sales, is now read mostly by enthusiasts and undergraduates. Dorothy Sayers, whose Lord Peter Wimsey novels were everywhere in the 1930s, is read in our decade by a much narrower audience. Both of them are, in any honest assessment, magnificent. Both of them were, at the height of their fame, considered untouchable. And both of them have, within sixty or seventy years, narrowed.

The thing about all those writers — Wilkie Collins, not so much Conan Doyle, but certainly Dorothy Sayers — is that they come in and out of fashion. It does not mean they are not damn good at their job. It just means that fashion does move on. Unless you are Charles Dickens, unless you are Conan Doyle — you survive a fashion cycle but rarely two — it is damned hard to survive.

Why? What separates the survivors from the rest?

I have been thinking about this question for fifty years, and I have a tentative answer. I do not know if it is right. But it is the closest I have come.

The writers who survive are the writers whose characters survive. Not their plots. Not their settings. Not their style. Their characters. Sherlock Holmes is more famous than every story Conan Doyle ever wrote. Hercule Poirot is more famous than any Agatha Christie title. Sydney Carton is more famous than the rest of A Tale of Two Cities. Heathcliff. Mr Darcy. Bertie Wooster. Holden Caulfield. The character escapes the book. The character lives in the wider culture, separate from the work that produced them. That is what survival looks like.

If you cannot name three of the central characters of a famous novel, twenty years after first reading it, the book is unlikely to survive in the long term. If you can name them all, instantly, half a century later — the book is going to be read by your grandchildren. That is the test.

What this means for the writer trying to write a novel that will last is uncomfortable. Plot will not save you. Setting will not save you. Style will not save you. Character is the only material that lasts. The novelist who builds a story around three or four characters who genuinely live on the page has a chance, even a small one, of writing a book that survives the fashion cycle. The novelist who builds a story around a clever idea — however clever — does not.

This is, I should say, a warning to the writer who reads the bestseller lists looking for what to copy. Whatever is at the top of the list this year will be gone from the list in three years. The fashion will have moved. The book that survives is the book whose characters are so alive that fashion cannot quite kill them.

Aim for the character who is bigger than the book.

If you can do that, you have a chance of joining the small handful of writers who, in any given century, simply do not go out of fashion. Dickens. Conan Doyle. Christie. Wodehouse. They survive because their characters became larger than the work that produced them.

It is the only test I have ever found that holds up across generations. And I have looked.

A few practical notes

• The character test for survival. Can you name three central characters from a novel twenty years after reading it? If yes, the book has a chance of lasting. If no, the book will fade.
• Write specific, not universal. The universal emerges from the specific. Sherlock Holmes is specific (Baker Street, deerstalker, violin, cocaine). The universal — the iconic detective — emerged from those specifics.
• Avoid cultural references that won’t age. Specific brand names, current politicians, slang of the moment. Use them sparingly. They date a book faster than anything.
• Read writers who lasted. What do they have in common? Almost always: at least one character who escaped the book.
• Don’t chase trends. By the time you’ve finished writing the trend, the trend has moved.
• The 50-year test. Would this book make sense to a reader in 2076? If the answer is no, you may be writing a book of the moment, not a book that lasts. Both are valid choices — but they are different choices.

Worth reading on this. John Sutherland’s Lives of the Novelists (a literary biography of 294 authors, with brutal candour about who lasted and why). Tim Parks’s Where I’m Reading From (essays on what makes books travel across generations and languages).