Category: Creative Writing

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.

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.”

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.

On Loneliness

I finished a short story draft this morning before dawn. I don’t know if I’m going to post it here, but I’m definitely sending it to magazines once I edit it. That’s what it’s like to be a writer. You sit alone at a desk in the early morning or late into the night, making a world from the stuff in your head. You never know if you’re good. You never know if the responses you get (if any) are accurate or truthful. You’re completely alone in every way that matters. And, when you aren’t, you still are. Amateurs say “writing community” and the real artists give a little side-eye. Sure, sure, the writing community. That’s great. Now excuse me, I, uh, gotta be somewhere.

When you’re finished and the draft is as good as it’s going to get, you put it into the Submittable churn or email it to a magazine editor. If you’re a big deal or trying to pretend that you are, you send it to an agent or a manager, the beneficent industry parasites who are supposed to make everything easier but who can’t until you make it easier for yourself and don’t need them. Most of them don’t understand anything about sitting at the table in the dark.

And then your story, which is weirdly no longer connected to you, does its own thing out in the wild, cycling through the picayune innards of small-press publishing—the ugly Rube Goldberg literary digestion machine, glimpsed imperfectly at a distance and kind of stupid, mean, and silly all at at once. But by then you don’t care. You’re already on to another project.

A professor of mine once said, without early childhood loneliness, there’d be no one majoring in English. But I say, without lifelong loneliness, there’d be no one writing short stories or poems at 4:00 AM at the kitchen table. Or maybe I’ve got it backwards. Maybe without the stories, there wouldn’t be a cold, empty house. There wouldn’t be darkness and the need to imagine you are somewhere else. There wouldn’t be regret and the bitter absence of everyday joys that others take for granted. Because this is what you get, what everyone gets. This is the price for being able to make art.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic. Some days, I think so. On the worst days, not. Like when Vincent Hanna asks Neil McCauley in the legendary diner scene in Heat, “So you never wanted a regular type life, huh?”And Neil answers, “What the fuck is that? Barbecues and ball games?” And all Vincent can say, because it’s true, is “Yeah.”

Somebody asks me why I’ve been a wanderer all my life. Someone asks me what it is I actually do. And I have a variety of thought-stopping answers prepared. Because I don’t understand barbecues and ball games. I don’t understand normal life and day jobs, even though I’ve nearly always had one in which I wear a convincing man suit, function more or less effectively, and run a reasonable simulation of humanity.

A big part of the price is alienation, is becoming a weirdo, but that might be a chicken-egg thing. Would you have accepted this lifestyle if you weren’t already weird? When I was a kid, I spent most of my time alone, even when I was at school, especially when I was at school, making up stories. In college, the same. In law school, the same. In graduate school, the same. In fact, stories were what yanked me out of law school and full-on into the world of creative writing. Was I writing the stories or were the stories writing me?

James Baldwin said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” And that also seems true. But then I think, would I be reading so much if I hadn’t already walked away from the barbecues and ball games? Shit, man, I didn’t even go in the stadium. I didn’t even get through the parking lot. A weird goth bus full of theater kids got me and I wound up smoking weed on a rooftop, asking is this where it’s at? And concluding, no, this isn’t. This is just another ball game. Where it’s at was back home in my room in my imagination. And now it’s at the kitchen table five days a week a few hours before I have to go interact with the general population.

Loneliness does strange and awful things. When we can’t share who we are or what we do in a meaningful way, something starts to rot and twist. And it never untwists. It just keeps twisting and rotting and twisting. You look at yourself one morning, at the shadows in your face, and ask, is this what I am? A creature of the night? You think, I’d rather be a night-blooming flower than a cockroach. But it’s all of a piece.

You’re a member of the class of beings that takes meaning in absence, in solitude, in the unnatural silence of the world asleep. But you’re not asleep. In fact, it’s the only time you’re fully awake. And so one comes to understand, to see oneself, in the figure of the moth, the vampire, the possum, the spider, the blossom at the end of a branch nodding in the wind, all the carnivora that wait for nightfall while the wide world pounds by overhead. The moon is their sun. And yours.

As I sit at my desk, like I did this morning and the morning before that and the morning before that, building artificial realities out of words, I often wonder what it’s like to lead a regular type life. “No such thing,” someone said to me recently, but he doesn’t know. He’s a weirdo, too.

I got up last week and the words wouldn’t come. So I went for a run and wound up walking through the neighborhood, hearing wind chimes, looking at yellow rectangles of distant windows. I watched black water twist under a bridge and felt the first drops of morning rain. No one was awake. No one looked out at the shape of a man standing still on a bridge in the dark, listening.

What if?

My fellow fiction writers, I’m not asking you to accept this, just to entertain it: what if you engaged in less self-promotion and diverted a little more energy to the substance of your writing?

What if you read more of what you love and also made sure to read some poetry? What if you stepped out from behind your shield of irony, self-consciousness, sarcasm, and cute internet lingo? What if you did something sensuous or dangerous, preferably outside your living space? What if you stopped numbing yourself and voluntarily felt some pain—perhaps only to see how far you could go?

You would slow down. You would be less monetized and your momentary publicity would decrease. Yes, the rat race of cynical, always-online, self-promoting content regurgitation would pass by for a time.

You probably wouldn’t die. You might live.

Government Cheese: There’s Only One Way to Write a Novel

 

Writing a novel is a sustained evocation of mental energy, of shifting energetic states, and you have to acknowledge that on some level if you want to do it. This isn’t me pulling out the crystals. I’m saying that the state of mind involved in writing a novel is very different than that of a short story or a screenplay. It’s sometimes compared to an endurance run, but that doesn’t fully encapsulate how it feels when you’re actually writing. Maybe nothing can truly convey the feeling. You have to experience it for yourself.

The act of producing creative writing (maybe of producing any writing) seems subjective in the extreme. But look at the multitude of writing programs out there. There must be something about the practice that’s objective and teachable. I think, maybe: grammar, spelling, punctuation, awareness of voice, economy of language, paragraphing, dramatic tension, plot structure, metaphor, concrete detail, chapter dynamics, dialogue, symbolism, mood, perspective, cliché avoidance, implicit characterization, theme, and narrative summary.

Those are probably the things that can be taught. But they can’t really be taught. They can only be presented and absorbed. You get them or you don’t. You get them by reading, by being quiet and listening, by discarding the methods, formulas, and nostrums that purport to teach you about doing them so that you can experience the actual, unmediated thing. You have to get writing at the soul level, if you’ll excuse me for shouting from all the way back at the crystal counter.

Yes, I’m being romantic. Making art is a romantic thing. It’s not replacing irrigation systems or baking pies or doing basement plumbing; though, I should note that if you treated basement plumbing like an art, like something you have to essentially intuit through doing, through long observation, through cultivating appreciation, even through love, it would be pretty damn romantic, too.  Basement plumbing can be an adventure like novel writing. Ready? Bring me the PVC Charlotte pipe and some Oatey. This draft isn’t going to write itself.

In my first university creative writing workshop, the instructor said to the class, “I know a lot of you want to be writers. If there’s anything else you can do with your lives, do it. Because this is no way to live”—said the associate professor on the tenure track with his third book being turned into a screenplay for Miramax. Oh, I know, I thought, hard times.

What he was really saying was, “I’m special. None of you are special like me. So don’t try to be.” That ditty gets sung in every creative field (maybe in all fields) by those trying to reconcile crushing impostor syndrome and sunk costs with the countervailing sense that they’ve had to make deep violating sacrifices to get where they are and now they’re due for some cheddar. Bring on the cheddar, the sugar, the cash, the dancing girls. You owe me. “You” being the entire world in general and certain key individuals who haven’t yet come across with the goods. I want it and I want it now. See this contract? It’s a two-book deal. Look at it. LOOK AT IT.

Sure. So while he was saying this to us, I was thinking that I didn’t know if I was a writer, but I did know that I never wanted to be the sort of person who tells a room full of young, optimistic people to quit while they’re ahead.  To my credit, as a writing instructor, I have never done that.  Because you never know what somebody can do and talent is mostly hype.

You (yes, you, my little cabbage) can write a short story today.  You can write a good short story maybe next year (if you write most of the days between now and then and read a lot).  If you lay enough pipe, maybe you can write a novel, too. And my message to you is not that you need to be special.  No one is special.  My message is simple: time is short. So get to it.  Don’t quit while you’re ahead.  Don’t quit while you’re behind.  Don’t quit.

But I’m starting to sound like a motivational speaker, which is not my intention. Yesterday, in one of those weird end-of-day office conversations that only make sense after a gallon of coffee and a greasy cafeteria lunch have brought one around again to a deep appreciation of the plumbing arts, someone said that nobody wants a conservative artist the way nobody wants a hippie CEO.

Artists need to be liberal and romantic.  CEOs need to be stapled down and pragmatic. Otherwise, the great chain of being will snap into the abyss.  Apples will fly up.  Sad clowns will laugh again. And all the stained glass in all the cathedrals of the world will shatter at once.  If I’m not up at 3:00 AM with Lord Byron, drinking Albariño Do Ferreiro out of a human skull and speculating about beauty, am I even human?

It’s the mental shifts that get you. Your life is a river of thought, of energy.  You cannot change the course of the river—even if the uncertainty and lack of agency implicit in that realization cause so much anxiety that you run to the methods, formulas, and nostrums for at least some semblance of control. In this work, there is no control other than revision, which comes as an afterthought.

First and foremost, there’s the river, which twists and turns, shifting through the landscape of your weeks and months.  You have to let it carry you.  And the only way to do that is to trust it’s heading somewhere. That sort of trust doesn’t come from the world telling you you’re special. It comes from being afraid and doing it anyhow.

Don’t all rivers flow to the sea? If you don’t believe me, listen to the King:

Like a river flows

Surely to the sea,

Darling, so it goes

Some things are meant to be.

Which is to say, you need to let it happen and get out of the way.  Let it flow, holmes. What will be, will be.  There is nothing more authentically human than experiencing something with that degree of inscrutable inevitability. And being afraid.

My various writing instructors (assiduously not teaching novel writing, ever) over the years must have had the facility with language to express these things.  I suspect they didn’t because novels are what sell.  Novels are, as the abovementioned instructor put it on a different occasion, where it’s at. Novels bring the cheddar, the government cheese (in his case, the state college cheese).

Why teach 15-20 youngsters every semester how to become your competition when you could derail them into decades of story writing and frustration?  Instead, be sure to impart a short-form aesthetic that, while certainly beautiful, will also certainly not help them into an associate professorship and a novel optioned by Miramax.  Teach them scrimshaw instead of casting in bronze. You’re the bronze guy, after all.

We may not be special.  And the world may not need another novel (or another plumber, though, if I had to choose, the latter always seems like the better option), but when we get down to it, the world really doesn’t need anything.  It doesn’t need another accountant, another inflatable beach ball, another green-eyed cat with a striped tail.

Like the cat, you’re here because that river of energy coalesced into the shape of a person. You want to write a novel because that same energy put some mysterious sacred geometry in your head that makes you see in the dark with a writer’s eyes. And that means even if there’s something else you can do with your life, you don’t have to. You can do what you want.

Ang Lee wrote:

At one point, my in-laws gave their daughter (my wife) a sum of money, intended as start-up capital for me to open a Chinese restaurant – hoping that a business would help support my family. But my wife refused the money. When I found out about this exchange, I stayed up several nights and finally decided: This dream of mine is not meant to be. I must face reality.

Afterward (and with a heavy heart), I enrolled in a computer course at a nearby community college. At a time when employment trumped all other considerations, it seemed that only a knowledge of computers could quickly make me employable. For the days that followed, I descended into malaise. My wife, noticing my unusual demeanor, discovered a schedule of classes tucked in my bag. She made no comment that night.

The next morning, right before she got in her car to head off to work, my wife turned back and – standing there on our front steps – said, “Ang, don’t forget your dream.”

And that dream of mine – drowned by demands of reality – came back to life. As my wife drove off, I took the class schedule out of my bag and slowly, deliberately tore it to pieces. And tossed it in the trash.

Sometime after, I obtained funding for my screenplay, and began to shoot my own films. And after that, a few of my films started to win international awards. Recalling earlier times, my wife confessed, “I’ve always believed that you only need one gift. Your gift is making films. There are so many people studying computers already, they don’t need an Ang Lee to do that. If you want that golden statue, you have to commit to the dream.”

But back to drinking wine from human skulls: do it, mon petit chou, and have no regrets. Many people have uttered words over Albariño Do Ferreiro at 3:00 AM with Lord Byron regarding the subject of beauty. Why not you?

 

AWP in Ten Exotic Fruits

The guy who sold a superhero script to Disney was giving a talk in the Jabuticaba Room. The topic was whether superhero scripts were still commercially viable. The consensus was that they were not. The consensus was also that a superhero script optioned by Disney could pay the rent for up to three years in west Los Angeles if one lived frugally. The crowd appeared very amenable and the speaker was loud and effusive. It seemed like this was the most exciting thing he’d done in a long time. He told jokes and a few people laughed. A knot of MFA professors sat together, sipping the free coffee, looking on with blank expressions. It was the first event of the last day of AWP.

The aged lesbian who’d written a dystopian novel about gang rapes on a subterranean moon base was hosting the Mangosteen Awards Ceremony for the year’s top 30 writers under 30. It was called Mangosteen’s 30 Under 30, which had nothing to do with gang rapes on a moon base unless one wanted to think in very abstract terms. It was being held in the Tamarillo Auditorium and was listed at the top of the programme.

The important thing was HBO had adapted the moon base novel into a three-season series. Everyone wanted to know: how did this happen? How did she get an agent? How did her agent get an agent? How does one sell a novel to HBO? How does one sell a novel? Could I sell a novel to HBO? Could I sell you a novel to sell to HBO? Where is your agent’s assistant? Could she be sitting somewhere in the Tamarillo Auditorium right now? Are we in the Tamarillo Auditorium or are we somewhere else? Who are you?

The third top writer under 30 received her medallion at the podium and began to speak about her literary influences. She wanted to thank her mother and her fiancee, Matt. She wanted to thank Mangosteen Magazine for this award and for saying we see you. She knew she wanted to be a writer at age three, when she wrote her first short story. It was about a young girl with impostor syndrome. Moon Base broke in, said thank you and now we need to move on to the next medallion recipient. The third top writer hesitated, looked at the audience, then sat down in her folding chair.

The fourth top writer was called. His name was Durian Miller. Extremely pale and thin with spiky carrot-orange hair, he leaned into the mic and spoke directly to the first two rows, which appeared to be fellow students from his MFA program. They cheered like a high school pep rally. He wanted to thank his girlfriend and someone named Parcheesi. Or maybe his girlfriend was named Parcheesi. He’d already published a chapbook with Operose Press and wanted to congratulate them for going all-in on his recent short novel, The Whitest Tooth. He wanted to thank his agent for believing in him. His agent was also his mother, but she was his mother before she was his agent. He grinned and the first two rows clapped and hooted and called out, “Durian!”

Then came a pause for refreshments. Smokers over the age of 40, ineligible to receive a medallion from Mangosteen Magazine, shuffled toward the exit. A few others dashed past them. Neil Gaiman had been sighted in the bar across from the convention center, which created some anxiety. How long would Neil be there? Would there be time to approach Moon Base, ask her about HBO, and still catch up with Neil? There were 26 more top writers to go.

There was the panel discussion of nature writers who were now or had once been high school English teachers. It was held in the Tamarind Business Plaza, two blocks south of the convention center. This was an older crowd. The event was not well attended. Multiple glasses of water were drunk. There were many thoughtful, perhaps mordant, pauses in which panel members and the audience seemed to turn inward and ask themselves how it could have come to this.

A gray-haired panelist named Jacob spoke haltingly about his creative process, then stopped in mid-sentence and sighed. Someone at the back of the room began a phone conversation. But, because it was a small room, everyone present came to understand that the dog had gotten loose and the wife had been driving around the neighborhood with the kids calling its name. Its name was Salty.

The large woman to the left of Jacob had her hair in a thick braid that ran over her shoulder and coiled in her lap. She spoke slowly about the ecological conditions in western Paraguay, the Gran Chaco dying because of social media, her brother-in-law’s stomach cancer, and the rise of fascism.

Salty had not been located. Did you look in the park? Not that park, the one by the rec center. I know it’s getting dark, but you’re going to have to walk around. Tell the kids to stay in the car. I know they’re upset. IT’S NOT MY FAULT THAT THIS HAPPENED WHILE I’M GONE, CHERYL.

Someone said Neil Gaiman’s giving a reading in the bar across from the convention center, but the audience didn’t react. The woman with the braid had moved on to systemic racism Canada. Rare earths pillaged from Africa. The organ trade. Tibet. Birds killed by wind farms on the Central Cordillera. No one had the energy or the inclination to interrupt her. She did not speak about writing. People were constantly returning from feeding parking meters along the street.

The closest bar was the one where Neil Gaiman was supposed to be reading. It seemed probable, even necessary, that after this everyone would go there. Not for Neil but for solace. The parking meters would need to be fed along the way.

Back in the convention center, there was a different reading scheduled on the Jackfruit Mezzanine. Poets. Poets but actually MFA students who’d written poems, calling themselves poets. Well, that’s what they were, right? If you write a poem, doesn’t that make you . . .

A young woman had printed business cards. They read, L. B. Hannaker, Writer & Poet. They had a Gmail address and blog URL. Nice paper. Embossed. Would make a good bookmark. Could you let me have a few more? But L. B. was already across the room, still handing them out, smiling directly, if only for a moment, at every recipient. Blond hair. Big blue eyes. You’ll go far, my child, one thinks and then berates oneself for unconscious sexism. Of course she won’t go far. She’s a poet.

She’ll go as far as the podium to read something called, “My Grandmother’s Hands.” After that, she’ll read one entitled, “I Loved You In Sadness.” A knot of MFA professors will look on with blank expressions—except for L. B.’s poetry professor, Kyle, wifeless for the duration of the conference, who’ll give L. B. a loud, standing ovation. The other MFA professors will slowly turn their heads and look at him.

All these things will come to pass like dust in the wind, like blossoms on the cherries, the cherries of fate, the cherries of consequence, perhaps mistaken for salak in denser climes. Called “snake fruit,” salak have a scaly exterior that suggests snakeskin. They grow in Malaysia, Sumatra, Indonesia, Thailand. They’re a fruit-lover’s fruit the same way J. K. Rowling was once called a “writer’s writer.” But who called her this? Maybe a literary journalist, trying to stir something up. Maybe someone on a low-level pop-culture site, prospecting for clicks. J. K. Rowling is the snake fruit of the publishing industry. Once the darling of emotionally stunted grownups who liked to dress like English boarding school children outside Harry Potter movies, she’d become a pariah due to her political statements on social media. She was not invited to AWP. Still, there was a rumor. She’d arrived with her security detail at nearby hotel. There’d been a protest in the lobby. Arrests. A group of anti-trans-exclusionary furries. The donkey punched the puma in the face. A large rabbit was also involved.

Still, still. The important thing was that J. K. Rowling had a new book in spite of the controversy and a Potter TV series. The important thing was: how did this happen? How did she get an agent? How did her agent get an agent? How did she get stinkin’ rich? Can I get stinkin’ rich? Can I at least make enough to live in west Los Angeles for up to three years? J. K. Rowling, the salak of our times, might know.

People snuck out of the convention center and went looking. They slipped away from the “Creative Non-fiction for Social Justice Symposium” and the “Is Moral Fiction a Thing of the Past or the Future” address. They redirected their questions from Moon Base to Rowling because, after all, Rowling was richer and more famous than Moon Base. The world will never know whether Kyle, L. B. Hannaker’s poetry professor, was actually one of the furries arrested in the lobby, perhaps the man-sized pink lemur.

The last thing, the continuous thing, was the book fair itself, a noni of possibilities, lumpy, green, and undeniably pungent. Despite its smell, noni is highly valued for supporting the immune system. And so it was with AWP’s central book fair, more convention than conference, each booth containing a pocket dimension of dismay and prevarication, desperate glad-handing and perspiration. Walk around that noni and grow stronger.

This is where the business cards that say “Writer & Poet” really start to flow, where the indy press people, in their raggedy T-shirts and jeans, affirmatively and regularly remind themselves not to grind their teeth because, after all, they don’t have dental. It’s where you can walk the length of the floor, looking at new books, magazines, and literary journals from all over the world and not feel interested in any of them, everyone smiling but not wanting to smile, everyone passive-aggressively sharing contact information, eyes wide, thinking about the future or lost in the past.

At the end, the rumors about Neil Gaiman were revealed to have been started by the owner of the bar across the street. The reader was Neil Greenman. But by then, nobody gave a shit. Everyone just wanted a drink. The juice of the rambutan with four shots of soju. The devil’s soursop, a margarita of despair. The last night of the last day of AWP is when the healing could begin, but even that had a price. And Salty was still missing.

I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write.  And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it.  We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared.  People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated.  Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss.  We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!”  Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul.  He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen.  Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me.  But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford.  And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable.  One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar.  That’s bullshit.  You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves.  So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’”  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock.  Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you.  Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul.  I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared.  I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am.  The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me.  It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation.  I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings.  Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage.  Nothing.  No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation.  You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work.  There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions.  Turn up the amp.  Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right.  Too bad for you.  You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

Learning to Write Fiction

Things to do.  Books to read.

Vincent Price holding cats is better than a stock photo of someone trying to write.

Garbage

I’m still learning.  I hope you are, too.  If you’re struggling with wanting to write a story but feeling intimidated by it, you might start by attempting a three-page short short (about 1050 words) as poorly as possible.  Make it the worst story you’ve ever written and see what happens.

Quit trying to be interesting and brilliant.  That’s your ego at work, the same thing that subverts your writing process in lots of other ways.  Let it go.  Write trash.  Don’t be afraid of making garbage.  Just pay attention while you’re doing it.  You’ll learn a lot that way.  More importantly, you’ll have a moment in which you’re creating without anxiety, without the need for permission, which is a rare and wonderful experience.  Such moments are our greatest teachers.

This is part of the considerable inner work of being a creative writer.  The publishing industry doesn’t have blogs that talk about this because you can’t monetize inner work.  Even writers, so adept with words and images, can’t explain it, aren’t sure it’s real, and wonder whether they’re simply distracted when they have creative inner experiences.  They aren’t.  The inner work is ubiquitous and undeniable.  They’re merely trying to contend with self-doubt which comes from living a society that calls everything other than monetized productivity stupid and delusional.

You do your best creative work not through trying to impress your ego, which is worried about how acceptable you seem and about whether you’re going to survive, but through dropping those aspirations and getting to the unadulterated creative impulse that first called to you.  For a fiction writer, the way to a powerful creative state is not by going up into the light of concepts, ideas, and social approbation, but by going down into the darkness of urges, emotions, and impulses.  You can civilize your writing later, in revision.  For now, be a savage.  And write garbage first.

Books You Don’t Have to Read

Of course, there are books you could be reading.  Think of this as part of the “outer work.”  What books are these?  Only you can say, because your work, your artistic project and path belong to you—not to some voice on the internet preaching about life hacks and best practices (which is what most writing advice amounts to).  All of that is, as Ecclesiastes might say, vanity.  Or is, as we might say, marketing.  But here are some suggestions nonetheless.

Get a library card and read a lot of what you want to write.  No one writes without influences.  So locate your influences.  Originality exists, but fixating on it, such that the idea of “finding your voice” becomes a restrictive, overly romantic obsession, is another obstacle.  Instead, saturate yourself with anything you like and be honest with yourself about it.  It could be trashy (get away from literary status anxiety—read what you want to read, anything that speaks to you).  It could be classic literature (works in translation count, too).  It could also be the latest socially acceptable novel being pushed by Penguin Random House.  It absolutely does not matter.  Just immerse yourself in whatever stimulates your imagination.  And read vigorously.

Creative writing programs and English departments have a problem with this.  They’re in the business of stratifying, articulating, and hierarchizing products of the imagination.  So there will be an implicit bias there, usually coming from the careers, anxieties, and assumptions of the professors.  But repeat after me: “I will read what draws me, what stimulates my imagination, not what I am being implicitly or explicitly told is marketable and therefore preferable.”

I’m not bashing art school.  I believe in creative writing programs the way I believe in The New York Post.  It’s entertaining, often darkly absurd, and provides material for lively conversation.  MFA programs rarely amount to more than an interesting form of literary journalism—talking about writing and talking about talking about writing.  You can learn a lot from all that talk.  I believe the arts and humanities do matter and do offer a valuable education, in spite of what the misguided STEM fetishists may think.  But the MFA industrial complex is not where you discover the inner imperative that makes you want to create.  That comes from experiencing art and then attempting to create it.  All the talk (and discursive essay writing) in the world can’t make you an artist.  Only art can.

I rarely enjoy reading lists created by actual journalists, even by the journalists I like and think are smart.  What journalists consider new, important, and a “must read” (I hate that clichéd expression) is never important to me, since I’m the one that matters in this process.  Remember: my project is to go down into the darkness of my inner self and find that raw, creative impulse.  News publications focus on social tensions, explanations of current events, cultural trends, laws, politics and, when talking about art, how it relates to those things.  Good journalism is essential for a free, capable, concerted citizenry, but it does not understand art.  Some journalists are artists, but many more have no concept of art or how to think about it.

Tiresome Theory and Craft Books

Remember to keep the “you should be reading this right now” lists in perspective.  That includes the lists I’m offering you here.  You shouldn’t necessarily be reading any of these things right now (or ever).  But I recognize that in our culture of life hacks and best practices, we will inevitably go seeking authoritative methods.  I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve read these books, too.  Besides, there are so many awful ones in the Self Help for Writers category.  The following craft books are less awful than most, in my opinion.

  1. Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself, Chuck Wendig.  Wendig is smart and he cares about writers.  In spite of the title, he’s not engaging in nauseating Julia Cameron hand holding.  He’s not doing a ridiculous “tough love for writers” Robert McKee performance, either.  Wendig’s in-between those extremes.  His advice is sane and even-tempered.  But he likes to be cute and thinks he’s funny.  That can be aggravating if you don’t share his sense of humor.  It doesn’t bother me and I actually find myself smiling a lot, especially when I read his footnotes.
  2. Writing Fiction: a Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway.  Useful, neutral advice.  By “neutral” I mean what I meant with Wendig’s book, but also that Burroway never seems to be lying, boasting, or to have an agenda other than describing a range of technical options.  Her example stories are great (at least in the third edition, which is the one I have) and she uses them like a gifted creative writing instructor to demonstrate what she’s talking about.  Her writing exercises are not boring and I’ve relied on a number of them in my own teaching.
  3. Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, Madison Smartt Bell.  Read this after Burroway.  Think of it as the intermediate sequel to her book.  In my opinion, Bell is a good fiction writer and much of what he says here comes from his firsthand experience.  I return to this book more than any others.
  4. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts, David Lodge.  His excerpted examples are wonderful and he uses them to good effect in his discussions.  His opinions are solid and not beholden to any particular school, voice, or movement.

Read these four books and you will have a bellyful of exercises and theories about fiction writing, more theories than you ever wanted.  But you might also come away with a new repertoire of examples and references, which can be helpful.

I used to recommend McKee’s Story to people, but honestly you can get what’s good in his book from the four books I list above and skip his absolutist bluster.  I also don’t recommend John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, not because it isn’t good, but because it’s very closely aligned to a particular fiction writing aesthetic.  And I think taking that as a guide can create counterproductive stylization in beginning writers.

Fiction

Saturating yourself with fiction you like is far more important than looking at craft books.  Here are some things I’m reading now, which may change at any time.  I follow my creative impulses above all else (i.e. I read permissively, not like a scholar).  If you don’t know where to start or what to read, you could start with these (why not?), but you should quickly diverge from this.  The value of starting here is as much based on not liking these books as it is on liking them.  Find out what speaks to you.  You can do this by starting anywhere with any reading.  Starting’s the thing.  Read multiple books at once if you feel that’s the way to go.  Or look at them one at a time.  There are no rules.

  1. Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi.  Not sure what I think about this novel yet, but the voice intrigues me.
  2. Murder Most Serene, Gabrielle Wittkop.  This writer has no fear.  If you read her novel, The Necrophiliac, you know what I mean.
  3. The Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant.  I’m just getting into Gallant, but I already feel she has things to teach me.
  4. The Savage Spear of the Unicorn, Delicious Tacos.  You may find this one extremely offensive and valuable in that respect.

This list is idiosyncratic.  How could it be otherwise?  If you don’t like the look of these, compile your own list.  The point is to involve yourself with fiction that stimulates you.  There is no time to waste.

Final Thought

The world doesn’t need more artists.  It also doesn’t need more people trying to prove their worth to mom and dad.  It also doesn’t need more kids in law school, STEM worshippers, venture capitalists, or any other thing.  The world needs more introspection and individuality.  The rest follows.  My way should not, actually cannot, be your way.  And that is a beautiful thing.  Find your way.