Great read. I experienced a version of this identity-based fake power cycle on a smaller scale a few years ago. I started submitting my short fiction for publication in a more focused way in 2020. I was writing quiet, literary stories that drew on my Korean family's history and spoke to the immigrant experience. When Asian representation and #StopAsianHate blew up in 2021, I thought (cynically): great, now is my time. They are going to open the floodgates to Asian American writers and I will ride this wave to literary stardom. And then... that didn't happen. I published a couple of stories in small literary journals. A handful of Asian Americans got book deals, mostly about intergenerational trauma and strong women. Quotas were met. Winners were chosen. Interest faded.
I also thought the Compact article was funny. At one point, he narrows the parameters even further to make some point about award nominees. Now, it's not just white male writers who are underrepresented-- but STRAIGHT white male writers! The gays don't count. I could feel the unspoken assumption lurking in the background. Straight, white, men-- you know, NORMAL people. Everyone else is a deviation.
I am a little torn because pretty much all of my favorite writers are white men. Also, full disclosure, I'm married to a white man. I'm sympathetic to the grievance. I think our society would be healthier and the culture more vibrant if more straight white men were engaged in reading and writing literature, and didn't feel shut out of those cultural spaces. But I'm not convinced that we need affirmative action for white male writers.
I know the article was so funny! Good luck with this, guys. Yes, I went through the same thing in 2021. Ultimately was not my time. I'm sure the winners would say it was because I wasn't good enough. But in the end it doesn't matter--the difference between the winners and losers is so miniscule.
You talk about "the central problem of the white male writer" but then you describe your own struggle to publish stuff that authentically reflects your experience as a trans person. I think authentically expressing yourself is the central problem of every writer, or maybe every person.
It's interesting that girls were turned off by the depiction of sex in your YA novel. I tend to think we're going through a moral panic against male sexuality. It's all rather tiresome. You get the sense women have become very frightened of something they secretly desire. Sometimes I think the quantity of extreme sexuality available on the internet leads people to try to create a safe, sexless space elsewhere. But safe art is usually not very good.
I am spending ~35 hours with Tolstoy this month, and I think any white male writers who seriously want to make a bid to earn the attention of women readers should do the same, plus actually read those men of other colors with the lens of seeing them as peers, and then do some work. But and also… there’s this other component of the culture, where once women and people of color enter a space in any kind of numbers, white men flee. So first maybe reconcile that and then call us☎️
Yes indeed. I don’t expect they will write like Tolstoy but maybe just absorb the idea that compelling and believable female characters are possible for a man to write and also worthwhile, if they want women to be curious about or possibly buy their books.
As a straight white male, exactly. I guess I'm a rare bird? It doesn't feel that way to me. But I work in an academic library, so maybe it's matter of being in a bubble.
Pretty even, actually. And not everyone is an avid reader (despite the literary environment), but even amongst those who are, the male/female scale is pretty balanced. If there's any difference, it's in the types of books we all read. The women in the group might be more inclined to read current releases.
> "With real power, you have fans for whom your voice is irreplaceable, whereas with fake power, you're just a box to tick and you can be replaced by any other authors with the same demographics."
And of course, with "fake power" comes hostility to and from other authors in your demographic, because you're all competing for the same slot as The One (SEXUALITY) (RACE) (GENDER) Author!
Another way to think about attaining "real power" is to find ways to separate your identity and sense of success as a writer from your income. I'm not dependent on the big book deal for my sense of artistic identity, so I'm much less worried about whether I am occupying the white male writer space in the grand game. I need some kind of recognition/compensation, but it can be much smaller and more niche because I don't need to support myself and my family on the income I generate from writing.
On your note re: our conversation, one thing that occurs to me is that I may often come across as though I don't want to engage with left wing ideas on race in part because left wing ideas on race were so much of what I focused on for the first decade or two of my life as a political person.
No reason for you or anyone else to know that, if it's not evident in my current writing. I'm just pondering how I might be skipping over a lot of relevant information, about my perspective. My dad was involved in a fair amount of local activism around race/civil rights, and he was a lawyer when I was growing up whose main thing was suing people for race and sex discrimination, so I was raised on stories of racist white people, abusive cops, America as a fundamentally racist society, etc. We weren't discussing Kimberle Crenshaw around the dinner table, but I did read and think a lot about those issues in my 20s, and I got pretty burnt out on them, and also maybe rather contemptuous of a lot of the left wing thinking on race that felt (feels) to me as though it's stuck in the past. Doesn't mean I shouldn't still be engaging with it, but it's part of the personal explanation for why it's hard for me to want to devote my newsletter/podcast to it.
That makes perfect sense. You have a whole history with race and liberal politics. It's the same with me and, say, Russian writers. I read all the Russians in a bygone era of my life, and I probably won't revisit them in this blog any time soon, which might lead someone to think I don't believe they're important.
IMO anyway, an interview with your dad about being a civil rights lawyer during the Rodney King years would be a kajillion times more interesting than yet another roundtable discussion asking "What Hath Woke Wrought!?" (And I'm saying this as someone who *likes* you and Naomi.)
Lol. I promise no more panel discussions! Will ponder the suggestion. Debating whether my dad would be interesting for 60 minutes. Maybe if I throw my mom in the mix.
My guess here is that decades of familiarity have jaded you to how interesting his line of work actually is. (I say this as someone who routinely gets told, "wow, you have the coolest and most unique job I've ever heard of!" and then scoffs.) And your father-son rapport would be, I assume, a big plus!
Now, looking at the relatively muted response to your episodes about the prep aesthetic, it is plausible to me that such an episode would be less popular on Substack than stuff more obviously plugged into the culture war, but that's not the same as being less interesting. If anything, the relationship there is inverted. (Exhibit A: The Met Review.)
Honestly this background makes me MORE disappointed in your inflexible belief that "woke" is a great scourge. I guess I shouldn't underestimate how much parental influence can denature interest, but it kinda sounds like you should have a very clear idea of the present day situation rather than believing in stuck in the past. Or maybe I am not understanding how you are saying one informs the other.
I think I’m deeply versed in the historic strengths and insights of the left, its characteristic flaws, and also its relatively cyclical patterns. So I was pretty sure, for instance, that a backlash against woke was coming, and I was pretty inoculated against the danger of turning anti-woke into an identity.
I don’t think I’m inflexible at all when it comes to assessing the relative dangers of various tendencies. Trump is the great threat right now. Clearly. I just don’t think we’re required to stop talking about other pathologies as well.
I think the fact that you're still discussing "woke" and "anti-woke" is a sign that if you managed to avoid making it your identity it was only just barely. I've said elsewhere that self-declared "anti-wokeness" (as opposed to skepticism about the tactics and arguments about speech and the need to protect from it which floated about the Internet) was, literally, acceptance of right-wing propaganda and doing the work of the right wing that led us straight to Trump and Musk. I think I said it to you, but maybe not. It's this line that I'm struggling with, because I don't know either when you mean it's stuck or which time period is stuck on it: "rather contemptuous of a lot of the left wing thinking on race that felt (feels) to me as though it's stuck in the past."
You sound like we are to take on faith that you engaged with this stuff and now it doesn't matter and you aren't going to talk about it again, but just because you say you did this work doesn't make it evident in how you articulate your point above.
But that’s literally the point I was trying to make, that I shouldn’t expect people to take it on faith. Was mostly just trying to explain how I may have failed to accurately represent my perspective, if some people are interpreting me as a kind of crypto conservative.
I really appreciate your balance on this issue. I see a lot of extremes one way or the other around such topics, sometimes with good points, but this article was a breath of fresh air.
Thanks for reminding me that I got so angry reading Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station that I wrote an entire essay about how the white male protagonist deifies and then intentionally crucifies himself so that he can play on his peers’ sympathies!
In all seriousness, GREAT article. I am ALWAYS happy to see a Jeanne Thornton mention in scholarship like this — she is SO underrated.
That was such a thoughtful articulation of something many of us ask ourselves: what does it mean to have lasting vs fleeting impact in our writing. And I loved the idea of interest vs enthusiasm. Interest feels fleeting; once someone scratches that itch by reading one author, that may not translate into continuous engagement with that author or their demographic. You need enthusiasm to survive the long-term grind.
I will certainly be thinking about the difference between "interest" and "enthusiasm" for a while...
As usual, such a great unpacking of ideas done so so meticulously. Thank you for this. I don't feel like I have anything useful to add, but I really appreciate your care with this essay.
Jacob Savage really needs to just read the classics. At least in the classics, you can get something wild and weird. Melville and Faulkner and Eliot and Shelley (to pick a somewhat random assortment of white men and women classics authors) offer digression and specificity and intensity and a total lack of piety.
How many mediocre books from the 21st century does one really need to read, no matter the identity of who is publishing them? Most new books are tame and boring because they come out of the MFA-Big 5 Publishing-Legacy media Iron Triangle. Peters had to take a long journey away from her Iowa MFA to write a wild and weird book about outer-borough nobodies, and she had to publish through an independent press. The only recent example I can think of like her would be Atticus Lish, who also wrote an wild and weird book about outer-borough nobodies published through an independent press. They're both from fairly privileged backgrounds, but the idea that the Iron Triangle can elevate actually interesting diverse voices rather than squelching most everything that's interesting about them has been proven mostly false.
I am going to use your Goodreads rule to see how many copies some of my favorite books have sold. God it is depressing how many good books sell so few copies while slop rises to the top, though since I have never read said slop it might actually turn out to be good in it's own way.
This narrowing also, I believe, applies to literary fiction. I mean it seems to me that Straight White Guys are doing very well in genre fiction. So to meet Compact's narrow grievance quota, you can't just be a White Guy you must also be a Straight White Guy, and you can't publish in genre fiction, you have to be literary.
I don't know if that's what they consciously want. I just think that people tend unconsciously to read characters similar to themselves with more empathy, and this means they're more likely to enjoy a book about someone like themselves.
I'm starting to get the feeling that this belief is part of the problem. It feels self-fulfilling, like the more we say it's true, the more true it becomes. Case in point: in the last couple years, the books I've loved the most have been from key literary figures from the '80s like Rushdie and Murakami. I guess, after reading, that I can find similarities between myself and the central characters, but it was actually the plot structures that held my attention most firmly. But these books were published before the literary world became obsessed with aligning author, character, and reader as closely as possible. For me, that way of thinking contradicts one of the key reasons for reading: to put myself in SOMEONE ELSE'S shoes and see the world through different eyes.
When an entire demographic gets shut out of a space simply because of their sex and skin tone, it's racist, unfortunately, regardless of the details. So it's racist for white men to be silenced due to their sex and skin tone, which is 100% what's happening. The weird undertone to the entire publishing industry about this is "we don't like THIS demographic so even though we've loudly supported a bunch of other demographics it's ok for us to be suppressive and racist towards white men!" And, most of my favorite writers are also white men, and I find it deeply frustrating honestly that I keep having to read the *type of stories women write*, which is mostly novels about relationships. I feel pretty safe in projecting we will never get a War and Peace from a woman.
Great read. I experienced a version of this identity-based fake power cycle on a smaller scale a few years ago. I started submitting my short fiction for publication in a more focused way in 2020. I was writing quiet, literary stories that drew on my Korean family's history and spoke to the immigrant experience. When Asian representation and #StopAsianHate blew up in 2021, I thought (cynically): great, now is my time. They are going to open the floodgates to Asian American writers and I will ride this wave to literary stardom. And then... that didn't happen. I published a couple of stories in small literary journals. A handful of Asian Americans got book deals, mostly about intergenerational trauma and strong women. Quotas were met. Winners were chosen. Interest faded.
I also thought the Compact article was funny. At one point, he narrows the parameters even further to make some point about award nominees. Now, it's not just white male writers who are underrepresented-- but STRAIGHT white male writers! The gays don't count. I could feel the unspoken assumption lurking in the background. Straight, white, men-- you know, NORMAL people. Everyone else is a deviation.
I am a little torn because pretty much all of my favorite writers are white men. Also, full disclosure, I'm married to a white man. I'm sympathetic to the grievance. I think our society would be healthier and the culture more vibrant if more straight white men were engaged in reading and writing literature, and didn't feel shut out of those cultural spaces. But I'm not convinced that we need affirmative action for white male writers.
I know the article was so funny! Good luck with this, guys. Yes, I went through the same thing in 2021. Ultimately was not my time. I'm sure the winners would say it was because I wasn't good enough. But in the end it doesn't matter--the difference between the winners and losers is so miniscule.
You talk about "the central problem of the white male writer" but then you describe your own struggle to publish stuff that authentically reflects your experience as a trans person. I think authentically expressing yourself is the central problem of every writer, or maybe every person.
It's interesting that girls were turned off by the depiction of sex in your YA novel. I tend to think we're going through a moral panic against male sexuality. It's all rather tiresome. You get the sense women have become very frightened of something they secretly desire. Sometimes I think the quantity of extreme sexuality available on the internet leads people to try to create a safe, sexless space elsewhere. But safe art is usually not very good.
I agree with everything you wrote here! Esp paragraph two.
You know, I thought that. "We're expecting *artists* to live upstanding lives like we used to expect for heads of state?"
I am spending ~35 hours with Tolstoy this month, and I think any white male writers who seriously want to make a bid to earn the attention of women readers should do the same, plus actually read those men of other colors with the lens of seeing them as peers, and then do some work. But and also… there’s this other component of the culture, where once women and people of color enter a space in any kind of numbers, white men flee. So first maybe reconcile that and then call us☎️
Tolstoy is a high bar =] Can't wait for your Tolstoy post though!
Yes indeed. I don’t expect they will write like Tolstoy but maybe just absorb the idea that compelling and believable female characters are possible for a man to write and also worthwhile, if they want women to be curious about or possibly buy their books.
As a straight white male, exactly. I guess I'm a rare bird? It doesn't feel that way to me. But I work in an academic library, so maybe it's matter of being in a bubble.
Is the library a “feminized” workplace or do you have a balanced group of colleagues?
Pretty even, actually. And not everyone is an avid reader (despite the literary environment), but even amongst those who are, the male/female scale is pretty balanced. If there's any difference, it's in the types of books we all read. The women in the group might be more inclined to read current releases.
> "With real power, you have fans for whom your voice is irreplaceable, whereas with fake power, you're just a box to tick and you can be replaced by any other authors with the same demographics."
And of course, with "fake power" comes hostility to and from other authors in your demographic, because you're all competing for the same slot as The One (SEXUALITY) (RACE) (GENDER) Author!
Oh of course. Gotta pull down those other crabs.
Two thoughts:
Another way to think about attaining "real power" is to find ways to separate your identity and sense of success as a writer from your income. I'm not dependent on the big book deal for my sense of artistic identity, so I'm much less worried about whether I am occupying the white male writer space in the grand game. I need some kind of recognition/compensation, but it can be much smaller and more niche because I don't need to support myself and my family on the income I generate from writing.
On your note re: our conversation, one thing that occurs to me is that I may often come across as though I don't want to engage with left wing ideas on race in part because left wing ideas on race were so much of what I focused on for the first decade or two of my life as a political person.
No reason for you or anyone else to know that, if it's not evident in my current writing. I'm just pondering how I might be skipping over a lot of relevant information, about my perspective. My dad was involved in a fair amount of local activism around race/civil rights, and he was a lawyer when I was growing up whose main thing was suing people for race and sex discrimination, so I was raised on stories of racist white people, abusive cops, America as a fundamentally racist society, etc. We weren't discussing Kimberle Crenshaw around the dinner table, but I did read and think a lot about those issues in my 20s, and I got pretty burnt out on them, and also maybe rather contemptuous of a lot of the left wing thinking on race that felt (feels) to me as though it's stuck in the past. Doesn't mean I shouldn't still be engaging with it, but it's part of the personal explanation for why it's hard for me to want to devote my newsletter/podcast to it.
That makes perfect sense. You have a whole history with race and liberal politics. It's the same with me and, say, Russian writers. I read all the Russians in a bygone era of my life, and I probably won't revisit them in this blog any time soon, which might lead someone to think I don't believe they're important.
IMO anyway, an interview with your dad about being a civil rights lawyer during the Rodney King years would be a kajillion times more interesting than yet another roundtable discussion asking "What Hath Woke Wrought!?" (And I'm saying this as someone who *likes* you and Naomi.)
Lol. I promise no more panel discussions! Will ponder the suggestion. Debating whether my dad would be interesting for 60 minutes. Maybe if I throw my mom in the mix.
My guess here is that decades of familiarity have jaded you to how interesting his line of work actually is. (I say this as someone who routinely gets told, "wow, you have the coolest and most unique job I've ever heard of!" and then scoffs.) And your father-son rapport would be, I assume, a big plus!
Now, looking at the relatively muted response to your episodes about the prep aesthetic, it is plausible to me that such an episode would be less popular on Substack than stuff more obviously plugged into the culture war, but that's not the same as being less interesting. If anything, the relationship there is inverted. (Exhibit A: The Met Review.)
Honestly this background makes me MORE disappointed in your inflexible belief that "woke" is a great scourge. I guess I shouldn't underestimate how much parental influence can denature interest, but it kinda sounds like you should have a very clear idea of the present day situation rather than believing in stuck in the past. Or maybe I am not understanding how you are saying one informs the other.
What would you hope I’d understand better?
I think I’m deeply versed in the historic strengths and insights of the left, its characteristic flaws, and also its relatively cyclical patterns. So I was pretty sure, for instance, that a backlash against woke was coming, and I was pretty inoculated against the danger of turning anti-woke into an identity.
I don’t think I’m inflexible at all when it comes to assessing the relative dangers of various tendencies. Trump is the great threat right now. Clearly. I just don’t think we’re required to stop talking about other pathologies as well.
I think the fact that you're still discussing "woke" and "anti-woke" is a sign that if you managed to avoid making it your identity it was only just barely. I've said elsewhere that self-declared "anti-wokeness" (as opposed to skepticism about the tactics and arguments about speech and the need to protect from it which floated about the Internet) was, literally, acceptance of right-wing propaganda and doing the work of the right wing that led us straight to Trump and Musk. I think I said it to you, but maybe not. It's this line that I'm struggling with, because I don't know either when you mean it's stuck or which time period is stuck on it: "rather contemptuous of a lot of the left wing thinking on race that felt (feels) to me as though it's stuck in the past."
You sound like we are to take on faith that you engaged with this stuff and now it doesn't matter and you aren't going to talk about it again, but just because you say you did this work doesn't make it evident in how you articulate your point above.
But that’s literally the point I was trying to make, that I shouldn’t expect people to take it on faith. Was mostly just trying to explain how I may have failed to accurately represent my perspective, if some people are interpreting me as a kind of crypto conservative.
It's nice to have vanished. It takes the pressure off. And it keeps people from seeing your stuff as a homework assignment they're obligated to read.
Agreed. Being homework is quite deadly to long-term interest.
I really appreciate your balance on this issue. I see a lot of extremes one way or the other around such topics, sometimes with good points, but this article was a breath of fresh air.
Thanks =]
Thanks for reminding me that I got so angry reading Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station that I wrote an entire essay about how the white male protagonist deifies and then intentionally crucifies himself so that he can play on his peers’ sympathies!
In all seriousness, GREAT article. I am ALWAYS happy to see a Jeanne Thornton mention in scholarship like this — she is SO underrated.
Jeanne is a wonderful person and wonderful writer! She's my editor now at Feminist Press.
Terrific essay, Naomi. Nail on the head.
Thanks!
I arrived, and will endure, for the Mahabharata posts
That was such a thoughtful articulation of something many of us ask ourselves: what does it mean to have lasting vs fleeting impact in our writing. And I loved the idea of interest vs enthusiasm. Interest feels fleeting; once someone scratches that itch by reading one author, that may not translate into continuous engagement with that author or their demographic. You need enthusiasm to survive the long-term grind.
I will certainly be thinking about the difference between "interest" and "enthusiasm" for a while...
Thank you!
As usual, such a great unpacking of ideas done so so meticulously. Thank you for this. I don't feel like I have anything useful to add, but I really appreciate your care with this essay.
Jacob Savage really needs to just read the classics. At least in the classics, you can get something wild and weird. Melville and Faulkner and Eliot and Shelley (to pick a somewhat random assortment of white men and women classics authors) offer digression and specificity and intensity and a total lack of piety.
How many mediocre books from the 21st century does one really need to read, no matter the identity of who is publishing them? Most new books are tame and boring because they come out of the MFA-Big 5 Publishing-Legacy media Iron Triangle. Peters had to take a long journey away from her Iowa MFA to write a wild and weird book about outer-borough nobodies, and she had to publish through an independent press. The only recent example I can think of like her would be Atticus Lish, who also wrote an wild and weird book about outer-borough nobodies published through an independent press. They're both from fairly privileged backgrounds, but the idea that the Iron Triangle can elevate actually interesting diverse voices rather than squelching most everything that's interesting about them has been proven mostly false.
Never read Atticus Lish! But I'll try to remember the name
I am going to use your Goodreads rule to see how many copies some of my favorite books have sold. God it is depressing how many good books sell so few copies while slop rises to the top, though since I have never read said slop it might actually turn out to be good in it's own way.
This narrowing also, I believe, applies to literary fiction. I mean it seems to me that Straight White Guys are doing very well in genre fiction. So to meet Compact's narrow grievance quota, you can't just be a White Guy you must also be a Straight White Guy, and you can't publish in genre fiction, you have to be literary.
It only really works for books published in the Goodreads era (I.e. last ten years), but it does work relatively well!
This one was published recently. If your still reading fantasy I strongly recommend
Do readers really just want to read about people like themselves? That doesn't track with my experience.
I don't know if that's what they consciously want. I just think that people tend unconsciously to read characters similar to themselves with more empathy, and this means they're more likely to enjoy a book about someone like themselves.
I'm starting to get the feeling that this belief is part of the problem. It feels self-fulfilling, like the more we say it's true, the more true it becomes. Case in point: in the last couple years, the books I've loved the most have been from key literary figures from the '80s like Rushdie and Murakami. I guess, after reading, that I can find similarities between myself and the central characters, but it was actually the plot structures that held my attention most firmly. But these books were published before the literary world became obsessed with aligning author, character, and reader as closely as possible. For me, that way of thinking contradicts one of the key reasons for reading: to put myself in SOMEONE ELSE'S shoes and see the world through different eyes.
When an entire demographic gets shut out of a space simply because of their sex and skin tone, it's racist, unfortunately, regardless of the details. So it's racist for white men to be silenced due to their sex and skin tone, which is 100% what's happening. The weird undertone to the entire publishing industry about this is "we don't like THIS demographic so even though we've loudly supported a bunch of other demographics it's ok for us to be suppressive and racist towards white men!" And, most of my favorite writers are also white men, and I find it deeply frustrating honestly that I keep having to read the *type of stories women write*, which is mostly novels about relationships. I feel pretty safe in projecting we will never get a War and Peace from a woman.