Catnip for me, and I'll have to circle back for a full comment, but I'd say in conjunction with your point about the Hamburg crucible, that writing is not only in the doing, but in the reading. One of the truly depressing features of publishing now is that it so often does not offer a fertile source of ideas for one's own writing or for craft. I find myself defaulting to slightly older texts as touchstones for new material. And I rarely find a Substack essay that spurs me to create in quite the way that an exquisite book or film always does. Wouldn't you agree, Sam, that one must read voraciously to also write well?
Use of constraints eg leaving out a particular letter, and other techniques, eg n+7 take each noun in a piecve of writing and replace it with the noun seven entries aloing in a dictionary. I reviewed three books about it, which will give you more info: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/three-collections-of-oulipo-writing
Thanks Josh! I think reading is by far the hardest, most complicated part of writing - and I feel like it needs a whole other discussion. On the one hand, yes, it's absolutely essential. There's a really interesting Annie Baker interview where she says something like, "There is only one way to get better as a writer, and that's to read a ton, but for some reason it makes everybody very upset when I say that." On the other hand, there's a quote with Samuel Beckett later in his life where he was asked about his favorite books and he said that he was very sorry but he'd been too busy writing and just hadn't had time to read.
There are a few very difficult things to deal with in reading. There's somebody else's voice and worldview leaking into your own. There's the feeling of authority that one tends to give an already-written text, the feeling that what I'm doing doesn't really matter since there are so many great books out there and I might as well just read instead. And there's the very fraught relationship with people whom we feel are doing something close to us but are just doing it better - I've had real physical pain when I've come across people like that. There are points in the process where, I think, you have to put away all your books, forget everything you've ever read, and write as if you're the only writer in the world.
I think navigating that dynamic especially throughout one's formative period is just about the most difficult thing that writers have to do - but, yes, I'm basically with Baker. Reading is essential and the more the better. My favorite quote about this comes from some medieval Persian and he says something along the lines of: "You can begin writing once you've memorized one thousand Persian poems and then forgotten all of them."
Hey Paul Wittenberger, thanks for all your recent making hay. You have been sending out 'machines for consc's' consciousness that catch us at the right loudness level of lyrical. Appreciate your privileging of the intense voice in writing letters to lovers. People are reading your poems because you write a good title and then the what follows after. Yup. Hay, Paulbwttnbrgr? How do they say t word Yes where you are living? In my Toledo we say 'yup'
Thank you for such an insightful article on the skill and the vocation of writing. I come from the land of teaching grammar and comma splices, and I know that good writing doesn't suffer fools who mindlessly follow rules. Two notes: First, inspiration sometimes trumps editing. Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery" while walking her baby. The short story is a first draft. Sometimes leaving work alone is best. Second, popularity of the memoir has arisen in relation to the selfie. Everyone seems to want to turn eyes toward self. True writers see the world differently, as you note. A writer listens, observes, reflects. A writer-- as Silas House remarks-- may never write a word and still be "a writer "
Thanks so much Cathy and very happy to have agreement from the land of comma splices! I was lucky to have good English teachers and all of that baked into me from early on. A good understanding of grammar is essential, but then - I agree - the rules are just a staging ground for breaking them. It's given me such pleasure when I realized that I preferred starting sentences with 'And' and 'But' to starting them, really, any other way; that repetition could be very effective; that I often preferred passive to active verbs, etc. It's been interesting to me how many professional editor types seem not to have realized that and approach what they read like it's a middle school copy book.
Wow. That was fucking freeing. That machine you write of. I developed one as a survival mechanism. My childhood was fractured, fearful and I was left to my own devices, often for weeks on end. With no one to talk to or with I took to writing to myself in order to make sense of the stranger’s world I found myself enduring.
There is so much wrong with all the little "rituals" the mainstream tells writers they have to do; the kitschiness of it all is only the beginning. You've addressed many. I never understood the need to destroy a first draft; maybe chapters, but as you said it's an attempt to try and formulate an empty craft. You'd find the writer Can Xue interesting: she claims that she only writes one draft and her novels are complete. It might be possible with Chinese pictograms.
Also found feedback to be fairly useless; especially with poetry. I thought one friend was giving good feedback until I realized my type of novels just weren't his type, and that his negative feedback was in fact a stylistic disinterest. In the era of compartmentalized target audiences, feedback is simply not as reliable as it was in the old days. As for "show don't tell," you're preaching to the choir. Writers today can't seem to hide how blatant and systematic they are with detail. Once one finds a conduit for their heart and intellect to express itself in literary artistry, things like style and craft tend to take care of themselves. I also don't heavily revise my posts because I don't need to: the craft more or less works itself out. My only issue is length; amusing, given that I like novellas where fiction is concerned.
What you said about writing being like a last statement in the court is very important, though in autofiction some authors take the whole confessional tone way too far; this, of course, is why l'Etranger is such an important novel. As a metaphor of the literary act, it's like seeing the process from the outside and the inside. For what it's worth, in the Art of Fiction interviews the lion's share of great authors took classes in the history of their literature, if they did take classes. (Meaning American writers should know American lit well) And virtually every one of them said that going to university to "learn to write" is not the answer.
Really agreed with all of that Felix. 'Kill your babies' and destroy the first draft have always been very perplexing to me. Apparently, it does work for some writers. Hemingway and Thurber apparently would write some unbelievable number of drafts. I just don't think it's the only way or even the best way.
The dislike of autofiction on this platform is I guess explicable in the age of its supposed ascendancy. But good autofiction is not memoir with the names changed, its narrative shaped from real events and ordered by a writer. I’m not saying there isn’t bad autofiction but I am saying you and Barkan and others really seem to think it’s aesthetically daring to dis autofiction in broad strokes. It is in fact a failure of the literary imagination, and a lazy take to get likes on a deeply stupid platform that has self-selected for contrarian and self-congratulatory puffery rather than seriously engaged literatteurs. I think that you are better than that, but this reflexive need to swipe at something, to imagine that there is an “outside” of the mainstream no co-opted by capitalism and market forces, is naive and tiresome. You’re too late.
Interesting Moravagine. Thank you for the note. I'd be curious to know what are some of the instances of autofiction that you think are really superlative. You're right that I was being flippant here. I definitely felt the power of some of the earlier bouts of autofiction when it was catching on - Leaving the Atocha Station, for instance. But I definitely feel that it's calcified, particularly within the publishing industry, and at the expense of writers' imaginations. And I also think this was fully predictable from some of the inherent limitations of the form. But very happy to argue this further! - Sam
I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail but I will say that Auster, Modiano, and conceptual artist Sophie Calle play with the conventions and mode of autofiction in interesting and fruitful ways.
Jean genet, obviously, took it to some delirious extremes.
Henry miller, Nin, Kerouac, and Roth all worked in it in varying ways and with some success in the States. Most of Lew Welch’s poetry too.
Javier Cercas has written a number of “true novels” but at least one was explicitly autofiction. And then there are Malaparte, Luiselli, and the Surrealists: Nadja and Mad Love, Dorothea carrington’e novels, Vache. Cendrars, hence my nym.
Being an inadvertent sexist I haven’t yet read much ernaux or cusk, but even the more conventional Anne Berest’s the Postcard (which features guest appearances by Francis Picabia and others) is quite good.
I think it’s at least arguable that osamu dezai and to a lesser extent Oe were approaching autofiction in some of their works, too.
I guess my point is really that there is a big tradition well before Lerner (who I passed in undergrad) and Knausgaard (who is astonishingly boring in his interests and interesting in his dullness - he is a master class in how to write suspensefully about nothing, even and especially when it’s boring).
I’ll grant you that publishers are likely looking for a narrow range of the stuff at present but that has ever been thus and you should just go browse two dollar radio’s catalogue or the Koch-funded one, catapult, which published an ok autofiction by hermione hobe.
Thumbs down on Josh F.'s "A Calling For Charlie Barnes?"
Fiction scares me precisely because of the requirements you give for writing it well. A well-balanced life and that writing machine/daemon can be deadly foes.
Haha! I still need to read that. I guess I feel this need to dunk on Ferris for rhetorical purposes and so am reluctant to read the book that might force me to change my perception! Then We Came To The End really is one of the best novels I've ever read - certainly one of the best about work life, which I really agree with you, is very under discussed in fiction - and I was very shocked at the fall-off in his next few books. But he really has it and I should read the more recent stuff.
Speaking as a guy who grew up as a copywriter in ad agencies, I agree: Then We Came To The End is a great workplace novel, a great novel about ad agencies, and a great—and under-appreciated—novel, period. The idea that the people in the office become a kind of gestalt, and that it changes as people leave and join, is pretty brilliant, as is the idea that we all really all fictions to each other. (Maybe neither of those ideas is earth shattering, but the execution is great.) This was one of the biggest oversights on the NYT list.
And, yes: I think A Calling For Charlie Barnes is at least a partial return to form.
And thanks for this piece, Sam. Most copywriters I know edit themselves as they go. There's no time for shitty first drafts in a create-on-demand world. I've found this kind of polish-as-you-go style of editing works for my creative writing, too.
At the end of my screenwriting studies I had a chat with the professor and he told me that he was impressed with the fact that no matter the assignment, I kept on writing my weird little sci-fi stories unphased by any need to score points with the teachers. 🤣 I didn’t quite get it at that time but now I know what the problem was: I was making use of my imagination. Fortunately, the professor was a gamer and he liked little weird sci-fi stories.
Claidia Befu you speak my mind. A good picture of this is some committed anti- the market machine-, and a good enough writer on Counterpunch or here says in a leed:" enough of post apoclyptc scifi". That clan has read books on inter? In-the-city campaigning for a little bit of cotrol ,that they never forget that the rubber meets t road in a similar order of presentation of facts. But in plain English i have read 5 lets say sci fi that have an automatic participatory ride in my apprehension of the present AND STILL that to write in the sci fi vein is admittance from some of us who have feeling bones into oh multiple things, into longform, and lots of things, always more conversations than in precious poetry, right, and the shame level? Zero.
Totally! I've found it interesting these stories about how people go through MFAs/writing programs in some sort of opposition to what the program is doing and that seems to work out for them. I don't have much criticism of MFAs - probably, on the whole, it's good for writers to be in an environment where writing is prioritized - but it is striking how much people seem to need to stake out their own ground to get anything from the program. - Sam
Hi Sam, I honestly didn't realise that I was going against the 'tide' until the teacher told me that at the end of the program. I was very fixated on writing my story and developing my secondary world. Anyhow, my ideas were too 'high concept' to do anything with them. I was advised to try Apple TV 😅. So now I'm writing on Substack.
That's me as well, I was lucky to begin a CW degree as a mature student, knowing ahead of time exactly what I was going to hate about it. On the other hand, there just is a lot of technical knowledge in those buildings, and you can't help but pick something up while you're there, whether because you like it or loathe it.
Thank you Ann. It's really amazing to me how much people think that some form of 'tough love' or 'constructive criticism' are what writers need. I think it's almost always just time to write, and encouragement that what they're doing is worthwhile even without direct outside affirmation.
That’s a very refreshing take, Sam! I particularly like the passage on confidence. Having both attended and taught many writing classes, I think the problem with the kind of writing advice you discuss is that it generalizes formal rules without helping to figure out when they make sense and when not, which is a matter of taste, judgment, a sense of appropriateness. E.g., people fear they are bad writers when they love a first draft. Most of the time, their drafts probably are shitty, but maybe this particular draft is excellent. So why not keep it? Because the pros and big shots insist that writing is rewriting? This is where confidence comes in and all the other dispositions that cannot be taught but only encouraged.
Thank you Dirk. Yes, I think that everybody is well-meaning and offering generally decent advice on its own terms. I am mostly arguing here with some ideas that, mostly through repetition, have gotten embedded in the culture and pass for timeless verities - even if they may be only one approach to writing out of many. Glad you agree that confidence is king! I had a few teachers (acting, mostly) who basically threw out the whole curriculum and just encouraged students to play and to love themselves. They were invaluable and I think all students need that somewhere along the line.
Loved all this. I do find a lot of the gold in revision, personally, but maybe that's because I came up as a reporter? But the metastizing acknowledgements, that's so dead on. Political act vs weird solo art. 'What you know' as the autofiction black hole: yes. Confidence as a process of elimination: why does this take so long for some of us to learn? Back to the machine, I got typing to do. Thanks, man!
Thanks Dan! Enjoy the typing! Reporting is a tough one. In the case of creative or personal writing, you can usually sense the outer limit to one's world. But in reporting there are two limiting agents, there's the organic shape of a story, which is usually sprawling and complicated, and then there are the column inches available to it, which usually are vanishingly small. I always found it impressive the kinds of people who could ruthlessly chop away at material to get clean copy, but it seemed to be a different type of brain (as well as different values) from what I had. - Sam
Thank you for taking on "show don't tell." A good general principle that it often makes sense to break. Sometimes, you just gotta tell, and it's a lot more effective way to get the story out. I have only ever read one novel that was 100% showing, namely "The Maltese Falcon." And while that's a very efficiently (and dare I say cinematically) told story, it has to leave a lot out (i.e. you find out very little about Sam Spade's background, why he got into detective work, his or anyone else's family life, etc).
Cinematic yes, efficient no. Like in a movie where we see only what the main character sees, the third-person “narrator” of The Maltese Falcon sticks close to Spade’s side: every chapter is about Spade. This limitation means if anything happens elsewhere, somewhere that Spade isn’t, someone else has to tell about it in Spade’s presence. For example, with the shooting of Captain Jacobi, we learn about it in a roundabout way via lots of dialogue rather than see it occur. And the narrator exists only in the “present,” so can’t give us Spade’s past; only dialogue can give us that.
I’m not sure if those are even show vs. tell things, but rather detective fiction conventions, where we get only what the detective gets, when he gets it, often via dialogue.
Where the “show” comes in is how the character of Spade is revealed. With Spade, this is most notable in the earlier case he relates, about Flitcraft and the falling beam (arguably the most interesting thing in the novel). This was omitted entirely from John Huston’s film adaptation, probably because it would have been one very long speech in an already very talkie movie.
Yes, dialogue has to do a lot of heavy lifting in a story like that. And I agree that the "Flitcraft Parable" is the most interesting thing in the book.
There is a wickedness of Things in that thing about the techinicolor that I want to point up. Without legitimizing the bible, or any other fact of our times, 70 millimeter film stock could have made some of the movies in your spotlight of attntn worth watching as a entoto event. Say Cleopatra, Two Women, Alphaville, Spartacus and the Getaway. But instead using it to cover a more than paper tiger but in a sense just a paper tiger like Charlton Heston , it vitiates the guts out of lets say that there is a costume drama The Fall of the Romanempire actually starring Sophia Lauren, that gives back what you came for. And as you say, i would make a strangervnew acquaintance watch a few minutes of Girard or the Napoleon Dynamight director or I Have Got One: it is called "george wasington" about a young man in North Carolina and you if you watch it will like its slice of life.
Almost certain the clouds dumping frogs in Magnolia movie was PTHs entry to this comments. That film was done on 35 mm, and if you want to- say it was referrencing 10 Commandments. In our other words, that smaller events bloom fitfully beautifully in a good movie. He then seconds this emotion by not showing the There Will Be Blood actor carrying his gold strike the ten miles to town, limiting the action to keep us present for the actors' tics and for the good long shoots.
Totally totally. These things are mostly about distribution mechanisms. In the '50s, all films were out of the Hollywood machine, so they did what machines do, just polish themselves endlessly. And then with the New Wave, some new distribution mechanisms emerged (as well as an ability to make things cheaper) and what they were producing was so much wilder and freer and plainly better than anything else from the studios.
I think we're in a similar moment. There's 'filter world' where the distribution mechanisms are all in place and it's just a matter of slotting in 'content,' which always has to be slick and well-produced. And then there's where creativity actually lives, which is always wilder and more unpredictable. That kind of creativity always has trouble finding its distribution mechanisms but this sort of enhanced social media, like Substack, is really encouraging.
This is subjective but I see more programs with actors who are clearly better than the scripts they have to follow. I sense an aching and impatience in them, like they're anxious to bust through but can't.
I think lots of people feel that way about what passes for culture, like we're waiting for someone to call bullshit on all this.
Catnip for me, and I'll have to circle back for a full comment, but I'd say in conjunction with your point about the Hamburg crucible, that writing is not only in the doing, but in the reading. One of the truly depressing features of publishing now is that it so often does not offer a fertile source of ideas for one's own writing or for craft. I find myself defaulting to slightly older texts as touchstones for new material. And I rarely find a Substack essay that spurs me to create in quite the way that an exquisite book or film always does. Wouldn't you agree, Sam, that one must read voraciously to also write well?
Every time I have writer’s block, I know it’s time to pick up a book and fill the tank.
I use an Oulipo technique or two -- or read a book!
Never heard of the 'Oulipo technique'... what does it do?
Use of constraints eg leaving out a particular letter, and other techniques, eg n+7 take each noun in a piecve of writing and replace it with the noun seven entries aloing in a dictionary. I reviewed three books about it, which will give you more info: https://terryfreedman.substack.com/p/three-collections-of-oulipo-writing
Wow, this sounds too complicated for my brain! 😅
don't be daft! It's a huge amount of fun. Come to London next July and do my course! https://www.citylit.ac.uk/courses/creative-writing-using-constraints
Thanks Josh! I think reading is by far the hardest, most complicated part of writing - and I feel like it needs a whole other discussion. On the one hand, yes, it's absolutely essential. There's a really interesting Annie Baker interview where she says something like, "There is only one way to get better as a writer, and that's to read a ton, but for some reason it makes everybody very upset when I say that." On the other hand, there's a quote with Samuel Beckett later in his life where he was asked about his favorite books and he said that he was very sorry but he'd been too busy writing and just hadn't had time to read.
There are a few very difficult things to deal with in reading. There's somebody else's voice and worldview leaking into your own. There's the feeling of authority that one tends to give an already-written text, the feeling that what I'm doing doesn't really matter since there are so many great books out there and I might as well just read instead. And there's the very fraught relationship with people whom we feel are doing something close to us but are just doing it better - I've had real physical pain when I've come across people like that. There are points in the process where, I think, you have to put away all your books, forget everything you've ever read, and write as if you're the only writer in the world.
I think navigating that dynamic especially throughout one's formative period is just about the most difficult thing that writers have to do - but, yes, I'm basically with Baker. Reading is essential and the more the better. My favorite quote about this comes from some medieval Persian and he says something along the lines of: "You can begin writing once you've memorized one thousand Persian poems and then forgotten all of them."
Cheers!
Sam
Love the Persian epigram, Sam. I don't agree with all your points but you make them with aplomb. Thanks and keep up the good work.
Good ideas throughout. Thank you!
Hey Paul Wittenberger, thanks for all your recent making hay. You have been sending out 'machines for consc's' consciousness that catch us at the right loudness level of lyrical. Appreciate your privileging of the intense voice in writing letters to lovers. People are reading your poems because you write a good title and then the what follows after. Yup. Hay, Paulbwttnbrgr? How do they say t word Yes where you are living? In my Toledo we say 'yup'
Thanks for your kind and generous words, Nathan. We say ‘yup’, ‘yep’, & yes
Uh huh yep. In Oregon is funny, they say this network news perfect Ye'ss . As in t word dress.
Thank you Paul!
Great essay-swallowed it-thank you, Sam
(I wonder if "great" here means "I agree"? lol)
Signature: not-a-writer
Haha! Thank you so much Chen!
Thank you for such an insightful article on the skill and the vocation of writing. I come from the land of teaching grammar and comma splices, and I know that good writing doesn't suffer fools who mindlessly follow rules. Two notes: First, inspiration sometimes trumps editing. Shirley Jackson wrote "The Lottery" while walking her baby. The short story is a first draft. Sometimes leaving work alone is best. Second, popularity of the memoir has arisen in relation to the selfie. Everyone seems to want to turn eyes toward self. True writers see the world differently, as you note. A writer listens, observes, reflects. A writer-- as Silas House remarks-- may never write a word and still be "a writer "
Thanks so much Cathy and very happy to have agreement from the land of comma splices! I was lucky to have good English teachers and all of that baked into me from early on. A good understanding of grammar is essential, but then - I agree - the rules are just a staging ground for breaking them. It's given me such pleasure when I realized that I preferred starting sentences with 'And' and 'But' to starting them, really, any other way; that repetition could be very effective; that I often preferred passive to active verbs, etc. It's been interesting to me how many professional editor types seem not to have realized that and approach what they read like it's a middle school copy book.
Wow. That was fucking freeing. That machine you write of. I developed one as a survival mechanism. My childhood was fractured, fearful and I was left to my own devices, often for weeks on end. With no one to talk to or with I took to writing to myself in order to make sense of the stranger’s world I found myself enduring.
Looking back, this isolation was a writer’s gift.
Thank you Monnina! Yes, I think detachment can save us sometimes.
There is so much wrong with all the little "rituals" the mainstream tells writers they have to do; the kitschiness of it all is only the beginning. You've addressed many. I never understood the need to destroy a first draft; maybe chapters, but as you said it's an attempt to try and formulate an empty craft. You'd find the writer Can Xue interesting: she claims that she only writes one draft and her novels are complete. It might be possible with Chinese pictograms.
Also found feedback to be fairly useless; especially with poetry. I thought one friend was giving good feedback until I realized my type of novels just weren't his type, and that his negative feedback was in fact a stylistic disinterest. In the era of compartmentalized target audiences, feedback is simply not as reliable as it was in the old days. As for "show don't tell," you're preaching to the choir. Writers today can't seem to hide how blatant and systematic they are with detail. Once one finds a conduit for their heart and intellect to express itself in literary artistry, things like style and craft tend to take care of themselves. I also don't heavily revise my posts because I don't need to: the craft more or less works itself out. My only issue is length; amusing, given that I like novellas where fiction is concerned.
What you said about writing being like a last statement in the court is very important, though in autofiction some authors take the whole confessional tone way too far; this, of course, is why l'Etranger is such an important novel. As a metaphor of the literary act, it's like seeing the process from the outside and the inside. For what it's worth, in the Art of Fiction interviews the lion's share of great authors took classes in the history of their literature, if they did take classes. (Meaning American writers should know American lit well) And virtually every one of them said that going to university to "learn to write" is not the answer.
Really agreed with all of that Felix. 'Kill your babies' and destroy the first draft have always been very perplexing to me. Apparently, it does work for some writers. Hemingway and Thurber apparently would write some unbelievable number of drafts. I just don't think it's the only way or even the best way.
The dislike of autofiction on this platform is I guess explicable in the age of its supposed ascendancy. But good autofiction is not memoir with the names changed, its narrative shaped from real events and ordered by a writer. I’m not saying there isn’t bad autofiction but I am saying you and Barkan and others really seem to think it’s aesthetically daring to dis autofiction in broad strokes. It is in fact a failure of the literary imagination, and a lazy take to get likes on a deeply stupid platform that has self-selected for contrarian and self-congratulatory puffery rather than seriously engaged literatteurs. I think that you are better than that, but this reflexive need to swipe at something, to imagine that there is an “outside” of the mainstream no co-opted by capitalism and market forces, is naive and tiresome. You’re too late.
Interesting Moravagine. Thank you for the note. I'd be curious to know what are some of the instances of autofiction that you think are really superlative. You're right that I was being flippant here. I definitely felt the power of some of the earlier bouts of autofiction when it was catching on - Leaving the Atocha Station, for instance. But I definitely feel that it's calcified, particularly within the publishing industry, and at the expense of writers' imaginations. And I also think this was fully predictable from some of the inherent limitations of the form. But very happy to argue this further! - Sam
I don’t have time to go into a lot of detail but I will say that Auster, Modiano, and conceptual artist Sophie Calle play with the conventions and mode of autofiction in interesting and fruitful ways.
Jean genet, obviously, took it to some delirious extremes.
Henry miller, Nin, Kerouac, and Roth all worked in it in varying ways and with some success in the States. Most of Lew Welch’s poetry too.
Javier Cercas has written a number of “true novels” but at least one was explicitly autofiction. And then there are Malaparte, Luiselli, and the Surrealists: Nadja and Mad Love, Dorothea carrington’e novels, Vache. Cendrars, hence my nym.
Being an inadvertent sexist I haven’t yet read much ernaux or cusk, but even the more conventional Anne Berest’s the Postcard (which features guest appearances by Francis Picabia and others) is quite good.
I think it’s at least arguable that osamu dezai and to a lesser extent Oe were approaching autofiction in some of their works, too.
I guess my point is really that there is a big tradition well before Lerner (who I passed in undergrad) and Knausgaard (who is astonishingly boring in his interests and interesting in his dullness - he is a master class in how to write suspensefully about nothing, even and especially when it’s boring).
I’ll grant you that publishers are likely looking for a narrow range of the stuff at present but that has ever been thus and you should just go browse two dollar radio’s catalogue or the Koch-funded one, catapult, which published an ok autofiction by hermione hobe.
Thumbs down on Josh F.'s "A Calling For Charlie Barnes?"
Fiction scares me precisely because of the requirements you give for writing it well. A well-balanced life and that writing machine/daemon can be deadly foes.
A valuable essay, Sam.
Haha! I still need to read that. I guess I feel this need to dunk on Ferris for rhetorical purposes and so am reluctant to read the book that might force me to change my perception! Then We Came To The End really is one of the best novels I've ever read - certainly one of the best about work life, which I really agree with you, is very under discussed in fiction - and I was very shocked at the fall-off in his next few books. But he really has it and I should read the more recent stuff.
Speaking as a guy who grew up as a copywriter in ad agencies, I agree: Then We Came To The End is a great workplace novel, a great novel about ad agencies, and a great—and under-appreciated—novel, period. The idea that the people in the office become a kind of gestalt, and that it changes as people leave and join, is pretty brilliant, as is the idea that we all really all fictions to each other. (Maybe neither of those ideas is earth shattering, but the execution is great.) This was one of the biggest oversights on the NYT list.
And, yes: I think A Calling For Charlie Barnes is at least a partial return to form.
And thanks for this piece, Sam. Most copywriters I know edit themselves as they go. There's no time for shitty first drafts in a create-on-demand world. I've found this kind of polish-as-you-go style of editing works for my creative writing, too.
At the end of my screenwriting studies I had a chat with the professor and he told me that he was impressed with the fact that no matter the assignment, I kept on writing my weird little sci-fi stories unphased by any need to score points with the teachers. 🤣 I didn’t quite get it at that time but now I know what the problem was: I was making use of my imagination. Fortunately, the professor was a gamer and he liked little weird sci-fi stories.
Claidia Befu you speak my mind. A good picture of this is some committed anti- the market machine-, and a good enough writer on Counterpunch or here says in a leed:" enough of post apoclyptc scifi". That clan has read books on inter? In-the-city campaigning for a little bit of cotrol ,that they never forget that the rubber meets t road in a similar order of presentation of facts. But in plain English i have read 5 lets say sci fi that have an automatic participatory ride in my apprehension of the present AND STILL that to write in the sci fi vein is admittance from some of us who have feeling bones into oh multiple things, into longform, and lots of things, always more conversations than in precious poetry, right, and the shame level? Zero.
Totally! I've found it interesting these stories about how people go through MFAs/writing programs in some sort of opposition to what the program is doing and that seems to work out for them. I don't have much criticism of MFAs - probably, on the whole, it's good for writers to be in an environment where writing is prioritized - but it is striking how much people seem to need to stake out their own ground to get anything from the program. - Sam
Hi Sam, I honestly didn't realise that I was going against the 'tide' until the teacher told me that at the end of the program. I was very fixated on writing my story and developing my secondary world. Anyhow, my ideas were too 'high concept' to do anything with them. I was advised to try Apple TV 😅. So now I'm writing on Substack.
That's me as well, I was lucky to begin a CW degree as a mature student, knowing ahead of time exactly what I was going to hate about it. On the other hand, there just is a lot of technical knowledge in those buildings, and you can't help but pick something up while you're there, whether because you like it or loathe it.
“It’s just endless encouragement — and compassion.“
It’s simpler than we want to believe.
And, sadly, compassion is not usually part of the Core Curriculum.
Thank you for giving your voice to these ideas.
Thank you Ann. It's really amazing to me how much people think that some form of 'tough love' or 'constructive criticism' are what writers need. I think it's almost always just time to write, and encouragement that what they're doing is worthwhile even without direct outside affirmation.
That’s a very refreshing take, Sam! I particularly like the passage on confidence. Having both attended and taught many writing classes, I think the problem with the kind of writing advice you discuss is that it generalizes formal rules without helping to figure out when they make sense and when not, which is a matter of taste, judgment, a sense of appropriateness. E.g., people fear they are bad writers when they love a first draft. Most of the time, their drafts probably are shitty, but maybe this particular draft is excellent. So why not keep it? Because the pros and big shots insist that writing is rewriting? This is where confidence comes in and all the other dispositions that cannot be taught but only encouraged.
Thank you Dirk. Yes, I think that everybody is well-meaning and offering generally decent advice on its own terms. I am mostly arguing here with some ideas that, mostly through repetition, have gotten embedded in the culture and pass for timeless verities - even if they may be only one approach to writing out of many. Glad you agree that confidence is king! I had a few teachers (acting, mostly) who basically threw out the whole curriculum and just encouraged students to play and to love themselves. They were invaluable and I think all students need that somewhere along the line.
Sam, I simply couldn’t understand a single word you’ve written here. Would you like my editor’s number?
Niice.
Haha! Thank you Adrian!
Loved all this. I do find a lot of the gold in revision, personally, but maybe that's because I came up as a reporter? But the metastizing acknowledgements, that's so dead on. Political act vs weird solo art. 'What you know' as the autofiction black hole: yes. Confidence as a process of elimination: why does this take so long for some of us to learn? Back to the machine, I got typing to do. Thanks, man!
Thanks Dan! Enjoy the typing! Reporting is a tough one. In the case of creative or personal writing, you can usually sense the outer limit to one's world. But in reporting there are two limiting agents, there's the organic shape of a story, which is usually sprawling and complicated, and then there are the column inches available to it, which usually are vanishingly small. I always found it impressive the kinds of people who could ruthlessly chop away at material to get clean copy, but it seemed to be a different type of brain (as well as different values) from what I had. - Sam
maybe not categorically everything....
Thank you for taking on "show don't tell." A good general principle that it often makes sense to break. Sometimes, you just gotta tell, and it's a lot more effective way to get the story out. I have only ever read one novel that was 100% showing, namely "The Maltese Falcon." And while that's a very efficiently (and dare I say cinematically) told story, it has to leave a lot out (i.e. you find out very little about Sam Spade's background, why he got into detective work, his or anyone else's family life, etc).
Cinematic yes, efficient no. Like in a movie where we see only what the main character sees, the third-person “narrator” of The Maltese Falcon sticks close to Spade’s side: every chapter is about Spade. This limitation means if anything happens elsewhere, somewhere that Spade isn’t, someone else has to tell about it in Spade’s presence. For example, with the shooting of Captain Jacobi, we learn about it in a roundabout way via lots of dialogue rather than see it occur. And the narrator exists only in the “present,” so can’t give us Spade’s past; only dialogue can give us that.
I’m not sure if those are even show vs. tell things, but rather detective fiction conventions, where we get only what the detective gets, when he gets it, often via dialogue.
Where the “show” comes in is how the character of Spade is revealed. With Spade, this is most notable in the earlier case he relates, about Flitcraft and the falling beam (arguably the most interesting thing in the novel). This was omitted entirely from John Huston’s film adaptation, probably because it would have been one very long speech in an already very talkie movie.
Yes, dialogue has to do a lot of heavy lifting in a story like that. And I agree that the "Flitcraft Parable" is the most interesting thing in the book.
Funny, I was just thinking about The Maltese Falcon today and how I need to read it. Moving higher on the list!
We need to stop trying to achieve perfection because perfection is boring.
I'd like to see more books and films and paintings with all the hair on, that are not smooth and modulated and product tested.
There was a period in the mid to late sixties when people stopped going to the big, technicolor bible epics Hollywood churned out.
That was when more daring films emerged, ones that sought to portray the lives of ordinary people who weren't ordinary at all.
We need that now more than ever.
There is a wickedness of Things in that thing about the techinicolor that I want to point up. Without legitimizing the bible, or any other fact of our times, 70 millimeter film stock could have made some of the movies in your spotlight of attntn worth watching as a entoto event. Say Cleopatra, Two Women, Alphaville, Spartacus and the Getaway. But instead using it to cover a more than paper tiger but in a sense just a paper tiger like Charlton Heston , it vitiates the guts out of lets say that there is a costume drama The Fall of the Romanempire actually starring Sophia Lauren, that gives back what you came for. And as you say, i would make a strangervnew acquaintance watch a few minutes of Girard or the Napoleon Dynamight director or I Have Got One: it is called "george wasington" about a young man in North Carolina and you if you watch it will like its slice of life.
Wickedness of things in Technicolor is right.
Almost certain the clouds dumping frogs in Magnolia movie was PTHs entry to this comments. That film was done on 35 mm, and if you want to- say it was referrencing 10 Commandments. In our other words, that smaller events bloom fitfully beautifully in a good movie. He then seconds this emotion by not showing the There Will Be Blood actor carrying his gold strike the ten miles to town, limiting the action to keep us present for the actors' tics and for the good long shoots.
Totally totally. These things are mostly about distribution mechanisms. In the '50s, all films were out of the Hollywood machine, so they did what machines do, just polish themselves endlessly. And then with the New Wave, some new distribution mechanisms emerged (as well as an ability to make things cheaper) and what they were producing was so much wilder and freer and plainly better than anything else from the studios.
I think we're in a similar moment. There's 'filter world' where the distribution mechanisms are all in place and it's just a matter of slotting in 'content,' which always has to be slick and well-produced. And then there's where creativity actually lives, which is always wilder and more unpredictable. That kind of creativity always has trouble finding its distribution mechanisms but this sort of enhanced social media, like Substack, is really encouraging.
This is subjective but I see more programs with actors who are clearly better than the scripts they have to follow. I sense an aching and impatience in them, like they're anxious to bust through but can't.
I think lots of people feel that way about what passes for culture, like we're waiting for someone to call bullshit on all this.