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.

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.

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?

Allow Yourself to be Hurt

For a poet is an airy thing, winged and holy, and he is not able to make poetry until he becomes inspired and goes out of his mind and his intellect is no longer in him. As long as a human being has his intellect in his possession he will always lack the power to make poetry or sing prophecy. Therefore, because it’s not by mastery that they make poems or say many lovely things about their subjects (as you do about Homer)—but because it’s by a divine gift—each poet is able to compose beautifully only that for which the Muse has aroused him. . . .

That’s why God takes their intellect away from them when he uses them as his servants, as he does prophets and godly diviners, so that we who hear should know that they are not the ones who speak those verses that are of such high value, for their intellect is not in them: the god himself is the one who speaks, and he gives voice through them to us.

Ion, Plato

I’ve taught fiction writing at multiple universities since 1998. And, if I taught it now, I would seem prescient to a group of beginning writing students. I’ve heard their complaints, witnessed their anxieties, seen their mistakes, and helped them through these things hundreds of times. It can seem like ESP.

Just as a karate instructor can predict what you’ll do in sparring (because the human body can only move a set number of ways), I can usually predict what my students will do in their first stories. There are only so many dramatic moves and so many ways to convey those moves in a kumite of eight pages.

I say: “Write a five-to-eight-page story from a single point of view in a human or human-like protagonist, who struggles and changes before the end.” Sometimes, I add, “Alternately, write the story so that he, she, or it misses the last chance to change and, in the process, reveals something, which is, believe it or not, tantamount to another mode of change.” I tell them all dramatic perspectives flow into each other and that all voices and moods are ultimately one voice and mood. I tell them that singularity is what they’re here to discover.

These ideas don’t completely make sense. They don’t need to. They only need to sit in the class notes, radioactive, nagging, hopefully prodding the students into exploring for themselves because I believe that’s the only way to learn. There are no canned answers. We might talk about principles and realizations, which is what I do when I teach, but the paths to those principles and realizations must be idiosyncratic. In art, especially in the art of writing, there is only that aforesaid singularity. There are only individual discoveries. There’s only going out of your mind.

In the first workshop critique meeting, some students won’t show. Others will come ready for a fight. Others, will drag themselves in, ready to weep. A few will arrive looking for validation. I’ll say nothing and let the workshop do most of the critiquing, which will inevitably frustrate everyone.

Where’s the teaching? What are we paying you for? They’ll come to me after class and may be too polite to ask those exact questions, but they’ll want to know if their story was successful (which usually means marketable, because marketing is all they know at that point). They’ll want to know if they’ve “got it.”

“I don’t know,” I’ll say. “Have you got it? Where is it? Where’s it hiding? Your back pocket? Let me check. It’s not in mine . . . “

Davis is an asshole, I’ll read on their faces. Just give me the answer. Give me the formula, the template, the winning structure, the marketable, unobjectionable subject matter that will make people love and accept me as a creative person.

I’ll ask them what their creative project is. What emotional experience are they trying to create inside the limits I already proposed? Because good short fiction is prose that moves you in some way, on some level, within certain constraints. Moving the reader means moving yourself. Moving yourself means attaining the inspiration that Plato talks about in Ion. It means feeling those emotions. It means getting your criticizing mind out of the way. But I don’t say, “Plato” or “Ion” because they haven’t read it and generally wouldn’t if I recommended it.

To the complete beginners, I say, “Try this exercise and tell me what you discover.” To the ones a little more advanced, I talk about losing one’s mind. But I don’t say it like that. I always have to make sure to speak in language they can understand and accept. I recommend that they read according to their interests. I stress the library. I don’t say, “Make yourself vulnerable. You gain nothing by playing it safe except more of the same.” I don’t say, “The secret of powerful fiction writing is that the fiction writer must change.”

Most beginning fiction writers can’t tell me what their creative project is, which is the problem at the root of all their other complaints, anxieties, false starts, and mistakes. I learned this in a workshop run by Amy Bloom, who said I needed to write enough to know what I was writing about. If I didn’t have a sense of that emotion, my reader wouldn’t, either. She was a great teacher. Many of the things she said in the critiques of my writing helped me develop a writing and teaching style, which is mine, not hers, which is the point. There is no winning formula. There is only you, the page, and that thing coming through you.

So how do my students typically discover this—I mean, the brave ones who stick around? The cowards rest on the Davis is an asshole realization and put their paperwork in before the semester drop date, which is also very good. Maybe they go add a course in leisure studies or social ecology. May they be happy and multiply. This isn’t for them.

The ones who want to know give themselves permission to experience this pain. They allow themselves to be hurt, to become vulnerable, to suffer such that the emotion has its way with them. That’s their project. Good actors do this. Writers do this. Other artists can work this way, too, but we mostly imagine actors and writers, people wrapped up in a dramatic process. Because this is drama, the essence of it. This is not intellectual scholarship. This is becoming possessed.

Allow yourself to be hurt. Drop all your boundaries, shields, rationalizations, barriers, and evasions. Drop your training, conformity, and desire for approval. Drop your fucking achievements. Drop what you think should be. Make yourself vulnerable if you want to feel something. Then you become powerful in proportion to that. It’s one of the core paradoxes of art—the more blood you offer on the Muse’s altar, the more she returns to you. The greatest artists offer nearly all of themselves. The easier and more pleasant you try to make it, the more numb you’ll feel, the more you’ll start to think about marketability, the worse writer you’ll become, the more frustrated, rigid, and bewrayed by what you’ve given and the choices you’ve made.

The ones who find this truth on their own always want to talk with me about it, usually towards the end of a semester. They come with a certain look on their faces—I found this true thing, but it’s been hard, and I’m a little shaky. And I tell them yes, that’s it. Then I ask them what their project is and they can answer. I used to talk with them about it over drinks, which seemed to make it a little easier.

In the best creative writing class I ever taught (Western Michigan University, 2009), one of the most gifted students I’ve ever had explained the whole thing spontaneously to me in her own language, because she found it on her own. Then she said, “It seems to me that this vulnerability applies to other parts of life, too.”

“Interesting observation,” I said.

The Writing Expedition Omnibus Podcast Ep. 7: “First, Body” by Melanie Rae Thon

Listen to it here: https://michaeldavis.substack.com/p/the-writing-expedition-omnibus-podcast-243

Ignis Fatuus

A story about ghosts and possums.

I saw my nephew, Ricky, in the Amvets parking lot on a freezing Saturday in December with a centimeter of slick ice on the blacktop and a fair amount of booze in my veins. My three friends, Burt, Leo, and Klaus, came out with me to the car, since I was their ride. Bar time was now midnight at Amvets because the owner lacked joie de vivre.

I recognized Ricky immediately. He was sitting on the hood of my Tercel. When we got close, he pulled a gun out of his parka.

“Ima stick you up.”

Burt said, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Leo said, “You better get us all in one shot, kid, or you’re in some shit.”

And my friend, Klaus, the only one I could ever stand in the late hours after we’d all been kicked out of Amvets, said, “You’re definitely in some shit. That’s a pellet gun.”

“This ain’t no pellet gun, dawg. You wanna test me?” Ricky held it up so we could see it in the moonlight. Then he pointed it at each of us.

“Hi, Ricky.”

“Uncle Dave?”

I nodded, wobbly on the ice.

“Hey I remember when you had that piñata for your birthday,” Klaus said. “What was that, like five years ago? How’s your mom?”

“Don’t say shit about my mom.”

“Come on, man. I also know your dad. Kevin, right? I know your whole family.”

Ricky glared and turned the pellet gun on Klaus.

Leo yawned. “Why don’t you just put that thing away? You might kill a bird.”

Everyone but the stick-up kid thought it was funny.

“You wanna flex on me, motherfucker?”

“Who is this guy?” Burt said. “And why is he talking like that?”

“It’s the rap music.” Leo fished keys out of side pocket of my jacket before I could object. He had long fingers and had once made a living as a pickpocket. The more he drank, the more graceful and charming he got with bartenders and waitresses and the more likely he was to rob them. In a way, I envied that about him. Even his problems were smooth.

“It’s the Internet,” Klaus said.

“Video games.” Burt leaned against the car and crossed his arms.

Leo nodded. “Yeah. And the social media.”

“That’s clearly a pellet gun,” I said.

“Uncle Dave, I didn’t even know this was your car.”

“It’s okay, Ricky. Get in. We’ll drive you home.”

That evening in Amvets, I’d been hugged by a woman named Celestina, who’d been after me since high school. Now that we were both old and divorced and only associated with our respective groups of friends, she must have concluded the time was right for a full-body embrace.

The time was not. She’d been sitting on the barstool next to me, ignoring her two friends the same way I’d been ignoring Burt, Leo, and Klaus. Then, without warning, she put down her empty glass, slid half off her stool, leaned in, and hugged me. Celestina was a wide woman, stronger than she looked. When she hugged me, I had to stand up. She whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t make out what she said over the music.

Someone had played Waylon Jennings’ Never Could Toe the Mark in the jukebox and it was loud, louder than anything I’d ever heard played in Amvets. You rarely heard country blasting out of the ceiling. But time and space had distorted while steady pressure was being applied to my body by the woman who’d sat behind me in Civics decades before.

I knew I’d see her around town. Hauberk, Missouri, was on the small side and you ran into the same people about once or twice a month. Celestina and I were destined to encounter each other again in line at the bank or next to each other at a stoplight on Lagniappe Way, or drifting through the produce section of Harveys. Then we’d both have to smile and nod hello and think of her hugging me off my stool.

We’d all squeezed into the Tercel when she came out, waving at us across the parking lot. She almost slipped on the ice in her big, puffy, white jacket.

“Who’s the old lady?” asked Ricky.

“Christmas,” said Burt. “No, Christina.”

“No,” Leo pumped the gas as the engine sputtered. “Celestina. Like the stars.”

“You’re gonna flood it,” I said. “You don’t need to do that. Just relax. It’ll go.”

“She’s coming over here,” Klaus said.

“Bitch be crazy.” Ricky took out his pellet gun. “Ima blast her.”

I put my hand on the gun and guided it down. “Don’t do that. She nice. She’s just got a drinking problem like everybody else.”

“Oh shit,” Ricky said. “I’m not sure, but I think she works at Hoover. I think she’s the nurse.”

“You’d know if you ever went to class,” Klaus said.

The engine turned over and the vents started to blast hot air. Leo rolled down the window and smiled at Celestina. “How’s it going?” he said.

“Hello,” She leaned over and peered past Leo into the car. It took her a moment to place me in the backseat. “Dave, I think you, um, left your wallet at the bar.”

I smiled and nodded even though I could feel my wallet in my back pocket.

Celestina straightened up and held it out to Leo, her breath hanging around her like a halo in the moonlight.

“Well, thank you kindly.” Leo handed it back to my nephew without looking away and Ricky immediately removed the bills, folding them into his jacket pocket.

“Say,” Leo said, “you wouldn’t be interested in a nightcap over at David’s house, would you?”

You sonofabitch, I thought. You absolute, pristine, solid-state sonofabitch.

She focused on Leo as if she were noticing him for the first time. Then her eyes came to rest on Ricky sitting between me and Klaus. “No, but thank you. I think I should go home. I have to work tomorrow.” She tilted like she was about to pass out.

“Oh, that’s a shame.” Leo gave her his minty smile. “Don’t be a stranger, Celestina.”

She smiled back, glassy but very happy, showing teeth, and hugged herself, trying not to shiver in spite of the enormous jacket.

Burt leaned across Leo and said, “You better get inside. It’s cold out here.”

“Yeah,” she said, swaying a little but still smiling. “Good-night to you all. Good-night, Dave!”

Burt waved and said good-night, but we pulled away before she could hear. I looked back and saw her standing in the parking lot, still hugging herself, staring at the car.

When we hit the street, I dropped my hand on Leo’s shoulder and he flinched. “Why are you turning my nephew into a fucking criminal?”

“You mean the kid with the gun?”

“I’m sitting right here,” Ricky said.

Burt turned around in the passenger seat and coughed out a nicotine booze cloud. “It’s a good thing you are. Good thing you ran into us instead of some cop or a peckerwood with a hog leg.”

Ricky ignored him. He held the wallet open and squinted at it like an old man who’d lost his spectacles. “Terry . . . Ig-nat-ee-us.”

“Igneous?” asked Burt. “Like the rock? That’s a weird one.”

“Gimmie that.” Klaus snatched the wallet and angled it toward the window. “Ignatius. Terrence Ignatius. Any of you guys know a Terry Ignatius?”

“Never heard of him,” Leo said. “Let me concentrate. I get another DUI and it’s over.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d have multiple DUIs,” I said. “Then again, you don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d encourage somebody’s nephew to steal money out of a stranger’s wallet.”

This made everyone laugh, even Ricky.

“I am that dude,” Leo said to the windshield.

“He’s not a stranger.” Klaus snapped the wallet shut. “He’s Terry Ignatius. We know him. He’s our buddy, Terry. Good guy.”

“You guys’r fuckin’ strange,” said Ricky.

Burt sighed. “You don’t know the half of it.”

Leo dropped me off and they continued on in my car. He said he’d bring it back in the morning, but I knew he wouldn’t. The night was young and there were other cars to drive before bed. It would take me two or three days and that many bus rides to get the Tercel back but, like Leo, I couldn’t get another DUI. Unlike Leo, I didn’t talk about it to Burt and Klaus. Each of us had our things, our lingering problems, our punishments and payments, times when we’d made wrong turns or said wrong things or spent money or didn’t spend money or got in cars with the wrong people or made promises when we should have kept quiet. Leo had his own car, but he never drove it.

I walked up the outside steps to my tiny apartment, stopped to listen at the Porres’ door to see if Martin Porres was beating his wife—their customary family activity on Saturday night. But it was all silent. Was that good sign or was it bad? I decided to believe it was good and not think about it. Because who the hell was I?

Usually, when he was ranting and slamming doors and she was calling him a cocksucker and their two kids were crying and the dog was howling, I’d knock and one of them would answer, usually her, and say what do you want. I’d say excuse me but can you keep it down? She’d wipe her eyes and look at me more closely and say oh it’s you. And I’d say yeah, from upstairs. And then she’d say sorry and shut the door. We did that every weekend. It added continuity to our lives. But tonight, nothing.

My apartment was spare, save a few pieces of yard sale furniture. A Formica table with two rattan chairs, a diseased-looking velour Barcalounger with a rip down the seat, a mini-fridge and a two-burner stove, a twin mattress on the floor of my little bedroom with a cardboard box as a bureau-nightstand. I didn’t have a lot of clothes, either. My most valuable possession was the Tercel. I wasn’t some kind of ascetic, but I’d had reversals since the divorce. Money was infrequent. I was currently between jobs and had sold or pawned most of my things. I opened all the windows and sat at the table in the dark. I had an almost-full bottle of wine and, though my head was pounding and I felt unsettled by the Porres’ silence, I poured some in a coffee mug and started to drink.

Air had gotten into the bottle and I hadn’t touched it in about a week. So the wine already tasted like vinegar, but whatever. I turned on the radio, found the old person’s jazz station. Thankfully they weren’t playing Kenny G or fucking Manhattan Transfer. I turned Ugetsu up as loud as the little speaker would go without buzzing. It was Saturday night. If the Porreses weren’t screaming, I wanted to do my part.

That was one thing—the frozen wind coming in, lifting the dusty lace curtains. Sometimes a car hissed along the street. Apart from such infrequent movement, there’s a certain stillness after bar time, when all the drug freaks and booze mutants have either passed out, holed up somewhere, or are making their way home as quietly and inconspicuously as possums on a moonless night. Because, at such a time, every possum knows the same universal truth. When all your friends have left, there’s only one way to get your car back to the driveway: side streets, frontage roads, alleys, and the occasional cornfield turnrow. At least, that’s the Missouri version.

When you do get home, you open all the windows and put on some music. You give thanks. You drink whatever awful remainder’s lurking in the back of the cupboard. And you try not to dwell on the foolishness you’ve seen earlier in the evening or that you’re bound to participate in later in the night. This constitutes a good time, all things considered. If the night ends there, you’re safe. You’re lucky. The things you don’t remember don’t have to be remembered. And you can’t be held accountable for things you haven’t done.

Tomorrow will happen in the fullness of time and you will not need to contact an attorney or make a court appearance in ten days. But if the night doesn’t end there, be advised that whatever happens between the hours of 2 and 5 AM may negate all your previous good luck. They call midnight the witching hour, but they call 3 AM the devil’s hour. And they call it that for a reason.

But a ghost or an ignis fatuus can appear earlier than that: I saw her puffy white jacket at a distance hovering over the dark snow like a will-o’-the-wisp. And I thought, what are the chances? In a small town like Hauberk, the chances are already decent and in the devil’s hour they might even be fair-to-good that you will see some degenerate you left at the bar wandering down your street. Maybe drawn by the hard bop tumbling out your windows. Maybe just following the serendipitous magnetism that the devil’s hour exerts over all creatures of the night. Celestina’s jacket reminded me of a large segmented marshmallow. The night wouldn’t be over for me until dawn. Apparently, it wasn’t over for her, either.

I moved to the Barcalounger by the window and watched until she was half a block away. Then she noticed me.

“Hey!” She waved, swaying in the snow, her eyes half shut. “Hey, you live here?”

“A lot of the time.”

“I can’t find my car.”

“Amvets is ten blocks back the way you came.”

“What?” Celestina looked around. Did she still think she was in the parking lot? Her black hair had gotten stringy and stiff in the cold. The way she swayed, I thought she might fall.

“You better come up.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Dave.”

“You better. Then we can find your car.”

She processed the thought, then nodded. “Okay,” she said. “I like you, Dave. You’re a good . . . ”

“No, I’m not a good. I’ll be right down.”

Celestina was bigger than me. When she slipped on the narrow stairs, one arm hooked around my neck, we both nearly fell backwards. It made her laugh. I couldn’t tell if it was because she was drunk or embarrassed or a bit of both. But I couldn’t pass judgement. I thought of how many times I’d come home from Amvets and slipped on those concrete stairs. To be honest, I’d done much worse.

I let her down in the Barcalounger then hung her enormous white jacket up on the back of the door. I pulled one of my wobbly rattan kitchen chairs across from her and offered her my cup of wine, but she waved it off.

“I had a dream about you,” she said, her head nodding forward.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, a really great dream. It was beautiful.”

“What was it?”

“We were walking through a field of sunflowers.” Her head dipped again if she were going to topple forward out of the chair. “They were huge.”

“I’ve never had a dream like that, but it sounds nice.”

“It was nice. We were holding hands.”

I leaned forward and held my hand out. She took it in her big puffy grip. I thought I could at least keep her from falling out of the chair that way. She had a nice hand, warm and enveloping in spite of the cold wind coming in the open window beside us and the snowy blocks she’d walked.

I turned down the radio and we sat there for a while, listening to Sister Sadie, my left hand holding Celestina’s right, her nodding then gripping my hand harder to steady herself, me staring at the discolored circle over the door where the clock used to be. I’d even pawned the clock. Got $15 for it.

Eventually, she grew quiet and still, passed out. Maybe she was dreaming about sunflowers. Then I had to let go of her hand because Leo knocked. I knew it was him. I’d have known even if I hadn’t been expecting him. He had that soft, tentative knock—just like the way he’d smile and say something kind while picking a waiter’s pocket and ordering the souffle. Behind him came Burt and Klaus. They were holding cups of coffee. Everyone looked sober.

“Shit,” Burt said, closing both windows. “What’re you trying to do, get pneumonia?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You got me.”

Leo raised an eyebrow at Celestina and grinned. “So you and her, huh?”

“No. You wouldn’t believe it. She was just walking down the street.”

“This street?” Klaus said it flat with the straight face that meant he was joking.

“I was sitting here and she kind of floated down the sidewalk.”

“I can see her doing that, floating,” Leo said.

“What happened to my nephew?”

“Took him home,” Burt said. “You know, he’s kind of a shit. He’s on a bad path. He better straighten up and fly right.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well,” said Leo, “it’s getting about that time.”

I nodded, put the cup of rancid chianti on the floor next to Celestina. Then I went into the bedroom closet and got the bolt cutter, a mini crowbar, an old sawed-off Ruger over-and-under, a box of buckshot, the HK 9mm that looked like it had been burned in a fire but still worked, and a hardware store machete. I wrapped it all in a pillowcase.

On our way to the door, we stopped and looked at Celestina, now snoring loudly, her head lolled to the side. Burt said hold on, got my bedspread, and covered her with it, tucking it under her chin. Then the four of us went out and crept softly down the stairs. A car I’d never seen was idling on the street. We got in and put our seatbelts on. Burt and Klaus sipped their coffee. Leo pulled away from the curb and we glided into the dark.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be. I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing. I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness. And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep. I’m not proud of such feelings. But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care. It’s a hard world, Fluffy. Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago. Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke. At least someone still gets to enjoy it. But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine. I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat. I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance. Some writers really need to start drinking again. They’re not able to produce unless they do. Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.” That’s it. Light up. Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take. There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class. We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles). Of course, he had tenure. So he went on leave. Now it was almost Christmas. And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement. Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard. This is known. We were all trying to keep it together. Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees. There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester. Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive. But whiskey in Montana? Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy. She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant. I always ran into it because it was covered in snow. Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have. So I barked my shins on it regularly. But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot. Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember. I’d walk over and stand next to her. We wouldn’t talk much. The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift. Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school. This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness. No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift. But nobody knew anything. If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30. But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening. We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant. We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments. And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda. Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life. This was not real life. This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take. A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art. And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment. I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print. I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous. But she couldn’t write. Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten). But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors. Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages. I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.” Take that. Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah. Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea. After the program, we lost touch. I know Lauren didn’t publish another book. She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot. And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything. In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do. If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things. Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate. I don’t blame her. I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing. I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved. But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers. The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken. You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador. The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers. I hope so. Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in. At least I’m still working. I hope Andrea is, too. Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days. And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience. Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some. But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety

A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.” Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who he doesn’t like and who seems to be loudly and visibly struggling in his career.

Strangely, Jim is also getting close to his 50s, hasn’t done all the things he wants to do, and is also existing paycheck to paycheck, trying to live off his self-published work (which is quite good, in my opinion). The difference between them is the other guy whines loudly and constantly plugs his GoFundMe, while Jim works harder and (mostly) swallows his frustration.

Jim’s comments on social media are usually criticisms of people who complain about their difficult lives instead of working hard like him. I can accept that attitude. If anyone has earned the right to be scornful of the weak, it’s someone who started off in a weak position and made themselves strong or, in Jim’s case, perhaps marginally stronger. Still, it doesn’t feel good when his angst rises and he starts punching down.

His pronouncement above sounds like flinty entrepreneurial wisdom—Yoda in a self-made, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vein: do or do not (in your career, in your life); there is no try. But I know his criticism and anger are rooted in his own insecurities, not in some external source. We’re always the most critical of our own family, our own friends, our own professional colleagues, members of our own communities and cultures because, when they fail, it makes us feel like we’re next.

Jim was, to use a trendy term, “triggered,” and he had to release the vapors. We all have that friend who tries to speak like a philosopher or social critic as a way of purging anxiety and legitimating his concerns. Sometimes, I do that, too. So I’m not trying to be inordinately critical of Jim or except myself from a behavior that seems common among sensitive people, particularly artists and writers. If you’re not bothered by something, you usually have little motivation to write or speak about it publicly, especially on a blog or in a magazine op-ed or on social media. But in order to understand the criticism Jim’s making, we also have to know something about arts communities and social timing.

A creative community, whether physical (like a writer’s colony, a brick-and-mortar magazine, or a college art program) or on social media, is a perpetual knife fight in a submarine. It goes without saying that in every creative field, money is always tight, careers are always precarious, hyper-competitiveness is the rule, commercialism undercuts everything, and exploitation is a fact of life.

These hardships and uncertainties naturally produce immense anxiety, since survival is always at issue on some level, even when you ostensibly “make it” and get famous. As the actress, Jewel Staite, drolly notes on her Twitter profile, “I like routine, predictability, and living a non-stressful existence, which is why I’ve chosen the film industry.” That’s darkly funny. But it’s also true: life as an artist isn’t simple or calm. You don’t get job security, even when people know who you are. You’re always on the make.

Keeping this in mind makes it easier to see how tearing down other creatives can become a Malthusian side hustle. If they’re wounded, the instinct may be to kick them where it hurts. If they’re down, put your foot on their back. Do unto others before they can do unto you. More table scraps for you that way. You’ll feel less vulnerable, less likely to die in poverty and obscurity, less hopeless, lost, and ashamed that you ever considered yourself worthy to live a creative life.

If publicly criticizing others relieves your constant, grinding dread, even if only for a moment, it will be tempting. But there’s a problem with that way of being, apart from its meanness and craven pettiness: it makes you less able to do your own imaginative work. Competitiveness and the anxiety that stimulates it erodes creativity. It demands your emotional energy, the power you should be channeling into your creative process. And it makes you feel like you have to court public visibility at all costs to protect yourself from others like you. It brings to mind Putin parading around his nukes, saying don’t mess with me. I’m serious business. That’s exhausting. Artists should not have nukes.

This is why I have generally avoided arts communities; though, social media has put most writers like me in a perpetual online detention camp with my peers (and the current surge of AI art paranoia isn’t helping one bit). The pandemic only exacerbated the tensions and forced online interactions that would not have been advisable in any other era. Add the wave of self-conscious, humorless, social-activist writing still moving through pop-culture and the creative life seems nothing but an exercise in misery.

Western, middle-class, social timing says that by certain decades of life, one should have certain things and be certain things. But very few people will admit that they fall short of those ideals. One cannot log onto Twitter or Facebook without seeing some financial marketing come-on that goes, “How many millions will you need to retire?” In other words, how much money will you need to avert an ugly humiliating end after you retire? Millions? Most artists and writers have thousands (or hundreds) in the bank. Some, who are actually very gifted and good at what they do, live below the poverty line.

So I think I understand Jim when he says if you haven’t done a thing by 50, you aren’t going to. He’s not talking to you or me. He’s talking to himself. Because he’s thinking about social timing and emoting like a neurotic artist in a creative community, wondering if he’s destined to die in the gutter.

While I don’t accept the assumptions that go into the success / failure binary encouraged by middle-class social timing—I think it’s a little more complicated and there’s more room to live how you want to live, if you’re willing to make compromises—I also think it’s better to work hard than pump your GoFundMe for sympathy change. But I feel sad when I see a talented colleague desperately cutting down some other poor sap who’s just trying to make the rent any way he can.

We get one life. It isn’t over ’till it’s over. And ultimately we get to do what we want as long as we’re willing to accept the consequences. That means, if you really love being an artist, you’ll choose art. The hard part is making that choice in a relaxed, generous way.