A seemingly straightforward question posed by a friend in my previous journal -- how the word "novel" came into common usage to denote a literary form -- turns out to be pretty damn difficult to answer. Throughout the seventeenth century, authors and publishers used the words "novel," "history," and "romance" interchangeably, as a way of denoting the imaginative prose narratives that were being avidly consumed by the English-speaking world's growing middle class. It wasn't until the mid-18th century that "novel" came to be the commonly accepted term for a lengthy work of prose fiction, but that appears to have been a process slowly consolidated by convenience and marketing, much like the term "rock 'n roll."

Now I happen to like "imaginative prose narratives." Authors are free to do their best at whatever it is they've set out to accomplish, that usually being to sell more copies of their own books. All that matters is whether a given work of fiction succeeds or fails on its own terms, whatever those may be. (Cf. Aphra Behn's Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister (3 volumes, 1684 - 87) -- some things never change.)

Time is not kind to most authors: Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John P. Marquand is no longer read, Nobel Prize winner Rudyard Kipling is no longer respected, and is anyone today even aware that Arnold Bennett existed? You can't write for the future: you can only put whatever you already have into whatever it is you're doing now.