Hard agree. The tendency to argue from outliers is just really bad practice. I don't care about your unicorns; I do think that in most cases, experience teaches (among other things) rhythm, ear, style, and crucially a sense of humour (which is really a sense of proportion). Those sheltered greenhorns whose only personality is the books they read between ten and twenty often produce mumblecore garbage because they simply have not had the time to do, or listen, or reflect, or synthesise.
VERY good point re: a sense of humour, there's nothing that hardens that instinct more that the lack of proportion you're referring to, and almost all of the best literature is able to have a bit of humour about itself (something also often ignored by a lot of people within the academy, because something "funny" doesn't seem dignified enough to study)
Well, during all of this I spent about ten years dilettanting around university. I lucked out with my government student loans and was able to get about $12k a year in grants (not even loans, just totally free money) to take a few courses a year. I switched around a lot because I couldn't choose what I wanted to (plus, the drugs and mania) and wound up in linguistics (with a focus on cognitive linguistics) and philosophy (with a focus on philosophy of language and theory of mind), but I also wound up for a bit in Jewish studies.
As I mentioned, I went to a very Jewish school for two years, and I formed a lot of lifelong friends there, which led to me participating in a lot of Jewish holidays, and a lot of my first romantic experiences wound up being with Jewish girls, all of which compounded into a lifelong fascination with Judaism (I think the Jewish girls possibly played a disproportionate role in that, at least early on). While studying Jewish studies I decided (again, drugs and mania playing a major factor) that I needed to dedicate myself to a study of Jewish philosophy and become a spiritual leader. This was after a period in which I was trying to find a way to upload my brain to the internet (I had been working on some sort of hyperlink web on my computer I was convinced to make after reading a Ray Kurzweil book) and find immortality and "The Cyber God."
I think there is one more element to add for a good writer to have and that is “reverence” or “deep respect” for that which they are writing about. the napoleon example stood out to me because everyone is praising his letters to his wife rn on twitter saying he was a “real yearner” yet I do agree most of his writing is shit and reads like a little boy… he did not have reverence for anything in this world (the closest he got was that wife that he dumped eventually) and I believe that is why his writing remained so elementary. it is likely why people’s writing is elementary now. they want to have status of author but have no respect for the craft of writing… if they did I wouldn’t be finding so many goddamn chat gpt prompts in the free little library books.
Absolutely. Napoleon was also just too single-minded imo to produce the thoughtfulness to reflect seriously on his experience, which is perhaps a good quality for a military general (or an athlete -- DFW's piece on Tracy Austin comes to mind) but not a writer. His fiction, which many people forget he wrote, is terrible. This is a man who ate basically the exact same meal every night for a lot of his life. Very little mattered to him outside of his goals. When he saw the Pyramids of Giza he had a moment of profundity and then immediately began to scheme over using them for their morale potential to his troops -- it was always all about the campaign.
People with cool experiences can just hire a ghost writer to write their bibliography and nobody cares- readers are in it for the life-story. The magic is when good writers write about everyday experiences and make them extraordinary. Or write about extraordinary experiences and make them ordinary.
Really enjoyed this. Yes, I don't know anything about you, but I've had a bunch of rich, diverse, frightening, and mystifying experiences somewhat like the ones you describe in this piece. So, if I may, I feel like you're a brother, someone I'd enjoy having a beer with. Okay, I'm through ingratiating myself. About your article. I think this whole debate is 'chicken or egg' based on the singularity of choices. (I hope I phrased that right.) It's not experience vs writing talent, is the proper balance of the two, as you know, and have fleshed out here.
I don't agree with Barkan and Pistelli, especially Pistelli when he states that 'people increasingly have similar types of experiences. Take Franz, who shot himself through the hand when he was cleaning his rifle in the barracks--and Claude, who shot himself through the heart in 'Nam after receiving a 'dear john' letter from his girl, Jodi. Similar. But worlds apart.
The other thing he describes, this growing 'international' middle class. I think the glue that is between them is very thin. Yeah, maybe financially a techie couple from Silicon Valley has a few things--wealth, love of AI and gizmos--in common with a techie couple from Beijing, but not much. Having been married to someone of a different culture/race, I discovered that over time, a lot of differences arise making the relationship 'challenging.'
I like what you say about Pepys and Cheever, having read them both (well, about half of Pepsys memoir, I'll go back at some point to finish it). Why do I like this relationship you bring up? Because I once worked as an apprentice blacksmith at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and I've brought the various sensations and smells into a couple of my historical novels. I was in a real war and had someone killed right next to me, so I can stir that into my writing, and have.
No, I'm not bragging, but the above mentioned is relevent to the discussion. I've thought about this over the years. For me, experience is the matrix, the weave, into which you pull the strands of your story. It's somewhat like cloning. If you've never had experiences, your matrix will be at best, derivative. That's not necessarily all bad. But most would agree that actual experience is better rendered on the page than secondary vicarious experience.
I resonate with this topic--experience vs writing talent--as it relates to the book business, getting an agent, getting a publishing contract. The current ethos and make up of Big Publishing, or more accurately, Big Literary, is liberal left feminism. And I'm guessing that based on my name, age, gender, race, education or lack of it (MFA), and of course, the subject or 'world' of my submission, my queries go right into the trashcan. So, for me, this is personal. And I know that the few people who are aware of my presence on Substack likely find my opinions disturbing or worse.
Well, I better get off the soap box. But before I do that, I have to ask (and you don't have to respond, here or via chat) if you would consider looking at my work.
Thanks for the sweet comment, Paul. While I'd say we're pretty diametrically-opposed politically-speaking, I think we certainly agree on most of the defecits we see in literature today and much of why they're there. And even with our political differences, I don't even really disagree about the editors at Big Literary -- they are disproportionally at this point "well-intentioned" middle-class white liberal women who often make a lot of their decisions condescendingly ("voice uplift" and all that). Not that I have a problem with diversity in literature -- the problem is that everyone they choose regardless of background or sexuality or gender all writes the fucking same. And of course in the literary stream they're all MFAs. The aforementioned editors want to "uplift voices" but they ultimately only uplift what flatters their own perceptions of the groups they would like to uplift and the "heroism" they are doing in uplifting them. I can't imagine these people publishing something like Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man," it would make them far too uncomfortable with its frankness, its grit, its unwillingness to look away. Yes, of course they all claim to love Baldwin NOW, but were he an up-and-comer? Never.
I was writing a reply to this and hit the wrong key and it disappeared. I'm surprised you give the Big Literary Ladies a 'well intentioned' descriptor. I don't know about that, maybe half or less. Maybe it's subconscious--their fear and bias against people like myself) and they're not aware of it. Maybe they're like lowly soldiers in a war 'just following orders.' Who knows.
But I am curious as to what you want and get out of having your Substack. I do Substack for encouragement and sometimes get the opposite. I also do it in the hopes of promoting my own published work and that really hasn't worked out. I don't think I've sold more than a half dozen of my books from flogging away on here. Still I do it. I also am on here because occasionally people recommend good books to read, like The Man Who Fell to Earth, which I just finished last night and liked a lot. Another fine book, BTW, which if were new, the Literary Ladies Association would never touch.
So, what do you get out of being on Substack. Your posts resonate with me. Glad you're here, but wonder why.
One other point... Seems to me that... and I'm like the blind men feeling up the elephant... that there are several distinct groups here. One are the 'Indies,' and that would include me at this point in my life, and another I would call, the 'connected,' or young writers who want to hang out with the connected. The connected seem to coalesce around a couple big on-line literary mags. The wannabes hang onto every word the Big Boys and Girls on Campus put out, never disagreeing because, they believe, that would negate their chances of finding a 'way in' to the commercial, mainly big houses' publishing empires.
Have you seen anything like that, or is it just my normal paranoia?
One thing I've come to about this whole Literary Fortress is that writers, authors, in order to succeed, have to go the MFA route. The MFA-Way is the equivalent of the guilds of olde, and is also similar to the trades' unions of today, or of twenty years ago, namely that you can be highly skilled and hard working in your craft, but if you don't belong to 'the union,' you cannot get any customers or jobs. Same with publishing now. Yeah, you can work around the fringes, for a lower wage, but you are shut out of the well paying jobs.
Thanks for writing this. Love your voice. I get the edge. As a person with a PhD in English (Creative Writing), I am not as hardened to the academic route. It enabled me to fund a life that raised four 2e kids and brought them from various degrees of significant disability into lives they like living. But I have the sorts of experience you write about and the downright privilege of a rich formal education. It shocks me that we don’t all have such access. But even for the world where such things exist, I am an outsider. So maybe I have a little too much experience.
Again, thanks for writing this. It was worth the read.
Great piece. “Experience” to a lot of queers these days means “sucking and fucking” and “drugs” (and, like, they should try some uppers because this ket-prose is BORING) which many of them began doing in their 20s. They write whole novels less memorable than one sentence of Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals (Montréal shoutout). Maybe try to go work in a public school. Or even just step on a public bus and go ride to the “bad part of town.” Learn a foreign language. Talk to your Uber drivers, or any of the people for whom you claim to “advocate” or “uplift” and you’ll realize that they have more things to say than you, yes you, the MFA’d.
Hard agree. The tendency to argue from outliers is just really bad practice. I don't care about your unicorns; I do think that in most cases, experience teaches (among other things) rhythm, ear, style, and crucially a sense of humour (which is really a sense of proportion). Those sheltered greenhorns whose only personality is the books they read between ten and twenty often produce mumblecore garbage because they simply have not had the time to do, or listen, or reflect, or synthesise.
VERY good point re: a sense of humour, there's nothing that hardens that instinct more that the lack of proportion you're referring to, and almost all of the best literature is able to have a bit of humour about itself (something also often ignored by a lot of people within the academy, because something "funny" doesn't seem dignified enough to study)
For real, there is more genuine craft (ugh) in PG Wodehouse than in most contemporary Pulitzer Prize shortlistees.
I’d like to hear more about that Rabbi period.
Well, during all of this I spent about ten years dilettanting around university. I lucked out with my government student loans and was able to get about $12k a year in grants (not even loans, just totally free money) to take a few courses a year. I switched around a lot because I couldn't choose what I wanted to (plus, the drugs and mania) and wound up in linguistics (with a focus on cognitive linguistics) and philosophy (with a focus on philosophy of language and theory of mind), but I also wound up for a bit in Jewish studies.
As I mentioned, I went to a very Jewish school for two years, and I formed a lot of lifelong friends there, which led to me participating in a lot of Jewish holidays, and a lot of my first romantic experiences wound up being with Jewish girls, all of which compounded into a lifelong fascination with Judaism (I think the Jewish girls possibly played a disproportionate role in that, at least early on). While studying Jewish studies I decided (again, drugs and mania playing a major factor) that I needed to dedicate myself to a study of Jewish philosophy and become a spiritual leader. This was after a period in which I was trying to find a way to upload my brain to the internet (I had been working on some sort of hyperlink web on my computer I was convinced to make after reading a Ray Kurzweil book) and find immortality and "The Cyber God."
Thank you. I did not see that Kurzweil curve coming. Sammy Davis, Jr., take note (wherever you are).
I think there is one more element to add for a good writer to have and that is “reverence” or “deep respect” for that which they are writing about. the napoleon example stood out to me because everyone is praising his letters to his wife rn on twitter saying he was a “real yearner” yet I do agree most of his writing is shit and reads like a little boy… he did not have reverence for anything in this world (the closest he got was that wife that he dumped eventually) and I believe that is why his writing remained so elementary. it is likely why people’s writing is elementary now. they want to have status of author but have no respect for the craft of writing… if they did I wouldn’t be finding so many goddamn chat gpt prompts in the free little library books.
Absolutely. Napoleon was also just too single-minded imo to produce the thoughtfulness to reflect seriously on his experience, which is perhaps a good quality for a military general (or an athlete -- DFW's piece on Tracy Austin comes to mind) but not a writer. His fiction, which many people forget he wrote, is terrible. This is a man who ate basically the exact same meal every night for a lot of his life. Very little mattered to him outside of his goals. When he saw the Pyramids of Giza he had a moment of profundity and then immediately began to scheme over using them for their morale potential to his troops -- it was always all about the campaign.
People with cool experiences can just hire a ghost writer to write their bibliography and nobody cares- readers are in it for the life-story. The magic is when good writers write about everyday experiences and make them extraordinary. Or write about extraordinary experiences and make them ordinary.
Really enjoyed this. Yes, I don't know anything about you, but I've had a bunch of rich, diverse, frightening, and mystifying experiences somewhat like the ones you describe in this piece. So, if I may, I feel like you're a brother, someone I'd enjoy having a beer with. Okay, I'm through ingratiating myself. About your article. I think this whole debate is 'chicken or egg' based on the singularity of choices. (I hope I phrased that right.) It's not experience vs writing talent, is the proper balance of the two, as you know, and have fleshed out here.
I don't agree with Barkan and Pistelli, especially Pistelli when he states that 'people increasingly have similar types of experiences. Take Franz, who shot himself through the hand when he was cleaning his rifle in the barracks--and Claude, who shot himself through the heart in 'Nam after receiving a 'dear john' letter from his girl, Jodi. Similar. But worlds apart.
The other thing he describes, this growing 'international' middle class. I think the glue that is between them is very thin. Yeah, maybe financially a techie couple from Silicon Valley has a few things--wealth, love of AI and gizmos--in common with a techie couple from Beijing, but not much. Having been married to someone of a different culture/race, I discovered that over time, a lot of differences arise making the relationship 'challenging.'
I like what you say about Pepys and Cheever, having read them both (well, about half of Pepsys memoir, I'll go back at some point to finish it). Why do I like this relationship you bring up? Because I once worked as an apprentice blacksmith at Philadelphia Naval Shipyard, and I've brought the various sensations and smells into a couple of my historical novels. I was in a real war and had someone killed right next to me, so I can stir that into my writing, and have.
No, I'm not bragging, but the above mentioned is relevent to the discussion. I've thought about this over the years. For me, experience is the matrix, the weave, into which you pull the strands of your story. It's somewhat like cloning. If you've never had experiences, your matrix will be at best, derivative. That's not necessarily all bad. But most would agree that actual experience is better rendered on the page than secondary vicarious experience.
I resonate with this topic--experience vs writing talent--as it relates to the book business, getting an agent, getting a publishing contract. The current ethos and make up of Big Publishing, or more accurately, Big Literary, is liberal left feminism. And I'm guessing that based on my name, age, gender, race, education or lack of it (MFA), and of course, the subject or 'world' of my submission, my queries go right into the trashcan. So, for me, this is personal. And I know that the few people who are aware of my presence on Substack likely find my opinions disturbing or worse.
Well, I better get off the soap box. But before I do that, I have to ask (and you don't have to respond, here or via chat) if you would consider looking at my work.
Thank you for your stimulating article.
Thanks for the sweet comment, Paul. While I'd say we're pretty diametrically-opposed politically-speaking, I think we certainly agree on most of the defecits we see in literature today and much of why they're there. And even with our political differences, I don't even really disagree about the editors at Big Literary -- they are disproportionally at this point "well-intentioned" middle-class white liberal women who often make a lot of their decisions condescendingly ("voice uplift" and all that). Not that I have a problem with diversity in literature -- the problem is that everyone they choose regardless of background or sexuality or gender all writes the fucking same. And of course in the literary stream they're all MFAs. The aforementioned editors want to "uplift voices" but they ultimately only uplift what flatters their own perceptions of the groups they would like to uplift and the "heroism" they are doing in uplifting them. I can't imagine these people publishing something like Baldwin's "Going to Meet the Man," it would make them far too uncomfortable with its frankness, its grit, its unwillingness to look away. Yes, of course they all claim to love Baldwin NOW, but were he an up-and-comer? Never.
I was writing a reply to this and hit the wrong key and it disappeared. I'm surprised you give the Big Literary Ladies a 'well intentioned' descriptor. I don't know about that, maybe half or less. Maybe it's subconscious--their fear and bias against people like myself) and they're not aware of it. Maybe they're like lowly soldiers in a war 'just following orders.' Who knows.
But I am curious as to what you want and get out of having your Substack. I do Substack for encouragement and sometimes get the opposite. I also do it in the hopes of promoting my own published work and that really hasn't worked out. I don't think I've sold more than a half dozen of my books from flogging away on here. Still I do it. I also am on here because occasionally people recommend good books to read, like The Man Who Fell to Earth, which I just finished last night and liked a lot. Another fine book, BTW, which if were new, the Literary Ladies Association would never touch.
So, what do you get out of being on Substack. Your posts resonate with me. Glad you're here, but wonder why.
One other point... Seems to me that... and I'm like the blind men feeling up the elephant... that there are several distinct groups here. One are the 'Indies,' and that would include me at this point in my life, and another I would call, the 'connected,' or young writers who want to hang out with the connected. The connected seem to coalesce around a couple big on-line literary mags. The wannabes hang onto every word the Big Boys and Girls on Campus put out, never disagreeing because, they believe, that would negate their chances of finding a 'way in' to the commercial, mainly big houses' publishing empires.
Have you seen anything like that, or is it just my normal paranoia?
Well, I'll let you go.
One thing I've come to about this whole Literary Fortress is that writers, authors, in order to succeed, have to go the MFA route. The MFA-Way is the equivalent of the guilds of olde, and is also similar to the trades' unions of today, or of twenty years ago, namely that you can be highly skilled and hard working in your craft, but if you don't belong to 'the union,' you cannot get any customers or jobs. Same with publishing now. Yeah, you can work around the fringes, for a lower wage, but you are shut out of the well paying jobs.
This was a good article, thank you very much.
Sorry for the lack of effort in my comment, but I've not got much experience writing them yet.
Thanks for writing this. Love your voice. I get the edge. As a person with a PhD in English (Creative Writing), I am not as hardened to the academic route. It enabled me to fund a life that raised four 2e kids and brought them from various degrees of significant disability into lives they like living. But I have the sorts of experience you write about and the downright privilege of a rich formal education. It shocks me that we don’t all have such access. But even for the world where such things exist, I am an outsider. So maybe I have a little too much experience.
Again, thanks for writing this. It was worth the read.
Great piece. “Experience” to a lot of queers these days means “sucking and fucking” and “drugs” (and, like, they should try some uppers because this ket-prose is BORING) which many of them began doing in their 20s. They write whole novels less memorable than one sentence of Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals (Montréal shoutout). Maybe try to go work in a public school. Or even just step on a public bus and go ride to the “bad part of town.” Learn a foreign language. Talk to your Uber drivers, or any of the people for whom you claim to “advocate” or “uplift” and you’ll realize that they have more things to say than you, yes you, the MFA’d.