What We Talk About When We Talk About Beginning Fiction Writing

Long, long ago in a writing program far, far away, an idiot and his idiot story were dragged into the red-hot torture seat, the one with the spikes beside the jeroboam of leeches and the bucket of acid. Of course that’s how it was. Of course the idiot was me.

But you realize that. What you don’t realize is a famous two-book wonder guest-taught there for a semester and said we practiced the “Zen-inquisition” method. We did. Another, perhaps less famous but no less horrified and intimidated guest-teacher called the program “butch.” It was. Did they expect anything else? I, for one, had come to welcome the abuse.

Here was my story. Here was the inquisition chair. Here was my twerpy classmate, wasting two years of his trust fund, whose signature workshop comment was, “Maybe if the writer understood dialogue, this scene would have worked,” gleefully pumping the bellows, getting the iron good and hot.

Our professor had just offered his customary start-of-workshop invocation, “What are you people actually doing here?” It was an opening which always made him chuckle as if he were coming up with it for the first time. He slid my 20-page manuscript out and looked at it. He didn’t read it. He didn’t page through it to review his margin comments and line edits. There were no margin comments and line edits. There was only the slab of paper before him like a fish he had to eat.

When the most dateable girl in the program, the one who could do no wrong in any workshop run by this professor, summoned her opaque critique face, I knew it was on. For the next 90 minutes, I’d be receiving what a friend of mine liked to call, “The Royal Rubdown.” The Dirty Dissection. The Opprobrious Ordeal. Yes. I’d be put to the question. Confess! Confess! Only, I wouldn’t be allowed to speak. So others would confess for me. Maybe if the writer knew how to use dramatic tension, this scene would have worked.

But I lived. Over time, the torture chair, the emotional thumbscrews, the medieval chirurgeoning, the uncompromising imposition of the MFA workshop style made us hard. My inquisitors splashed the acid, but I was laughing on the inside—as I knew my colleagues would be when they were dragged into the chair. Everyone got their moment, their opportunity to laugh on the inside.

The professor would often ask the person being workshopped whether he wouldn’t be better served somewhere far away, doing something else, as if a rational, self-aware person would clearly find that the most reasonable option. But getting MFAed in fiction seemed to indicate a priori that we were neither rational nor self-aware.

Then he’d grin. And that was the worst. There was no warmth in that grin. I invited the grounding effect of the leeches when that happened. A light dash of acid. Perhaps a few degrees hotter on the chair spikes to bring me down to earth from that terrible unamused grin.

To be fair, he was powerfully hung over much of the time. And so were we. To be even more fair, he was an excellent fiction writer. But so were we. In the hindsight of years, I’ve slowly come to realize that we were all talented, all good, all had the guiding star that causes people to choose art instead of a fulfilling career in pesticide sales or human resource management. The creative heroin. It’s a helluva drug. But at the time, most of us were convinced we were talentless pretenders. After thinking about it, I’ve come to believe our professor felt that about himself, too.

But whatever. It was what it was. It was what it wasn’t. And it was highly traumatic both ways. Maybe if the writer knew how to be vulnerable in front of a room of nervous, competitive, somewhat Stockholm-syndromed mean girls, the MFA could have worked. Because it didn’t. It couldn’t. All it was was time and space.

Time to write. A small space carved out for creative development. For years, I’ve written about that as something extremely valuable in itself. But the shops? The Royal Rubdowns? None of us learned anything from those except how to nurse deep psychic wounds for months or how to angrily reject an entire room of one’s peers without uttering a word in self-defense.

I was mostly in group two, the Angry Rejectors. Too weird to vanish from sight, too macho (butch?) to take it like a freshly paddled schoolboy. When my twerpy classmate smirked and said to the table had the writer known, when the ingenue of the century pulled up her workshop face and mumbled passive-aggressive things people invariably asked her to repeat, when a catty status-anxious colleague pounced in retaliation for some imagined slight in some dingy classroom at some earlier time, I laughed on the inside and thought, well, that’s just, like, your opinion, man.

Because that’s all it was. An opinion from the netherworld of the MFA Industrial Complex expressing itself through insecure 24-year-old mouths. The training we were getting was speaking through us. Later, we’d have to untrain, deprogram, and write essays about it in order to produce fiction that didn’t function like literary Xanax.

Now we’re all Substacking in Virgina Slims’ kitchen: you’ve come a long way, baby. We have. But it’s hella hot in here. We can take the heat. We suffered on the inquisition chair all those years ago. We’ve got the callused backsides to prove it. Thick skin? Child, you have no idea. Still, not everybody’s like that. Not everybody can withstand the rubdown.

On Substack, in particular, the kitchen gets hot and some people can’t take it. Virginia has every burner dialed up to high in mixed writerly company: school kids, college “aspiring writers,” YA stylesheet laborers, pulp-noir-weird tale imitators, journalists on the grift, journalists off the grift, metaphysical embodiments of the grift as yet to be classified by traditional western science, bricks through the Overton Window, MFA convalescents, Andrew Tates, your cousin who’s deeply into novels about werewolf dungeon explorers, The New Yorker having its usual case of slick-magazine FOMO. Even Margaret Atwood. But we don’t talk about Margaret Atwood.

What we talk about is whether so-and-so’s writing is any good. We talk about it constantly, sometimes behind a self-deprecating façade, but it’s there all the time: so-and-so is a talentless hack; so-and-so is a brilliant savant; so-and-so bores me; I want to have so-and-so’s babies; I hope so-and-so self-immolates; I’m taking midnight dictation from my cat so don’t blame me; well, this reads like your cat wrote it—no it was my hamster he’s the literary one. All things around, about, beneath, in the middle, in spite of, in lust and torment and longing of and for writing. Because Substack started and remains, to a certain extent, a writer’s platform, which, in turn, implies a certain degree of inquisitorial distress.

Substack, connect me with other writers and creatives. “Be careful what you wish for,” says Virginia as she flips a pancake over a three-inch gas flame. Just know what you’re asking. Because not everybody welcomes the inquisition chair. Not everyone’s ready for the Royal Rub-a-Dub-Dub and maybe if this writer understood what Substack is for, she wouldn’t be lonely and ignored and unloved and scorned and her writing wouldn’t suck like the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s wind tunnel on a Thursday. Maybe. And people with my background will often shrug and say, “If you can’t take the heat . . . ”

But no. That heat was never productive, never did what it was supposed to do. It only caused pathological levels of anxiety that got in the way, that we had to transcend later in order to keep writing. See, Virginia isn’t actually one of us. She’s an agent of the system. She’s keeping the burners up to keep the algorithm at a rolling boil. You’ve come a long way in spite of the heat, baby.

So when I see a kid posting her first short story—which is probably just fine and might even be a work of art—I’m not going to let the Substack Industrial Complex speak through my mouth. It won’t be knives out. It’ll be: “Good for you. Keep going. Don’t read the comments. Use the block button. Don’t compare yourself to other writers. And put your time in as regularly as you can.” Because art, like life, is ultimately an expression of love. And somewhere, there’s a star in the East glittering just for you. Pack your bags right now and get going. You need to follow it.

Talent Actually Is Enough (if you can calm down)

Talent should be enough (to keep writing). And if it feels like it isn’t, you shouldn’t quit doing what matters to you. You should simply put your work out there differently and adjust your expectations. Because writing is the point, not complaining about the dehumanizing effects of working with the publishing industry.

Of course it’s dehumanizing. Literary publishing is about profits, not humans, not even about art. The writing, beyond its potential ROI and marketing clout, is often regarded as a tertiary consideration at best. But you’re a writer. What does any of this have to do with you sitting down and writing?

Publishing is sales with sales values and, in that respect, it isn’t different than any other profit-driven industry. But you may have an artist’s values, which is very good if you’re an artist, right? So when publishers, agents, and editors talk about books as “units,” your stomach may do unpleasant things. That is why you are not a publisher, agent, or editor.

Few artists and business people understand each other. Few ever have. Publishers and editors often have no idea what it takes to actually write. This is true even when they fill the air (and the screen) with advice on writing, which is actually just marketing advice (the only advice they’re truly qualified to dispense, whether they know it or not).

Beyond some very basic considerations, knowing how to massage your text into something professionally acceptable and how to prune your subject matter into something inoffensive and salable is not tantamount to knowing how to realize a creative vision. Often, editorial qualms will run counter to the impulse that brought you to the desk in the first place.

On some visceral level, writers know this, even if they’ve allowed themselves to be bullied into compliance. But literary editors may not and, in fact, often do not understand the creative impulse. They are instead driven by corporate values.

This is true even when publishing industry executives pretend that they’re also creative artists, perhaps because they’ve come to think that making art is really nothing—how hard can it be? There’s a commercial formula. Success depends on how faithful a submission fits into that formula. If you know the formula, do you really need 500 submissions in a slushpile or can you just put it together yourself, maybe with the help of a large language model?

At the same time, writers have no real idea what the business people have to go through to continue to exist as bagmen in the cultural assembly line. You think submitting to their homogenizing, risk-averse style sheets and paranoid social media surveillance is dehumanizing?

Try their job for a few weeks. It’s that to the power of a thousand. You think writers become drinkers due to the pain and frustration inherent in the creative process? Sit in a fiction editor’s ergonomic open-plan desk chair under an ugly light for a bit and you’ll be taking the pledge this time next year.

It’s all hard. Have some sympathy for the guy in the suit. He was once a child like you. He liked comic books and ice cream. Don’t hate him because now he’s got insomnia about losing the house if the latest coffee table novel he backed doesn’t clear an upcoming sales target. You can always write something else. What can he do? He doesn’t want to go back to selling vapes over the phone.

This isn’t a new thing. Watch the famous scene in Altman’s The Player where Larry Levy extracts formula script ideas from newspaper articles. It’ll help you understand how the publishing industry thinks. Levy asks whether it’s necessary to even include creatives in the process if a group of executives can use a newspaper article to extract a movie idea (“Save the Cat” is an oblique version of this. And literary editors love it just as much as Hollywood script editors).

The publishing industry and Hollywood are now doing the same thing with AI. Do we really need to pay writers to hack out safe scripts that will attract Chinese investors if AI can do it in an afternoon?

Besides, AI hasn’t said questionable things on social media. AI hasn’t had inappropriate sexual liaisons that might affect sales down the line. AI doesn’t pal around with individuals on the organization’s cultural “red flag” list. AI is beyond reproach because it is not human. And that’s the point.

Do you want a seat at Larry Levy’s table? I think most writers would prefer to be cleaning restrooms downtown at the Greyhound bus terminal. At least the shit there can be temporarily flushed. The AI slop getting literary and movie executives so juiced up at the moment is just another enshitified volcano of “content.” But you’re a writer. What does any of this have to do with you sitting down and writing?

There’s a trend of articles* on Substack by frustrated writers saying versions of the same thing: the publishing industry has become a morass of ideological, over-stylized, hyper-saturated, heavily mediated, spineless slop, and it is managed by advertising-and-marketing people who fundamentally despise writers.

Well, yes.

But when was it any different (other than for the celebrity 2% at the top—the same 2% that still exists)? There was no golden age where every writer got a fair shake and equal access. It was always a risk-averse old-boy network. And it still is. The old boys just have different performative politics and dress codes. Trendiness and cultural clout dominate because that’s what sells. And sales are the point. But you’re a writer. What does any of this have to do with you sitting down and writing?

On some level, you already know how bad it’s always been. And you say, “But if I reject traditional publishing and only self-publish, my signal will invariably get lost in the noise of the self-publishing shit volcano.” Probably true. So what? You’re bitter because you need a day job? You can write and still make a living if creating art matters to you at all. You are not a precious lily of the valley. And neither is your creative vision. Just keep showing up. Or quit.

Rick Rubin, in The Creative Act, puts it like this:

Popular success is a poor barometer of work and worth. In order for a work to connect commercially, stars must align and none of them relate to how good the project is. It might be the timing, the distribution mechanism, the mood of the culture, or a connection to current events.

If a global catastrophe happens on the same day a project comes out, the project might be overshadowed. If you’ve made a stylistic change, your fans may not initially be receptive to it. If a highly anticipated work by another artist is released on the same day, your project may not land with the same impact. Most variables are completely out of our control. The only ones we can control are doing our best work, sharing it, starting the next, and not looking back.

Do that and don’t worry about how many units can be shipped. That has nothing to do with you.

* Two of these articles are “For Writers Who Have Considered Literary Suicide When Talent Wasn’t Enough” and “Talent Isn’t Enough (And It Never Was)”—linked to each other and somewhat overheated but, in this writer’s humble opinion, well written and worth a look.

On Control: a Conversation with Myself

Instead of trying to control the people around you, which is ultimately impossible, why not try controlling yourself?

If you say, “My experience depends on this person. So I have to persuade, indoctrinate, contain, or otherwise influence her* in order to feel alright,” you are in for some roller coaster-level misery.

She has individual hopes, dreams, fears, agendas, desires, and wants to feel good just like you. So she’s faced with similar decisions: does she choose to control conditions or herself? Chances are, she’s thinking, “My experience depends on him. So I have to persuade . . . “

Trying to push all that she is into a box and keep it there disregards (and disrespects) her. Moreover, it’s ultimately impossible. She will break out and do her own thing. People hate to be controlled, even if you think you know what’s good for them. And your personal preferences are certainly not the only right ones.

“But if I don’t take some kind of action, she’ll hurt me.” Maybe. If you allow it. But this is also a question of self-control. Marcus Aurelius writes something about this in The Meditations: “Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” It’s very much up to you how you feel—not up to the multitude of people who’d like to influence you in a particular way. You’re the only one doing the feeling.

No one can push a feeling into you. You allow it to arise inside yourself. And you can accept it or reject it, change it or embrace it. It’s all you. Nothing is happening to you. Everything is happening within you—with your implicit permission. Realizing this is the first step toward having a little peace of mind. It also makes your relationships better over time. You’re in charge.

“But if she hadn’t done the things she did, I wouldn’t be in this position.” That may be true, but no one lives in a sealed, pristine environment where everyone is selfless and accommodating. We live in a world of friction and contrast with individuals determined to seek their own freedom and truth. That’s what makes people so interesting. It’s also what makes us want greater control over our experiences. Nevertheless, trying to do this by controlling others and the conditions around us is misguided.

What’s the alternative? Think of three things. One, stop complaining and whining, as if mommy’s going to run over and fix things. Mommy never actually did. And now that you’re older, the world isn’t going to act like a surrogate mommy. As is often said, nobody’s coming to save you—you make your experiences from the substance of your attitudes and perceptions. Character really is destiny. So accept responsibility for your life and then change it from within, without complaining.

Two, get your head straight. You are not a victim. Even people who are physically harmed by others can choose not to be victims. Survivors of violence are often some of the strongest people—not necessarily physically strong, but strong in mind and spirit. Victimhood requires your acquiescence and participation. Don’t participate in that. Choose not to be harmed without trying to force others into submission.

And three, your imagination is your greatest attribute; use it. Focus on what you want in order to associate yourself with it more intimately. This includes your relationships with others. If you focus on the things you find pleasing in others, you don’t have to cajole and manipulate them into behaving the way you want.

In a broader sense, this applies to all life and it’s not New Age foolery. It’s just the power of imagination applied to attention. Let confirmation bias work for you instead of against you. In short, the more you imagine something and look for it in the world, the more you’ll notice it and wind up interacting with it. Selective attention is a real thing. And it, too, is a choice synonymous with mindful self-control.

In Polishing the Mirror, Ram Dass writes, “If somebody . . . is a problem for you, they’re not the one who needs to change. If someone is a problem for you, it’s you who needs to change. If you feel they’re causing you trouble, that’s your problem. It’s on you. Your job is to clear yourself.”

You’re living your best life. You’re in heaven right now. You just have to see it. And, if you can, you’ll fall in love with everyone because you’ll realize they are just like you—trying to find relief, trying to find meaning, trying to rise above the fog of their inner confusion and drama. Don’t get in their way. Don’t get in your own way. Let others be free and so free yourself.

*Pronouns are always a problem. I’m randomly picking the female one so as not to have to butcher the English language. This isn’t about anyone in particular.

Blender

“Something’s wrong with this blender. It won’t work. I think it hates me.”

“Why don’t you plug it in?”

“I never plug blenders in. My parents never plugged them in, either. That’s absurd. It’s possessed.”

“You could try plugging it in.”

“And completely turn my back on my family, my values, my religion? No, I’m not going to hell over a blender. This thing has a demon.”

“Usually blenders don’t work unless you plug them in.”

“You would say that. You live in a corrupt society. You’re indoctrinated with groupthink. George Soros wants you to plug your blender in.”

“George Soros doesn’t know if I have a blender.”

“George Soros has interests that benefit from the growth of the blender industry. The elites are in bed with multinational corporations. You can’t just use a blender. Now you have to run electricity into it? Let me ask you: what did great-grandpa do? We’ve forgotten how to live. We’ve abandoned our cultural values.”

“Ever read about Alessandro Volta, Michael Faraday, Thomas Edison, Nicola Tesla? Maybe read a history book?”

“Your history or my history? You sound woke. I’m homeschooling my kids. In ten years, they won’t have blue hair and be living in Portland.”

“Okay, but could you please calm down?”

“No, I will not be calm. Next you’re going to tell me to trust the science. I don’t get my science from propaganda. The Overton Window has shifted. You want to kill me. This is a spiritual war for the soul of America.”

“No, it’s a blender.”

Law

Law

by Charles Bukowski

“Look,“ he told me,

“all those little children dying in the trees.”

And I said, “What?”

He said, “Look.”

And I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,

dead and dying.

And I said, “What does it mean?”

He said, “I don’t know it’s authorized.”

The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,

hanging, dead, and dying.

I turned to my friend and I said, “What does it mean?”

And he said,

“Don’t worry about it, it’s the way of things. They took a vote. It was decided.”

The next day it was cats.

I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did.

The next day it was horses,

and that wasn’t so good because many bad branches broke.

And after bacon and eggs the next day,

my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee

and said,

“Let’s go,”

and we went outside.

And here were all these men and women in the trees,

most of them dead or dying.

And he got the rope ready and I said,

“What does it mean?”

And he said, “It’s authorized, constitutional, it passed the majority,”

And he tied my hands behind my back then opened the noose.

“I don’t know who’s going to hang me,” he said,

“When I get done with you.

I suppose when it finally works down

there will be just one left and he’ll have to hang himself.”

“Suppose he doesn’t?” I ask.

“He has to,” he said,

“It’s authorized.”

“Oh,” I said, “Well,

let’s get on with it.”

Probatum Est: Let Emotion Be Your Guide

In a 1996 Esalen Institute workshop, Terrence McKenna is supposed to have said, “The truth does not require your participation in order to exist. Bullshit does.” This is amusing, given his preoccupation with “machine elves,” hallucinogens, existential singularities capable of being determined by the I-Ching, and UFOs. But the transcripts and audio recordings of the Esalen event don’t contain an exact match.

The passage is often cited as coming from various McKenna events, writings, speeches, and interviews, sometimes convincingly, given its close similarity to the McKenna material we do have. We want to believe he said it because it’s pithy and makes us smile. To be fair, he could have said it. But he probably didn’t, at least, not like that.

The best we can do is consider it a paraphrase or an apocryphal attribution of something he wrote, perhaps in The Archaic Revival—“The Truth doesn’t need your cooperation to exist. All forms of cult, all forms of hype, all forms of delusion do require your participation in order to exist.” This makes the former “bullshit” quote a small performative example of what it’s communicating, a fake passage (circulating primarily in online meme culture), which requires our participation for it to seem authentic.

This is something I tell my creative writing students, even though I know it’s not easy to hear. Words, though they are fluid, are still nouns with ostensible limits. They’re things. And when we choose to believe a thing is not what it clearly is or when we’re motivated to think a thing is something we wish it would be, we’re on the golden path to bullshit. And sort of thinking runs across the entire landscape of creative writing. Welcome, fellow traveler.

It’s a road with many sidetracks, byways, on-ramps, and roundabouts. We can spend large parts of our lives chasing, promulgating, justifying, and sustaining bullshit about writing, primarily because we have no idea what’s real and we’re invested in beliefs about it that, on some level, simply make us feel better. We’re taking everything on faith. Every sentence you hand me changes from you to me, just as it changed when it came to you, when the filter of your perceptions invested it with your preferred epistemological gravity. [1]

This provokes a certain amount of anxiety. Let’s try not to notice parity between the above McKenna quote and Philip K. Dick’s line from I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” Can we hallucinate a disconnect between two things? Can we simply stop believing in a similarity, a linkage, a connotation, because we’re now uncomfortable? We can certainly try. Most things seem to go away, or at least radically change, when we believe or stop believing in them. The aesthetic rules that produced Adam Bede would not result in a publishable manuscript today. Conversely, the latest non-objectionable coffee table novel from Penguin-Random House would read like noise to someone in 1859.

And don’t say, as a pissed-off English professor once did when I told him I couldn’t prove any of my assumptions about reality in an absolute sense, “Step out in front of a moving bus and then tell me you don’t know what’s real.” Appeals to physical experience are misguided. You don’t know (and probably won’t know, if the object is moving at any degree of speed) whether that was actually a bus. It could be a catbus, a rocket-propelled angel, a sumo wrestler on a skateboard, a realization so profound it physically knocks you into the next life, or your mother’s heavy hand. [2]

You just don’t know. You take it on faith. Absolute bus-reality requires imaginative participation, i.e. McKennian bullshit, to exist because you can choose to stop believing it in and it will instantly fall apart. It’s not real. And, for that matter, neither is writing craft, and neither are you as a writer.

So then what are you?

The black arm of writerly superstition.

We have our methods. Rituals, habits, compulsive daily offices, practices arising from the implicit missionaria protectiva of our conditioning and the aforementioned hype (often of book marketing masquerading as taste). We think we know what good writing is but, more often than not, the publishing industry insists that we look for a horse in the meadow.

Cut to a basement a few blocks away from the University of Missouri, long enough ago that I can name the place but not the lit professor sitting on the other end of the couch. We were avoiding the English department party upstairs. I wasn’t drinking and I’d brought a case of Mountain Dew Code Red to keep others from putting bottles in my hand—a soda sufficiently sugary that I was sure I’d have it all to myself.

My couch companion wasn’t much of a drinker, either, but she’d just smoked a shovelful of weed. As such, she was determined to deliver her aesthetic philosophy to me, even though it was pretty clear I didn’t feel like talking and was planning my exit.

“I’m so sick of decentered, pretentious, fragmented narratives with some defensive self-obfuscating voice that lets the writer off the hook. Give me a simple story about men and women in bad situations. You know?” [3]

Oh yes. “Actually,” I said, “self-obfuscation is the only thing I’m into now.”

I thought I was being funny, but she nodded like it was the bitter truth. “I know.”

She was one step away from saying, “You MFA people” and I immediately started to worry that she’d read my first book and was already accusing me in her narratology class of the sin of writerly self-obfuscation. I felt like I should keep talking to her to suss this out, but just as quickly, I thought: fuck it. I’m getting my Code Red and going home.

There’s no accounting for someone else’s faith, for someone else’s bullshit. Participating in that reality, even arguing with it, is what allows it to exist. She was asking for workmanlike creative nonfiction or autofiction, something ostensibly transparent enough that she didn’t have to feel anxiety about interpreting its essential fictional lie. I couldn’t blame her for that. Being a lit professor isn’t easy. At the same time, I thought of my own creative writing students, how frustrating it was when they thought I was hiding the right answers.

Later, I was not surprised to discover that her scholarship was mostly in the area of literary biography—getting to the truth of just who these darn lying writers were, based on critical sources like letters to their sweethearts, wine-stained revision manuscripts, memos from agents and publishers, and crumpled grocery lists found in the pantry.

It’s a living, I suppose, but it showed she couldn’t accept one of the fundamental yet self-contradictory facts at the heart of the English studies industrial complex: there are no right answers. Beyond a baseline degree of coherence, there is only performative taste, viral trend, publishing hype, and what people like my couch companion have to say. The only criterion is personal and completely subjective: did it move you? The rest requires your participation in order for it to exist. It’s a catbus packed with bullshit.

It’s alright to cry.

In Wired for Story, Lisa Cron flirts with neurological determinism in order to explain why we keep telling stories:

We think in story. It’s hardwired in our brain. It’s how we make strategic sense of the otherwise overwhelming world around us. Simply put, the brain constantly seeks meaning from all the input thrown at it, yanks out what’s important for our survival on a need-to-know basis, and tells us a story about it, based on what it knows of our past experience with it, how we feel about it, and how it might affect us. Rather than recording everything on a first come, first served basis, our brain casts us as “the protagonist” and then edits our experience with cinema-like precision, creating logical interrelations, mapping connections between memories, ideas, and events for future reference. Story is the language of experience, whether it’s ours, someone else’s, or that of fictional characters.

It sounds pretty good; though, whenever we use brain architecture as a way to definitively explain anything, the explanation begins to seem a lot more half-baked and ascriptive than descriptive. Cron’s theory threatens to fall apart as soon as we stop believing in it. But I was willing to make that leap of faith in my PhD program when I discovered her book, still desperately searching for something approximating the truth about what good writing should be and too wounded to accept that there was only one place I could find it—in myself.

“How we feel about it” is basic to our experience as writers and readers. It provides a basis. It’s the emotional undercroft that won’t cave in no matter what hallucinatory structures have begun to collapse above. As a basis, it might change, but it will remain present. For example, whenever I read Lorca’s poems, I feel moved. I may not feel moved the same way every time, but I know there will be emotional movement.

I think a lot about the medieval alchemists, who annotated their manuscripts with, probatum est, it works, it has been proven, as a way to differentiate successful experiments from the unverifiable or the wholly allegorical. There can be only one probatum est in fictional narrative. Did it make you feel something, however slight, however delicate?

I want to cry because I feel like it—
the way children cry in the last row of seats—
because I’m not a man, not a poet, not a leaf,
but only a wounded pulse probing things on the other side.

— Federico Garcia Lorca

[1] This is very reminiscent of Frank Herbert’s “Golden Path,” in Children of Dune and God Emperor of Dune, where the emperor Leto II inherits his father’s apocalyptic vision—inherited from the novel’s sinister Jesuits, the Bene Gesserits, who religiously manipulate history by seeding it with messianic stories and myths. It’s not surprising that, in the Dune novels, inherited stories change and, by extension, change reality around them.

[2] Merci, M. Descartes, I never doubted you: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/#InnaIdea

[3] I have her exact words because I wrote them down later that night, thinking they’d be useful in a story, but I’ve never used them before now.

All Tomorrow’s Parties

There’s a cockroach in my kitchen. We surprise each other in the mornings. By the time I get my slipper, he has maybe one, two moments to live. But he’s faster than me by a millisecond. Just that much and he runs under the cabinet. Gregor, I think, your time will come. Because it will. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But one day, one day my little friend, the party will be over.

I’m a rather clean person and I prefer a neat and tidy house. But I live by a stream in the tropics. That means the insect life is ubiquitous. So around me, insect death must also be. This is disturbing, of course, because I’d like to be a good Zen Buddhist. I’d like to harm none. And I’m not so arrogant that I can’t imagine myself in Gregor’s position. Wasn’t that Kafka’s point?

We have to be careful when we metamorphose human beings into something else. It’s an old, dark form of magic and, like all sorcery, comes with certain consequences. I think of Circe turning Odysseus’ crew into pigs:

She opened her gleaming doors at once and stepped forth,
inviting them all in, and in they went, all innocence.
Only Eurylochus stayed behind – he sensed a trap…
She ushered them in to sit on high-backed chairs,
then she mixed them a potion – cheese, barley
and pale honey mulled in Pramnian wine –
but into the brew she stirred her wicked drugs
to wipe from their memories any thought of home.
Once they’d drained the bowls she filled, suddenly
she struck with her wand, drove them into her pigsties,
all of them bristling into swine – with grunts,
snouts – even their bodies, yes, and only
the men’s minds stayed steadfast as before.
So off they went to their pens, sobbing, squealing
as Circe flung them acorns, cornel nuts and mast,
common fodder for hogs that root and roll in mud.

(Odyssey, Book 10, lines 253-268)

She’s a sorceress, certainly, and in some readings an immortal goddess. But in Greek myth, even the gods are subject to the peregrinations of consequence and fate. For example, in later retellings, Circe herself falls in love with Odysseus, a love which, in this story as in life, seems more like a double-bladed sword than a sorcerous wand. Unrequited love is maybe one of the most poisonous, wrenching potions we can drink. And yet I can’t imagine anyone who wouldn’t voluntarily drink it—only the odd Eurylochus, waiting in the front yard, unwilling to enter, the voice of bitter fear that says, I’d rather feel nothing than go through that.

At first, we think Eurylochus is wise. But he isn’t. Perhaps his voice still echoes in language of post-millennial generations that seem to have given up on romance. But they probably haven’t, at least not as a broad demographic. This despite endless overheated magazine articles about kids not moving out and not developing the social skills of their parents. Say it with me: the kids are alright. Human psychobiology being what it is, they may just be waiting for the right potion in the right bowl, offered by the right sorceress in the right economic circumstances. Circe’s out there, kids. She’s on an island, not on Tinder. And she’s cute. Your destiny might lie more in the realm of sus domesticus than homo sapiens, but I believe in you.

Still, what love could be less requited than one that transforms a human into an animal? Were Odysseus’ men really pigs at heart? Was Circe really that powerful? In Madeline Miller’s retelling, the crewmen of Circe are swine from the start, in essence if not in form. It’s a bad trope that has been part of a long misandrist literary tradition, going back at least as far as John Chrysostom’s homilies on the book of Matthew: “[T]hese men are swine; even as when the pearl is trampled under foot, it is not so trampled, because it is really contemptible, but because it fell among swine.”

The tradition finds its apotheosis in Victorian phobias about men’s sexual needs and the simple binary that takes physicality as the natural province of the devil—the absolute scullery level of Christian morality. But it’s still around and we’ve seen genocidal war propaganda dehumanize people by means of this same metamorphosis. It’s undeniably black magic when political rhetoric transforms a human being into a farm animal or a cockroach to be swatted. Love becomes hate. Man becomes beast. Or worse.

Thankfully, unlike Madeline Miller, Homer leaves the romantic aspect ambiguous. But what do we do? In the transformations of our lives, in every segment of every day, what potions do we drink? What is our human proportionality, our inner ratio of person to creature, especially when love’s “wicked drugs” get involved? And how do we apply this calculus to others?

Literature and popular culture keep asking. William Gibson, creator of the cyberpunk genre, made it about cybernetic implants and the identity dissolution that seems to accompany an overly online existence. But he’s posing the same old questions about human emotion versus human intention. In All Tomorrow’s Parties, he wrote: “[Laney] had always taken it for granted that he possessed some stable core of continuous selfhood, but now he suspected that this might be another of those illusions the node [data] had enabled him to outgrow.” As the character’s humanity gave way to the ethereal grip of digitality, he became less than human. Laney’s desires had outstripped his willingness to acknowledge his own humanity. He’d forgotten himself.

A decade earlier, Mike Pondsmith, in the Cyberpunk roleplaying game, took inspiration from Gibson’s novel, Neuromancer, and created a game rule for it: “When a character installs too much cyberware, they lose ‘Humanity’ points. Drop too low and they succumb to cyberpsychosis—a dissociative state where they become violent, detached from human empathy, and essentially a mindless killing machine.” A clear example of man into beast in a world where machines are fetishistically becoming the object of all desires.

*The replicant owl in Blade Runner. Expensive? Very. And perhaps a late-stage iteration of Uncle Bob. But we like the artificial owl better.*

The implications are inherently Shakespearean. Lear says to Kent, “Come not between the dragon and his wrath” (1.1.124), a transmogrification meant to justify Lear’s uncontrollable rage. In order to act inhumane towards Cordelia, he has to become something inhuman. And so Shakespeare poses one of his perennial questions: where do we locate our humanity? How savage do we want to be to each other by means of such transformations in the service of emotions we don’t fully appreciate or understand? Or, in High Pondsmithian: how many humanity points do we actually have left? How much of myself can I replace before I’m no longer me? And how does that make me feel?

Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” is also deliberately ambiguous on this point, even if it’s central to the story. Did Gregor Samsa become a giant cockroach because of who he essentially was (like Madeline Miller’s men being always-already pigs) or because the importunities of life had slowly replaced his parts, altering his nature, detaching his human empathy until he reached the scullery level of cockroach-psychosis? Of course, Lear was a dangerous king. So naturally, he transformed into a dragon. Gregor Samsa was a lowly clerk, a technician, so naturally . . . Now I hunt Gregor in my kitchen. Though, to someone else, I think I must be Gregor Samsa.

But this was about unrequited love and the inner convolutions that cause us to behave in ways other than human. How much of Circe’s Pramnian wine can I drink before I become an animal? How much emotion can I endure before I forget myself? When do I reach the point at which I say, “I’d rather feel nothing than go through that”? I think most people reach that point sooner than they expect. Maybe the post-Millennials are right.

We think Eurylochus can’t be wise. At least, we don’t want him to be. We look in the mirror and say, “I believe in you.” We affirm the power of love. We like the taste of sorcerous barley wine and ask for seconds. But we don’t know how much we’ve already changed. We don’t anticipate the degree to which our “continuous selfhood” has already been displaced—not through a wraith-like transformation into a digital persona or through a royal draconic invocation, but through the very sad, very human experience of self-forgetting. Because if an immortal goddess can fall in love, she can suffer heartbreak. And if she can, so can we.

Now we wonder about new taxonomies. We ask, “What rough beast am I becoming? Who was I yesterday? And will I forget this pain in some timeless animal life to come? Do I want to forget?” There’s a man standing in the front yard with a bitter look on his face. He seems to know something. I wonder what it is.

Disappearing Act

Like many college kids, I was in a hurry to get my piece of paper. By my last quarter at UC Irvine, I was taking 18 credits, working multiple jobs, and feeling the accelerated decrepitude that comes standard with silly 20-something social timing. I had to hurry up and “start my life.” I don’t blame myself for feeling that way, but it’s funny to remember.

I’m not looking back through time and saying, as a depressed, middle-aged relative once said to me, “After high school, the best times of your life are over.” High school sucked. And college more or less also sucked. But maybe the suction toward the end of my undergraduate years—of intense work, full course loads, worry, and frustration—was a bit less. And maybe in that margin, I brought a lot on myself voluntarily, like taking art classes I didn’t need to graduate.

In a moment of prescience, I thought, after this quarter, I’m never going to have time to take an art class. This is it. I petitioned for the right to take credits past the maximum and got turned down. So I showed up at Dr. Ladaner’s drawing and painting classroom on the first day and said, “They won’t let me take your class for credit. Can I just pretend I’m a student?” He gave me a long look, smiled, and nodded at an empty seat. Ladaner was great.

This is what he taught me. You have to air your work out. You have to let go. You have to be messy. You have to give yourself permission to draw and not erase because the line you draw is the line you draw. You have to accept it. And yourself. It’s the only way to get better.

I still can’t draw. But I took that lesson, which often came wrapped in some pretty harsh language, to heart. It has helped me in everything I’ve written. You have to be willing to make a mess of things. Neatness in the creative process (or really in any process) is, all too often, an expression of counterproductive fear. Ladaner didn’t get upset when we created something that didn’t work. He got upset at pretentiousness and stage fright.

You have to get over yourself, like the nude models we drew around midterms. A few were vampire-exhibitionists, sucking up the attention. But most were highly developed individuals who’d integrated being an artist’s model into their own process. They knew: you have to be willing to let people see you. It’s not about sucking up attention. It’s about exchange. And it’s about knowing how to get out of your own way.

We went outside to draw the cars in the parking lot. Ladaner didn’t tell us anything beyond that. His style: “We’re gonna go out and draw some cars today.” Someone asked, “How should we do it? What should we use?” He smiled and said, “Let’s go.”

So we went. We drew some cars. He did, too. I snuck up behind him and looked. He was using a piece of charcoal, making a wobbly kind of grid. I thought, this doesn’t look like that Toyota over there. It looks like an oversized waffle that dropped down a chimney. But then I realized he wasn’t drawing the cars. He was drawing the negative space between them, the light on the windshields, the shadows of the tires.

He noticed me and said to take a step back, unfocus, squint a little. I did and it all came together. I was impressed. On the way back to the classroom, he tossed it in the trash. That made me feel even more impressed. And I got it. Ladaner always did the assignments he gave us, but he didn’t dwell on his vastly superior technical ability. He was just hanging out, hanging loose, participating. He said, “Draw every day,” because that’s what he did. But he didn’t get hung up on it. He was more like a drummer doing his rudiments.

Years later, I was a writing instructor at a different university and had the privilege of teaching beginning fiction writing to his very quiet, buttoned-down, organized daughter in order to help her fulfill a gen ed requirement. On the first day, when I saw her name, I asked whether there was any relation (this university was in a different state). She said her father was a professor of art at UCI.

After regaining the power of speech, I said to tell him hi from me, that I once sat in on one of his fantastic drawing and painting workshops. She just gave me a look. I don’t think she ever said anything of the sort to him and I didn’t bring it up again. By the 15th week, she had a solid B in my class, only because she missed two assignments. I treated her like everyone else. She was a good student but largely uninterested in creative writing. Still, part of me really wanted to tell her that a lot of what I’d come to believe about the writing process and about life began with her father’s concepts.

Don’t be afraid to draw a wobbly line or write a wobbly sentence. Maybe you can fix it in the mix. When the time comes, maybe you won’t even want to. And maybe, if you’re really into it, you won’t think about yourself at all. That’s when I know I’m doing it right, when I disappear.

I try to have multiple projects going at once. I try not to get too self-conscious or fixated on whether I’m writing well, even though I sometimes can’t help it. A writing teacher of mine put it like this: “A writer can be shy and afraid of anything in life except writing.” So I try to be brave and let the project move through me instead of getting in the way.

In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin points out that we have to approach it with everything that we are: “We begin with everything: everything seen, everything done, everything thought, everything felt, everything imagined, everything forgotten, and everything that rests unspoken and unthought within us.” But it’s better if we’re not conscious of this inner substance. We don’t think, now I’m going to write a sad scene. We write a scene. And if the scene is sad, it’s sad.

Genre fiction writers call this “pantsing” (writing by the seat of one’s pants). They often despise it because the publishing industry does its best to make them deeply anxious about whether their work is marketable. But it’s a lot like making love. You can’t make love if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make art if you’re afraid of letting go. You can’t make friends, either. And you definitely can’t make love to artistic friends.

I remind myself: you have to confront uncertainty. You have to allow yourself to get lost, step off the path, forget the editorial style sheet, fall off the outline. You have to disappear.

Actors understand this. Francis Ford Coppola described Gene Hackman’s performance in The Conversation as “the first time I saw Gene truly lose himself. He wasn’t performing; he was unraveling.” Hackman was so immersed in the role, he was able to go off script in a way that squared perfectly with the character. Many of the best scenes in that movie were more like channeling than acting. Then again, at the deepest level, is there really much difference?

Blue Nights

In certain latitudes there comes a span of time approaching and following the summer solstice, some weeks in all, when the twilights turn long and blue. This period of the blue nights does not occur in subtropical California, where I lived for much of the time I will be talking about here and where the end of daylight is fast and lost in the blaze of the dropping sun, but it does occur in New York, where I now live. You notice it first as April ends and May begins, a change in the season, not exactly a warming—in fact not at all a warming—yet suddenly summer seems near, a possibility, even a promise. You pass a window, you walk to Central Park, you find yourself swimming in the color blue: the actual light is blue, and over the course of an hour or so this blue deepens, becomes more intense even as it darkens and fades, approximates finally the blue of the glass on a clear day at Chartres, or that of the Cerenkov radiation thrown off by the fuel rods in the pools of nuclear reactors. The French called this time of day “l’heure bleue.” To the English it was “the gloaming.” The very word “gloaming” reverberates, echoes—the gloaming, the glimmer, the glitter, the glisten, the glamour—carrying in its consonants the images of houses shuttering, gardens darkening, grass-lined rivers slipping through the shadows. During the blue nights you think the end of day will never come. As the blue nights draw to a close (and they will, and they do) you experience an actual chill, an apprehension of illness, at the moment you first notice: the blue light is going, the days are already shortening, the summer is gone.

— the opening to Blue Nights by Joan Didion

καπνός μαντεία

That’s the thing with bucket lists. They end. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I had one, I’d have said I thought they were stupid. I’d have called them products of an increasingly enshitified media-internet convergence, self-help waffle, and that one bad movie. The bucket list concept has always seemed like life-coach hype. But I did have one. I didn’t write it down or post it or engrave it on a thin sheet of marble to hang over my desk, but it was there, implicit, a coil of smoke always turning in my field of vision, a divination only I could read. And it said one thing: hurry up.

So I did. I wanted to publish a book of stories. I published two with a third complete manuscript still out there, tumbling through the maybe-someday abyss. I wanted to learn martial arts. I studied multiple styles. I wanted to teach university writing and wound up teaching it for over two decades, travel the world and live abroad for substantial periods (at least 13 countries to date), and get a PhD (2010, English). For these things, I feel only gratitude—mostly to myself for having had the courage to attempt them, but none of it was accomplished in a vacuum. What did the millennials say twenty years ago? Something, something, the friends we made along the way? I made a few.

But I’m Generation X, where the “X” evokes the old cartoon “wingding eyes,” which are supposed to indicate being “dead or asleep without dreaming. Comical depictions of corpses or ghosts will have their tongues sticking out as well as this. Sometimes, both eyes will combine into a single, longways X. May also be a feature in depictions of clowns.” Sounds about right for Gen-X. Dead. Asleep without dreaming. Corpses, ghosts, clowns. I’m all that, depending on which day of the week you encounter me. Come over on a Sunday afternoon and you get a trifecta. But one of them always has to be “clown.” And the friends I made along the way turned out just the same. Now they’re mostly ghosts.

In classical antiquity, sorcerers would burn sacrifices to gods and spirits of the dead, then practice capnomancy with the smoke, reading it like divine script. Καπνός (kapnos) means “smoke” and μαντεία (manteia) means “seeing,” as in divination or second sight. The bucket list I had was capnomantic in that sense. I was my own burning sacrifice, my own smoke, my own divine message from myself to myself. And the smoke always said time was short. So I needed to do what I needed to do. And it worked out, more or less. It wasn’t much of a list, unless I thought about it for a while and scared myself. But the bucket part ran deep.

And now? Now I peer into my bucket like a child afraid to dive in. Because it seems like I’ve come around, made a perfect circle to where I began. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.” A brighter flame for more powerful μαντεία, of course, but in the end it’s all the same. The smoke blows away. After mountains, more mountains. And if you don’t die a hero, you live to carry other people’s ashes, too. So many. A million metric tons of ashes, the remains of the dead that are now your responsibility, their memories, their ghosts. Quite a burden to carry up a mountain trail.

The rim of the bucket makes a perfect circle. Wobbling on the edge, I try to grip with my toes. The mountains are watching. Smoke twists above my head like a thin snake. You ask me what the gods and spirits said in its coils. And I tell you to be patient. Just wait a little longer. I’m still burning.