Hellooooo again…
Let me try to make my argument again. Perhaps I can be clearer.
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There is a such a thing as a great writer, who could be successful in one or more media: poetry, drama, short stories, novels, etc. There is such a thing as great writing. No doubt about it.
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Great writers have applied their powers to the novel and produced real art in that form. This was never in doubt either.
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The novel, by definition, requires a plot that sustains the story over the course of a few hundred pages. I.e., the “story” in its most narrow sense. This is difficult to do well! It’s hard to do well in a novel, and it’s hard to do well in a movie.
A. Characters aren’t the bottleneck. Settings aren’t the bottleneck. Dialog isn’t the bottleneck. Great writers typically do these things quite well and quite easily. Original and interesting plots are the bottleneck. It’s hard to come up with an interesting setup, even harder to manage that for a few hundred pages (“plot arc”), and good satisfying endings are especially tough.
B. Even as great a writer as Shakespeare made up very few of his own stories. He took them from others or from history. Shakespeare's plays - Wikipedia
C. There is a fundamental tension between art and entertainment when it comes to the plot. J.K. Rowling is an effective world-builder and can be quite literary in her descriptions, but the whole plot centered around the eeeevil villain is cliched schlock. It’s entertainment, at best. Yet a novel without the Big Plot can easily devolve into character studies with an episodic structure. Now we can argue about the definition of “novel,” but to me, even Great Writing that fills a few hundred pages without a firm backbone of story is a novel in name only (it could still be genuinely good writing, however, and even be a real work of art).
D. Redundancy is the great killer of future art. For example, so many “serious” novels (and movies for that matter) have as their plot “something something more something major character dies oh that’s sad and really meaningful.” Here again, we may love the characters and the writing may be Great, but the beats are cliched. At one point, however, not all that long ago, such a simple story structure could have felt original.
In sum: The novel is fundamentally an entertainment medium that nevertheless was used by great writers to produce real art. They were able to take advantage of the newness of plot arcs and beats that today strike us as worn out and cliche. Today’s novelists thus are faced with the stark choice of going with the Big Story beats and writing something that will not strike anyone as art, or trying to be more subtle and writing something that is boring in terms of story or is not actually a long-form story.
That’s why I said that the novel is not fundamentally a great art form: it’s potential to be engaging had about a 200-year lifespan built in.
By the way, I don’t think we really need to agree upon what Great Art is in order for the above argument to work. I think we only need to agree what Great Art is not. For example, let’s say that, for whatever reason, only 10 great melodies could be written before we reached complete redundancy. We could debate whether those 10 original melodies were Great Art or not, but I think we could all agree that all the melodies produced thereafter that were mere copies were not Great Art simply by dint of being copies, i.e., redundant.
I think people got pissed at me here because they thought I was saying that Great Writing was no longer possible. No, I think writing of quality can be produced ad infinitum. I think, however, that it’s become very difficult to come up with a fresh, original story. That is the crux of the issue.
