Go Long, Young Man

On the state of writing

I was very pleased to chat with Chris Dalla Riva, who runs an excellent Substack on music and analytics, about my new novel, Glass Century, my love of the Beach Boys, and a host of other topics. Chris is a great writer and interlocutor, and you won’t want to miss this one.

And if you haven’t bought Glass Century, please do. It has, according to the Jewish Book Council, earned “its place in the canon of the New York City nov­el, along with Don Delillo’s Under­world, Tom Wolfe’s The Bon­fire of the Van­i­ties, E. L. Doctorow’s Rag­time, and many others.” If you’ve read it already and like it, please rate it on Goodreads.

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Not long ago, I was at a party with media and political types. While slugging my white wine, I ended up in conversation with a former editor of a high-flying, 2010s digital publication that still exists but no longer punches above its weight class. The editor, who’s moved on to other ventures, and I spoke briefly about writing, and what might work in today’s age. I spoke about Substack, and my love for in-depth, discursive pieces, as well as my nostalgia for the days when prestige magazines like Esquire could print many thousands of words from a single writer, or the New Yorker might turn over a whole issue to a single piece, as they did for John Hersey’s reportage from Hiroshima. The editor was not especially moved. He felt much of what he saw on Substack was too long. When I mentioned the New Journalism greats of yore, and their penchant for heavyweight dispatches, he was unmoved. “Whatever they turned in was longer, and the editor made it shorter.”

“But what about…” And I tried, again, with my invocation of past glories, and also my belief that, on Substack, the high-performing pieces are usually longer.

“Everything can be shorter,” he said with finality.

It was a bit ironic, I as the Millennial arguing for lengthier writing in the internet age as the editor, more than a decade my senior, insisted on the opposite. And it’s true, in one sense, that everything can be shorter. Read any stray piece of fiction or nonfiction—novel, article, essay—and there’s writing that may seem, to some, extraneous. An argument doesn’t feel entirely central to the greater thesis or a scene appears to be digressive, not aligned, in totality, with the forward momentum of the narrative. Editors of nonfiction or fiction will often find themselves roving with a scalpel, hunting for subtractions before they might ever consider additions. The logic, in the 2020s, seems ironclad enough: the internet moves fast and readers don’t want to waste time. Attention spans are shortening. In print, this appears to be the case too, with a great deal of new literary fiction rarely exceeding 320 pages or so, and a sizable percentage of it clocking under 300 pages. I can tell you, from firsthand experience, it is exceedingly hard to sell longer fiction. Glass Century, my latest novel, is 482 pages, which is less than half of Infinite Jest and more than 200 pages shy of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Still, I am fairly certain its length, more than any other factor, was the reason more than twenty publishers passed on the manuscript. In today’s literary world, 400 pages seems to be a no-go zone, with nonfiction books offered more rope—a politics or historical book is permitted, still, to be fairly long—and non-literary works, like romantasy, also given more leeway. Online nonfiction, though, is traditionally viewed the way the editor explained it to me: shorter, from most media outlets, is believed to be better.

The 2000s and 2010s, in media, were a bounty for the bitesized. Blog posts were all the rage, as were BuzzFeed-style listicles and punchier dispatches. Twitter ruled, and Twitter style permeated much of what was written. “Less is more,” a hoary precept, was often what I would hear as a young reporter. Few editors were literary scholars, but many of them were familiar with Ernest Hemingway’s “Iceberg Theory.” In the pared down language you see in a good deal of internet writing and contemporary fiction, Hemingway is usually lurking. It’s a virtue to “show, not tell” and little is more gauche than excess. Substack, in the view of the editor I spoke with, implicitly represented this embarrassing excess. Whenever a member of the mainstream media wants to dismiss Substack out of hand—not this editor, to be fair, who was gracious in our conversation—the putdown that’s almost always summoned is the Substack writer “needs an editor.” You’ll hear, again and again, there’s so much “bad writing” here because there aren’t gatekeepers to enforce discipline. No teachers, no minders. Without an editor, a writer become discursive and that, they suppose, is a dangerous thing.

What fascinates me about Hemingway’s influence is that it can be both understated and overrated. If Iceberg Theory—minimalist language that implies a deeper meaning without making it evident on the surface—was so dominant, why did the heirs to Hemingway, so entranced by his mythos, not write like him at all? Norman Mailer, very badly, wanted to be Hemingway, down to his lust for physical combat and encomiums to a certain sort of existential chauvinism, but he in no way aped Hemingway’s style. He was a writer, in every sense, of excess. Joan Didion could be said to be Hemingwayesque, but even she was more descriptive, more attached to the literary flourish, spiritually but not substantively like Hemingway. The entire New Journalist movement, as much as they may have lingered Hemingway—he was only one generation removed from them—implicitly rejected that writing project. As did the postmodernists, including Don DeLillo and Thomas Pynchon, who in Gravity’s Rainbow violated every Hemingway precept imaginable. Toni Morrison owed far more to Faulkner. Sam Delany, I doubt, thought much of Hemingway, and Joyce Carol Oates, her prose lush and overflowing, was not evidently taking many cues from Papa. Nor were the Gen X wunderkinds, Zadie Smith and David Foster Wallace and Michael Chabon. Bret Easton Ellis, in Less Than Zero, may have by the transitive property of Didion worship, but in American Psycho, he’s far more expressive, the heft of a business card or the bloody sheen of a murder scene conveyed in a visceral and entrancing assault of detail. If anything, Hemingway’s diktats seem to have most influenced contemporary nonfiction—less is more, et cetera—and the autofictional novels, not so much in content but in style, the adjectives shorn, restraint or even a form of blankness prized most.

Now that, in addition to my writing career, I am the editor of a literary publication, I have a stronger sense of my own convictions. The Metropolitan Review, nearing the eighth month of its operation, has been described as “neo-Romantic” but a better conception may be “maximalist.” I am not sure if I would consider myself a maximalist writer, but I am, by temperament, a maximalist when it comes to the written word itself; I want more ambition, not less, and the writer, in this curious technological age, to demonstrate what human potential, even genius, is still possible. If there are fewer regular readers than there were two or three decades ago, the reader today is no less hungry for greatness. So much internet writing of the 2010s, the era of SEO slop and social media obsession and infantile clickbait, was disposable. Few people, in the mid-2020s, turn to a ten-year-old listicle or a 300-word “hot” take. But they do still pour over 15,000 words from Gay Talese that was published more than fifty-nine years ago. At TMR, we’ve tried to keep some of that spirit alive, and I do have heartening news to share: substantive, expansive writing is still, in this decade, quite popular. To date the second most-read piece from TMR was an 11,860-word profile, from Alexander Sorondo, of William Vollmann and his quest to publish a sprawling novel about the CIA. To date, it’s racked up more than 52,000 views. Personally, I am not terribly interested in metrics, but I do enjoy them only as a means of amassing evidence against the “kill your darlings” school of writing, those who shrink for the sake of shrinking and rarely give thought to the bounty that might be lost. Editing Sorondo, I can promise you the darling were allowed to live and frolic.

It’s intuitive, really, that the meatier essays are rewarded on platforms like Substack and a lengthier, splashier magazine piece can still achieve a degree of virality. As the internet fragments and AI dross proliferates, a hunger sets in among individuals who still want to have a satisfying reading experience. The consumption of much of the content on the internet today amounts to the ingesting of frosted cupcakes—tasty at first, and then unfulfilling and ultimately sickening. Plenty of people, of course, eat far too much junk food, but there’s also a greater awareness of healthy living, of not spending a whole life gorging on cupcakes. The 2010s clickbait, chained to the shifting algorithms of Facebook and Google, amounted to an assembly line of cupcakes, one after the other, and once the tech giants decided they didn’t want to renumerate outside websites any longer—Facebook, Google, Instagram, and X all actively suppress links to written work—this assembly line couldn’t churn on. Most of the 2010s digital news and content upstarts collapsed. There’s a reason you haven’t heard of Upworthy which was once, for a brief period, perhaps the most popular website on the internet.

We’ve hit what I’ve come to call the “investment” era of the internet. A discerning class of reader comes to a publication or platform looking for a reward for their precious time. They want to feel invested—in either a person or publication. They want the most out of it. If they subscribe to Nate Silver, for example, they do not want Nate Silver to trim down his writing, abbreviate himself, or self-censor. They want the fullest experience of Nate. With my own publication, The Metropolitan Review, the same ethos applies. As an editor, I want our individual writers to be themselves, to roam, and to ultimately test their limits. We will eventually have a print edition, but we exist online and that means there’s no great reason to demand concision. In the olden times, physical paper was the constraint; a newspaper reporter truly had to sweat the column inches. It seemed like editors at digital publications imagined there was some invisible length barrier a writer simply could not cross. The metrics for this school of thought never bore themselves out. What determined virality was the snappy headline or the news hook. There was no hard evidence that length prevented virality, or actively worked against it.

TikTok is the new siren song, but one that is, fundamentally, deceptive. A reading audience that seeks to invest time in a person or publication could also be a TikTok audience, but a newsletter or publication that attempts, in some form, to mimic TikTok is doomed to fail—especially if they hope to accrue paying subscribers. If TikTok began to institute a paywall, it’s hard to imagine anyone but the genuine addicts forking over $80 a year or $8 a month or whatever a subscription to TikTok might cost. A New York Times digital subscription will eventually cost you $25 every four weeks, or around $300 a year. The Times is, for all its flaws, a high-quality news publication and a successful business. There are millions of human beings across America and the world who will, once the introductory offers exhaust themselves, pay several hundred dollars, at least, for a subscription to the Times. (I’m not including their print subscribers, who are also sizable.) Now, how many Americans would pay $300 a year for TikTok? What about Instagram? Some, surely, but a lot may abandon the platforms altogether, hunting for free alternatives. This is the dirty secret of all the AI startups, whether it’s ChatGPT or Claude or any other hyped purveyor of the supposed rapid acceleration of human civilization: their products only work if given away, en masse, for free. If, starting tomorrow, ChatGPT charged $300 for an annual subscription, what percentage of its user base would remain? Of course, given how costly the technology remains, none of these companies can reach their break-even point without potentially charging into the thousands of dollars for individual subscriptions.

For all the ways we are, today, saturated by the image—what Neil Postman once called the “peek-a-boo” world—the written word still matters a great deal. Readers have not vanished, nor have printed books. The long-form essay is in full bloom, and there’s an audience for serious reportage, if funding models are often lacking. There are economic challenges that the internet long ago wrought for printed media, but this is a question of shifting models, not audience interest. Before the internet, monetization was fairly straightforward: a print newspaper or magazine charged cash for advertising space and advertisers, with few options to reach consumers, happily paid. The classified sections were a boon, too. In the twenty-first century, that model swiftly collapsed. The print magazines that supported long-form essays and reportage were hit incredibly hard. No longer could GQ, Esquire, Vanity Fair, or Sports Illustrated regularly pump thousands of dollars into a single piece of literary reportage. At the same time, blogs proliferated, and shorter writing was assumed to be meeting market demand. Wasn’t anyone in a hurry on the internet, anyway?

There are bloviating writers, those that ramble about, and perhaps I’d be considered one of them. This piece of writing, right here, could stand—in your mind perhaps—to shed a paragraph or three. Did he need that opening anecdote? The aside about the collapse of print media? The jag on Hemingway? I am philosophically inclined to more over less because it’s in more where the real opportunity lies—for exploration, for thrills, and maybe, above all, enlightenment. A digression may be a new flower in bloom. For the writer, writing itself amounts to a sacred act of creation, a white magic, and restricting it, in certain ways, can feel anti-human. This does not mean concision can’t be a virtue, or editing isn’t necessary. What it means is that, on the balance, the ambition to create should be prized. The reader should be trusted. And the world itself, in its sublimity, requires writing to match it.