Monday 9/30/24
What am I suggesting by that opening statement? That you change how you write? No, not necessarily. I meant it as I said it: You have to be aware of how obtuse people are. Be aware. As you go.
Being aware is huge. Being aware has a powerful influence. Being aware allows for solutions and can generate solutions in the very act of doing what one is doing as they are aware of these additional realities, which is different than "Here are the marching orders!" and "Follow these rules!"
You can use, for example, the word "incarnadined." But you have to be aware of what you're doing. And there are things that need to be in place and be happening so that if the reader falls with this one thing, then this, this, and this keep them upright and it's like they've not fallen at all. You must be aware of where the reader stands. You have to be looking out for him or her. If you want to do this one thing like use "incarnadined"--and it's for the best--you also need to do these other things.
You make choices as you write. The better someone writes, the more choices they make. The more choices there are to be made. The more levels they're making choices on.
Sometimes you're writing for this part of the brain with this kind of person, or that part of brain with that kind of person.
Writing is never a matter of "Fuck it, whatever," and you steamroll on over what you wish to steamroll over, screw everyone in your way, crushing readers and essentially giving them double middle fingers as you bulldoze along, frightened and screaming to yourself over the din that this makes you a real artist and it has to be this way, right? Right? Oh God, right? And hoping no one outs you. And hoping you can stop what you know is really the truth from eating you alive.
It's a very limited writer who works that way. Like, say, Matt Bell.
That's the shtick. People not getting it, people not liking it. "My prose style," that is. "It's their fault. This proves how great I am." That's the desperate ruse and attempted lie to self. Said lie is then buttressed by industry/writing community liars, who feed on this kind of thing themselves and then spit it up again for others of their ilk to feed on. It's just people chewing on vomit. Gnash gnash gnash, slurp slurp slurp. But that's how it happens. That's how someone like Matt Bell gets a following. A following of these people. It's not because a single one of them ever thought for a second he was actually any good. That's how awards happen. Book deals. It's the chewing on the vomit, swallowing it, spitting it back up for the others to take their turn.
MFA writers don't think about audience because they are talentless narcissists. They can't invent anything and instead deal solely in the non-existent drama, stakes, and interest of their of their navels. They have no empathy. Their main objective is in providing protective housing for their considerable insecurities and masking the truth of their limitations.
They blame readers. What I mean by that is they know that no one could ever honestly like what they write. They blame the concept of readers, you might say. They blame readers in the abstract. They resent readers. They try to reframe their lack of ability by thinking that they're so smart, so talented, that no one understanding their work--which, again, they know as a matter of course regardless of who sees it or not--is proof that they are in a class above lowly readers who probably didn't even go to graduate school and are yokels if they don't live in Brooklyn or teach another form of vomit--prose vomit--in an MFA program where a professor, being that author's friend, put their latest book on the syllabus. Parents: Don't pay $200K to have your kid forced to read Matt Bell.
It's always about class for these people. Class is what they hide behind. Classism helps them lie to themselves about themselves. But the lies don't really work. They might work outwardly, at some reading or event, where other liars are lying to them. But lying in bed at night--no, the lies never work then, do they?
Hey, Junot Diaz, I dare you to think up a character. To invent one. To create just a single character who isn't you or the embodiment--hmmm, it's almost like there's a pun in there--of one of your female stereotypes scraped (because I know how hard any amount of writing is for you to do) from the mind of a weak little misogynist or a woman who is not treated as the equivalent of a semen spittoon for men.
Awww, can't do it, can you? I can stand here and pop you in the mouth (figuratively) and pop you in the mouth and pop you in the mouth and you'll just never be able to do this thing. Your very life could depend on it and still wouldn't be able to do it.
You know what would be fun? How about a prose off in the next little bit between a Junot Diaz Story from The New Yorker and one of mine? I'll get on that. We'll do George Saunders, too. One Pulitzer winner and one Booker Prize winner. That's hilarious.
It's always the person on the other side of the table who matters most with writing. The reader.
And it just happens that that reader will often be obtuse.
People are bad at most things. Reading is one of the things they're the most bad at. You'd be amazed at what people can't understand. Or maybe you wouldn't be.
For instance: You have a sentence with a subject. Obviously. The sentence comes to some conclusion. You start the next sentence with the word, "This." Many people are not able to understand what the "This" refers to, how it carries over from what was just established. You can't just spell out what you just said using the same words. That's not good writing. You can have that "This," but you have to be aware of what you're dealing with here, and you must find a way to make your "This" more than just a "This" because of what you're doing all along to that point and on both sides of the "This."
You have to be aware.
None of this means that you conclude, "I need to write this for an idiot." You can go as high as you can go. But you must take people with you. Maximum impact is key. To write for maximum impact, you must write as well as possible. The dynamic between maximum impact, writing as well as possible, and readers being what they are presents problems that need to be solved.
I don't believe in writing for any one group. I believe in writing for all groups equally. Lots of people just try and write for idiots. Usually they are idiots themselves. Look at all of this crap about wizards and owls and time slips and fantasy and "romantasy."
Then you have your people like Matt Bell who are working with no talent--and who are in actuality stupider than the wizard and time slip writers who are often people who are like, "I decided earlier today that I'm going to be a writer now"--and who write for frauds who want to say they read something when they didn't because that's how they try and trick people that they're smart. Matt Hanson, aka Junior Colin, is like this. They'll make sure they're seen with that copy of Infinite Jest or Blood Meridian. (I had an agent I'll talk more about later who told me to write like David Foster Wallace. Can you even imagine saying something that dumb, let alone to me? He also told me that he stole what I posted on Facebook about baseball and passed it off as his own material to his friends.)
You also have people who are well put together, who aren't in the publishing system, who have a job and a life and they read. They'll read Moby-Dick because they read it in college and want to see if they get more out of it now or they'll read this biography of Eisenhower or just whatever.
Sometimes I hear from them after they've read something of mine. They're normal people. What I mean by that is they're not the broken freaks of the publishing system. They're usually secure in themselves. There aren't a lot of people like that, though. Some writers would do the math, crunch the numbers re: readers, and say, "Well, there might be 2500 people out there for what I do."
Me, I'm not like that. I believe what I do is for everyone, but I'm not getting to the people I need to be getting to because of the whole industry-wide suppression thing.
How does someone out in the world learn about anything? They're told about it, in effect, by a lot of other people who are talking about it, drumming up attention for it. People are usually pushing that thing--that person, that work, both--on the industry side.
As I wrote recently, Beethoven was pushed. Hard. He had writers fashioning this whole mystique for him. "Beethoven, he's the favorite son of the Muses, why, the opening of the Fifth is fate knocking on the door and that was Beethoven's message because he is Fate himself" blah blah blah. It was like he had a team of Greil Marcus types as his marketing firm.
On occasion, the person who is pushed forward, the person on whose behalf the members of a village are laboring, is good at what they do. Beethoven was good, the Beatles were good.
In publishing, the village decides, "Okay, we're making Tommy Orange the star of our scene right now, and we'll get him those awards, and his book in the window of bookstores," and he obviously sucks. If you actually look at any of it. But what he writes has nothing to do with those awards or the sales. It's the push. It's that these people decided.
You can push anything into doing that--and in publishing, it's now easier than ever, because it takes less sales to have a bestseller, because people don't read. And it's easier because there are no prying eyes. There isn't a system of checks and balances. It's these people in all of their evil incestuousness, and they can get away with it--or so they've thought--because they've driven the public away. They're on their own island. Lord of the flies.
Yes, there are half a million books--actual number--coming out every year, but they're almost all garbage, and the industry--the literary industry--simply picks who they want for a star--more like a flickering flashlight with the battery running down--right then and there.
That's all it is, my friends. All of the crap these people write is the same as the crap. Sure, some proper pronouns change, but it's always the same approach. And there's no life in any of it.
So that's one way people encounter things. Or, they stumble across something. But what are the chances? And hardly anyone reads now, so what are the chances they stumble across anything written? Nearly none, right? What if they stumble across something amazing? What if they stumble across the best thing they've ever seen? What if that's by someone whose name they don't already know? Who has been at it, as they subsequently learn, for a while. What do they think then?
People naturally think if something is the best, they find out about it because the best gets rewarded and put forward. They're usually ignorant in how many things work, and how publishing works is almost unbelievable, unless someone is paying close attention or, really, only if they're reading these pages, because where else would you get it? They would never come up with how it really works on their own. Just out of their own thoughts. It's too fucked up. And people don't read. For the most part.
See how the publishing people are protected? A lot of the money in publishing is old money. They don't need readers in the world. Remember: The publishing system exists so that the people of publishing can be the people of publishing. That is its main agenda. There's less onus to make new money. I'm not talking about websites and magazines. They have little money. They are desperate for clicks. Not for good work, not for readers. They don't really care about the quality of the work. They care about clicks.
That was a panic move that became a sustained panic--with good reason that these people ironically helped bring about--which has gone on for years now and it was this infatuation with clicks that was worse for business than anything.
In the very near future, there will be but a handful of these venues left, and they'll have skeletal staffs, and the little money coming in will go entirely to those people. The writing is usually bad. It's stupid and cheap and headlines are meant to manipulate you and then you do feel manipulated, as you should, and the writing itself is basically Wikipedia but not as clear and often with annoying ads that make you just say, "This isn't worth it," as the page keeps reloading.
And you know what? It wasn't. You'll get the info elsewhere. It's not like there was anything there besides surface info. There will be plenty of posts about it on Twitter or Threads. Wherever. You won't go back to that site. Isn't worth the bother. Sure, they got your click. But it was also hammered home to that reader that nothing was offered to them--certainly nothing they can't get anywhere else--and the site won't get their clicks in the future.
A lot of times when something runs, do you know why it does? The venue/editor needed a piece on that subject. Any piece. Someone was there with the piece or the pitch. It's because something on that subject usually get X number of clicks, no matter what it is, so the place wants the piece for that nominal subject, not because of what the piece will say. The writer, the writing, is irrelevant.
These writers have no expertise. They don't know anything about any subject, let alone many. They look things up and rephrase what they got from Wikipedia. People know less and less in our world. Ironic, given how easy it is to learn faster than ever before. But that's not what people do when they're looking at their phones.
Why would people read those articles then? Time goes on, there are less people who can write a decent article about anything with any insight, any ideas, anything interesting in the language, anything that the reader of that article couldn't get thousands of other places, because those writers are devolving and the ones who could offer something are gone, and those coming along just look up whatever on Wikipedia and rephrase.
Remember when Paul McCartney got back his bass that was stolen in the 1960s earlier this year? I think it was this year. Maybe last year. What happened? Well, someone wrote a puff piece with a few quotes in it about it first. Someone must have gone first.
Then every other venue wrote the same piece. They used the quotes, moved them around, changed some language, so that it wasn't legally plagiarism, but you had hundreds of venues writing the same piece, because everyone had to have this thing to try and get in on some clicks. That's not even writing. But that's magazine and website writing now.
And those people can't see that this is how you end yourself as an outlet. You have to go in the other direction and have quality. But who are you going to get it from? Or get enough of it from?
But let's look at a couple scenarios, both of which involve the same work and the same person who comes to that work. In scenario one, they find it on their own. By chance. However. They think something. They move on. They are not going to stay attached to their own thinking. They won't disavow it, but they're not going to pursue it. That work which they experienced is precisely that: That experience. Of then and there. They can think it's the best thing ever made. But they are still apt to leave it in the past back in that moment of that occasion when they experienced it.
In the second scenario, our person picks up the same work because everyone is saying it's amazing. They experience the work, they have the same experience, for the most part, as they would have in the first scenario. But now they don't move on. They don't leave that work, that thought, that experience, behind. They cultivate. They allow themselves to think what they think more than they would have with that other set-up. They're emboldened in their own thoughts. People aren't confident. If they hear music and it's the best music ever and if they think it's the best music ever they're not going to bang that drum alone. I would. But I'm not other people. I know what I know and I know when I know it.
The Beatles had some records released in the States in 1963. They did nothing. There were people who heard them. They didn't care. Big push in February of the next year and those same people then officially loved what they'd actually heard before and hadn't thought twice about. I'm not saying they didn't honestly love that music in February 1964. I'm saying that the way people come to something is important. Or it can be.
So I'm in this war right now. I keep going. I fight the war. I create the work. I stockpile the work. The books. There is a huge storehouse of art ready to go out when the time comes. And continue going out. Art that already can keep up a steady flow from the storehouse out into the world for the next fifty years at a very brisk pace.
At present, I have 500 new stories from those last six years--and that's just one thing--all at the level of the best of anything I've ever done. There are what, fifty-five stories in The New Yorker every year? So you could have one author provide all of that fiction for the next eleven years based off of what he's written in six years and each of those stories would be better than any fiction The New Yorker has ever ran. And that leaves out earlier works. I have to apply some time restrictions, or we're just dealing with even wilder concepts.
Instead--for now--you'll just get what I call the tote bag style of fiction with what runs in such a venue. (Go to The New Yorker's website; look how fast they mention a tote to you. You just got there and they're like, "Subscribe and you get a tote bag!" and we all know the real purpose of the tote bag; even this--a tote bag--is intended to convey class and rank and superiority.) It's not meant to be read or cared about. It's meant to be in a magazine that people display conspicuously so that others will see it and think certain things about them, a subscription to which gets you a tote bag so you can replicate the experience of thinking that people think you're smart as you make your way to work and throughout your day each time you head back out with your tote bag.
The fiction is legless. And spare me the "Cat Person" thing. It had legs! No. That was just news cycle timing. There is nothing in that story from a writer who stole it from someone else anyway. And what is that writer doing now? What will she ever do?
She'll only ever be the person who wrote a bad story that was a product of a news cycle as culture became more of a shit show. It's just a variant on fifteen minutes of fame. She'll keep milking that one thing. But you'll never hear from her again. It was just that one bad, trite, empty piece in which nothing happens, with no stakes, no walloping epiphany, no truth, really just humdrum, basic, "there's hook up culture and people don't always have super altruistic intentions"--this needed saying?; in a New Yorker story?--stock fare that she, again, stole from the person who told it to her. She didn't even think it up on her own. This thing that was barely a thing which will always be the thing she tries to milk.
There's almost nothing out there in writing that can even be a tiny news cycle thing, so when there was that one thing, it got amplified. When things get amplified, people are making it something other than they would off on their own, if they just saw it themselves. People will weigh in on hook-up culture. I mean, so? They just want a voice. It's like click bait. Engagement farming. People want to sound off. Look at the dumb engagement bait posts on Threads. Same idea. Same idea as Danny from Quincy calling the sports radio station. That's what you had in that case. It had nothing to do with the work. With what was actually in the story. Or how compelling the story was. The story wasn't a millimeter deep.
But okay, sure, the writers and editors who hate me don't number among the "everyone" from above, but they'd give anything to be able to write anything at the level of a single thing I write. So I'll call that a write off. They only act the way they do, which we see documented time and again on here, because they know what I am. If I wasn't this thing, and they didn't know it, they wouldn't behave like this. They all know it. Think about that. In a world where people can't even agree on the color of an orange, all of these people recognize what this one writer truly is.
But everyone--what I think of as more or less everyone--is in what I write. Home has to be in your work. Do you understand what I mean by that? People have to be coming home. To feel like they are at home. A place to be their home, where they can be them, has to be in there for them.
As I'm writing this entry, I'm working on two stories: "Dead Thomas" and "Go and Come Back," both for There Is No Doubt: Story Girls. And yeah, home is in there for everybody. Not one home that we all pile into. I mean your home. And your home. And his and hers. Your own home. For me, that's what I'm going for. No reader left behind, no reader out on the street.
Part of the solution originates with the aforementioned awareness. Because when you're aware, you're sensitive. The better the writer, the more empathetic the writer is, and that empathy extends to the reader. Empathy begins with awareness. It puts something else first other than one's self. For the writer--a good writer--the reader comes first.
What brought this on for me--the idea of being aware in the manner I mentioned above--was a series of posts I read--screenshots--from a guy on a dating site that was uploaded elsewhere. He was talking to a woman, and she did what many women do on dating sites, because 1. People usually have nothing to say (men are more likely to try to say a few things, but will be inept at doing so and fake as hell, whereas women are more likely to revel in attitude and that these guys are coming to them and the knowledge that they have more options, though most of these people, men or women, will end up equally alone unless you count when they do finally pair off out of a combination of fear, panic, desperation, and keeping up appearances just so they can be with someone and not have to face the abyss alone, which they will still ultimately be doing unbeknownst to them until, say, a few months after the wedding when no one brings it up anymore or they have the slow burn of a realization that this is how it is now and all it's going to be until death, with no dreams to dream, and then kids will be made, if it's not too late, then the post-wedding process repeats, until there are grandkids, and, finally, the formal arrival at death) and 2. They are there simply to collect compliments before returning to their miserable lives on which they blame the patriarchy.
He was trying, in good friendly faith, with energy and some aplomb, and she was doing the one-word response thing, and then stopped. So the guy just started talking about taffy that he gets from Trader Joe's. In message after message. These details reports and updates about taffy. Talking about what makes Trader Joe's taffy so good, what you're looking for when it comes to taffy, what he likes best about taffy in the fall, and so on.
It was pretty funny. In one of his taffy messages he used there, they're, and their--correctly--and pointed that out in the next message.
I wish I could say that he was obviously just doing satire, but to most people who saw this it wasn't obvious at all. They had no idea and thought this was actually a guy obsessed with taffy, a creeper, someone who should be on the sex offender list, a guy who couldn't take the hint. I saw hundreds of idiotic posts from people who could not understand the joke.
And like I said, it was pretty funny. To one of his accusers, some white knight who was like, "Sir this is not how you treat a beautiful woman hey baby hmu if u want a friend," the guy said, "I think she's into me."
And people just got angrier. They swore at the guy, told him to take the hint, have some self-respect, to stop chasing women not into him, etc.
She didn't even see these responses from the man, because she was busy collecting compliments from other people she had no intention of talking to, let alone meeting, and of course this guy knew this, it was the whole point. And he made the point well. Not just about her, or even about her. But how people are. And his sense of humor probably helps keep him sane. Smokey Robinson said you have to dance to keep from crying. You don't think that's a valid point? People typically don't have a second thought. They usually don't have a first thought. They have a first impulse. A first reaction.
They go in jaded, looking to be superior, to be the decider. The judge. They go in looking to convict. They are the smart main character in their minds. The old guy who likes baseball wants to see a comment so he can think--react--by saying words like "These pitches today all wear dresses" or at least having the feeling of those words in his mind. When you come in with so much of what you're going to think--as per these reactions--already established, you're not going to see something--no matter how obvious it should be--for close to what it is. People don't pick up on sarcasm, right? Or nuance.
Their thoughts aren't these sustained, advancing waves; any thinking that they do at all is this simple little flash. And then it's just done. They're doing all of their thinking, as such, in that flash. Where their minds are already a certain way, with determinations largely in place before the flash happens. You can get those people to take you literally no matter how outrageous whatever you're saying is.
People believed that Swift was calling for children to be eaten. That was then. Imagine now, in the social media era? The era when attention spans are at four seconds? What that has done to our abilities to cogitate? How it's changed human brain chemistry.
Having published thousands of things in my life, I have learned that there is nothing you can write that people cannot fail to understand. If you say, "I had an apple for lunch," someone will ask you if you really rode purple zebras once on the moon.
I've heard it all. I came to understand this a long time ago in a manner that no one else does because no one has ever cared more about audience. It's something I'm always aware of every time I write. I never think, "Dumb this down." Writing that phrase here was the first time I've ever thought it as in, Do you even want to use that phrase?
But I am aware of how people are, and I know that you have to write on so many levels at once (which is different than writing on all of the different levels you're writing on in other regards--as I said, it's complicated, and it takes so much ability to do what I would consider at the level of art), and you have to find a way to make your meaning get through to people even when--this is where it gets tricky--they miss it.
To have people receive your meaning--the meaning--when they miss it.
The big paradox. That is, they're missing it on some level, but it's landing, somehow, all the same, but maybe somewhere else with them. Also complicated.
To have something look simple--as in, "Oh, I know all of those words, they're words I use, and that's a five-word sentence, I use those"--and in reality be rich and complex and timeless and unique is an ability that people don't have. It's one of the very hardest things for any artist to do. Recently I worked for four days on a single sentence. So much has to go into every single letter of what you write. There has to be so many reasons for everything you do, and they have to work in concert with each, on myriad levels.
If you're blocked by the conscious mind of a reader, because that conscious mind is just some marbleized slab of beef through which little can pass, you have to find a way simultaneously to do an end-around and get in there some other way. You have to get in there. Do you see what I'm saying? It's up to you, the writer, to figure that out.
Put differently: You often have to work on people despite them. You cannot bank on readerly strengths. Assume readerly weaknesses. A limitless amount of them. Extreme readerly weaknesses. A poor level of reading comprehension. Make your choices. You can have something that you don't want people to understand, necessarily, on some level, so that it hits more on a different one. (And that can be with the cagiest of readers. You may want their subconscious to stir so that when you play off of this portion of your work later on, it's as if something moves from their subconscious to their conscious mind, like this thing has been in them all along so far as they know--think of it like the feeling we get in music when returning to the home key--but is also new and, further, a discovery they were a part of and can share in.) But be aware. That awareness will serve you well in all that you do as a writer.
What you write must be transcendent. How do you write something transcendent? Like I said, it's hard. These MFA people, these publishing people, they have no shot at doing that. It'll never happen with any of them. It takes too much. Too much ability, too much dedication, time, effort, essence, humanness, courage, empathy, love, understanding, range, humility, knowledge, humility, wisdom, genius, a soul that's a universe, both here with us and where no one has ever gone, and balls--metaphorical balls--the size of planets. You gather up, lead, and walk alongside, step for step, heart to heart. At once.
All of this must be done without making readers feel stupid. Even if they are stupid. Because you're not writing to make them feel dumb, which is a big thing for MFA fiction writers because they're dumber than anyone else, but also pretentious, and scared, and cowardly, and this is what a person like that does to shield themselves from all that they are. They posture, project, but give themselves away to anyone happening to read their work who is not one of their ilk.
The person of their ilk is looking to do what the baseball fan mentioned above is looking to do when he sees a post about some pitcher in the modern day game. The agenda is in place. That's another reason why people like Matt Bell will say things about Matt Bell. It's automatic. It's automatic bullshit. It's what you say if you're one of them. No more honest thought is given to it than you've given to something you've never thought about. No thought actually happens. It's just what they do and what they say.
You can be writing so that people realize things about themselves. Those can be hard things. Things they've never realized anywhere else. That no friend or family member ever told them, probably because they didn't know. And you need to be doing this, if you're any good.
But you are coming from a place of empathy and kindness. You want to help people live better. Get more out of themselves, their humanness. Their relationships. Their imagination. Their heart. Their emotions. How they see the world. Themselves. Their life. A bird. A child. Their past. The love they've not known. The love they squandered. Their despairs. Their dreams. Their shortcomings. Their strengths.
You want them to feel like they're being touched. And seen. And heard as they watch and listen. You want them to relate to people in the work who may not, on the surface, be anything like them. But relate to them as much as they could ever relate to anyone. You drive the humanity home. The driving home of this humanity is like a blow that then breaks up a block of ice of more humanity. A sea of ice. The humanity pools, it flows. Work and reader are a part of that together. And now they're off towards the horizon. Thanks for coming out, safe journey home.
What I'm talking about here takes and requires many forms. Entertainment is one of those forms. That challenge to not peek ahead at what's happening further down the page because Oh my goodness we must know what happens! So is a gut punch. Which can be entertaining depending on the context and how the blow is delivered. There is no more painful a story than "Finder of Views," and yet, it can be read over and over and looked forward to being read again with great desire and anticipation. Every single second of your life--and by that I mean every single second; I'm not casually throwing out numbers--has to be about mastering what we've been discussing. Allowing that you were born with ability. You can't just do this fifty hours a week. And now I'm talking about more than physically writing. Every single thought in your life must in some manner be about this. Or you'll just never come close. There's too much that goes into it. There are no limitations. You have to find a way to outpace the limitations of readers so that they're not held back by limitations. There's so much to be aware of, so much to do There's never any, "Okay, that's enough, I know all I need now."
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