Thanks for your kind words and links! I suspect that this Substack will have an influence similar to what my Livejournal (yikes!) did in the old days. I certainly hope it will serve to shunt young literary men* off the Bernie Bro-to-cryptofash waterslide.
At the risk of being a monster, I'd also like to advertise my new book. 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era is an anthology. It includes new writers such as recent workshop alum Cyan Katz (debut!) and now-prominent writers including Silvia Moreno-Garcia (who also got her English-language start as an anonymous commenter on my LJ). I called in many favors, and sold my soul to one thousand different demons, to make this book.
As an amazon-hater, I am also picky about links. For ebooks, I recommend DRM-free you-actually-own-the-book-no-foolin' Weightless Books:
I don't have a story in the book, but I did write one that was bundled with certain pre-orders. Now that the book is out, you can read "Shriek of the Week" right here at Tough Magazine:
*A bit of advice for them. If I were a straight white male novelist just starting out in the field of realism, I would write about fatherhood. That is, the protagonist should be the father of a young child or children. Don't know anything about fatherhood? It's okay, neither does anyone else. (PS: Don't give the kid cancer.)
Quite right. Genius is all over. I know a plumber who thinks his pipes and holds a house in his head while running them out, sliding around in mud and shouting. So not just writing. And many writers ought to be plumbers. Or plumbers as well.
You left out one thing and glided over some others.
Contemporeinety is a sop. Also money. And success an accident.
But there is also the stroke-making. The joy and power of white heat is fine, but painterly right arm movement and an eye is another. Two and a half others, probably. Writing the right novel at the wrong moment involves being confident enough not to write the wrong one. And confidence is full bore arrogance made of utter servitude beyond life and death. My friend who died last year after a very successful career could not walk toward the end, but almost certainly could have had anything but love of greatness driven him. Of course that takes many forms.
Perhaps the view of genius many have is one who can get one work right after another. But almost nobody is like that. The sight of genius is the sight of all the work as one thing, which enlivens insight into "minor" work but is seeded in at least one that connects, before or after death. If you haven't yet made that connecting or key work, and may never, that's hard. But also fun, finding it. Is the key to Le Guin Always Coming Home? Or Searoad? Or is it the poetry? Is Delany's Ballad of Beta 2 a way in? Is Shakespeare's Sonnets? Some of these works were rebirths for their authors, but some were written for the money, accidents. I do know that Dylan, changing voices, literally, mid-career, several times, involved not working sometimes. Plumbing.
> This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
People can get what they want out of life. But you have to be honest with yourself about what you want. If you really want fame, you can be famous. If you want to write a really good short story, you can do that. If you want both, you better think carefully, because they can contradict each other. The two most viral short stories are "Cat Person" and "The Feminist." I think both are skillful, but neither is great.
Genius and fame have never been more opposed than they are now. The sublime feeling that exists in works of genius makes you feel very, very small, but people today seem to have an insatiable appetite for media that makes them feel large & powerful. It would be one thing if people just avoided genius, but I increasingly think people avoid art that shows the kind of messy emotions that are part of everyone's life. I'm optimistic things will get better, because when people avoid their own emotions it leads to intense unhappiness, it isn't livable for long.
‘because not every writer has experienced this divine feeling’. I’ve gotten rejection after rejection but I keep coming back to the well for this feeling alone. Through the keyboard I’ve touched the source more than I’ve ever done with a psychedelic or sat on a meditation cushion. But as you say, it can be harder and harder to trust that the source I’m touching is giving me anything more than private genius which fills my cup alone,
Firstly, I find it very refreshing to read things like this:
> At some point I set up a timer, trying to estimate if I’d reached the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell recommended in Outliers. I’m sure young writers do these same things today, and…I think those things are good!
I'm not a writer, but I've done this kind of thing before in other domains - the effortful pursuit of targets that seem, once you're actually good at the thing, to be irrelevant. It's an important part of the process; it's hard to get good enough to be disdainful of this stuff without going through it. But it seems pretty unpopular to admit that. A lot of experts are sort of /too cool/ to admit to that kind of thing. I think presenting as a de novo genius is probably better socially.
Secondly, I'd be interested to know more about your stories' virality on substack. Are the ones that went viral the same ones that *I* was really into? What sorts of things is the *public* really into? How well does that track with your own inspiration, or your own confidence in stories?
Yes Outliers hit young millennials like a bomb! I used to be somewhat cynical about the 10k hours idea (because there must be many people who practiced 10k hours and didn't become the Beatles), but I've come to think it's a useful notion to help writers, especially, get used to the idea that they will have to produce a lot of work before they're good. Certainly I've written a lot more fiction than most writers my age, and it's been great for me, even though most hasn't been published.
Regarding tales that work. I mean...there's two types of success they tend to have. Some tales are shared widely. Others get shared one place that has a very high readership. So for instance I had one tale (a fake review of a book about why reading is bad) that was shared by Scott Alexander, and that led to many, many subscriptions. My Gatsby tale also made Substack's weekender and resulted in lots of subscriptions. It's generally the weirder or more offbeat tales that have that kind of impact.
The other kind is usually about au courant topics like Trump or male novelists. People are interested in the subject matter, so it hits harder.
In general, the subject matter is quite important (this is true with fiction in general). People are drawn to subject matter they already care about. My tales about religion or parenting or sci-fi stuff or the tech world tend to do less well than my tales about books or writing. But it's still good to experiment :)
interesting! i personally like the very weird stuff. I was directed here by Scott, but the thing that really caught me was your story about gaining magic powers from reading the Mahabharata. Thanks for the insight!
Recently I’ve been thinking about literature in terms of ideas needing writers (rather than writers needing ideas). Like you said, there are only so many book ideas that have the potential to resonate at any given time— even the best possible book about, say, Zoroastrianism, would probably not take off in 2025. And there are only so many people with the perspective to turn those ideas into books in a way that resonates.
Some of these ideas were better captured in novel form than others, but many more were never captured in great novels at all! So atm I’m thinking it’s equal parts “divine inspiration” and savvy recognition of your ability to capture a particular book idea “in search of an author”.
It's funny: yes, you and I were certainly laughing at the idea that when your work is "ready" (in scare quotes but I also think there's something real about this), the gates of publishing will open. Totally absurd idea. Publishing is totally not set up to recognize genius. Often or usually kicks it right to the curb in favor of lesser stuff. God knows (and you know!) that I've had experience with the feeling of divine stuff working through me, then that "crash against the rocks of that same ecosystem and lose their voice, lose their vital energies."
Which is why part of me thinks it's still the right advice to wait to publish until you're ready, but NOT because the readiness will cause the gates of publishing to open. (It won't.) It's got to be about preserving that pure inspiration thing, which is so, so good, and shoring it up against whatever publishing will do to it. I've been able to get back into writing by building a little protective mental fence around it that external things like publishing--whether with presses or on Substack--can't touch.
That said, publishing on Substack is great, and it's a fantastic valve, and I love it.
I also wouldn't say my Substack posts are coming from the same font of divine inspiration that my novel(s) do :)
I agree. Whatever happens after you decide you are "ready" probably isn't going to be good, so it's best to put it off. On the other hand, there comes a time to jump out of the nest. I think most writers are writing towards publication, and they won't produce anything good unless they think publication is a possibility. It's kind of like a race: if the finish line never got closer, you'd just stop running. Yes, the point is to run, but nobody wants to just run endlessly.
Remembering that I am the world's greatest literary genius ruins my flow. Whenever I get too up my own ass, I write some fanfiction. (I still do not receive accolades, because I am a tortured genius.)
Thanks for this! I’m still mining biographies, but I appreciate the earnest invocation of divine influence. Even if someone rejects that language, it’s helpful to give form to a creative impulse. And it’s a nice distinction from the grindset.
I think, by the end, I agreed with this post. Mostly in that it's important to trust (and protect) your own creative process. Try to find an audience, whatever audience there is, and write the things that really speak to you. This is all good advice for anyone who wants to create something meaningful. Considering the amount of time alone it takes to finish a manuscript, even a bad one, I can't imagine going through all that for something merely because I thought it would be marketable.
That said, there are several points where I disagree, quite strongly.
First, I do think that genius is rare. The idea that genius (in any field, but we'll stick to novels) is common rests on some interesting assumptions. You put it this way: "in reality they [agents and editors] don't want distinctive work—they actually want work that's plain and bland."
Ok, you don't quite frame this as what you fully believe, but you come close. It's certainly the implication, and I find it kind of hard to believe. Agents and editors want work that's plain and bland? Why? I find it far more likely that they want something that's interesting and distinct, but they don't find it often and settle for less. I also think that the experiments in non-gatekeeping kind of bear this out. With Substack, we all get to be our own agents and editors, going through the slush pile, and you know what? It's not great! There are a few interesting writers on here, but even mediated by the algorithm, so much of what's posted on this site is just bad. The general content in Substack Notes does not lead me to believe that genius is everywhere.
Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that genius may get passed over. It's not the right time, or it didn't find the right individual, or so on. And there are fewer spots available than there are manuscripts, so there's an element of luck.
I think a lot of this disagreement, though, comes down to definitions. What you call "genius" in this I would call the "muse," or perhaps "flow state." That's available to everyone, in some form and in some field, but it does not, I don't think, always result in genius-level work.
We know genius often isn't recognized as genius when it appears, so we know for a certainty that genius must be more common than we think it is. Because most of today's geniuses are yet unheralded as geniuses, or they're heralded alongside a hundred other people who future ages will consider mediocre.
Maybe! Genius sometimes isn't recognized when it appears, sure, but often? I haven't counted or run the numbers, so I don't know. And (I think we agree) some are counted as genius then later forgotten. So we've got factors adding to and taking from the total count -- figuring out how much genius is out there is not an easy question!
I do think you're a genius. The tales feel so vital to me in a way little fiction does. But I reject this theory of genius.
I don't think that most of the works of history have come from these moments of divine inspiration. Take Virginia Woolf's career for example: some books are effortful and great (The Waves). Some books are effortless and great (To The Lighthouse). Some books are effortless and not great (Flush).
But, more vitally, I don't think any one way of writing is better than any other. I agree that there is a quality--let's call it vitality--in some texts which comes from divine inspiration. But some works which are genius don't have vitality: La Vie Mode d'Emploi, for example.
Also, I think that we are entrained, or interpellated by the media-sphere so some of what feels alive to us also feels alive to other people. That's the Girard of it all. But I don't think there is anyway to feel whether a work will be alive to other people. To imagine that there is a divine vein that links us to the collective unconscious or something I think would be to destroy the otherness of other people.
I like your tales and this post. It all lands. It seems like you are also in a unstated conversation with Lewis Hyde’s work on genius, and gifts, The Gift, which, incidentally, is the namesake of my issue of tales. The 1982 book is excellent. I don’t say this as a marketing ploy to get you to read my words or to be that person who responds to a thoughtful essay by saying, “why didn’t you you cite this?”, though of course you are welcome to read my words and/or dismiss the suggestion as annoying. What I hope to offer with this comment is recognition of what seems to be cornerstone to your take on the dehumanizing tension between marketplace and the genius we labor to release through writing—the work of sharing the gift—and suggest that citations can be part of the conversation; if writing for an imagined reader is about fostering a connection between minds across places and times, marketplaces can also opportunities to establish and legitimate lineages of giving and receiving. So, I see citations as tribute and a way to widen and acknowledge what we create when we give. ♥️🙏
Nice post. Didn't read all of the examples cause been thinking about this stuff too, but would have probably thought it was so cool in high school lol.
Un-ironically, id recommend checking out that Disney movie about souls and jazz - I think the whole 'writers in the zone' concept from the movie is a lot about what you're saying. Anyone can get in the zone about anything, and works made while mostly in the zone are basically genius, but the genius people are probably the ones good at regularly accessing the zone for non-zero but also non-infinite amount of time.
Hope you keep up the writing. While it wasn't the most polished thing I've read recently on here, most of the polished stuff has been about current politics and being angie about something, so I really appreciate the semi-polished stuff you just happen to be thinking about in your life. A nice content algorithm to cleanse my content consumption pallete *sticks out pinky and sips fruit water from a tea cup*.
Here's to Nick! The man drops truth-bombs about writing like a preschooler spreads respiratory infections. And yes, he will fight you. In person, if he deems necessary.
As a rule, I appreciate curmudgeons. But I stridently disagree with his quote on genius, about not caring whether you live or die. It seemed anti-social and hermetic and totally wrong. I would fight him about it.
Writing is a hermetic activity. It requires a pretty well-developed inner life. Of course people are social animals and need social lives, but if you lose yourself in your social life (and many people do) you would never think to write in the first place.
Ah, we meet again! I agree with what you’ve written, but I don’t agree with the quote from the article about committing to your inner life to the exclusion of everything else.
I just read "Winesburg, Ohio" and I was reminded of a quote from the first story:
> He had shouted at George Willard, condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the people about him, "You are destroying yourself," he cried. "You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them."
I don't think anyone is saying "be a hermit all the time." I think for many people it can be switched on and off. But it is good advice generally. A lot of people who want to write are hopelessly enmeshed in communities, and they end up just imitating the people around them.
Thanks for your kind words and links! I suspect that this Substack will have an influence similar to what my Livejournal (yikes!) did in the old days. I certainly hope it will serve to shunt young literary men* off the Bernie Bro-to-cryptofash waterslide.
At the risk of being a monster, I'd also like to advertise my new book. 120 Murders: Dark Fiction Inspired by the Alternative Era is an anthology. It includes new writers such as recent workshop alum Cyan Katz (debut!) and now-prominent writers including Silvia Moreno-Garcia (who also got her English-language start as an anonymous commenter on my LJ). I called in many favors, and sold my soul to one thousand different demons, to make this book.
As an amazon-hater, I am also picky about links. For ebooks, I recommend DRM-free you-actually-own-the-book-no-foolin' Weightless Books:
https://weightlessbooks.com/120-murders-dark-fiction-inspired-by-the-alternative-era/
For paperback, please patronize my local independent store, East Bay Booksellers:
https://www.ebbooksellers.com/item/qHl97caDRCpgW7y8fTG4Pw
I don't have a story in the book, but I did write one that was bundled with certain pre-orders. Now that the book is out, you can read "Shriek of the Week" right here at Tough Magazine:
https://redneck-press.blogspot.com/2025/04/shriek-of-week-fiction-nick-mamatas.html?m=1
*A bit of advice for them. If I were a straight white male novelist just starting out in the field of realism, I would write about fatherhood. That is, the protagonist should be the father of a young child or children. Don't know anything about fatherhood? It's okay, neither does anyone else. (PS: Don't give the kid cancer.)
Quite right. Genius is all over. I know a plumber who thinks his pipes and holds a house in his head while running them out, sliding around in mud and shouting. So not just writing. And many writers ought to be plumbers. Or plumbers as well.
You left out one thing and glided over some others.
Contemporeinety is a sop. Also money. And success an accident.
But there is also the stroke-making. The joy and power of white heat is fine, but painterly right arm movement and an eye is another. Two and a half others, probably. Writing the right novel at the wrong moment involves being confident enough not to write the wrong one. And confidence is full bore arrogance made of utter servitude beyond life and death. My friend who died last year after a very successful career could not walk toward the end, but almost certainly could have had anything but love of greatness driven him. Of course that takes many forms.
Perhaps the view of genius many have is one who can get one work right after another. But almost nobody is like that. The sight of genius is the sight of all the work as one thing, which enlivens insight into "minor" work but is seeded in at least one that connects, before or after death. If you haven't yet made that connecting or key work, and may never, that's hard. But also fun, finding it. Is the key to Le Guin Always Coming Home? Or Searoad? Or is it the poetry? Is Delany's Ballad of Beta 2 a way in? Is Shakespeare's Sonnets? Some of these works were rebirths for their authors, but some were written for the money, accidents. I do know that Dylan, changing voices, literally, mid-career, several times, involved not working sometimes. Plumbing.
I agree with all of this. Thank you.
From Walden:
> This spending of the best part of one's life earning money in order to enjoy a questionable liberty during the least valuable part of it reminds me of the Englishman who went to India to make a fortune first, in order that he might return to England and live the life of a poet. He should have gone up garret at once.
People can get what they want out of life. But you have to be honest with yourself about what you want. If you really want fame, you can be famous. If you want to write a really good short story, you can do that. If you want both, you better think carefully, because they can contradict each other. The two most viral short stories are "Cat Person" and "The Feminist." I think both are skillful, but neither is great.
Genius and fame have never been more opposed than they are now. The sublime feeling that exists in works of genius makes you feel very, very small, but people today seem to have an insatiable appetite for media that makes them feel large & powerful. It would be one thing if people just avoided genius, but I increasingly think people avoid art that shows the kind of messy emotions that are part of everyone's life. I'm optimistic things will get better, because when people avoid their own emotions it leads to intense unhappiness, it isn't livable for long.
I'm sure. Everything is changing. And there's always new generations being born :) they will figure it out even if we can't
‘because not every writer has experienced this divine feeling’. I’ve gotten rejection after rejection but I keep coming back to the well for this feeling alone. Through the keyboard I’ve touched the source more than I’ve ever done with a psychedelic or sat on a meditation cushion. But as you say, it can be harder and harder to trust that the source I’m touching is giving me anything more than private genius which fills my cup alone,
Firstly, I find it very refreshing to read things like this:
> At some point I set up a timer, trying to estimate if I’d reached the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell recommended in Outliers. I’m sure young writers do these same things today, and…I think those things are good!
I'm not a writer, but I've done this kind of thing before in other domains - the effortful pursuit of targets that seem, once you're actually good at the thing, to be irrelevant. It's an important part of the process; it's hard to get good enough to be disdainful of this stuff without going through it. But it seems pretty unpopular to admit that. A lot of experts are sort of /too cool/ to admit to that kind of thing. I think presenting as a de novo genius is probably better socially.
Secondly, I'd be interested to know more about your stories' virality on substack. Are the ones that went viral the same ones that *I* was really into? What sorts of things is the *public* really into? How well does that track with your own inspiration, or your own confidence in stories?
Yes Outliers hit young millennials like a bomb! I used to be somewhat cynical about the 10k hours idea (because there must be many people who practiced 10k hours and didn't become the Beatles), but I've come to think it's a useful notion to help writers, especially, get used to the idea that they will have to produce a lot of work before they're good. Certainly I've written a lot more fiction than most writers my age, and it's been great for me, even though most hasn't been published.
Regarding tales that work. I mean...there's two types of success they tend to have. Some tales are shared widely. Others get shared one place that has a very high readership. So for instance I had one tale (a fake review of a book about why reading is bad) that was shared by Scott Alexander, and that led to many, many subscriptions. My Gatsby tale also made Substack's weekender and resulted in lots of subscriptions. It's generally the weirder or more offbeat tales that have that kind of impact.
The other kind is usually about au courant topics like Trump or male novelists. People are interested in the subject matter, so it hits harder.
In general, the subject matter is quite important (this is true with fiction in general). People are drawn to subject matter they already care about. My tales about religion or parenting or sci-fi stuff or the tech world tend to do less well than my tales about books or writing. But it's still good to experiment :)
interesting! i personally like the very weird stuff. I was directed here by Scott, but the thing that really caught me was your story about gaining magic powers from reading the Mahabharata. Thanks for the insight!
Aww, that’s a favorite of mine! Glad to know those have some fans =]
Yes. I love being 'read' by Naomi. I swear I've done all the things she described in her post. The reading biographies, the outliers thing, and so on.
Yes I was 100 percent positive that some readers would relate to this! These books exist for a reason after all :) Are you an aspiring writer?
Yes!
Recently I’ve been thinking about literature in terms of ideas needing writers (rather than writers needing ideas). Like you said, there are only so many book ideas that have the potential to resonate at any given time— even the best possible book about, say, Zoroastrianism, would probably not take off in 2025. And there are only so many people with the perspective to turn those ideas into books in a way that resonates.
Some of these ideas were better captured in novel form than others, but many more were never captured in great novels at all! So atm I’m thinking it’s equal parts “divine inspiration” and savvy recognition of your ability to capture a particular book idea “in search of an author”.
It's funny: yes, you and I were certainly laughing at the idea that when your work is "ready" (in scare quotes but I also think there's something real about this), the gates of publishing will open. Totally absurd idea. Publishing is totally not set up to recognize genius. Often or usually kicks it right to the curb in favor of lesser stuff. God knows (and you know!) that I've had experience with the feeling of divine stuff working through me, then that "crash against the rocks of that same ecosystem and lose their voice, lose their vital energies."
Which is why part of me thinks it's still the right advice to wait to publish until you're ready, but NOT because the readiness will cause the gates of publishing to open. (It won't.) It's got to be about preserving that pure inspiration thing, which is so, so good, and shoring it up against whatever publishing will do to it. I've been able to get back into writing by building a little protective mental fence around it that external things like publishing--whether with presses or on Substack--can't touch.
That said, publishing on Substack is great, and it's a fantastic valve, and I love it.
I also wouldn't say my Substack posts are coming from the same font of divine inspiration that my novel(s) do :)
I agree. Whatever happens after you decide you are "ready" probably isn't going to be good, so it's best to put it off. On the other hand, there comes a time to jump out of the nest. I think most writers are writing towards publication, and they won't produce anything good unless they think publication is a possibility. It's kind of like a race: if the finish line never got closer, you'd just stop running. Yes, the point is to run, but nobody wants to just run endlessly.
I love this essay. I definitely consider your essays genius.
I wonder if the feeling of being possessed by the muses is the same as the “flow” described by people like Csíkszentmihályi?
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/20/flow-state-science-creativity-psychology-focus
Remembering that I am the world's greatest literary genius ruins my flow. Whenever I get too up my own ass, I write some fanfiction. (I still do not receive accolades, because I am a tortured genius.)
Thanks for this! I’m still mining biographies, but I appreciate the earnest invocation of divine influence. Even if someone rejects that language, it’s helpful to give form to a creative impulse. And it’s a nice distinction from the grindset.
I think, by the end, I agreed with this post. Mostly in that it's important to trust (and protect) your own creative process. Try to find an audience, whatever audience there is, and write the things that really speak to you. This is all good advice for anyone who wants to create something meaningful. Considering the amount of time alone it takes to finish a manuscript, even a bad one, I can't imagine going through all that for something merely because I thought it would be marketable.
That said, there are several points where I disagree, quite strongly.
First, I do think that genius is rare. The idea that genius (in any field, but we'll stick to novels) is common rests on some interesting assumptions. You put it this way: "in reality they [agents and editors] don't want distinctive work—they actually want work that's plain and bland."
Ok, you don't quite frame this as what you fully believe, but you come close. It's certainly the implication, and I find it kind of hard to believe. Agents and editors want work that's plain and bland? Why? I find it far more likely that they want something that's interesting and distinct, but they don't find it often and settle for less. I also think that the experiments in non-gatekeeping kind of bear this out. With Substack, we all get to be our own agents and editors, going through the slush pile, and you know what? It's not great! There are a few interesting writers on here, but even mediated by the algorithm, so much of what's posted on this site is just bad. The general content in Substack Notes does not lead me to believe that genius is everywhere.
Of course, there are plenty of legitimate reasons that genius may get passed over. It's not the right time, or it didn't find the right individual, or so on. And there are fewer spots available than there are manuscripts, so there's an element of luck.
I think a lot of this disagreement, though, comes down to definitions. What you call "genius" in this I would call the "muse," or perhaps "flow state." That's available to everyone, in some form and in some field, but it does not, I don't think, always result in genius-level work.
We know genius often isn't recognized as genius when it appears, so we know for a certainty that genius must be more common than we think it is. Because most of today's geniuses are yet unheralded as geniuses, or they're heralded alongside a hundred other people who future ages will consider mediocre.
Maybe! Genius sometimes isn't recognized when it appears, sure, but often? I haven't counted or run the numbers, so I don't know. And (I think we agree) some are counted as genius then later forgotten. So we've got factors adding to and taking from the total count -- figuring out how much genius is out there is not an easy question!
I do think you're a genius. The tales feel so vital to me in a way little fiction does. But I reject this theory of genius.
I don't think that most of the works of history have come from these moments of divine inspiration. Take Virginia Woolf's career for example: some books are effortful and great (The Waves). Some books are effortless and great (To The Lighthouse). Some books are effortless and not great (Flush).
But, more vitally, I don't think any one way of writing is better than any other. I agree that there is a quality--let's call it vitality--in some texts which comes from divine inspiration. But some works which are genius don't have vitality: La Vie Mode d'Emploi, for example.
Also, I think that we are entrained, or interpellated by the media-sphere so some of what feels alive to us also feels alive to other people. That's the Girard of it all. But I don't think there is anyway to feel whether a work will be alive to other people. To imagine that there is a divine vein that links us to the collective unconscious or something I think would be to destroy the otherness of other people.
It's true not everyone loves my woo-woo outlook on creativity :) That is understandable.
I'm glad you like my tales!
I like your tales and this post. It all lands. It seems like you are also in a unstated conversation with Lewis Hyde’s work on genius, and gifts, The Gift, which, incidentally, is the namesake of my issue of tales. The 1982 book is excellent. I don’t say this as a marketing ploy to get you to read my words or to be that person who responds to a thoughtful essay by saying, “why didn’t you you cite this?”, though of course you are welcome to read my words and/or dismiss the suggestion as annoying. What I hope to offer with this comment is recognition of what seems to be cornerstone to your take on the dehumanizing tension between marketplace and the genius we labor to release through writing—the work of sharing the gift—and suggest that citations can be part of the conversation; if writing for an imagined reader is about fostering a connection between minds across places and times, marketplaces can also opportunities to establish and legitimate lineages of giving and receiving. So, I see citations as tribute and a way to widen and acknowledge what we create when we give. ♥️🙏
Nice post. Didn't read all of the examples cause been thinking about this stuff too, but would have probably thought it was so cool in high school lol.
Un-ironically, id recommend checking out that Disney movie about souls and jazz - I think the whole 'writers in the zone' concept from the movie is a lot about what you're saying. Anyone can get in the zone about anything, and works made while mostly in the zone are basically genius, but the genius people are probably the ones good at regularly accessing the zone for non-zero but also non-infinite amount of time.
Hope you keep up the writing. While it wasn't the most polished thing I've read recently on here, most of the polished stuff has been about current politics and being angie about something, so I really appreciate the semi-polished stuff you just happen to be thinking about in your life. A nice content algorithm to cleanse my content consumption pallete *sticks out pinky and sips fruit water from a tea cup*.
Here's to Nick! The man drops truth-bombs about writing like a preschooler spreads respiratory infections. And yes, he will fight you. In person, if he deems necessary.
:)
As a rule, I appreciate curmudgeons. But I stridently disagree with his quote on genius, about not caring whether you live or die. It seemed anti-social and hermetic and totally wrong. I would fight him about it.
Writing is a hermetic activity. It requires a pretty well-developed inner life. Of course people are social animals and need social lives, but if you lose yourself in your social life (and many people do) you would never think to write in the first place.
Ah, we meet again! I agree with what you’ve written, but I don’t agree with the quote from the article about committing to your inner life to the exclusion of everything else.
I just read "Winesburg, Ohio" and I was reminded of a quote from the first story:
> He had shouted at George Willard, condemning his tendency to be too much influenced by the people about him, "You are destroying yourself," he cried. "You have the inclination to be alone and to dream and you are afraid of dreams. You want to be like others in town here. You hear them talk and you try to imitate them."
I don't think anyone is saying "be a hermit all the time." I think for many people it can be switched on and off. But it is good advice generally. A lot of people who want to write are hopelessly enmeshed in communities, and they end up just imitating the people around them.