Books are first draft movie scripts

The book market is broken. Maybe we need to start thinking about it differently.

Exhibit A: some sales figures

• Number of television viewers for the 2015 ICC Cricket World Cup Final between India and Pakistan: 1-billion people
• Angry Birds Space in its first month: 50-million copies
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling in its first day: 15-million copies
• Grand Theft Auto V in its first 24 hours: 11,2-million copies
• N’Sync’s album No Strings Attached in its first week: 2.2-million copies
• Okami, the least successful winner of a Game of the Year award: 500 000 copies
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, the winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize: 182 044 copies
• The Finkler Question by Howard Jacobson, the winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, up until the week he won the prize: 8 360 copies

It takes a village to make a movie. An average of 588 people, to be precise. The first Hunger Games movie was made by 1 604 people. The book, on the other hand, was so badly copy edited I suspect it was made by Suzanne Collins completely on her own with a home printing machine.

I imagine it would be like making a book with 1 604 people. You couldn’t split the actual writing between more than, say, 35. Mulan, the film with the highest number of credited writers on the IMDB database, had 32. Writing can be a team sport, but it has its limits.

Plot can be collaborative. There aren’t that many original plots, anyway. So I’d throw 20 people in a room and put them on story duty. They could make storyboards and invent plot twists. I’d put 10 people to work writing dialogue. Each writer could have their own character, so that the voices are unique. Maybe 3 people writing filler and transitions, describing scenes. And 2, no more than two, writing the mind of the protagonist, the flesh of the novel.

You could occupy 20 people as editors. 50 people working with the distributors and doing all the publisher things. Maybe another 50 in the marketing department, running a Snapchat feed or whatever inane things marketing people do. 25 translators. 10 designers and copy setters.

That still leaves 1 414 people to run errands and get coffee.

I’m not convinced that it would be a particularly good book, but those 35 writers would sure get enough coffee.

That’s hyperbolic, but I do like to imagine what writing books could be like if there was a truly commercially viable industry supporting it. If writers of literary fiction were paid what executive creative directors are paid in the advertising industry, for instance.

1 604 people are too many, but what about 10? Most novelists could use a couple of creative assistants, young people fresh out of their MFA programmes doing research and writing first draft material. This sort of apprenticeship happens in almost every other industry, but not in writing. And maybe a few manager types who wear suits and have business meetings with publishers and compile entries for competitions.

And, far more important, at least five personal assistants. Writers all have messy lives, don’t we? I’d have one who’s responsible for crafting witty replies to texts from my friends and remembering to order something for my Mom’s birthday. One who goes to the bank to do whatever people do in banks and makes sure I have medical aid. One who forces me to eat occasionally and to exercise, maybe by prodding me with a small taser as I sit at my desk. One who checks my mood every hour and doses me with whatever chemicals I need to bring me out of melancholy or distraction. And one who just hovers around my right elbow making sure my coffee cup is never empty.

We don’t need Rooms of Our Own, we need people to keep our lives together while we sit around having conversations with our imaginary friends.

But this is not the world we live in. A few lucky writers make enough of a name for themselves that they get some support: an agent, a sympathetic editor, a publishing house that supports them. But this happens for fewer and fewer writers. For the vast majority of us, any work we ever do will be done alone, in stolen moments between day-jobs and family obligations. It’s like living with a chronic illness, constantly having to decline invitations because you need to stay home and wrestle with a wayward character.

In business speak, we would call it a classic Porter competition problem. The barrier to entry to becoming a writer is too low: you just need a computer (I went to the launch of a truly awful book a few weeks ago where the writer proudly announced that he’d written the whole thing on his mobile phone, while riding the Metro — this book is now a bestseller in five countries). There are just too many writers. Often, it feels like there are more people who want to write books than people who want to read them. It’s a special law of the universe: every middle class lady with a bit of spare time on her hands will think, at some point, “maybe I’ve got a book in me…”. It’s as inevitable as signing up for yoga classes or trying that low-carb diet.

I’d argue that we’re seeing the whole book market all wrong, these days. Literary fiction is its own form, of course, but it’s increasingly irrelevant. Popular fiction books, on the other hand, aren’t books at all. They’re first draft film scripts masquerading as books. Their real life will be on screen, if they’re successful.

Books, viewed as film prototypes, make a lot more commercial sense. There’s a pretty good ratio between the investment and the data that’s received about the audience’s interest in the story (as long as you discount the writer’s broken relationships and depression). A short story is even better: you can invest a few hours into one and get a sense of whether it resonates with readers.

There are no limits to the special effects you can throw in, either. You can have flying robot elephants arrive in a scene, explode, and disappear, without having to worry about the extra budget this is going to require. You can create elaborate alternative worlds. Maybe this is why science fiction and fantasy remains stubbornly tied to books.

Of course, there are some impressions that can only be created by written prose. Consider a passage like this one from The Goldfinch — its only alternative in film would be that dreaded movie device, the voice-over:

I look at the blanked-out faces of the other passengers — hoisting their briefcases, their backpacks, shuffling to disembark — and I think of what Hobie said: beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, that the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.” — Donna Tartt

Reading is something we’ve only been able to do for about 5500 years. The blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. It’s certainly not a natural process. We’re not even particularly good at reading, as a species. Reading is a strange staccato process of recognising shapes. We’d be foolish if we trusted too much in its permanence.

For a few hundred years, in a few small pockets of the world, the novel was the primary form of entertainment for the middle class. Great art was born from the form, but novels were culturally important — they shaped conversation, they changed how people thought about themselves. But maybe this was just an aberrant stage of history, based on the fact that books were the best technology we had for circulating ideas.

We have much better media now for transmitting and preserving thought and story. We have film. We have games, which are interactive. We may eventually just be able to plug our mind into a machine that allows us to experience someone else’s mind.

The commercial reality of writing tells us something about what our culture values. Maybe this is something writers should just embrace, rather than wringing our hands at the death of something dear to us.