Why I sometimes feel like the literary fiction community is full of self-assured, shallow liberals

If anyone were to piece together the occasional political strands of this blog, he might be tempted to conclude that I was a political conservative. After all, I've used a number of posts to complain about liberal rhetoric or liberal culture (here, here, here, here, and here, for starters). But I write these posts because I consider myself to be more liberal than conservative. I'm a mix of some centrist-liberal and some centrist-conservative ideas, but if I had to pick an island to live on and the only two choices were Isla Conservativa and Isla Liberal, I'd go with the liberal one. I write critiquing liberal modes of expression because I don't want the people I share an island with to talk like idiots. We are supposed to be better than that.

Habits of how we talk about complex things should be even less cluttered by bum thinking in the culture surrounding serious literature. Since literature often operates for me as a stand-in for religion, I rely on the people who take that kind of literature to heart to exemplify solid thinking. It ruins my faith in the value of literature when those who are closest to it are lazy thinkers, much as it ruins the faith of a Christian when everyone in the local church is judgmental and selfish.

But the default political views in literary fiction, views that seep into everything, seem to be a very lazy stripe of liberal politics. For example, an essay this past week on the usually excellent and reasonably influential website Lithub committed all the sins I've come to hate from people whose politics I generally agree with. While writing "When Fiction Pulls Back the Curtain on American Conservatism," ostensibly a review of two novels with conservative main characters, Colette Shade first veers to the side to spend more than half the article talking about why American culture is essentially conservative. By "conservative," Shade means "the theoretical voice of animus against the agency of the subordinate classes," a definition she takes from Corey Robin's The Reactionary Mind. Much of her quick analysis of conservatism and the last 50 years of American politics comes from Robin.

In the course of developing her views on conservatism, Shade exemplifies three characteristics of liberal rhetoric I've come to dislike. She dismisses the strengths of conservative arguments, she argues against a straw man version of conservatism, and she is unable to argue effectively for why a liberal philosophy is better, or even what such a philosophy would entail.

Sin number one: dismissing conservatism

But first, an aside

Conservatism and liberalism are two forces that ought to exist in dynamic tension with one another. Consider a poor, black child in Baltimore. She is up against every hurdle in the world. A conservative would say you have to encourage that child to rise up above her circumstances, to believe that with hard work, she can achieve whatever she puts her mind to. The conservative is right. A liberal would say you have to teach the child how the past has conspired against her to put her at a great disadvantage, at no fault of her own. You must make the child understand that if she fails, it is not her fault, because otherwise, the child may grow to think there is something inherently wrong with her instead of the world she was born into. The liberal is also right. For the child to have a chance, she will have to inhabit a space where she both accepts personal responsibility and also understands that there are factors beyond her control. Too much of one and she has no self-esteem. Too much of the other, she has no agency. 

This dynamic tension needs to exist in hundreds of ways. We need personal freedom, but we must also sublimate personal freedoms for the good of the community. We need to try new ideas, but we also need stability. We need peace, but we also need to defend ourselves when peace breaks down. For liberals, conservatism isn't the enemy. It's the balance we need for our ideas to exist. 

And now, what I mean by "dismissing conservatism"

Shade mostly talks of conservatism in neo-Marxist and economic terms, rather than strictly political ones. For her, the conservative world is a world in which "the right of property ownership has superseded even the right to clean air and bodily autonomy for those without means." Conservatives, in her logic, exist only to enrich themselves at the expense of others. Conservatives, in a word, do not care about the good of the world as a whole, they care only for themselves.

There is a reason why conservative ideas got into the world. It wasn't entirely something pushed on the poor by the rich. There were environmental stresses that caused the poor to accept the rule of the rich. The poor continued to accept these rules partly because of political oppression, but also because the poor often judged that rule by the rich was better than the alternative. Pre-historic Central American citizens of large cities chose to continue to live in the town under authoritarian rule rather than flee to the jungle. People made a choice for security over individual freedom. We might deride the choice, but unless we've lived with true environmental stress and scarcity, we really can't judge.

A friend and I were talking recently about the rights of trans-gendered people. He, the more conservative one, made a point I had a hard time arguing with. The fact that our society is able to even talk about these issues is a sign that we are living with abundance. In a time of stressed resources, nobody gives a damn about these kinds of things.

This is what I feel is missing from the Hulu show The Handmaid's Tale. It's easy to root for the oppressed when she's fighting to get the boot of her oppressor off of her neck. But the show takes place in a world that is dying. What would the oppressed do to save that world if they were in charge? We don't know. It's possible that, as in the musical Urinetown, the soft-hearted underdogs would, if put in charge, end up making everything worse.

Shade's essay, though, sees only the boot. It does not see conservatism as a force that keeps community together. There is no dialetic to be achieved through synthesis with its forces; it is only a thing to be annihilated.

The closest Shade comes to offering respect for conservatives is when she calls it a "frighteningly coherent ideology." But she fails to interrogate its coherence. In fact, the internal consistency of some conservative philosophy is what gives it universal and perennial appeal. To be coherent, in philosophy, is difficult to achieve, and not something to be lightly dismissed. Liberals wish they had as much coherence.

This musical ought to be required viewing for anyone about to write a story about a spunky underdog. 

Sin number two: arguing against a straw man version of conservatism 

Shade claims that the novels she is reviewing--The Sport of Kings and Mr. Bridge--provide the reader with "valuable attempts to use fiction to peer behind the facade of American conservatism." She compares reading these books--one about a man who uses his privilege to try to breed Triple Crown-winning horses, the other about a quiet racist--to reading Lolita. She views conservatives on a level with pedophiles in this analogy. She believes we can understand these loathsome beings, but that such understanding should never imply acceptance.

Although assuring the reader that the best fiction "embraces the moral totality of human existence--the range of good and bad actions of which people are capable--and suggests that there is some value in understanding all of it, including the bad," Shade is herself offering only the bad sides of conservative ideals. She has picked two books with awful conservative characters and joined her analysis of them to a one-sided essay about how America is essentially conservative, meaning it always seeks to stomp out the little guy.

Shade briefly alludes to conservative intellectuals who reject Trump, such as the folks at The National Review, but then quickly dismisses such conservatives by claiming they are a small minority and that most Republicans like Trump. She does not interrogate the notion that Trump himself is not, as The National Review would tell us, a conservative, nor does she interrogate whether the Republican Party itself is becoming something other than a conservative party.

She seems to be a breed of liberal who see in conservatives only hypocrisy. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why Christians decry abortion but do not themselves adopt, ignoring the rate at which Christians do, in fact, adopt. There is a kind of liberal who wonders why religious people ignore Jesus's injunctions to help the poor, ignoring that conservatives are either more generous than liberals or at least no less so.

Back when I was a Marine living in Hawaii, my first wife worked for a very conservative oral surgeon. I was just starting, then, to discover a lot of liberal ideology, and I would bring books like A People's History of the United States to the office to read while I waited for my wife to get done working so I could take her home with our one car. The doctor would come out from the back, where Rush Limbaugh was playing on the radio, and criticize the book I had and all such "revisionist history." I would roll my eyes at how little he understood.

But that same doctor routinely provided extensive medical care for young people whose parents, he knew, would never pay their bill. He might grouse about it and criticize parents for having kids they couldn't afford to take care of, but he gave them expert medical care, free of charge. "What am I going to do, let the kids suffer?" he'd say.

Conservative economics basically believes that if people follow their own interests, rather than having those interests directed for them, then economic growth as a whole will be greater. This growth benefits society in a broad sense even while it hurts some individual members of it. Conservative economics does not teach that you cannot donate the money you earn out of your own self-interest to charity. It does not stop the wealthy from forming charitable organizations that carry out large-scale philanthropic projects. And, of course, there a ample examples of rich people doing exactly this kind of thing. Liberals may argue that these are just crumbs to the poor after robbing them of a meal, to which conservatives reply that inequality is better than everyone being equally poor, as has happened in some socialist experiments.

I am not an expert on these things. Most literary writers aren't. We present the world as we see it in great detail. That doesn't make us economists. We can certainly present portraits of the unevenness of capitalism by showing the contradictions within society. We can be the voices of the people who tried for the American Dream and failed for reasons not entirely within their control. We can show the ugliness that exists beneath America's gilded promise. But we ought to be circumspect about conclusions we make with too much certainty. That's not considering "the totality of human existence."

Shade has essentially reviewed two books in which the worst kinds of conservatives are presented, then tried to link these portraits to an argument that conservative ideals are evil and have always threatened to destroy America. If someone else had reviewed two novels with extremist Islamist terrorists, then tied that to a brief history of how Islamist governments violate human rights, readers would have cried foul. But Shade isn't capable of granting that there are good conservatives--and even a good conservatism--with as much liberality as she would grant to Muslims and Islam.

Sin number three: not knowing how to argue for liberal ideology

Right at the outset, Shade acknowledges that she is probably preaching to the choir: "Whether you like it or not (and if you're reading this, the answer is probably "not"), America is a deeply conservative country" (emphasis mine). She is admitting two things by starting this way: that the literary fiction community is deeply liberal, and that she can assume this political viewpoint when addressing the readers of a prominent literary fiction website.

Because Shade is also part of this community, there is a cost to this ideological unity: Shade and others in that community are insular and exhibit a provincial way of thinking. They are so used to assuming a particular political philosophy in those around them, they have lost the ability to even articulate that viewpoint to outsiders. They are like Christians who only associate with other Christians who have lost any ability to "give an answer for the hope within them," to use St. Paul's phrase. If anyone challenges their views, they grow anxious and upset, and rather than engaging in the marketplace of ideas, they insist they do not have to engage with racists and misogynists.

Shade is not, to be sure, without some facts at her disposal. She is able, aided by Robin, to present at least something of a case for how America is fundamentally conservative and why this is bad. She cites several facts of life in America for the poor--many of which I very much agree with as realities that should be at the top of our agenda to address--as examples of the failure of our conservative beliefs.

I’m not referring to policy polls, party registration, or even the fact that Donald Trump is our president. Rather, I am referring to the material realities of daily life in America: the $2 a day on which our poorest citizens live, the for-profit healthcare system and the 45,000 Americans who die because of it every year, the veneration of the U.S. military at sporting events (and even at the putatively liberal Oscars), the fear of a violent black underclass that’s used to justify the imprisonment of millions of mostly poor people, the bipartisan obsession with “competition” and “innovation,” and the corporate exploitation of the natural world that imperils all life on earth.

Again, I agree with a lot of these assertions. However, there is a lack of balance to the picture Shade is presenting here. For example, many countries have a class living in abject poverty. America has the means to at least preserve the lives of most of these people (often through the volunteer efforts at soup kitchens of essentially conservative people). So in some ways, our system is better for our poor than it is elsewhere.

She also fails to acknowledge that there are a lot of conservatives who care about the same things. The libertarian strain of conservative is probably the most ideologically committed to ending mass incarceration. Some conservatives actually take seriously the "conserve" portion of their philosophy. Larry Hogan, the Republican governor of Maryland, just agreed to make Maryland one of the states supporting the Paris accords. Hogan has also asked for Maryland to be exempted from offshore drilling.

Shade is quick to push aside Trump and insist that the problem with conservatives predates him, but the two examples she chooses for novels are exactly the kind of people who put Trump over the top. They are not conservatives in any considered sense.

We have quickly forgotten how much America was not particularly thrilled with either Trump or Clinton. We have ignored the extent to which many people voted for one or the other candidate as a default least-terrible option. We have forgotten that many conservatives voted for Clinton and many liberals thought both candidates so terrible they voted for neither.

But liberals have adopted a siege mindset since the advent of Trump. We have no independent vision of the world, only a rebuttal of all things Trump. We are utterly wrecked. Rather than take this as an opportunity to remake ourselves, we are doubling down on simply opposing what we see as ugly rather than proposing what we view as beautiful.

We could be trying to reach out to conservative intellectuals right now, people who have fled the Republican Party since Trump showed up. We could be remaking a platform that represented a new vision of the sweet spot in the dynamic tension between conservative and liberal ways of looking at the world. Instead, we are constantly focused on cutting up all the bands that tie us together with conservatives in a dynamic tension.

If Trump proves anything, isn't it that America is essentially NOT conservative? That we're willing to blow up the status quo and try new things, even if those new things are really, really stupid?

How this all poisons the world of literary fiction

A lazy, self-assured liberal politics is the default political position in literary fiction. Shade clearly assumes it in her readers. That's the world I'm trying to enter when I submit stories to serious literary journals. That's the assumed view of the world on the minds of many gatekeepers reading those stories, and it's the worldview of the senior editors those stories get passed on to.

It's no accident that the stories I've been able to get published so far are all about people whom capitalism has failed in some sense. I've written a number of stories I think are possibly better than the published ones, but if you don't count my book, I've only had one story about a white, middle-class, American character published. (Joke's on those publishers, though. Nearly all of my downtrodden characters maintain a belief in the American dream, a belief they continue to hold onto at the end of all the stories I had published.)

Literature ought to keep an open mind to the data the universe is giving our senses. That includes data that refutes the deeply-held beliefs of the literary community itself. The literary community ought to be a place full of lively debate of all kinds of beliefs about the world. It should not be a place where one can assume liberal politics when addressing the community. That leads to tepid, boring work. Even when I read something I agree with, I find it dull.

I'm not trying to put myself out like Tim Allen or James Woods do, saying a liberal establishment is against me because of my conservative politics. I am, by and large, politically liberal. If, in the tension between personal freedom and social good, you are not sure what choice to make, I believe you should always err on the side of personal freedom. I'm not asking people to change their political beliefs. I'm begging, with tears in my eyes, for literary people to do what literary people ought to do: consider how what you are saying seems to others who view things differently from you. Consider whether your rhetoric increases understanding and healing or just makes both sides dig the trenches deeper. Consider that your own entrenched beliefs may be part of what brought us Trump, not the antidote to him.

Asking the right kinds of questions of literature

There are two things about my life I've beat to death on this blog: that I used to be a rather devout evangelical Christian, and that when I stopped believing, literature partly filled the gap in my life where Christianity used to be. I ask a lot of literature. So I was intrigued by an essay that appeared on Lithub last week by Rachel Vorona Cote, who confessed to a similar habit. As she put it in her essay ""The Complicated Comforts of Marilynne Robinson,": "I have a nasty habit of asking too much from books."

Her essay is a personal look at her own pain and an attempt to use literature to overcome it. In late 2017, she was discouraged by the first year of Trump's presidency and personally undone by her mother's death. She was in a place where people often turn to religion, but knowing ahead of time from personal experience that heading to church would end up fruitless, she was looking around for something religion-like to fill the void. 

Gilead

She tried Marilynne Robinson's Gilead. It is a very well-regarded novel about an aging Congregationalist minister, John Ames. I read it last year. Almost nothing happens in it in the present. There is some action that takes place in flashback, but much of the action in the novel gets sidetracked by Ames' own theological musings. Still, it's not like being preached to for the length of the novel. Ames, in fact, is a bit too introspective to be a fire-and-brimstone preacher. In one of the few passages I highlighted from the book, he says of himself that "...there is tendency in my thinking, for the opposed sides of a question to cancel each other more or less....If I put my thinking down on paper perhaps I can think more rigorously. Where a resolution is necessary it must also be possible." 

But Ames never really quite succeeds in achieving his resolution. The conflict of the book, if it can even be called that, is that Ames is concerned that the ne'er-do-well son of his lifelong best friend is going to try to move in and marry his much younger wife when Ames dies. But the conflict more or less takes care of itself. 

Cote found comfort in reading the book. She had hoped that Robinson could be her Virgil, "a woman of faith to guide me through her theological web--and who could believe in my stead what I feared couldn't possibly be true. That I would find my mother again. That she had not been obliterated by death. That our shattered country might stumble onto a path of progress, however slow and aching." 

Although Ames asserts that the "purpose of a prophet" is to "find meaning in trouble," you won't find that meaning explicitly stated in Gilead. I found reading it to be akin to looking at a painting for an extended period of time. I was left more with a continuous mood or feeling than with what you might call a discursive kind of impression. 

This was enough for Cote, at least mostly:

 "Gilead could not entirely soothe my despondence: it couldn’t assure me that Mom was peeping into my apartment’s darkened windows, or directing her love-filled gaze at Dad while he slept. It couldn’t even convince me that her soul awaited mine in some obscure afterlife. But John Ames would have believed this to be the case, and somehow, that was enough for me." 

She found that simply vicariously huffing off the faith fumes of someone else was close enough to the experience itself to bring comfort. She read another Robinson novel, Housekeeping, which I have not read. But then, she did something I find telling: she read a book of essays by Robinson. As Cote put it, she was hungering "for a more explicit manifesto." She had been comforted by living in Ames' head for a bit, but she was looking for something that offered a less poetic sense of meaning here in the modern world. 

But Robinson's refusal to be more certain of herself in her non-fiction is a double-edged sword for Cote. Robinson is not an agitator; she is too circumspect about her own conclusions for that. On the one hand, this is the hallmark of a rational thinker, but on the other hand, too much self-circumspection can lead to inaction. 

It's a familiar conundrum for liberals. Cote nicely sums up this conundrum in the concluding paragraphs:

If Robinson’s nonfiction feels insufficient in the face of a political crisis, it’s because certitude seems foolhardy, and a bit smug. The agnosticism that plagues me in mourning strikes me as productive, even necessary in the political sphere. We do not have the luxury of always being sure, especially when we are a solitary voice within a purportedly democratic cacophony. To achieve anything worthwhile we must writhe and grapple like blind animals in a net, stumbling upon deliverance without the satisfaction of knowing it’s within our reach.

          Still, too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy...

Truth and Comfort

"Too much fear and doubt becomes unwieldy?" Tell me about it. Agnosticism seems to me to be the most intellectually honest position to take, but the thing about agnosticism is that its adherents are, well, agnostic. Which doesn't mean, of course, that they are "indifferent," as many people are now starting to use the word. It means they just don't know what's right. An agnostic can look at the faith of a true believer and be genuinely jealous. Look how that person seems filled with certainty. Look how much she accomplishes. I wish I could believe like she does. 

I don't think it was wrong of Cote to expect a lot from a book. I keep reading because I am constantly hoping I will find something that can help me resolve my honest uncertainty with my desire to be more certain. But I'm not sure Gilead is the right place to look. Musicians and prophets may both have been inspired by the gods, but they bring different things. Musicians--and Gilead is more like music than a sermon--bring comfort. Prophets bring truth that demands action. 

There's nothing wrong with comfort, but even an agnostic like me can see the wisdom in C.S. Lewis's warning: "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth--only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair." That's the reason Cote found herself wanting to read non-fiction: she wanted truth. 

In fact, I'd say that it's only because Cote was steadfast in wanting truth that she found any comfort in Robinson at all. It wasn't a deep and satisfying comfort, but it was a small comfort. It was enough to keep going on. And maybe that's the most an intellectually honest person will ever get. The most you can hope for is to string together enough moments of hard-won comfort until you reach a point, like John Ames did, where you live long enough "to outlast any sense of grievance you may acquire." 

Hump day thoughts on the artist and the day job

Quartz recently ran an article, based on a letter from 19th Century French novelist Gustave Flaubert to his mother, on the notion of an artist taking a day job to survive. Flaubert himself called the notion an "illusion," claiming that such pursuits were for the mediocre, and that if he were going to commit himself to writing, he would only do it if he could apply his entire energy and strength to it:

When one does something, one must do it wholly and well. Those bastard existences where you sell suet all day and write poetry at night are made for mediocre minds — like those horses equally good for saddle and carriage — the worst kind, that can neither jump a ditch nor pull a plow.

The article was balanced, offsetting Flaubert's artistic puritanism with examples of writers (Kafka, Harper Lee, Jennifer Egan) who had succeeded as writers in spite of holding down day jobs. It also pointed out that Flaubert's parents were fairly well-off, which is not a privilege every writer has. 

The problem isn't work; it's kids

Long ago, when I was in my mid-twenties, didn't have kids yet, and wanted to be a great writer more than I wanted anything in life, I wrote a personal creed of sorts in which I said words to the effect of "anyone can raise kids, but only a select few people can be prophets who create great art, so if I have to choose, I will choose not to have a family so I can create great art." 

It's hard for me to believe that puttering away at the kind of job needed to preserve a subsistence living for one person is going to keep you from being a great writer. You can do almost anything full-time, and if you're willing to make personal sacrifices like having a roommate, you will be able to sustain yourself. (Assuming, of course, you don't have unusual obstacles like expensive health issues.)

Furthermore, the kind of job you need just to pay your own bills isn't going to be so taxing you can't still write when you get home. It probably isn't going to be the kind of job where the boss is on your ass so much you can't sneak away for a few minutes to jot down the idea you just had so you can work on it when you get home. You think the manager at a drug store is going to write you up because you took five minutes to jot something down? As long as you more or less show up on time and more or less don't insult customers and more or less don't steal from the store, you're going to be fine.

A single person with a day job should be able to discipline herself to write when she can and still write everything she needs to write to accomplish her goals. It's when kids enter the picture that things become difficult. First, you're going to need a better job, the kind that sucks your best energies and makes you expend brain cells. You'll maybe have some fleeting idea for your story while on the job, but you need to run to the bathroom or you won't have time to go before the next meeting starts.

Then, of course, when you get home, there is a whole other set of people with problems that require your attention. A single writer with a day job can still put writing first in his life; a conscientious parent will be lucky if it's a distant third.

Priest vs Preacher

I have no issue with someone making a conscious decision to avoid the responsibilities of family life to pursue art. If artists are in some sense prophets, then they are entitled to follow the long tradition of beliefs in the world that espouse the need for spiritual leaders to avoid Earthly entrapments. The Catholic Church, for example, wants its priests to remain unmarried so that they can focus fully on pastoral care. It wouldn't be hard for me to believe that the writers who are the greatest virtuosos with language were also the writers with limited familial responsibilities. The music inside their heads was seldom blasted away by The Wiggles.

But the Protestant in me feels like this isn't the only route, and not the one for me. I feel like it's a little rich to be doling out life advice when you aren't yourself experiencing the one thing that most profoundly affects the lives of nearly all your adult parishioners. I'd prefer to take my advice from someone who struggles to deal with his kids fighting each other as he writes his sermons on the kitchen table. As Clint Eastwood's preacher put it in Pale Rider, "the spirit ain't worth spit without a little exercise."

The only photo of this scene I could find. 

At the very least, I think you have to agree that once you have kids, your responsibility for them is greater than your responsibility to create art. I may not still be a Christian, but C.S. Lewis's evaluation that a Christian writer must know from the outset that saving one soul is worth more than all the great works of human history still checks out with me.

How can you be a vessel of divine truths when you neglect the needs of your own family? In my experience, words and images worth committing to paper are hard to come by. You have to place yourself in a position somewhere between the most abject humility and the most unjustified certainty. I don't see how one could even get in such a place while ignoring the welfare of the people you are responsible for.

The decision to not have kids is a great life decision. I don't want to deride it in any way. But I can't believe that taking on such a basic part of human existence--even if it comes with all kinds of mundane extras like having a job-- makes one unable to write about the mysteries of that existence. My two favorite writers, Melville and Vonnegut, both had heavy family responsibilities. In Vonnegut's case, it altered the way he wrote, because he needed his books to sell. In Melville's case, it dogged him his entire life. They both still managed to write great art.

For me, developing the discipline to be a father, including all the pain of having a grown-up job, has also helped me develop the discipline to be a writer. I might miss out on a few scenes I'd otherwise have written if I were able to write on "event time," but I think I gain more than I lose.

The benefits of occasionally rage-quitting writing

By all accounts, when you get a personalized rejection letter from an editor, it's supposed to be encouraging. They don't send those to everyone. They don't have the time to tell you they liked it if they didn't. They publish a few stories and send out a few more notes to those who almost made it. If you got a personal note, you were in the top one to three percent. So you should feel good about it.

Video games and me

I tend to get pissed off kind of easily while playing video games. I was like that playing tennis as a kid, too. I broke a fair number of rackets. Nowadays, if I keep playing a tough level in a video game over and over and can't beat it, I have a tendency to chuck the controller on the ground, swear a lot, and quit playing. The kids call this "rage quitting." They generally mock rage quitters, especially in a multi-player game where you leave your teammates down a player, but I can't even pretend that's not me.*

The benefits of the rage quit

As disconcerting as it might be to watch a grown man have a fit over playing a stupid game, there are some benefits to the player. It's sort of a giant reset button. You get away from the problem for a while, maybe go take care of the things you ought to have been doing for the last four hours while you failed at your game. You know, because you're a grown man and all. You remember there are other things in your life besides the game. You could live quite happily without ever beating the game. You don't need to beat that level. And suddenly, you've got it. You realize the way to beat the stupid thing. Sometimes, the best you'll ever play is immediately after coming back from a rage quit.

The getting published part of writing is a lot like a boss level of a video game to me

I usually like writing stories. I usually like editing them. But getting them published is a pain. I have little control over it. Luck is involved. I think I've written the story I always wanted to read, but editors have their own ideas of what they've felt was missing in their lives. You can keep putting a story up over and over again, only to have it fail repeatedly to get past the final level.

This would be an interesting form rejection letter for an editor to use

This is especially frustrating if it's a story you're personally invested in. Last year, I started puttering around with a story and I realized while writing it that I was writing about my adopted daughter and how she'd changed my life. It's been a bit of an obsession to me to get this story published. I feel like I owe it to her. 

I recently got my third encouraging rejection letter, a.k.a. the "almost" letter, on this story. I ought to be encouraged, but really, I feel more like I've now gotten to within seconds of beating the final boss only to have it all fall apart. It's more than just disappointing; it's infuriating. 

So I'm rage quitting for a bit. I don't believe in waking up each day and answering to some higher calling to be a writer. If it's not making me happy, I don't want to do it. But the very act of acknowledging that I can live without it is often just the thing to get me past the hurdle. Either I'll think of some way to change the story that will put it over the top or I'll come up with something new. But I'd never have gotten either without first clearing my head through a little purifying rage. 

*I don't really play video games that much. I haven't for most of my life. But for a while, I was playing a lot when my son's interest in the games exceeded his manual dexterity, and he kept asking me to get him past the hard parts. That phase is long gone, now. But there were definitely some times when I was trying to beat levels for him that I threw controllers across the room. 

Train to Busan: Post-apocalyptic Gothic that works

A few weeks ago, I contrasted "Gothic" stories with a more rigorously defined science fiction. To summarize quickly, the Gothic is more concerned with the interior, psychological landscape of its characters, while science fiction is concerned with how humanity interacts with the environment, especially as technology both shapes humanity and is shaped by it.

In a science fiction post-apocalyptic or dystopian tale, for example, much time will be spent on how humanity got into the mess it's in, the social and technological steps it is taking to survive, and the specific details of day-to-day existence. The science doesn't necessarily need to be so rigorous it would pass muster in a peer-reviewed journal, but it must exist, and it must be central to the story. Interstellar comes to mind as an example.

In a Gothic post-apocalyptic or dystopian story, on the other hand, the focus is more on how the change in society wrought by environmental distress affects humanity psychologically. Cormac McCarthy's The Road is a perfect example. McCarthy never even explains how the world inhabited by his characters came to be cold, gray, infertile, and lawless. We see the characters struggle to survive in great detail, but there's not much science that goes into it: scrounge, sneak, steal, get lucky. That's the formula. Mankind doesn't overcome the trouble by applying rational thought to solving problems, but by keeping hope alive.

The first Korean zombie blockbuster

I decided recently that my Korean skills have atrophied to an unacceptable level, so I started watching nearly everything Netflix had to offer in Korean. (I haven't yet committed enough to get Drama Fever or one of the Korean-only apps.) Netflix now has Train to Busan, the 2016 zombie blockbuster. I loved it. It reminded me a lot of the 2008 hit The Good, The Bad, and The Weird, which was Korea's first hit "Western" (set in the Gobi Desert). That movie took a quintessentially American genre that Americans have used to understand themselves for over 50 years and turned it on its head. While the American Western was about settling the frontier, The Good, The Bad, and The Weird was about what happens when where you live is someone else's frontier to be settled. I saw it as a working out of the old Korean proverb about how geopolitics apply to a small country: "When two whales fight, the shrimp breaks its back." This movie was about how the shrimp can learn to survive.

Train to Busan also took a common Western genre--one that's becoming more and more common by the day, it seems-- and gave it a uniquely Korean twist, one that managed to have moments in it of meditation on the rapid changes in Korean society.

Train to Busan (부산행) was as good as any Western movie about zombies, and better than most.

The story focuses on Seok Woo, a fund manager who will happily screw whoever he needs to in order to come out on top. He reluctantly agrees to take his daughter, whom he temporarily has custody of while he and his wife work out the details of their divorce, from Seoul to Busan to see her mother. He agrees because he feels sorry when he buys her the same birthday present he got her for Children's Day because he works too much to notice what she likes. He also missed her recital, when she wanted to sing the song she'd been practicing for him. So he gets on the train with her on her birthday.

Along the way, the great zombie outbreak happens. It's very sudden. We get very little explanation of what caused it. We learn that the company responsible for the virus was a company Seok Woo's fund was working with, so he bears some responsibility. But we don't know what the company was trying to accomplish or where they went wrong. That's not what the movie's about.

Before the train gets going, we get little peeks into the lives of some of the other passengers Seok Woo will interact with. There is a high school baseball player and the girl who likes him but he is too shy to like back yet. There are two elder ladies (ajuma), one of whom is much more caring than the other. And then there is Yoon Sang Hwa and his pregnant wife. All the passengers will work to change how Seok Woo sees the world, but Yoon will be the strongest impetus to Seok Woo's catharsis.

Seok Woo's daugher, Soo Ahn, is different from him. As the crisis unfolds, he tries to convince his daughter to take care of herself and let others worry about themselves, but she insists on helping others. She naturally takes to Yoon and his wife, who also exhibit concern for other passengers. Seok Woo's personal change takes place when Yoon unselfishly helps him and when he sees how upset his own daughter is with how much he only cares for himself.

It's not a complicated twist for a character to make, but why should it be? One thing about Zombie fiction is the way it breaks human behavior down to its rawest elements. When a crisis hits, you either throw others ahead of you to save yourself or you try to help others.

We don't get a whole ton of exposition about what abilities the zombies have. They're strong, but not the most powerful zombies we've seen in film. Tougher passengers can fight them off. We know they get confused by the dark and that they immediately calm down when they do not see live humans. One difference between them and other zombies I've seen is that the disease passes to new hosts very quickly. You get bit, and within seconds, you're turned. (The movie does cheat at the end in order to give us a tender moment, but it was worth it.)

The quickness with which the zombie virus passes is mirrored by how quickly selfishness spreads among many of the human survivors on the train. When faced with fear, they turn on each other with lightning speed.

The part where I make it about something more than just the movie

"In order for the culture to have a future, we have to go back to the past." -Korean rappers Epik High

The movie reflects an angst in Korean society that's been growing for some time. Korean society modernized with unbelievable rapidity, going from a medieval society to hyper-modern in a little over a generation. It hasn't slowed down its pace of change. Standards of living for most Koreans have skyrocketed, but along the way, old relationships that kept society together have collapsed. Korean parents used to put all their money into their children rather than retirement plans, because their children were their retirement plan. But a strapped young generation cannot pay for their elders, leading to an impoverished older generation being stuck into sub-standard poor houses.

It's not unlike when feudal relationship broke down in the West. On the one hand, they needed to go. Nobody wants to be born into relationships and kiss ass to everyone born above him. On the other hand, even though it sucked to have to serve a lord, that lord did have responsibilities to take care of you. Similarly, in Korean society, you had to show a shocking (to me as an American) amount of deference to your elders, but they in turn owed you care and concern.

In the West, The enlightenment was a result of the breakdown of feudalism, as was democracy. But so were the nightmare capitalist and industrial societies Dickens wrote about. Korea went through that, but on a highly compressed timeline.

We often see zombies as a warning of how mindlessly people now live their lives. It's a commentary on how we consume media and, nowadays, social media. Train to Busan turns zombies into something more basic. The cause of the zombie outbreak is selfishness, and the zombies are nothing more than an external monster representing what people are becoming internally.

Zombies have power on our imagination because they are humans stripped down to the reptilian brain, devoid of empathy and sympathy. This movie doesn't overthink what to do with that thematically. What is opposed to non-human humanity is human humanity. Caring for one another isn't just hippy-dippie crap. There's a strong biological basis for it, and the better we are at it, the better able we are to survive stresses in our environment, whether they are slowly creeping socio-economic changes brought about by globalization and technology or monsters hurling themselves as us as we speed through life on a train.

The Devil and Judd Apatow

I have a rather low tolerance for vicarious embarrassment. Vicarious suffering I seem to be somewhat okay with, but if I have to watch a fictional character humiliate himself, I struggle to keep going. Mrs. Heretic hates to watch a lot of shows with me, because I honestly have to pause them every five minutes to gather my strength to continue watching someone be debased.

Right now, I'm watching the series "Love" on Netflix. I have to watch it alone. Mrs. Heretic would never stand for how each 30-minute episode takes me 90 minutes to watch. Judd Apatow and the writers on this show seem to be masters of nothing so much as sticking characters in crucibles built by their own vices. It's wonderful and excruciating.

Writers are often told to make terrible things happen to their characters. I've certainly done that to mine. I'm able to make them suffer. But I have a very hard time humiliating them. I suppose I gave characters in "Brokedick" and "The Strongest I've Ever Been" some humiliation, but it was temporary and they bounced back from it. I can't imagine constantly torturing characters the way Apatow does.

I think there's some of my religious past at work here. If God exists, He apparently has no problem allowing his creations to suffer. It's one of the reasons I don't believe in God anymore. I feel like I owe my creations better than that. I want to use my omnipotence better than He does. So I tend to make sure that if someone endures something, there's a point to it. They live through it and become better somehow. I know this isn't how it usually works out in the real world. What doesn't kill you in the real world doesn't make you stronger. It doesn't make you anything. It just happens. I'd like the worlds I create to be different.

Yes, your characters are incredibly life-like and relatable. Please make them less so.

I wonder, when I consider my unwillingness to be a negligent parent to my characters, if writing is really my calling. I have the same weaknesses as a writer I do as a parent. I want to solve things for others instead of letting nature take its course and seeing if they've got the stuff to make it on their own.

Maybe that's the real link between alcohol and writing. It isn't that alcohol unlocks visions for writers, it's that if you become enough of an alcoholic, you can also be enough of an asshole to let terrible things happen to the people you've created.

Breaking the rules well: starting near the end of a story and when to really start at the beginning

Like a lot of writers, when I read advice on how to write well, my first instinct is to look for counter-examples that negate the advice. Anyone who is drawn to do creative work probably feels this instinct. We don't like to be told you can or can't do something, even if it's friendly advice from another creative type. This is probably a healthy instinct; every great work probably breaks some rule or another. But anytime a rule is broken, it probably does so following the logic of some other rule. The "rules," in fact, are nothing more than generalizations drawn from inductive reasoning from thousands of stories that worked.

On the one hand, if you could write a great story from merely following a list of rules, everyone would do it. You need to be able to show readers something they've never seen before by breaking the rules in the right way. On the other hand, if you've written a story and it doesn't have anything in common with any story anyone has ever cared about, you might need to ask yourself if you haven't broken the rules in a bad way.

One rule that comes to mind is the one best expressed by Kurt Vonnegut: start as close to the end as possible. Vonnegut himself followed this in a lot of his novels by having a narrator write to us from the perspective of someone who is already at the end. The narrator will drop hints throughout the novel of what the end is. The world has ended, and I'm writing to you from the future of this novel, for example.

I think the standard literary short story probably should follow the "start near the end" advice most of the time. Let's say you have some character in mind who grew up with a hard-knock life. He never knew his daddy and his mama never loved him. He discovered he was good at math by running numbers for a local mob boss. A kind-hearted teacher realized his gifts and got him a scholarship. But on the night before he leaves for Yale, he accidentally runs over the mob bosses's kid with his car. Nobody saw the accident. He can leave and nobody will ever know it was him. He has to decide, right there in the rain and in the dark of night somewhere, what he will do.

You start that story near the moment your hero hits the kid with his car, not back in his childhood. You can fill in the details of his past life from how your hero reacts to hitting the kid. His thoughts and actions will fill in the details for the reader so the reader knows all the stakes involved.

Different from "write the story with the end in mind"

"Start the story near the end" isn't the same as the principle, advocated by some writing advisers, of writing the whole story with the end in mind. This separate advice has to do with plotting throughout the story, not deciding where to begin. It is simply the idea that everything in your story should contribute to the eventual end. Even though most writers of "serious" fiction now eschew this idea, and advocate writing without pre-determining the end, I think it's still possible to let the end "just happen" on its own and still write with an eye toward the end of the story. This comes about through editing and revising the draft once an early version has shown you the way to the end. Dream, then draft.

But that's not what I'm talking about when I mean start your story near the end. I mean pick the spot where the crux is. Look at the entire arc of your character's life. Figure out what this story is about and start the story right at the crucial moment. Don't start "Bartleby the Scrivener" with the boss's decision to go into record keeping as a profession. Don't start "Gift of the Magi" with Jim and Della falling in love and getting married.

When don't you start near the end, then?

The epic seems to be a place where you should ignore the rule about beginning near the end. In an epic, you really want to start back at the beginning somewhere. Tolkien doesn't start Lord of the Rings with Frodo deciding whether to drop the ring into the fires of Mount Doom. Game of Thrones begins with a scouting party that picks up the first clues of a coming doom that will take 4,000 pages to fully materialize.

Reader expectations in the epic seem to be that they're going to get a long story, one that goes more or less in straight chronological fashion, and that it's going to give us a pretty complete timeline as it happens.

Of course, that still doesn't mean you start at the actual beginning. Tolkien had a world plotted out back to the creation, but he doesn't start the story of Frodo and the ring with the Valar singing Arda into existence. Martin also has a long history in his world that pre-dates the Game of Thrones series, but he still is focusing that series on a part of the timeline of his world that makes sense for that individual story.

I've argued that Justin Cronin's The Passage started too early; we spend over 200 pages seeing how the vampire apocalypse came, then another 500 pages watching as characters a hundred years in the future re-learned the whole history. Obviously, since the book did very well and millions of readers love, it, most people disagree with me, but the point is that it is possible, even in an epic, to start too early.

Limits to the rules and using your intuition

There isn't any rule for how to determine the exact correct point at which to begin a story, which should make fellow rule-breakers happy. Whether you're writing a tight short story with expectations that we are starting near the climax, or writing a fantasy series with expectations of hundreds of pages of world-building, there is a point that is too early to begin, and a point that is too late. You're going to have to use your own intuition to feel out where the sweet spot is. It is helpful, though, just to have the issue raised to your consciousness, to mull it over while thinking of some of your favorite stories or reading new stories in the future. What makes this the right place to begin? Is this similar to a story I want to write, and should I begin in a similar place in it?

A diverting exercise to try sometime is to take a story you love and imagine it beginning somewhere else. If it did, how would you still include everything in it that needs to be there? Is it now too difficult to tell the story, because you need to rely too much on flashbacks? Are you taken out of the moment too much? Then, try it with your own stories. Sometimes, you might find by starting it somewhere else that you've actually improved the sense of urgency within it.