Does a novel need to be as accessible as a website?

I feel lucky to have a day job where I do, occasionally, get to write things. Things I get paid a salary for. Things people actually read. To be sure, sometimes it's a double-edged sword; when you've been writing stuff all day, or even just sitting at a keyboard all day, it's hard to do it all over again after dinner. But recently, the writing I do at my day job has been affecting my creative writing in another way, too: it's been making me question what good writing actually is.

That's because, in capital-L Literature, people want sentences. They want long sentences with artfully constructed clauses and sub-clauses, and sentences with interesting words deployed even more interestingly. They want sentences that express complicated ideas through metaphor and analogy. I think some capital-A Authors very consciously believe that the more challenging their sentences, the better the book. (Judging from their published output, at any rate.) And certainly, it's that approach to literary sentences that I was taught over and over again during my MFA, both directly through instruction, and indirectly, through seeing how other people in my classes read and responded to assigned work. To write great literature, you have to ruffle some letters.

Then, on the other hand, there's my day job, where I write capital-C "Content". That means blog entries and LinkedIn posts for a professional audience, yes, but maybe more importantly, it also means copy and "microcopy" for websites. (Microcopy is the text you find in website and software interfaces. Scintillating stuff like: "You have unsaved changes. Do you really want to close this window?")

On the face of things, you will naturally assume that there's a wide gulf between Literature and Content, and naturally you will be right in many respects. But the thing is, the people who write Content are as much of a cottage industry as MFA students these days, and they're just as dogmatic about what makes good writing. (A "Writing Microcopy" bootcamp is also a lot cheaper than an MFA, and comes with better employment prospects, but that's a post for another day.)

To write good Content, you need to consider clarity, and context, and many other things that also make for good Literature. More importantly, you also need to consider accessibility. A lot of very smart people have spent a lot of time putting together Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which I won't pretend I can adequately summarise in a sentence or two, but one of the key tenets of WCAG is comprehensibility. That's because true accessibility isn't about catering just to people with obvious physical differences, like deafness or blindness; it's also about catering to people with cognitive differences, like dyslexia or learning difficulties. It's also, ultimately, about catering to people with limited education or a low reading level, because, spoiler alert, they are also people who might want to look at your website.

Anyway, that means good content on the web — whether microcopy or a blog post or anything else — needs to use simple terms, minimise jargon or other specialised vocabulary, and avoid complex or difficult-to-understand sentences. This is the same kind of advice you also find in writing guides like Strunk & White, but over the years I've been writing for the web, I've come to see those things less as curmudgeonly stylistic fiats and more as a sort of beautiful exercise in democracy.

Sometimes, it's very literally democracy, if you're talking about a government website where you have to register to vote or apply for benefits. But increasingly, too, when I'm writing blog posts — and also when I'm writing capital-L Literature, or trying to — I feel that same awareness of comprehensibility, and how exclusionary it is to abandon it. Because when I'm writing a sentence like the one you just finished, full of sub-clauses and asides, I'm excluding people. I'm deliberately making it harder for some readers to appreciate what I've written. That's not good content for sure, but all of a sudden it doesn't sound much like great literature either.

Now, mind you, great literature clearly doesn't have to be difficult or incomprehensible. Look at Hemingway, at Orwell, at Salinger. Look at Agatha Christie, why not? Look at Sally Rooney. A lot of the time, these writers are using clear, simple prose to convey complex ideas and characters; a lot of the time, it's through their clarity and simplicity that they achieve such wide appeal and success. But on the other hand, people still read Joyce and Beckett.

Usually in discussions like this, that continuing love for Joyce and Beckett gets attributed to something like "cultural capital", which is just a nice way of saying snobbery and elitism. But even elitism feels like too generous an interpretation. If you believe that everyone has the right to understand Content, then it becomes much harder to defend impenetrable prose in Literature, or in any other context. Rather, lauding Joyce as great literature — lauding any difficult prose as great literature — starts to look a lot like discrimination.

This isn't me being too woke for my own good, I don't think. When I was suggesting earlier that comprehensible copy on a government website is beautifully democratic, you were probably not scandalised by the suggestion. Having dyslexia, say, shouldn't disqualify you from voting — which means someone with dyslexia needs to be able get on the electoral roll as easily as any other eligible voter. In fact, that's why a lot of governments now have laws requiring that publicly funded websites meet minimum WCAG standards: because if you don't make your content accessible, you're discriminating. I expect a lot of the ivory tower intellectuals who read Joyce and Beckett would agree with that basic statement. Heck, I've read Beckett, and I said it.

So is it really that much of a leap to apply the same thinking to literature? If a great novel can provide valuable commentary on modern life that enriches the reader's life in the process... Shouldn't that experience be available to everyone? If people with dyslexia deserve to vote, don't they also deserve to have a transformative experience through literature? If great novels can bring joy and enlightenment to their readers, isn't it the people without "cultural capital" who need that experience the most?

When you insist on writing or publishing literature that's hard, and also insist that its hardness is what makes it great or valuable, you're saying to vast swathes of the world that they don't deserve to experience great and valuable things. That's kind of a dick move. Anyone can walk into the Tate Modern for free and be stunned by a Picasso; anyone can listen to a Glass concerto and be moved. What gives your modernist novel the right to put up barriers?

To be clear, I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to write difficult novels, or any other kind of novel they feel compelled to create. Full disclosure, the last novel I wrote was pretty difficult to read too: it switched narrators every chapter, and experimented with form, and used made up words in two-sided dialogues where the reader only got one side of the conversation. (It also didn't sell. Go figure.)

Still, I wrote it anyway because I thought it was saying something interesting, and I thought there might be an audience for it, and because above all I enjoyed writing it; it was certainly more fun than writing microcopy. And I think there's some sort of utilitarian argument here about it being okay for me to do something I enjoy as long as it doesn't harm anyone else.

So absolutely, it's okay for Joyce to write Joyce, and it's okay for publishers to keep printing it, and it's okay for people to still read it and enjoy it. That's not harming anyone. But once you start calling it Great Literature, once you start calling it An Important Part of the Canon, that utilitarian bubble collapses, because now you're excluding people from something you say is a foundational part of our culture and civilisation. And really, what good does that achieve, except making you feel better about yourself for having finished The Dubliners?

What I am saying is that maybe we should stop calling Joyce great literature. Because maybe the term "great literature" needs to be reserved for books that are both transformative pieces of art, and are written with such clarity and comprehensibility that anyone can have that transformative experience. After all, let's be honest: it's hard enough to write a transcendental piece of fiction that compellingly explores deep themes of humanity, but it's even harder to do so when every sentence has to stick to an 8th grade reading level. And if you can do that, then you really do deserve to be called great.