Are novels getting worse or…

[TheTrinary]

So, I was wondering why there’s so much perceived negativity surrounding current writing and reading. I’ve seen it on here, on my otome reading sites, etc: readers feel like quality is decreasing.

I’ve been assuming that it’s really just genre fatigue, where you have already read the masterpieces and are now reading many similar novels/mangas, often now pushed into your recommendations due to those masterpieces.

Then I considered that it may be due to militant contracts where authors and artists are forced to churn out work constantly in order to pay bills, and they make popcorn and potato chip stories since they sell.

…which means the readers are reading it regardless of whether they like it, meaning there is no reason to shift towards a different style or plot.

speaking of readers, are the things they are reading getting worse? Are they fatigued? Or… are they just older?

I started reading light novels and manga and every variation of it because it wasn’t blocked by my public school’s website restrictions. I was bored, it was there. Now that I’m writing on here, I’m old enough to legally drink in the U.S.

I was thinking maybe it’s like rewatching an old kids movie you loved. Some just don’t hold up in comparison to the media consumed since you were a kid. Sometimes you are no longer in the target media (think like the whole coco melon thing: you aren’t a preschooler or whatever).

what do you think is responsible for this phenomenon?

I don't think at any point and time that novels have gotten worse in the past two hundred years. There has and always will be good work out there, but were are in a valley where what is "good" isn't being advertised. We go in waves where what's being pushed is trite and y ou've seen it before. It's more low effort stuff that's more and more derivative.

It's a cycle. Eventually, publishers, movie studios, etc realize that the ROI is gone, and then they are forced to take risks on new things. AND then one of those things hits it big, the audience is excited. A bunch of new writers and creators start copying that, and so the cycle continues beating that new horse into the ground.

 

[K5Rakitan]

I think that readers are getting comfortable enough in their anonymity to take off their filters.

 

[georgelee5786]

It is. I blame authors becoming less educated and less passionate and more driven by money for this phenomenon. Quality of authors decline, quality of books decline

 

[TsumiHokiro]

I was going to write a wall of text but I gave up.
There are too many people writing today, most of them do not really try to write original novels, but instead, they write Inspired Novels.
The sheer volume, however, gives the impression that a new novel is instead a creative work. After enough spin-offs have been created from a particular work, a Creative Work is created finally, and you end up with a new novel.
New "Genres", like 'Isekai', for example, are not really new. They have been explored ad nauseam in the past, and a few new elements were added to them in the present generation. They, however, resonate with this generation and help make them "unique" for a moment.
Since anyone can publish nowadays, there is no quality control. Anyone can read anything as well. New authors read just about anything and go to publish having read other works of questionable quality. This ends up making a vicious cycle of more of the same, where people end up questioning: "Isn't this just more of the same rubbish?"
Lastly: Authors usually isolate themselves in communities of same voices. They never hear the different. This promotes the homogenization of the same ideas, same genres, same positions.

 

[Prince_Azmiran_Myrian]

Fatigue doesn't happen when the story is good. Many stories do not have the same spirit as the greats. If the spirit is bland, then the story will be too.

 

[Verdante]

I agree and think part of it is easy money. Creators need money to survive and it's easier to make a hit by following trends and/or writing smut into your work. Of course there are still writers who put all their passion into their books, but I imagine that would take a longer time to make than works that copy and paste tropes and follow storylines based on what had already gone popular

 

[TsumiHokiro]

I won't get started in the money issue. Money is needed to live. Tell me, how many of you would go without it? For all that talk of "money brings no happiness" I do not see many people going without it.
There is, however, a difference between being able to sell and being able to live out of it. And it is true that nowadays, those who can live out of their writings seem to be those who write the most debatable of stuff. But you would have to ask yourselves too why that is, right?
Most probably, it is related to every other choice we all make in our lives that it is possible. It is not only limited to literature, it is also included in all other things that we buy in our lives. So let us stop being hypocrites and look at the thing as a whole, as society should, and not talk about a single issue at a time.
To buy cheap copies or a quality product, think about it the next time you buy something.

 

[Evil-Empire]

I'd say, for Isekai, rather than trying to "do something that hasn't been done before," you first need to study and REALLY understand what made the best examples in the genre actually successful. It turns out, all the ones that did REALLY freaking good are NOT the ones that tried to come up with some gimicky twist to make it feel "new." Instead, it's the ones that start off by playing their isekai really serious and straight, and maintain a high degree of fidelity and realism in their tone.

Mushoku Tensei would be the crowning example of this. That one played it about as straight as it gets, and that's a very large part of why it gained just so much success.

The stuff that makes your story unique will naturally flow from the world-building that is naturally going to be a part of that kind of really high-fidelity work. Thing is, the uniqueness has to come secondary. You first have to decide to take the genre seriously, then everything else flows from that.

I agree that coming up with weird gimmicks in order to be "original" is not the key to writing a good story. There isn't anything really new anyway. Even isekai, which is a relatively new genre, isn't really new in concept. Character A travels to a new world or land is a concept as old as storytelling itself. Isekai merely puts a bit of a new spin on it.

The problem for me with isekai is that you have to sort through mountains of mediocre at best to find the rare good isekai stories. And that's true for isekai manga which were made by professionals and went through a editing and proofreading process. How much more true is it for stories published on the internet not made by professionals or edited or proofread?

 

[Jemini]

I agree that coming up with weird gimmicks in order to be "original" is not the key to writing a good story. There isn't anything really new anyway. Even isekai, which is a relatively new genre, isn't really new in concept. Character A travels to a new world or land is a concept as old as storytelling itself. Isekai merely puts a bit of a new spin on it.

The problem for me with isekai is that you have to sort through mountains of mediocre at best to find the rare good isekai stories. And that's true for isekai manga which were made by professionals and went through a editing and proofreading process. How much more true is it for stories published on the internet not made by professionals or edited or proofread?

Well, definitely gotta agree, Isekai is the popular genre now and that means it will attract a lot of people who really don't know what they're doing or people lazily trying to make a quick buck off it.

Anyway, it is also true that the concept of going to another world is actually a trope as old as the fantasy genre itself. In fact, 'going to the other world' was so standard that it wasn't until Tolkein that we got a break from it where there was no character 'from our world' in the entire story. (And maybe A Mid Summer Night's Dream. I haven't seen that play, but I don't remember a human character from the synopsis I got.)

It was called Isekai for a good while in Japan before the term was popularized in the west, and it was very much "The Big 5" back in 2011 that crystalized what have become the genre tropes today, but the concept of going to the other world has existed for a very long time.

At any rate, as I said, the actual sign of whether or not it's a good Isekai has more to do with the care put into the world building than anything else. And, the kind of care required to make it good via the world building generally forces you onto a path of taking a fairly serious tone, with a few stand-out exceptions like The Eminence in Shadow.

(That series has excellent world building, but it still manages to take an absolutely insane whimsical tone because of the angle it took. That said, it still knows exactly what it's doing, and everything and every little angle and ridiculous thing it's protagonist does is all very carefully calculated by the author. This goes to show that it's not any one aspect of the genre itself that's used, but rather the level of care and attention the author puts into it, and having good world building tends to be an easy sign-post for how much care really was put in.)

 

[Evil-Empire]

At any rate, as I said, the actual sign of whether or not it's a good Isekai has more to do with the care put into the world building than anything else.

Ugh, world building. Generally, world building in manga is tolerable simply due to the constraints of the format. In prose there's nothing stopping the writer hitting you with 10k words of exposition right out of the starting gate (often labeled as a prologue). The moment I see that it's time for the back button. That's a problem that goes far beyond just isekai, it applies to fantasy and science fiction in general.

The best world building is where it's done as sparingly as possible and only where necessary and where it makes sense.

 

[Verdante]

I won't get started in the money issue. Money is needed to live. Tell me, how many of you would go without it? For all that talk of "money brings no happiness" I do not see many people going without it.
There is, however, a difference between being able to sell and being able to live out of it. And it is true that nowadays, those who can live out of their writings seem to be those who write the most debatable of stuff. But you would have to ask yourselves too why that is, right?
Most probably, it is related to every other choice we all make in our lives that it is possible. It is not only limited to literature, it is also included in all other things that we buy in our lives. So let us stop being hypocrites and look at the thing as a whole, as society should, and not talk about a single issue at a time.
To buy cheap copies or a quality product, think about it the next time you buy something.

I’m not sure if you said this as a response to my post, but you’re just repeating what I said in more words? Some writers need money to survive and sometimes they do what they need to do even if that meant copy and pasting the tried and true formula for a hit book.

I apologize if this post is not meant for me, but you came off very antagonistic I just had to make things clear.

 

[Jemini]

Ugh, world building. Generally, world building in manga is tolerable simply due to the constraints of the format. In prose there's nothing stopping the writer hitting you with 10k words of exposition right out of the starting gate (often labeled as a prologue). The moment I see that it's time for the back button. That's a problem that goes far beyond just isekai, it applies to fantasy and science fiction in general.

The best world building is where it's done as sparingly as possible and only where necessary and where it makes sense.

Ok, I think there's a confusion of terms here. What you're complaining about here is called Exposition. This is a lazy way to tell people your world building.

Actual competent writers won't do exposition dumps like this. They will show you their world building just by having the characters live in the world and discover it.

And also, seriously, exposition dumps in Isekai really are a sure sign that the author has no idea what they're doing at all. The biggest strength of Isekai is the "fish out of water" dynamic, which allows you to actually present the world to the audience via your protagonist as the protagonist is just as new to this world as the reader is. This means you actually can quite easily introduce them to the world a little at a time via exposure rather than dumping it all at once to catch the reader up with what your protagonist already knows.

Seriously, you're making the right decision backing out the moment you see an early exposition dump in an Isekai. It means the writer is tossing aside the single greatest strength of Isekai, which is a sure sign they have absolutely no idea what they're doing.

Also, if what they call "world building" amounts to nothing more than a list of races and country names and the relation of one country's political relations to another, that's another sign that the author doesn't know what they're doing, especially if they're dumping this info very early on in their story. That's not the actual interesting world building. Interesting world building would be things like what kind of environmental considerations the towns people take into account when they build their houses. And, telling the reader those considerations is also a no-go move at that. The author should just describe interesting features about the house and let the environmental reason for the structure be something you figure out by working backwards.

One group being prejudiced against another is also a sign of good world building if shown well. And, by shown well, I mean "show, don't tell." Actually show the prejudiced actions or the impact it has on people's lives rather than just saying "this group hates this other group."

So, yeah. World building = good. Showing the world building via exposition dumps = bad. So bad it can actually trash any good work you did with the world building.

Again, consider some of the greats in this. Mushoku Tensei, Overlord, and Shield Hero handle the presentation of their world building excellently, and in the case of MT it's actually some incredibly elaborate, in-depth, and very original world building. Re: Zero also has what seems to be some pretty good world building, but it actually goes to the opposite extreme in terms of how it presents the world building to the reader. Re: Zero's world building is a little inscruitable. It tells so little to the reader/viewer that you actually need to go to outside sources to understand how things like the magic system works or the various groups involved. And, really, not knowing that stuff really doesn't harm your ability to enjoy Re: Zero at all. The world building is there for Re: Zero, but it doesn't actually matter to Subaru's story at all, and as such the author decides not to tell it all that openly to the reader and just lets the super-fans figure it out by going to the extra effort if they really want to know.

And then, you have Ascendance of a Bookworm. OMFG, Ascendance of a Bookworm. This series is the absolute god-tier of world-building and also god-tier in the slow and perspective-driven presentation as well. It starts you off knowing nothing more than the inside of Mine's house. Then, it shows you the city streets. Gets you familiar with the city gate and the forest outside. The activities of the kids, and goes into detail about winter prep. And, the existence of magic is completely hidden from the reader for a huge chunk of the early story and is more dropped as a shocking reveal much later into the early parts of the series. The world building of Bookworm is incredibly elaborate, but it shows it to the reader a little at a time and never overwhelms them with it. It doesn't show anything until it matters, and it's ALWAYS "shown" rather than "told." There is very little outright exposition in Bookworm at all. In fact, I can't think of a single moment in Bookworm where there was even exposition at all.

 

[Evil-Empire]

Ok, I think there's a confusion of terms here. What you're complaining about here is called Exposition. This is a lazy way to tell people your world building.

Actual competent writers won't do exposition dumps like this. They will show you their world building just by having the characters live in the world and discover it.

I get the distinction, my point was all too many, maybe even the majority of, amateur writers who write fantasy or science fiction start off with reams of exposition introducing the world the story is set in. It's how I realized tons of exposition is a bad thing to write. If it's something I don't want to read then it's also something I don't want to write. It's an issue not contained to just isekai, which I don't write, bit also prevalent in fantasy and science fiction, which I do write.

 

[QuercusMalus]

Ease of publishing/posting=higher numbers of works available. But the number of 'quality' pieces (however you define that) is still only a small segment. But if before it was 1 in 100, and now it's 10 in 1000, your percentage is still the same, you may just have to search more.

 

[TsumiHokiro]

I’m not sure if you said this as a response to my post, but you’re just repeating what I said in more words? Some writers need money to survive and sometimes they do what they need to do even if that meant copy and pasting the tried and true formula for a hit book.

I apologize if this post is not meant for me, but you came off very antagonistic I just had to make things clear.

Sorry if I sounded antagonizing to you. You are right, I agree with you. I put your words in more words indeed, and if that has offended you, I am sorry.
I never meant, however, to say that my opinion was the same as yours, not to mean anything that might I was against your opinion. What I meant to say is: if you were to consider the point of money, we would all devolve into a point where there would be no return because, as you have said, writers ultimately have to live.
And to live, we all do what we have to do.

 

[BearlyAlive]

Novels aren't getting worse we're just getting more bad ones than before. New good ones are still as good as old good novels, just harder to find due to reduced entry requirements.

 

[beast_regards]

I think it is more an issue of the tag vs. the genre.

If you read the stories in a specific genre, like fantasy and sci-fi you would still find a decent variety even among the stories written by complete amateurs as long as the circumstances don't put them under specific restrictions (i.e. include x or get cancelled)

Vague tags, sub-genres if you like, for example, "isekai" (or portal fantasy, if you don't feel weeaboo today) would still provide some variety, but you would start to see the repetition more, but some variety is there unless one again you put author under specific restrictions (i.e. anime studios select only certain types of work to adapt)

Add specific tags and all variety is gone. You know, there is only so much you can do with something quite specific as otome and even the best author eventually runs out of options.

 

[HungrySheep]

It's not that novels are getting worse. It's that the market is so saturated with authors trying to be the next Solo Leveling or the next big isekai that most novel sites are just absolutely inundated with low-tier work. It doesn't help that companies want their project to be the next Sword Art Online or whatever self-insert isekai and make omegabucks, hence why they pick up every isekai that manages to gain a decent following on Syosetu.

There are still great works out there to enjoy. A particularly beautiful story I've been obsessed with lately is The Moon on a Rainy Night. Though it's a manga and not a novel, I think both mediums are swamped enough with brainless copy-paste series to qualify for this discussion. The Moon on a Rainy Night has its flaws, but it's by and far better than any recent works in the genre, but perhaps yuri is a genre that's too small for you.

That's okay.

In terms of more popular content in the last couple years, the 86 series has set itself apart from other media in its bracket. Regrettably, its anime release was eclipsed by a lot of other series launching in its first cour due to not being a wish-fulfillment plot, but its worldbuilding, lore, and characters are rather solid aside from a rocky start in the first volume. No one really suffers from the "one arc and done" deal either as the side characters all get their own development and in some cases, their arcs even span nearly 3/4ths of a volume.

Only thing I'd do different is have it paced much slower like Ascendance of a Bookworm instead of doing the whole countryhopping thing, but the intended audience probably wouldn't enjoy that.

tl;dr There are still good novels out there, the market is just being spammed by garbage. Looking for a good novel is like trying to find a gold nugget you accidentally swallowed after you've dumped out a mountain of diarrhea.

It is. I blame authors becoming less educated and less passionate and more driven by money for this phenomenon. Quality of authors decline, quality of books decline

Gotta get that $5k/month Patreon grind bro!!!!!!!!!!! FANTASY HAREM, GO!!!!!!!!

Ugh, world building. Generally, world building in manga is tolerable simply due to the constraints of the format. In prose there's nothing stopping the writer hitting you with 10k words of exposition right out of the starting gate (often labeled as a prologue). The moment I see that it's time for the back button. That's a problem that goes far beyond just isekai, it applies to fantasy and science fiction in general.

The best world building is where it's done as sparingly as possible and only where necessary and where it makes sense.

What you're describing isn't worldbuilding. It's just bad writing.

Ascendance of a Bookworm has insane worldbuilding and next to no exposition dumps. It's crazy. Does it have its flaws? Yes. Does it worldbuild well without blasting you with resident sleeper lookin' walls of text? Also yes.

 

[TwoApes]

So, I was wondering why there’s so much perceived negativity surrounding current writing and reading.

It's the current trend of the world. Every single thing is blown out of proportion and into the next big crisis. The thing is that, as others noted, the cost of entry for creators of 'content' is, essentially, zero. But the number ( or, more specifically, percentage ) of people who are talented enough to churn something edible is more or less constant.

Quick search gave me 2100ish novels published in 1980 USA. That is across all genres and target audiences. Those books went through the sieve of the traditional media and thus presented some level of quality. Adjust for population growth, and that number ought to grow to what - 4000-ish. There are 21k stories on this site alone ( and all of the "I was reincarnated into a demon futanari kitchen sink" ;) ), and there is RR, Wattpad, smaller sites, forums, traditional publishing, blogs, facebooks, private sites, and god-knows-what else. The sheer volume of stuff is insane and since the percentage of qualified people is the same - by sheer numbers the noise / signal ratio today is much worse.

It, obviously, makes searching for good stuff harder, and getting noticed even more so. Which is frustrating for both parties.

Now couple that with our atomized, thin-skinned, western culture of doom-and-gloom, mix some negativity bias and you'll get the usual whining about the end of times.

 

[Anon2024]

I’d say it’s because people don’t come up with new ways of story telling and end up copying many others.

System novels, self-insert novels. There are very few compelling character development novels these days.