be yourself
or, a lesson on writerlyness
I have a groupchat with the only writers I would ever even consider speaking to in real life and I was critical of a book that is liked by a member of the groupchat, which led me onto a bit of a tirade about writing, which was, admittedly, Byronic1, though I said it without irony and I persist in my belief that what I said was true and good and will lead to tragedy or greatness.
I have read a lot of books. I say that not to brag but to contextualize my life and my attitude towards books. I have probably read more books than you. I probably read more books this year than you’ve read in the last five combined2. I consider it almost a compulsion for I often persist in reading terrible fiction that I convince myself I’m doing for some arcane purpose that I call research3 but it’s just as possible that I’m always reading a book because the only times I can be silent and still is when I have a book in hand. For I crave silence and stillness, perhaps because they are alien to my nature. A sort of lust for the exotic, if you will.
But in reading a lot of books I often come across books that I consider failures for a number of reasons. Often these books are very well written. If you isolated the prose, it would be inarguable that the writer knew how to write a sentence with gravity4. But because I read a lot of books by a lot of people across a lot of genres and time periods, I find strange echoes rippling across literature. And there are times where an acclaimed book strikes me as nothing more than a poor imitation of a dozen writers who have already tread the same writers, using eerily similar language.
Thus and so, I grow weak and ragefilled, like mighty Troyless Achilles caged by age, locked away from the fame of his early doom. I look upon all these piles of books teetering round me and find that my primary reaction is disgust at their necrotic lyricism, their conjuring of the dead, of the already worn tongues, and how this language so lauded feels like trying to sing with someone else’s throat.
You may hit the notes but you will never hit their notes.
You will forever be but an echo of those masters you emulated, you worshipped.
There are people on social media sites who have turned their entire personalities into being the ________ Account. You may fill in the blank with Cormac McCarthy or James Joyce or JRR Tolkien or JK Rowling or Virginia Woolf or whoever else. The point is that they turn their entire life into a fixation on a specific artist. And I’m sure many of them write their own stories and books and maybe some of them find success and acclaim this way.
Good for them. All well and good. I wish them well.
Because there is an art to mimicry, yes. It’s even an art that I appreciate quite a bit and have played around with myself5. But if you devote yourself to mimicry, you will, at best, be a shadow of your hero.
And perhaps that’s all one aspires to be. After all, who are we to stand atop the shoulders of giants so that we can see a bit further? Who are we to expect that we will one day be so much more than an emulation, a simulacrum, a well crafted golem burlesquing our own ambitions?
I find writing an embarrassing habit. This may surprise you since if you’re a regular reader here you’ve possibly consumed hundreds of thousands of words I’ve written. And while I find it a bit embarrassing, I also take great joy from it.
For me, one of the true pleasures of life is writing fiction. I, of course, enjoy writing nonfiction here as well, as you no doubt realize6, but I always imagined my nonfiction would be a gateway to readers to pick up my fiction. This doesn’t really seem to be the case and so I have accidentally cultivated two largely nonoverlapping audiences. And, at this point, I believe the nonfiction readers far outnumber the fiction readers.
So it goes.
But all of this was meant to be a driver to my fiction and, come the new year, I’ll be making some changes here to hopefully create a funnel leading in that direction.
But one thing I’ve spent the last twenty years doing as a writer is to sound like myself. There are a number of reasons for this, not least of which is that I’ve no real talent for literary mimicry. I have picked up many things from the thousands of books I’ve read and the many writers I’ve enjoyed—and some of whom I haven’t—but I’ve treated them all the way I treated Target when I used to be a petty thief.
I learn and I take but I do not let the costumes overtake myself.
This spills over to my nonfiction here, no doubt, because, if anything, my style here is simply more myself than my fiction since I am, you know, writing as myself.
But because I find writing embarrassing I think you may as well dive all the way in and hold nothing back. Be as much yourself as you can possibly be.
Yet I find so few writers are this way. Worse, I find that many writers get worse as their careers go on, as if they begin to become corroded versions of themselves, and they were already, sadly, an imitation of someone else.
If you intend to write or make art of any kind, you must be yourself. Go ahead and try on the hats of your heroes but remember always that these are only costumes meant to help you find yourself. Some of these suits may fit better than others and this helps you weave your own pattern, cut your own fabrics and invent your style.
Call it voice or vision or whatever.
When I used to teach teenagers writing, I told them to lean into their obsessions. Be obsessed! Even if it’s embarrassing. All artists are obsessive freaks. But they get better by allowing their obsessions to flourish rather than bury them away. Whether your obsession is coins or baseball or pornography, you will become better at whatever art you’re attempting by allowing yourself to be obsessed and by pouring that obsession back into the world.
Because while there are those who say there are only seven plots or that every story has already been told, they haven’t been told by you.
And so find a way to say what you have to say, to give the world a source of light or darkness, but make sure it is you who they will find there.
All of this is a long way to go about introducing a novel I’ll be writing next year. I won’t be publishing it here because I don’t think my audience has been particularly interested in serialized fiction. I’d also rather just get it right than have to deal with the various issues you run into when serializing. But I will be sharing a look behind the scenes. Essays on process and concepts, on craft, and on and on. This will be a separate section of the newsletter that you may opt out of.
But this idea all came about because I read Stephen King’s It and Donna Tartt’s The Secret History back to back, and so this novel will, in a sense, be a combination of those two ideas, along with a healthy dose of other influences. For one thing, a publisher I like called Apocalypse Party put out a call for submissions earlier this year and they wrote the phrase Bleach bath Sailor Moon and that sliver of an idea got caught in my skull like shrapnel tearing through grey matter and I haven’t been able to not think about it in the months since.
And so a novel is born. It’s likely to be one of those gargantuan novels that reaches octopuslike across genres and stories, but all of it will happen in the town of my birth, my longtime home: Minneapolis.
And I write this, in part, because no one else could. No one else would.
And so while it will be a sloshing mix of many diverse influences, it will be wholly me.
For what else could it be?
Free books:
There’s this burning, bursting need within me, I must admit
If we look statistically at how many books Americans read per year, I may have read more books this year than you’ve read in the last thirty
Right now my obsession is children’s literature because I was reading Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files and I was thinking about my many nieces and nephews, my own children, and the mechanics of a story, of a long running narrative that people tie themselves to, Harrypotterly, and I also, on a whim, picked up The Spiderwick Chronicles by Holly Black and found it such a delight and surprise and my own son is picking up real life books from the library to read quietly to himself, which still shocks me for the simple profundity of time’s movement over and through our lives, but so and I got this idea for a children’s story and I decided to shotgun fifteen books because what else would I do with my time and now I feel this world swimming up to my eyeballs and soon—maybe this evening—I’ll be writing the very first words in it.
Listen, I cannot explain what every word means when I use it.
There would not be over 400 essays sitting here if I didn’t
My problem is that I undertake a novel as a thought experiment, suck the marrow from the bones of that idea, and then by the time I'm well into querying, I have moved on so decidedly that I no longer "believe in" the thought experiment. I might still enjoy the characters and story on some level, but I don't BELIEVE them. If such a novel were to get through the publishing pipeline in a couple years, I would be the scapegoat of its target audience for I have transcended its version of reality and moved on to something else -- most likely something they'll hate.
The universe is bringing me DFW today. Synchronicity happens.