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I don’t ask people to read my work unless they’re featured in it, they ask for it, or I’m paying them to make sense of my overwrought prose before I inflict it on the public. I don’t always follow this rule, but I regret most of the times I broke it. It’s not only that it was an imposition on someone else, but they also gave bad or non-advice half the time, being unwilling or unqualified to critique. There’s value in peer groups, but I prefer superior groups: professionals paid to edit or educate, and even in the latter category, an English teacher of some thirty years once told me: “There are only two things you can really tell someone: keep writing, or stop writing.”
I’m not an editor or an English teacher. I wouldn’t be good at it. In ascending order of things not to put on a resume: I’m impatient, I’m not a team player, and I don’t have an eye for detail. My nominal strengths are in composition, complaining about my job, and giving my dad panic attacks when I write about mortality. Editors have to help writers sharpen their own voices for the unknown multitudes they’re trying to reach. I imagine it’s like being an oral presentation coach for alien species. As for teaching, the ability to do something is not the same skill as the ability to say anything useful about it. The sum total of my writing curriculum would be read The Elements of Style, don’t read On Writing, Hemingway is bad, and On the Road is boring.
So that’s the it’s-not-you-it’s-me part, but I’ll be honest: It might be you. You might write screed after rant after hot take of self-satisfied and misinformed op-ed pieces. You might drag one poor, unoriginal thought across fifteen paragraphs of synonyms for boredom, in some accursed no-man’s land between bad poetry and overwrought prose. You might try to communicate a seemingly optimistic yet intensely condescending epiphany in an attempt to bring enlightenment to all, but instead perfectly describe the width of the canyon separating your fortress of ignorance from the rest of the world. You might have one interesting theme that you revisit so many times I can recite half your work without reading it. Your villains might all have faces that would have been handsome but for the jagged scar they never talk about except they always talk about it halfway through the story. Your characters might all have exactly the same flippant sense of humor that makes them both indistinguishable and cloyingly obnoxious because you can’t get over your own cleverness. You might just use the word “just” too often.
If any of that sounds like hyperbolic cruelty, that’s because of the most important part: Yes, you might have something to do with it, but it is definitely always me. Every one of those sentences made an appearance in a tirade of self-flagellation that went through my head when I read my own work insufficiently drunk. Many of them were true. Just search this blog for the word “just” someday.
If you come to me because you like my work and want my take on your possibly similar work, you need to know that for all the time I spend trying to figure out how to do this, I hate my own work. However long I slave at what I’m writing at this very instant, I’ll hate it next week. I might hate it before I publish it, but publish it anyway, despairing that I can do any better.
I also hate everyone else’s work. There is nobody that I can read that I won’t start hating. Greg Egan is the living master of diamond-hard science fiction, but has some abrupt endings once he’s done with the math. Claire North wrote the only book I’ve read more than twice, The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August, but I don’t even know what she was going for in her last couple of books, I just know I got bored of looking for a plot. Roger Zelanzy is among my favorite dead authors, but his opus The Amber Chronicles had maybe a dozen good scenes, a lot of chatting in studies, and everything seemed to get fixed as soon as somebody found a powerful enough magic thing in a drawer. I used to go on ten-article Cracked.com benders, now I cringe at the thought of slogging through 6 Predictable Analogy Jokes. Ernest Cline wrote a gripping dystopian page-turner for Gen Xers with a stalking subplot, and followed it up with a plodding novella of derivative wish-fulfillment with a Hot Girls Near You Want to Bang subplot. Sufficiently Advanced Technology might have gotten away with its title being a sly attribution recognized by most science fiction readers, but instead decided to use the entire Clarke quote no less than three times, plus a variant as the very last line of the book. It was like watching some Hell-born version of Star Wars with lines like “But I wanna see the star wars,” and “We will crush the rebels and win the star wars,” and closing on “I am excited to award these medals for bravery in star wars.” I grew up on Tom Robbins, but Villa Incognito is so bad it made me like all of his previous work less. The next time I come across the phrase “dear reader” in a Daniel Dennett book I’m going to set it on fire.
These are the blood-tinted glasses through which I cannot help but read. All my personal reading is a neurotic exercise in figuring out what not to do. Everything eventually irks me in some subjective way and I add it to the list of things that could potentially annoy people like me. If I read your work, I’m looking for these kinds of things, and if I find them, they’re not much use to you, because they’re about me. If I don’t find them, I’ll have nothing to say. Or I’ll conclude you should stop writing, and I don’t break dreams unless I’m getting paid.
1 I went through Shutterstock for about two hours trying to find something vaguely relevant to the theme. I was stuck on a throwing paper motif, but that mostly led to “The young man, the businessman, in a dark business suit throws a pile of documents upwards, aside. The beginning of new life.” Then this caught my eye, but I wasn’t sure why, so I brought it to the bar and discussed it with some friends, after giving the context. Alex wasn’t listening, so we got his impression without context. He looked at it for two seconds and said, “She’s looking down at your broken body after utterly humiliating you in battle, and you use the last ounce of your strength to throw a crumpled up piece of paper at her, and she snatches it out of the air and smiles as she watches the life go out of your eyes.”
