Sunday 11/3/24
There are writers--many of them--whose name you see and you know what they were thinking in writing that particular story, which is how it works with everything they write: "Time to do my surface, box-checking thing!"
The surface thing makes no attempt to tell a story. It's writing via trendy words, it's lazy as hell, but the connected writer who does this--in part because they can do nothing else--knows how it'll go over with the literary establishment.
The story will read like a high school creative writing exercise, but it need not be anything more. There will be stock description, emphasis on gender, race, and color over characters, and the actual racists who do the "I'm one of the good ones!" thing and have turned feigned racial guilt into a business, will eat it up. Sheep are daredevils of individuality compared to editors of this sort.
I don't like reducing people to nothing but color or any type of box. I would never do it. I simply care about who you are, what you do, the level at which you do that thing, and what you try and do for others.
People who write in the fashion I've just described are selfish ego profiteers who don't offer anything to anyone. They're trying to get what they can without creating any work of value. There is such an arrogance to writing like this, that you all you have to do is posture, play up your box-checking, and you get the book deals, the commendations, the awards, the spots.
The writing isn't about identity or freedom. It makes no effort to combat wrongs. It's about the cash-in. And if one objects, one has transgressed. It's a catch-22 type of scam. You read these stories--well, if you were to read them--and you quickly see that hard work hasn't gone into them because there's no need.
Fiction in The Atlantic is usually written the same way. It's cookie-cutter traditional. Nothing inventive happens in the language. There's a house style to fiction in The Atlantic. Hardly any voice. Indelibility is also limited.
What you will get, though, is something readable. You can read it. Whereas, you can't read something in The Baffler.
It's remarkable how low the standard is right now for fiction, in that saying something can be read is about the best you can say about any current fiction. Atlantic fiction in 2024 is such that you could close your eyes and pretend it's 1952, then open your eyes to their latest fiction and expect to see Mickey Mantle patrolling center field for the Yankees the next time you go to the ballpark. It's that tepid Saturday Evening Post mid-century tone.
Here's an example from a Lauren Groff story called "The Ghosts of Wannsee" in which she does her surface thing of wan privilege, which these people "like," given their own amounts of unearned privilege.
In Berlin, the winter sky is screwed on so tight that all the world beneath becomes dark and gray and grim. On my runs around Wannsee, from the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the furious ghosts of the place seething in the middle of the lake, transforming into whitecaps if I looked at them directly. Around some bends, I’d come across naked old men, bright red with the cold of their swim, vigorously toweling off their withered loins. When I’d come to the ferry launch to Pfaueninsel, the peacocks across the spit of water would cry out so loudly in their winter rutting, I could easily imagine that the island was entirely made of peacocks, in layers four thick upon the ground, that the castle there was wrapped in a hissing sheet of iridescent blue, the million eyes of Argos on their tail feathers staring up, affronted by the low gray clouds.
Then, in mid-April, just as despair crept in and I began to think that we would be stuck in chill darkness for good, the lid of the sky blew off, and the sun poured down, and the earth leaped up in joy to meet it. A green fur grew on all the bereft trees and dirt, and the tulips stood up and unfurled themselves, the brave avant-garde of more color to come. Even the German people who’d so dourly walked their dogs along the lake paths all winter began to smile and nod in greeting. But the ghosts still wrestled mutely in the middle of the lake; even the sun couldn’t burn those off.
It's just so...unremarkable. Lots of mistakes. Poorly edited. Why do you keep saying "across"? That's not by design. And that double "even," which is made worse by having the word start a sentence and then start the clause after the semi-colon. There's no quality control on the writer's part or the editor's.
You have the token description--she's just doing go-nowhere adjective shit, which is what Groff often does to compensate for a lack of actual narrative--set in a European locale. Add those things together (believe me, editors of this sort cream themselves over the word "Pfaueninsel") and Groff's name as someone highly connected in publishing, and that's all she's going to need so far as The Atlantic is concerned. And for everything else she gets. Most people, of course, aren't going to get the Argos reference, but that doesn't matter to Groff.
Of course Groff also has a Guggenheim. There was no way someone like this wouldn't have been awarded one. Zero chance.
This is such a low threshold of quality to meet. Think about the threshold of quality you have to clear to make the NBA. Writing is harder than anything. Shouldn't there be a much greater standard for being in The Atlantic than doing go-nowhere description of a European locale and being a connected system person?
Just as there should be a much greater standard than doing the color thing with nothing behind it--no substance, no point, and no real belief. No conviction. If you know that you have a key that opens a door, you're not going to question the lock; you're going to use the key.
Well, I'm not. I'm going to make sure that what I have in my hands is the best anything ever, not some token pass that gets me to places where my work wouldn't have all things being equal.
That's a key phrase: All things being equal.
I want a level playing field, because I'll crush everyone on it. I'll send them racing home screaming in terror. The only way you can beat me is to make it so that we're not actually competing; like you're playing a game inside the arena, but you've padlocked all the doors so I'm stuck out in the parking lot.
But once I get in? Or once I drag your ass out and we square off? It's game over. Which is why the doors are locked when it comes to me.
People who have to get by this way don't want a level playing field. If you take away their shtick--whatever it may be--they're cooked.
Do you think if you went around to everyone in publishing and said, "Okay, here's the deal. We have this agent from the cosmos and it's the veritable god of truth and the god of truth spits out reports based on how good something really is, the value it has for readers, and being the god of truth, those reports are 100% accurate, and your score is going to determine if we publish your work or do your book," that anyone else but me would be like, "Fuck yes! Bring it on!"
It'd just be me, right? Obviously. That would be fun--I dream of things like that. We can resurrect every writer there's ever been, too, and get them in on it, and that would just make me more excited, because I know how it'd go.
Imagine a world in which we're all translucent. Do you know how many golden gooses that would kill? How many writing careers that would end if people couldn't do their standby? The standby plays in this age of fake guilt. Of false valorizing.
I hate racism. Actual racism. I hate anything that isn't about what a person does, the level on which they do it, and the person they are. I hate that more than anyone because no one is a greater victim of discrimination than I. I live it, I fight it all day. I work 140 hours a week because of it. It's almost seven in the morning on Sunday right now. I began work at one this morning. I'll be up later than you tonight, too, working. Then I'll get up before you do. Because I am in a war against actual bigots. And it's a war I'm going to win. I don't pretend to have issues I don't have so I can get paid. Be given that which I don't deserve. Work less hard. Be less honorable.
There are people in publishing who all but show up with a trophy. They have the trophy before the game starts. Hell, they don't even go to the field, the court, the rink. They go to the engraver's so the engraver can label that trophy, "Fiction in The Atlantic November 2023," or whatever the case may be.
This is from Jesmyn Ward's "She Who Remembers" in The Atlantic:
The Georgia men wake everyone in the drenched dark. The pain of the march simmers through me, and I wipe at my mud-soaked clothing, swipe at the threads of soil in my wounds—all of it futile. We are tired. Even though the Georgia men threaten and harass and whip, we chained and roped women plod. “Aza,” I say, sounding the name of the spirit who wore lightning: “Aza.” Every step jolts up my leg, my spine, my head. Every step, another beat of her name: Aza.
We walk down into New Orleans, and each step is a little falling. We leave the lake and the stilted houses behind; the trees reach, swaying and nodding on all sides, and us in the middle of a green hand. When the hand opens, there is a river, a river so wide the people on the other side are small as rabbits, half-frozen in their feed in the midmorning light. Aza disappears. The boat that carries us over this river is big enough that all the women fit. There is no reprieve from our rope here. This river is wordless, old groans coming from its depths. After we cross, there are more houses, one story, narrow and long, and then two stories, clustered close together, sometimes side to side, barely space for a person to stand between them. The grandest are laced with wrought iron and broad balconies: great stone palaces rising up and blotting out the sky. Long, dark canals cut the city at every turn. The air smells of burning coffee and shit.
People crowd the streets. White men wearing floppy hats coax horses down rutted roads turned to shell-lined avenues. White women with their heads covered usher children below awnings and through tall, ornate doorways. And everywhere, us stolen. Some in rope and chains. Some walking in clusters together, sacks on their backs or on their heads. Some stand in lines at the edge of the road, all dressed in the same rough clothing: long, dark dresses and white aprons, and dark suits and hats for the men, but I know they are bound by the white men, accented with gold and guns, who watch them. I know they are bound by the way they stand all in a row, not talking to one another, fresh cuts marking their hands and necks. I know they are bound by the way they wear their sorrow, by the way they look over an invisible horizon into their ruin.
Of course Ward has a Guggenheim. There was no way someone like this wouldn't have been awarded one. Zero chance.
Scott Stossel once accepted a story of mine at The Atlantic. This was unaccepted by their literary editor, Ann Hulbert. Stossel told me that there was some "hot shit" Chilean writer that Hulbert wanted to publish. That was the thing--that the writer was Chilean and connected; that "hot shit" said everything, and Stossel knew this, which is why he presented this information to me as he did. She was Chilean and "hot shit"; what can you do?
I'm a straight white male who doesn't suck at writing with the whole genius thing, and that's a very limited term that doesn't get at what I am, because there have been geniuses, but there hasn't been anyone like this.
People want to "get" such a person and lock them out. They sure as hell don't want to roll the log for them. They want to roll the log for someone who sucks at writing, who checks boxes, which in turn allows that log-roller to think about themselves a certain way, or to continue doing so.
Stossel--who screwed me over for a long time, and wrote me saying that these actions of him caused him great guilt, and kept him up at night--told me that if I said the truth about how I was treated by The Atlantic, I'd not appear in The Atlantic again.
Which is meaningless--and wildly counterintuitive on Stossel's part, as Stossel realized--because I knew what they were doing--which Stossel admitted to anyway--and people and staff change and things change and leverage changes and, like I said, I'm ultimately going to win, and any bans or whatever anyone once put in effect will not matter at all.
I'm not playing for a squeeze on the ass in their perpetual game of grab ass.
What they want, though, is silence, which is really a matter of letting them do what they do as the person who hopes to get something from this people labors under this outrageous misconception that one day they're going to knock it off and send some florid letter requesting your involvement.
Right. That's not going to happen. Then you have people who think, "I better not associate with so and so because so and so doesn't like them." The second so and so cannot give a fuck about you or your work and they won't. They're busy being a person of the system, and that's not a matter of looking for the best work or wanting the best work. It's all just lunch table games with people of the right birthright. Be that literal birthright in their view, or metaphorical. We're talking an incestuous game of footsie.
You want to know a huge mistake that most writers make? Taking poor treatment because of their wildly incorrect belief that the people of the system who are only hooking up the people of the system will beckon them in with time.
They're not going to, unless you're one of them. And if you're one of them, you're a bad writer and a bad person. Don't be a bad writer if you can help it. You can at least work your hardest not to be. And don't be a bad person because you can always help that.
This silence allows the people of the system to get away with what they're doing. To do whatever the hell they want with no scrutiny, no challenges, no sanity. It's what they want. It's how the incestuous evil rolls on.
If you want to get somewhere, speak up. Speak out. Don't shield these people. They're not going to phone you one day and say they want you. They're looking after their own. And your ambition in life should never to be a person like that.
But back to the Ward story: You see what it is. I'm sure you see what she's doing and why she's doing it. That's not a sincere story. It's not a sincere attempt at a story. It's someone who knows what to say, how to say it, to get the rewards of a system. The narrative makes no attempt to involve you. Ward realizes that all she has to do is a bit of that, a half-assed touch of this, and voila: Serviced by The Atlantic.
The "Aza" thing isn't doing this potent dramatic work that the story would have us think it's doing. But again, lazy. "I'll drop in the Aza thing--they'll think it's deep." This is postering, it's not writing.
This is very eighth grade. The style is eighth grade, insofar as the story has a style. When in doubt, try to shock: Drop in that "unexpected" expletive!
"Simmers through" is a mixed metaphor. Writer mistake, editor mistake.
"Each step is a little falling." What? Then you read it again, trying to understand the meaning, and you kind of get it, but if you're making the reader reread the first sentence to know what you're saying, you risk losing the reader, because now you're asking for their patience, as if you're saying, "I know, this is annoying, but stay with me, it'll be worth it," but why should a reader have that level of trust and, besides, it's not going to be worth it. Rarely is it ever. She means "fall," but that wouldn't have been "creative" enough, so it's gerund time.
Do you see how simple these stock tricks are? You have to be pretty dumb not to be able to spot them. You also would have to be someone who doesn't read very much. By which I mean, honestly read. Read to read. Not read to simply pass someone along to your pages of your magazine/journal, to the bookshelf, to the awards committee. That's not reading. That's waving through. That's machinating.
Those two excerpts above are marked by their insincerity. Their own writers don't care about those stories. They're going through motions. They need not do anything else in their careers in this industry, so they don't.
Over time, you lose the ability to do what would be more, if you ever had it. Right? This is true of everything. I'd suggest it's more true when it comes to writing, because nothing is harder, takes more commitment, and requires greater sincerity than the creation of a matchless work of writing. A matchless work of writing asks so much of a writer. Asks them to give so much. To give more than they think is all they have to give.
When you get to that point where you've given everything that you think you are, that's more like when you're just getting started. You realize as much and then you say, "Okay, let's do this, all it takes, everything it takes, no matter what it takes."
And you give and you give and you give some more.
You will know when you've given all that there is for you to give. If you are courageous enough to honestly ask, and honestly answer, whether there's more that can be given.
This is from a story I'm finally finishing either today or tomorrow, after most of a year, because there's nothing left for me to give and the story itself--which is far more important than I am--now has everything to give.
The man recast his words before his wife had a chance to respond to his question.
“I think she’d rather talk to you.”
“You know I can’t,” the woman said with a rueful tone in part because of what necessarily took precedence at the moment, but would not have in a case of life or death or that which couldn’t keep for a bit longer, her arms beneath her thighs and her hands clasped below the intermittent alcove of air in their middle, feet elevated above the rest of her.
This pose, after the fact, reminded the man of an upside-down rocking horse for some reason. He hoped his wife wouldn’t say what he suspected she was about to, but then it came out anyway.
“We have to let the semen pool.”
The verb discomfited him. Pools were supposed to be either above ground, below, indoors, outdoors, tidal, or vernal, not something that happened. It sounded vaguely vortex-y. Like a death spiral.
“That leaves me,” he concluded, somewhat to his wife, mostly to himself. He hastened into a T-shirt and wiggled on a pair of shorts and walked down the hallway to their daughter’s room where the light was coming out from under the door.
He knocked, knowing the knock wouldn’t be answered, and entered after an extra second or two than usual. She was lying on her side in bed with her back to him. Her journal lay open on the nightstand. She looked smaller than her actual size, as though whatever she was going through, or believed herself to be going through, had lessened her physical form. He wanted to protect her and call her “kiddo,” but instead he sat on the edge of the mattress, keeping space between them.
“You doing okay?” he asked, like nothing had happened, or at least nothing new. Kids grow up fast in the ways of the world, he thought, and then realized that a trope will never do the work when it’s reality that is really on the clock. He felt selfish and evasive within himself, as if crouching behind a shield. There but not there. This is not how he wanted to parent. How he wished to be present. To give what was probably impossible to give so that its knowledge would be fully received. A communication, a reassurance, a gesture, the saying of a magic spell, a waving of the hand that…what? This, too, would pass?
He didn’t officially know, as per the system employed by his wife and himself, what the “this” was with the girl, mooting direct comment on the subject, and neither did he like that “too,” as in, “One more thing that grinds us down and then climbs atop a pile of other such things, stripped of their names and commented on no further, because there have been so many.”
That was a most misleading and unproductive “too.” And remarking that pain was fleeting and would necessarily pass sounded flippant. He thought again about how much he loved the three of them. They who were there. How they in turn existed in relation to each other. He could say something general about boys so that he wouldn’t be betraying a specific confidence that had already been betrayed. Sort of. That they were the worst. Some of the better ones will try to get a lot more correct than the rest, but they will still falter. They’ll rise and then they’ll stumble. Two steps up, three down with a clattering. They’ll need help standing again. And who provides that help? Someone in pain. Who has known it.
But this all sounded like boys had to be rescued and it was up to the girls they had disappointed and hurt to do the rescuing, which wasn’t what he wanted to impart at all. He could feel himself sliding back down the ladder.
I could go through line by line and talking about the design, but I'll just point out a couple things.
The reader matters more than anyone. Matters more than the writer. The work is for the reader, not the writer. A writer doesn't write for himself. Herself. Not a true writer.
That doesn't mean people get everything. There are times when they're not supposed to because what they don't get is part of them getting something else instead and getting--and/or feeling--what this better.
So much can be happening and so much can be different from work to work. But one thing that should never change is the writer's understanding of how important the reader is.
For me. Because each thing I do is very different from everything else I've done. Whereas, these people do the same limited thing. Again and again and again. They can't do anything else, they won't.
Recently, I mentioned "Box of Rain" with the passing of Phil Lesh. It has that lyric, "What do you want me to do/To do for you/To see you through?"
That's a question a writer--a great writer--is essentially always asking his reader. The reader who is there. The reader who has not come along yet. The reader who never may.
To see that reader through to what? The beyond. The better. The wiser. The more human. Who they are. Who they can be.
In that part about the man find the verb discomfiting, I know that many readers will not understand that the verb is "pool." That's not a clarity issue in the prose. It couldn't technically be clearer in that single spot. That is the verb. So, if you know what a verb is, you should know the verb being talked about is "pool."
But I know how minds work and what people don't know or get wrong.
Remember what I said yesterday about points of contact? When you scale a rock face, you want as many points of contact as possible. Writing is the same way. You want to give the reader as many points of contact so they don't plummet to the ground below.
So then the next sentence starts with the word "Pools." It's become a noun--such a subtle elision--but in case you didn't know before what the verb being referenced was, now you do. But this isn't a repetition for the sake of making sure people know what's what. It's a logical progression in the story, because with that elision--a modulation to the noun, but done very subtly, so we're not taken out of the story--we get this fantastic concomitant idea, a progression, about various kinds of pools, upending of expectations, undercutting of comfort levels, and the stuff of life, which is, in part, the stuff of death. Our brains work via eliding. This turns into that with leftover aspects of this. That becomes [ ] with leftover aspects of X but no longer Y. Eliding.
If I saw someone else write this, I would be concerned. I'd be like, "Oh, fuck, we have a real challenger here."
But I never see anything like that. And I'm not going to.
Now let's consider these three sentences:
Some of the better ones will try to get a lot more correct than the rest, but they will still falter. They’ll rise and then they’ll stumble. Two steps up, three down with a clattering. They’ll need help standing again.
Two steps up, three down. Look at how the actual language reinforces this idea. "...will try" and "will still"--"will" twice. "They'll rise" and "...they'll stumble" and "They'll need"--"They'll" thrice. See? Two, three. Two up, three down. Thematic linguistic fractals.
It feels silly saying this, given how obvious it is, but the difference in quality, and the different level we're talking here, is extreme. But it should be said, because this system is doing what it's doing, rewarding what it rewards, penalizing someone who does what no one else can do, and that's a system that needs to change or come down. Come down in order to change.
We all know that I would never write anything as ineffectual as what we see above from Groff and Ward, just as we anyone would know that if I did, I wouldn't be showered with praise and handed things and awarded, etc.
Nor would you be, hypothetical writer, if you weren't a connected person of the system. If you didn't check the requisite boxes. If you were not recognized as "One of us" by the people of that system.
Again. Obvious. All of this is obvious once you see it.
Don't enable what is being done and the people doing it. Care about writing. Care about readers. Care about the person you are. Be that person. Don't be a pose, don't be an affectation, don't be a scammer. It ultimately gets no one to any place of value or significance.
And we are here to get places--to viable, worthwhile places, in our selves and in our lives and in our relationships--and to help others do so as well.
You just saw excerpts from three stories by three writers. We all know the only one that would help anyone get through to anywhere.
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