I finally watched Alien: Romulus. It wasn’t bad. It also wasn’t good. It followed the Alien formula, which is the Friday the 13th formula: only the chaste and innocent shall survive the lurking horror, which pretty much means only “the final girl.”
Or, in this case, only the final Gen-Z girl—who shall nevertheless physically and tactically outperform a Colonial Marine and a variety of lethal aliens under extreme pressure in an adverse environment. And she shall be accompanied by an autistic, desexualized artificial companion, who she loves platonically as only a mutual can.
Cute-as-a-button Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny (essentially Rae Skywalker meets Zoomer Ellen Ripley), blows the alien out the cargo bay, instead of the airlock this time, for the sake of novelty. Meanwhile, her non-threatening imperial protocol droid, Andy (David Jonsson), functions as scene furniture and a deus ex machina. Whenever the story threatens to stall, he’s the answer: Andy! Open the blast door! Why aren’t you opening the blast door, Andy?! over and over.
(David, you’re a better actor than the others and I hope you got paid a lot, but you’re being forced to do Lance Henriksen’s ‘“Bishop” through a Rain Man filter and I feel sorry for what you signed up for here. Have you considered a career in theater?)
Alien: Romulus’ spin on Friday the 13th is that Big Pathological Cyberpunk Corporation (BPCC) wants to kill you with either (1) planetside black lung in the “mines” as an indentured servant or (2) in a secret bacta tank with an alien face spider or (3) by injecting you with alien bug juice that will cause you to immediately give birth to a Lovecraftian horror.
It wants to do one of these things to you because life is cheap, evil corporations of the future rely on 19th century extractive industrial power (even featuring canaries in little cages because these are apparently coal mines), and the alien is a “perfect organism.”
Of course the alien is perfect in a horrific killing machine kind of way, but that Hollywood villain pathology is so overdone that it barely registers. The evil corpo manager in these movies (here represented by CGI Ian Holm as the requisite sociopath android, “Rook”) always amounts to a crypto-Nazi trying to build a better gas chamber or call up the devil for der Führer.
Evil corpo android, “Rook”
Every Spielberg / Lucas movie is ultimately about WWII. And every Alien movie is a monosyllabic response to Spielberg / Lucas. And every one of those responses features a gas-chamber engineer in love with efficiency. Acid for blood? Perfect! Weird sexual impregnation spider alien body horror? Excellent!
Hence the movie’s sub-theme: the magical titan progenitor race of rubber-faced, cloak-wearing, weapons manufacturers from far-off Hyperborea (see Prometheus) created the alien species and were even better at genocidal technology than BPCC. It evokes the old sci-fi Nazi on top of the Van de Graaff generator getting electrocuted with demon energy from some Wunderwaffen, screaming about ultimate power, but unable to prevent his own face from melting. Moral: eugenics was probably a mistake, kids.
Event Horizon and Raiders of the Lost Ark did it better. And Sigourney Weaver in the first two Alien movies had a unique combination of sexual magnetism and indignant Boomer anger that Zoomer Rae and C-3PO just can’t touch.
The others are basic horror movie tropes: the insecure teen who shoots his mouth off, vulnerable girlfriend who whines to the extent that we hope Jason gets to her sooner rather than later, and the captain of the football team, who should survive but doesn’t because of his hubris.
Stereotypes. Alien fodder. Aliens, had great characters, including weaselly Carter Burke, Corporal Hicks, and Private Hudson screaming that we’re in some real pretty shit now. Well, we are. We were. Only, this Alien: Romulus shit really ain’t as pretty.
Alien: Romulus is fundamentally a big alligator in the sewer movie. The alligator was created by a mad scientist from central casting obsessed with genocide. And only the kids from home room can do anything about it.
Notes on a French love letter to a Wallachian prince.
I thought I might write about Luc Besson’s Dracula: A Love Tale, which came out in 2025. But, as I read the reviews and interviews published since then, I realized most of the things I wanted to say had been said. The weight of vampire scholarship, specifically centered on the Dracula story, is vast, ponderous, and more than a little tedious.
It seems like any Dracula review has to navigate existing impressions and ideas built up around Stoker’s (essentially boring) Victorian novel and somehow reach a Jungian conclusion—archetype, collective unconscious, mythos, trope, this is who we are when we’re denying our desires, etc.
At least, that typifies the genre of pop-culture vampire criticism. I’m not very interested in that (even if I won’t be able to avoid doing some of it here). So this can’t truly be a review in the “Dracula genre” sense. It can be akin to “notes,” which puts it more in line with Besson’s movie, also something that can only be described as “notes.”
My lasting takeaway after multiple viewings is that everything Besson does is self-consciously derivative. Nevertheless, like M. Night Shyamalan, he’s one of those directors who picks your pocket while you’re aware he’s doing it and you still love him for it.
That’s something about the director, not the movie, but it needs to be said. Maybe it’s all we can say, since Dracula: A Love Tale really does seem like a love letter to other, greater creations and creators. It cannot stand on its own as a coherent statement. But maybe that’s okay.
A funny thing happened on the way to Henry Spencer’s house.
Dracula: A Love Tale works best as a lesser reprise of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but without the round character development, stunning editing, and multi-dimensional plot work. In nearly every scene of Besson’s movie, one thinks, well, of course it’s happening like this, it’s Dracula, after all (or it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula after all, remade by a keen student of the master).
Besson merely gives end notes to the Stoker myth as powerfully articulated by Coppola. In order to appreciate each of the scenes, you have to understand the comparable scenes in the earlier work. Otherwise, Besson’s seem flat, rushed, telegraphed through cinematic shorthand.
His films always have an irresistible boyish infatuation with their subject matter, even if, in each of his big splashy movies (thinking especially of The Fifth Element,The Messenger: the Story of Joan of Arc, and Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), the spit and bailing wire holding up Field Marshal Potemkin’s village is inevitably exposed.
The idea of Besson’sDraculaas a creative love letter—a derivative work suffused with so much adoration that it passes beyond the delicate boundary of homage into worship—is appropriate. And that also makes it resonate, at least in a spiritual way, with Stoker’s epistolary form; though, Francis Ford Coppola adapted that better, too.
This doesn’t mean Besson’s movie isn’t worth watching. As Christoph Waltz puts it in a 2024 interview with Collider, “I always think comparing directors or comparing actors or comparing people, really, is a little unfair because, of course, they are all individuals. . . . They have their method and their vibe, if you want, their specific energy that makes them unique. . . . Luc has a very specifically French [energy], which I admire and enjoy a lot.”
And that tracks to how, for example, The Fifth Element felt with Jean Paul Gaultier’s costume design, the heavy Moebius influence, and the “Federated Territories” warships that seemed a lot like “French Navy in Space.” In other words, Besson’s Frenchness is part of the draw, part of his ever-present Metal Hurlant vibe. We can love his movies for that, if nothing else.
The Fifth Element / Moebius: all the Metal Hurlant you’d ever want and more.
We should, of course, take note of the celebrity voltage brought by Christoph Waltz. For all his humor and magnetism, he seems trapped in the psyche of Colonel Hans Landa from Inglorious Basterds, another far greater film.
Here, Waltz, as the vampire-hunting priest, is meant to embody the Van Helsing principle. As with Anthony Hopkins in Coppola’s movie, Besson seems to hope that Waltz will ground the story in a modicum of seriousness or at least wizardly fascination.
Compare this to Dolly Wells’ impressive Van Helsing as “Sister Agatha,” the vampire-expert nun in the 2020 Netflix miniseries, Dracula—much more of a comedy than Besson’s, yet she seems to out-Hopkins Hopkins. In every Dracula story, there needs to be a least one person with some magic who understands the horrible stakes and reminds us that this is still Gothic horror.
The amazing, unsettling Sister Agatha.
But Waltz, true to form, brings a weird mirth to the role that diminishes it. On one level, it’s delightful because it’s Waltz, but it exemplifies what’s he’s talking about in the Collider interview—different energies, different people, different performances. Unfortunately, his doesn’t fit very well with the overall movement.
It comes off a little too much like What We Do in the Shadows. Too much airy Taika Waititi, not enough gravely Hopkins. That would be great for a different movie, but not here. Waltz doesn’t want us to draw this comparison (or any comparisons), but how can we avoid it?
The merry inquisitor, first for the Reich, now for god.
Then there are the ham-fisted attempts at humor, which are never a good thing because when they fail, they wreck immersion. Ewens Abid goes through his paces as Jonathan Harker, but the role is so bumbling that it verges on Jerry Lewis and Mina’s dismissal of him seems like an afterthought. Dracula hesitates to eat him in the beginning because “he’s a funny man,” but he’s not written as funny, just pathetic, nervous, and bewildered.
Ewens Abid doing his best with what he was given.
Ultimately, what’s true for Jonathan Harker is true for every supporting role in this film. Zoë Bleu (Mina-Elisabeta) and Matilda De Angelis (Maria) are undeniably gorgeous (thank you kindly, M. Besson). And it’s true that Dracula must always be surrounded by horrors and beauties, but Bleu and De Angelis don’t get to act.
They come across as just another principle in the dominant formula—the shopworn embodiment of what we’ve come to think of as the bipolar Victorian dynamic of the feminine, the uncorrupted virgin vs. the fallen sexual beast. Winona Ryder (Mina) and Sadie Frost (Lucy) did it far better because they were given individual arcs. Coppola allows us to see the evolution of Mina’s chaste inner torment and Lucy’s depraved seduction and victimization at the hands of the Count. They’re real people.
Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra / Matilda De Angelis as Maria.
And, after all, what remains to be said about Caleb Landry Jones’s portrayal of Dracula? Should we compare him to Gary Oldman (or, for that matter, to any of the very impressive “master vampire” performances delivered by Christopher Lee, Tom Cruise, Willem Dafoe, even by Antonio Banderas, who did more in his small part as Armand in Interview with the Vampire than is done by anyone in Besson’s entire film)?
We should, if only to get a sense of what’s missing. But perhaps we can leave that to the vampire scholars and professors of pop-culture. No doubt, a year after its release, there are books being written about how this movie fits into the Dracula legendarium. For now, as with Ewens Abid or any of the cast, we can only say, yes, Jones did his best.
The eponymous Wallachian prince.
Ultimately, I will never stop loving and feeling shortchanged by Luc Besson’s movies. So when he inevitably remakes Lord of the Rings as the story of two plucky soldiers in Napoleon’s Armée de Réserve française marching into Great St. Bernard Pass in the War of the Second Coalition, I’ll be present for it.
Why having a day job and dying in obscurity might not be a bad thing.
My struggle as a writer isn’t about getting published. It’s about self-protection and self-realization, time and space, sanity and endurance. It might also be a love affair with death. It’s not about sales.
Goes like this:
I try to write fiction, not ad copy, because I’m not a salesman.
In order to write fiction, I have to write what I want to write. Otherwise, I’m marketing someone else’s preexisting product, betraying my reasons for committing so much of my life to this, and losing sight of the deepest part of who I am. I’m writing for me, not to move units.
When I say this, people (especially those who’ve adopted the values of the publishing industry) tend to get defensive: “Don’t be so arrogant. Think about your audience! Don’t you want your work to sell? Why should anyone care?”
My answer is always: “Go away now. The little squeals coming out of your mouth are offending my neighbor’s dog.” Because you cannot speak to advertising people in the language of artists. All you can say is, “I’m not interested” and “Mind the ‘No Solicitation’ sign on your way out, please.”
That doesn’t make me an elitist jerk (though I know someone who will laugh at me and call me that if she reads this). It makes me self-aware. Why? What I want to write (I almost want to say, what I have to write) is connected to the things that I care about and that occupy my inner life. And I’m a really weird guy with a weird inner life.
My writing is often me trying to express my weird visionary experiences—about others, about myself, about the world in which I live. I believe everyone has what passes for a unique inner landscape. The difference is that I’m exploring it through writing and others try hard to ignore it on their way to the widget factory or the bar.
So I’m not giving the reader a massage (a different metaphor also comes to mind). It’s more like I’m sitting in a completely dark, empty room in an abandoned house, talking to myself. When I die, I’ll get to rest. Until then, it’s talk, talk, talk, talk, talk to the emptiness. I take my birthday and Christmas off. Otherwise, I’m on the grind every day, whether I get one sentence (or nothing) or ten pages.
I can’t write to please others, but I also can’t stop myself. That doesn’t translate into profitability. It’s just what I need to do to in order to avoid jumping off a tall building. Often, it’s an excruciating obsession. And death is always there, waiting patiently. That’s a great relief. Someday, this will all end. Someday, all the talk can stop.
I’ve always been like this. I’m not working on a community project. I don’t even like community. I’ve developed myself interpersonally in order to get along in life and I do have a few friends, who I mostly connect with online now that we don’t live close to each other. But I’m a moody loner, an introvert, and highly, painfully empathic (yes, also in a new age sort of way, which is subject matter for a different piece).
I fundamentally accept those things about myself, but there’s no money in it. Expressing weird inner experiences and then selling them is generally not going to work as a career unless those experiences resonate with a customer base. People want to buy experiences that function like a flattering mirror, not like a window.
They want to spend money for a product that makes them feel good (or a little less horrible) about themselves. This is why genre fiction exists. I’d argue it’s why commercial literary fiction exists, too—i.e. literary prose as just another genre. Did I actually just say that? Did all the stained glass windows in all the English departments of the world just shatter at once?
When it comes to contemporary adult literary fiction, the job of the publishing industry is the same job as that of the person selling a salad shooter, saying as gently and persuasively as possible: you didn’t know you needed this, but I’m here to enlighten you on that point—with an added moral imperative.
It follows a dependable pattern: You’ve been reading a lot of genre fiction that provides vicarious emotional closure you’re never going to get in real life. Now let me show you how much better you’ll feel if you purchase this trendy lifestyle product, this coffee table literary novel, designed to demonstrate that you’re a good person for buying it. It has the correct politics and employs the correct discourse. It has been vetted by sensitivity readers and blurbed by people on the correct side of all the things that upset you. Don’t worry—you don’t actually have to read it. You just have to have it in your home. Like a talisman of goodness. That’s a lot of value for $34.99 in hardback.
It sure is. But I’m writing to find out about myself, not to market talismans of goodness or literary salad shooters. Back to the publishing squealers: “Well, then you can’t expect to make a living as a writer!”
This is a version of the ancient adage, the customer (market) is always right, and I don’t dispute it. In fact, I have a day job that I like for that specific reason (and because eating is good). It frees me from the squealing. And it forces me into the world, where I have to learn new things and grow in spite of my introversion and moodiness. A day job is vitamins for an artist’s soul. If you enjoy your work and your coworkers, all the better. Luckily, I do.
I’m no Franz Kafka. But I think about him a lot. And I often recall something by Anne Rice that is misattributed to him: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.” It doesn’t matter to me that she (a notorious bender and down-waterer) was the one who said it. She channeled Kafka powerfully. It’s just what he did. And he had a day job, too.
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.
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.
That’s the thing with bucket lists. They end. If you’d asked me ten years ago whether I had one, I’d have said I thought they were stupid. I’d have called them products of an increasingly enshitified media-internet convergence, self-help waffle, and that one bad movie. The bucket list concept has always seemed like life-coach hype. But I did have one. I didn’t write it down or post it or engrave it on a thin sheet of marble to hang over my desk, but it was there, implicit, a coil of smoke always turning in my field of vision, a divination only I could read. And it said one thing: hurry up.
So I did. I wanted to publish a book of stories. I published two with a third complete manuscript still out there, tumbling through the maybe-someday abyss. I wanted to learn martial arts. I studied multiple styles. I wanted to teach university writing and wound up teaching it for over two decades, travel the world and live abroad for substantial periods (at least 13 countries to date), and get a PhD (2010, English). For these things, I feel only gratitude—mostly to myself for having had the courage to attempt them, but none of it was accomplished in a vacuum. What did the millennials say twenty years ago? Something, something, the friends we made along the way? I made a few.
But I’m Generation X, where the “X” evokes the old cartoon “wingding eyes,” which are supposed to indicate being “dead or asleep without dreaming. Comical depictions of corpses or ghosts will have their tongues sticking out as well as this. Sometimes, both eyes will combine into a single, longways X. May also be a feature in depictions of clowns.” Sounds about right for Gen-X. Dead. Asleep without dreaming. Corpses, ghosts, clowns. I’m all that, depending on which day of the week you encounter me. Come over on a Sunday afternoon and you get a trifecta. But one of them always has to be “clown.” And the friends I made along the way turned out just the same. Now they’re mostly ghosts.
In classical antiquity, sorcerers would burn sacrifices to gods and spirits of the dead, then practice capnomancy with the smoke, reading it like divine script. Καπνός (kapnos) means “smoke” and μαντεία (manteia) means “seeing,” as in divination or second sight. The bucket list I had was capnomantic in that sense. I was my own burning sacrifice, my own smoke, my own divine message from myself to myself. And the smoke always said time was short. So I needed to do what I needed to do. And it worked out, more or less. It wasn’t much of a list, unless I thought about it for a while and scared myself. But the bucket part ran deep.
And now? Now I peer into my bucket like a child afraid to dive in. Because it seems like I’ve come around, made a perfect circle to where I began. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Nietzsche wrote, “I overcame myself, the sufferer; I carried my own ashes to the mountains; I invented a brighter flame for myself.” A brighter flame for more powerful μαντεία, of course, but in the end it’s all the same. The smoke blows away. After mountains, more mountains. And if you don’t die a hero, you live to carry other people’s ashes, too. So many. A million metric tons of ashes, the remains of the dead that are now your responsibility, their memories, their ghosts. Quite a burden to carry up a mountain trail.
The rim of the bucket makes a perfect circle. Wobbling on the edge, I try to grip with my toes. The mountains are watching. Smoke twists above my head like a thin snake. You ask me what the gods and spirits said in its coils. And I tell you to be patient. Just wait a little longer. I’m still burning.
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.
Jorge Luis Borges—whose writing can often appear so geometrically perfect that it seems more like girih or to have emanated from a non-human, maybe angelic, source—said, in his 1977 lecture, “Blindness,” that he had “always imagined Paradise as a kind of library.” He discussed the grand irony of being placed in charge of the National Library of Argentina the same year he lost most of his sight.
“There I was,” Borges noted with his usual introspective humor, “the center, in a way, of nine hundred thousand books in various languages, but I found I could barely make out the title pages and the spines.”
Of course, he composed a poem about it, the “Poem of the Gifts,” the beginning of which he quoted in the lecture: “No one should read self-pity or reproach/ into this statement of the majesty/ of God; who with such splendid irony/ granted me books and blindness at one touch.”
For Borges, the two “gifts” contradicted each other and therefore seemed to present a threshold or a crossroads, evoking his “Garden of Forking Paths,” in which the garden functions as a nexus of shifting realities: “It seemed to me that the dew damp garden surrounding the house was infinitely saturated with invisible people.” And what is that if not a library to a blind man?
In “Blindness,” he added that this ironic crossroads brought intellectual as well as physical uncertainties to his life:
There were the books, but I had to ask my friends the titles of them. I remembered a sentence from Rudolf Steiner, in his books on anthroposophy, which was the name he gave to his theosophy. He said that when something ends, we must think that something begins. His advice is salutary, but the execution is difficult, for we only know what we have lost, not what we will gain. We have a very precise image—an image at times shameless—of what we have lost, but we are ignorant of what may follow or replace it.
Much like the Death card in the tarot, which isn’t so much about death as transformation, Steiner’s anthroposophical ending-beginning is only possible if one assumes an a priori mover, an ur-cause from which all paths may fork, terminate, and fork again. Borges was a Christian and so this wasn’t an issue for him. Still, nobody likes getting the Death card. The querent would always rather make something of the other cards on the table, “for we only know what we have lost” and, even for the devout, tomorrow is only a vision, usually an unpleasant one.
With these thoughts in mind, I (with fairly good vision and being unworthy of any sort of comparison with Borges) recently entered a position at a prestigious library. Or maybe it is only prestigious to me, given the reductive materialism which seems to have become more viral than ever with the rise of artificial intelligence.
These days, people are less likely to see a garden of forking potentials, filled with invisible people, and would probably shake their heads at what seems like an unhygienic warehouse for carbon-based data storage. As an elderly gentleman said to me yesterday without a hint of sarcasm, “Books are obsolete, you know.” I told him I know. Or, at least, I know that’s what a lot of people believe. But I added that I don’t believe it.
“Some of the best things in life are obsolete,” I said.
Then he grinned. “Like me!”
He’d just turned 80. I wished him a happy birthday and he whistled out the door. Maybe, in that moment, he felt there was something to libraries after all. But I’m not sure yet what it means to work in a library eight hours a day, five days a week. In an abstract way, I also feel a bit blind.
Borges reached the end of his lecture by characterizing his threshold of blindness, his crossroads of forking changes, as an opportunity to know himself in a new way, to adopt a new way of life, and “think that something begins.”
He observed that “A writer, or any man, must believe that whatever happens to him is an instrument; everything has been given for an end. This is even stronger in the case of the artist. Everything that happens, including humiliations, embarrassments, misfortunes, all has been given like clay, like material for one’s art. One must accept it.”
This feels true. But the truth of what “it” entails, the nature of “everything that happens,” remains as mysterious as an unread, even an unreadable, book. Now I find myself surrounded by books I haven’t opened and invisible people I mostly haven’t met. What has ended in my life? What has just begun? And who will I meet next?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi. Not sure what I think about this novel yet, but the voice intrigues me.
Murder Most Serene, Gabrielle Wittkop. This writer has no fear. If you read her novel, TheNecrophiliac, you know what I mean.
The Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant. I’m just getting into Gallant, but I already feel she has things to teach me.
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.
