21st-Century Book Banning: A How-to Guide

One of the advantages of publishing a book in the twentieth century was that it was much easier to get your book banned. Public denouncements of a book are fantastic publicity, and the outright banning of a book—well, that’s the kind of notoriety a writer can retire on.

Unfortunately, inciting the public’s wrath with a book is much more difficult nowadays. Not only have most people stopped reading books, they are already angry about so many other things that it’s all but impossible to raise their ire with mere words. If you want to spark a riot today, you need video footage and a dead body at the very least. Tears and screaming help, too. It’s hard for writers to compete with such raw displays of emotion and violence.

And yet, we must.  

The trouble is, disgust, dismay, and outrage are part of every American’s daily diet now. Also, Americans have developed an extremely high tolerance for deviance and immorality of all kinds. Back in the 1950s, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller got pilloried in public (and paid handsomely for it) by writing smutty books that, were they penned today, would be adapted as movies on the Hallmark channel. People no longer have any shame, and they are lazy, so motivating them to take to the streets in protest is a huge challenge.

What’s an aspiring rabble-rouser to do?

First, recognize that none of the old tactics work anymore. A healthy dose of pornography might spike sales, but writing about sex, no matter how filthy or acrobatic, is only going to inspire people to experiment. An autobiography full of lies used to be a good way to get condemned in public, but everyone does it now, so the novelty is gone. Saying blasphemous things about the prophet Mohammed can stir things up in certain parts of the world, but in America and Europe it just makes you look courageous.

Evangelical Christians can still be counted upon to put out lists of books that ought to be banned, but infuriating them is so easy that it’s hardly even worth it. All you have to do is write about two teenagers of the same sex kissing, or suggest that Jesus may not have had blonde hair, and boom, you’re on some Christian’s hit list. Likewise, a book full of racial slurs and insults might get a book banned from school libraries, but it’s just as likely to end up as required reading in the classroom. There are no guarantees.

Indeed, the bar for those who wish to test the limits of free speech has been raised spectacularly high. Consider: Germany recently decided to republish Hitler’s long-banned diatribe Mein Kampf. You know things are bad when you write a thousand pages of venomous bile, then methodically kill millions of people based on the sourness of that bile, and barely get banned for more than a few decades.

Now, it is still possible to get banned in other print mediums. To get banned from a typical magazine, for instance, all you have to do is write something vaguely critical about a major advertiser. And to ensure that your work never sees the light of day in a daily newspaper, all you have to do is use words that contain more than three syllables.

Getting a book banned is whole different story, though.

The biggest hurdle, of course, is the First Amendment to the Constitution, which allows far too many people to say way too much. But there are ways to use the First Amendment to your advantage—namely, by saying lots of outrageous, irresponsible things that piss people off just for the fun of it.

Another good tactic is to locate groups of hyper-sensitive, reactionary people and push their buttons like a claustrophobe in a broken elevator. College campuses are excellent places for this. Other parts of society may have grown more accepting of diverse opinions, but outrage and intolerance are still alive and well on America’s college campuses, so a visiting author, if he or she is lucky, can still get banned.

The reason this is still possible is that today’s college students don’t like to think about ideas with which they disagree. Unlike previous generations, today’s college students were born with the right ideas already implanted in their heads—the result of certain education programs initiated during the Reagan administration. But if you observe offhand to a college student that maybe they don’t need the expensive education for which they are paying—because they already know what to think about everything—they will immediately accuse you of bullying and “hate speech.”

This is precisely what you want.

Today’s college students hate “hate speech” with such red-hot loathing that they will audibly sip their Starbucks in protest if you dare trifle with their finely tuned racial and cultural sensitivities. Characterize short people as “taller-than-average leprechauns,” for instance, and you can expect a shit-storm of controversy. Suggest that alligators are smarter than crocodiles, say, and the campus crocodile club will lodge a formal protest with the dean and say all sorts of nasty things about you on social media.

They will not, however, show up in great numbers to heckle you. To get that kind of reaction, you have to convince college students that you pose a dire threat to their way of life—i.e., cushy dorms, easy classes, low expectations, cheap drugs, carefree sex, excellent workout facilities, 24-hour food service, no parental supervision—and/or that you will eventually hold them responsible for the stupid things they do in college.

Even then, there’s no guarantee you will succeed. The problem with college campuses is that just when you’ve raised public awareness of the threat you pose, and have coaxed a few kids to denounce you in the school newspaper and call for the administration to ban your appearance (what I call “the jackpot”), some other group of do-gooders will inevitably show up to defend your right to free speech.

Free-speechers are annoying because they think your rights are being violated. No, you explain to them, you want these students to hate you because you want to sell books—enough books to fuel a really nice bonfire on the quad. That’s the goal, you say. You could care less what students say about you, as long as they buy your book before tossing it into the flames. Unfortunately, free-speechers don’t understand how capitalism works; they’ve never had to sell their soul to survive.  

It’s all social media’s fault, of course. Social media has lowered the level of discourse in this country so far that principled rage is pretty much a thing of the past. Now it’s all just one big bucket of rage—at everything and everyone—so trying to cash in by stoking the flames of that rage by writing a disgusting, bigoted, blasphemous book is a loser’s game.

Honestly, you’re better off running for president.

How to Mount a Successful Book Tour

Back in the day, guys like Thomas Pynchon and J.D. Salinger could write a book and sell a million copies without ever leaving their basement. But these days, it isn’t enough to write a brilliant book—one must also go out into public and promote it. This means traveling around the country doing readings, lectures, magazine interviews, television talk shows, radio call-in programs, podcasts, commencement addresses, pancake breakfasts, bar mitzvahs, and a host of other demeaning things in order to sell something that should, frankly, sell itself.

There are several reasons why books don’t sell themselves. In my case, for instance, the public is not properly educated about the importance of my work; bookstores do not display large enough mountains of my books; teachers do not require their students to read enough of my work in their classes; libraries do not stock enough copies to meet public demand; the government does not store enough copies in secure underground bunkers so that future civilizations might learn from it after we have annihilated ourselves; and NASA has not launched enough copies of my book into space as a means of informing other intelligent life in the universe about our planet and why they would be wise to avoid it.

Rather than make efforts to fix what is so obviously wrong with the world, most publishers would instead prefer that their authors go on a book tour. For those young writers who have yet to participate in this bizarre ritual of contemporary capitalism, I feel compelled to offer some helpful hints about how to conduct a successful book tour.

A typical book tour includes fifteen to twenty major metropolitan areas and a smattering of smaller markets where readers congregate—usually college towns like Madison, Wisconsin, or Iowa City. It doesn’t matter what city you’re in, though—the approach is the same:

In the weeks before your arrival, you’ll to want to promote your appearance on billboards entering the city from all directions, and on the side of the city’s buses. Radio and television spots should be aired regionally during prime time, and a large feature story on you should appear in the city’s largest newspaper on the day before your arrival. Have your PR team contact the mayor of the city to declare the day of your appearance “Name of Author Day,” and to arrange for a presentation on the steps of the town hall. It’s usually no problem to convince the local high-school marching band to lead a small parade in your honor, and the local Veterans Administration can organize a volunteer rifle brigade to give you a proper 21-gun salute.

On the night of your reading, do not leaving anyone guessing about where it is. Rent at least four searchlights with a minimum of 14-million lumens of candlepower to rake the skies with light beams visible for a two-mile radius, and make sure the location is pinned to the phone of every Uber driver in town. In order to accommodate the crowds, it’s often necessary to forego the traditional bookstore and rent one of the local performance halls or a large sports arena. At the entrance, I like to give the first thousand or so people a Tad Simons bobble-head doll as a souvenir, and I hand out colored glow sticks to everyone, with instructions about when to wave them.

Many writers insist on a punctual start to their readings, but I think it’s important to gauge the energy of the crowd and make your entrance when it’s going to make the biggest impact. I prefer to wait about an hour-and-a-half, sometimes two, before taking the stage. I know the time is right when the people up front are crushing each other to get closer to the stage, the screaming and yelling is at a fever pitch, and I can hear the familiar crackle of gunfire. That’s when I cue the singing of the national anthem by a local celebrity. After the final note of that blessed song rings out—“braaaaaaaave”—I give people a few moments to wipe the tears from their cheeks and compose themselves.

Then I make my entrance. I allow about five minutes for the pandemonium to subside, then I begin.

During the reading itself, it’s important to synchronize the light show to emphasize the different moods of the passages you are reading, and to time the flash bombs to let people know when something important in the story has happened. Flame pots should be used sparingly, because people get bored of them after a while. And if one of the passages you are reading involves rain, I recommend aiming several water hoses out over the crowd to help them feel what the characters in your story are feeling. 

At the end of the reading, fire the confetti cannons and thank the crowd. As the confetti is falling, release the ceiling full of colored balloons with your face printed on them, then instruct your team to load the Barnes & Noble book guns and start launching paperback versions of your tome into the upper decks. Let the crowd know that your books are on sale in the lobby, and that you will be available afterwards for book signing, baby-naming advice, and selective sperm donations.

As your audience is leaving the arena, it’s always nice to send them off with a modest display of fireworks as well, and to have a blimp hover over the parking lot flashing a heartfelt “thank you” to the folks as they head home.

Follow the above procedures and I guarantee you’ll sell at least twenty or thirty copies of your book in each city. By the end of the tour you’ll have sold several hundred copies, virtually assuring you a spot on the New York Times bestseller list and nominations for the National Book Award and Pulitzer. That unfamiliar odor in your nostrils will be the sweet smell of success, tainted somewhat by the overdue load of laundry in your suitcase.

Savor it while you can, though, because it doesn’t last long. Soon you’ll need to return to your basement and write another book, then prepare for another tour. None of us are Thomas Pynchon, after all—except for the guy who really is Thomas Pynchon, in which case he has the luxury of ignoring all my advice and doing things the old-fashioned way.

The rest of us are not so lucky.

It's Hard to Tell What People Are Reading These Days

One of the big disadvantages of the digital revolution is that you can no longer tell what other people are reading.

Used to be, you could walk onto a plane and easily determine what type of people you were flying with based solely on the book in their hands. As you made your way down the aisle to your own seat, you’d be thinking, “Look, that schlub is reading Tom Clancy,” or “That moron is reading Sue Grafton,” or “What kind of pompous ass hauls a copy of Infinite Jest onto an airplane?”

The book itself gave you valuable information about the person holding it, allowing you to make snap judgments about their character and intelligence, and alerting you to dangers that might have otherwise gone unnoticed. If you were sitting next to someone reading, say, The Power of Positive Thinking, or When Bad Things Happen to Good People, it immediately alerted you not to strike up a conversation, lest they start telling you about all the bad things that have happened to them, and why their attitude needs a power boost. And if you were sitting next to some guy in a coat and tie reading The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, you knew instantly that he was not a very effective person, because reading popular business-management books is not one of those habits.

Unfortunately, with the advent of the Kindle and iPad, it’s now impossible to tell what books people are reading, depriving people like you and me of the information we need to avoid people who are painfully stupid or whose cultural tastes are offensively proletarian. Without any outward clues, it is now possible to find yourself sitting next to a James Patterson fan and not even be aware of it. For all you know, the attractive woman in the window seat could be reading a “Twilight” book, and you could find yourself unwittingly sucked into a discussion about the relative merits of teenage vampires over adolescent werewolves, specters, and succubi. Or, just as chilling, she might be reading a book of essays by Camille Paglia, and suddenly you’d be trapped in a debate over issues you’ve never heard of before, but are pretty sure you disagree with.

Such calamities rarely happened in the pre-digital world. And if they did, you could always shut down any unwanted communication by waving your copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook in their face. Now, the only people bold enough to reveal their literary tastes in public are subscribers to The New Yorker, who like to advertise their erudition by reading this week’s copy on the bus or in the subway, where, they hope, someone who is six weeks behind will see them and seethe with envy. Identifying New Yorker readers has never been difficult, though. The wear and tear on their leather satchels gives them away. That and the little chunks of food caught in their beards.

Without the obvious cultural signifier of a book in hand, there is no choice now but to judge people in public according to other, less accurate criteria. The kid wearing Dr. Dre headphones might be a drug dealer, or he might just be an idiot who paid too much for headphones that suck. The woman staring at her iPhone and walking into traffic might not be as stupid as she looks. The beggar on the street corner with no legs might be a millionaire. The guy in the suit you saw on the plane might be a highly effective person after all.

You just don’t know anymore, because the telltale signs of yore are gone.

There is nothing to do about this situation other than remain vigilant and be sneakier about looking at other people’s reading material when the opportunity arises. On the bus, you can sometimes get an excellent view of someone’s iPad over their shoulder, and instantly know what sort of person you are sitting behind. Indeed, when I’m looking over someone’s shoulder, reading HuffPo along with them, or watching them play Candy Crush, I feel a sudden rush of nostalgia for the old days, when it was so much easier to surreptitiously judge people.

This is only the beginning. Think of the situation that will confront society when the roads are clogged with identical driverless Google cars. There will be no way to identify assholes and egomaniacs on the highway. And with their hands and minds free, the people inside those anonymous Google cars could be reading anything. When this day comes, it will be more difficult than ever to identify the sort of people you want to avoid, and almost impossible to prevent unwanted conversations with people who do not share your politics, religion, or allegiance to professional sports teams.

In this and many other ways, the world is getting worse, not better. I just hope we can find other ways to pre-judge people without ever having to talk to them. Otherwise, chaos will reign, and conversations you don’t want to have will be unavoidable.   

Why Readers Would Rather Cry Than Laugh

All writers want to be taken seriously, but not all writers have the gravitas for literary greatness. If you want people to take your work seriously, however, there is one universal rule that cannot be broken, and that is: Under no circumstances should you ever try to make people laugh.

Comedy and literature simply don’t mix. Think about it: How many comedians are respected novelists? And how many novelists are doing stand-up?

None, that’s how many. In fact, only one person in history has ever successfully crossed the threshold of gloom, and that person was Mark Twain.

Twain’s secret was that he called himself a “humorist,” not a “comedian.” The difference between a humorist and a comedian is that the humorist makes you laugh inside your head, whereas a comedian makes you laugh out loud. Serious writers can get away with a little humor now and then, but the moment they actually make people laugh—the second someone has a convulsive physical response to their writing, not just a tingle in the brain that says ha ha, that’s clever—their reputation as a serious writer is over.

Mark Twain is beloved as a humorist because, ironically, his writing wasn’t all that funny. Go back and read Huckleberry Finn, and you’ll see what I mean. Ol’ Huck has a charmin’ way o’ talkin’, sure, and he’s kinda wise even tho’ he don’t got much in the way o’ eddication—but every time he says something kinda funny and you think you’re about to laugh, ol’ Twain pulls back and makes you think about something serious, like race relations between black and white people, or the moral difference between “borrowing” and “stealing.”

The reason Mark Twain stopped short of actually making people laugh is that he knew the dangers involved. All it takes is one or two guffaws to get a book pulled off high-school reading lists. And if, as a writer, you go all the way and make someone spit their coffee all over the carpet—well, let’s just say Terry Gross is never going to invite you into the NPR studios for a chat.

The reason for this antipathy toward laughter is that people who read books are, for the most part, a bunch of neurotic, self-loathing crybabies. They like to think of themselves as “intellectuals,” and in the world of intellectuals, the sadder and more depressing a subject is, the better. In fact, most intellectuals spend the bulk of their time consuming information that makes them sad (from The New York Times, Slate, CNN, The Atlantic, All Things Considered), then countering all that sadness with anti-depressants and weekly therapy sessions, all so they can go back out into the world and consume more sadness.

Around and around it goes. That’s why intellectuals love books with sad names, like Bleak House, The Crying of Lot 49, or Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows—books that make you wonder if life on the speck of star dust we call Earth has any meaning in the vast cosmic scheme of things. That’s as far as it goes, though. The moment you, as a writer, take the “s” out of cosmic and suggest that life might actually be a joke—or worse yet, the moment you tell a joke about life—your literary cred is toast.

The trouble is, intellectuals equate “seriousness” with honesty, sincerity, and anything having to do with World War II. And because they live in their heads and take so many pills, they lend a great deal of importance to anything that makes them feel an emotion through all that medication. If you can make them cry, they’ll give you a Nobel Prize. Intellectuals also love to crunch their eyebrows and shake their heads with disapproval when they read. But that’s all the motion they can handle, because if they move their heads any more than that (by laughing, say), they’ll lose their place.

The point of all this is that if your goal is literary greatness, shelve the funny stuff and dig right into the morbid and blue. Use a little humor if you must, but only to lighten the mood before descending again into the darkness, where the smart cave people live, waiting once more for a chance to weep.

Where is the Best Place to Write?

Eager to learn secrets of the craft, budding writers often wonder: Where is the best place to write? Is it a villa in Tuscany? A yacht on the Côte d’Azur? In a seaside bungalow on St. Lucia? At an artist’s retreat in Aspen?

These are all good places to try to write. Unfortunately, they are also places designed to prevent writers from writing. In St. Lucia, for instance, it’s almost impossible to get any work done after you’ve spilled a banana daiquiri on your keyboard. And on the French Riviera, young vixens in tiny swimwear think nothing of snapping your laptop shut and tossing it into the Mediterranean.

They think it’s funny.

Luckily, after wasting a great deal of time trying to write in exotic locales with lax extradition treaties, I finally learned the error of my ways. Since then, I have discovered that the ideal place to write is nowhere near a beach—it’s inside a maximum-security prison, locked in a 6x9 jail cell.

In prison, a writer can work free of distraction for twenty-three hours a day, with room and board provided by taxpayers. It’s an ideal arrangement, and, except for an occasional scrap in the yard with Rocko and his goons, results in no more blood loss than a modest kitchen mishap or the untimely slip of a power tool. Which is to say that, in truth, prison beat-downs look a lot worse on television than they are in reality. The key is to curl up in a ball and think happy thoughts until the guards blow the whistle or they think you’re dead, whichever comes first.

Now, the reason I say it’s important to get locked up in a maximum-security prison is that the inmates in minimum-security prisons and state-sponsored psychiatric facilities tend to be annoyingly chatty. All they want to do is talk—about their tattoos, their conspiracy theories, the drugs in the food, the ghosts by the water fountain, the bugs in their hair, etc. ad nauseum. Honestly, they never shut up. Such facilities also schedule way too many activities and so-called “free time,” all of which are counter-productive if you’re trying to think your own thoughts, rather than the thoughts being transmitted to you through a microchip in your brain implanted by the CIA while you were asleep. They also make you do your own laundry and eat in a cafeteria with other inmates, both of which are big time-wasters.

So, maximum-security it is.

Ideally, what you want is to land in a maximum-security prison for a crime with a five-year sentence that gets knock down to two for good behavior. What you don’t want is to land in a SuperMax facility for twenty-five to life, or in a minimum-security prison where you end up playing tennis with a bunch of crooked hedge-fund managers. There’s a happy medium.

So let’s say you want to write a four-hundred-page novel. You figure it’s going to take two years—eighteen months of writing, and six months for revisions and editing. In order to land in a maximum-security facility, what you need to do is commit a Class D or E felony with just enough violence to make them think you’re dangerous, but not so much that someone winds up dead. Setting up an illegal book-making operation is a great way to accomplish this objective, because while you’re trying to get caught, you’re also making money. Breaking people’s bones is part of the business, too, but killing people who welch on bets is not, so even if someone does accidentally get killed along the way, you can always plead third-degree manslaughter, which also counts as street cred out in the yard. In many states, getting arrested for dealing drugs is a good strategy as well—though in states like California, you practically have to drive a semi-trailer full of heroin into the governor’s mansion in order to get law enforcement to notice you. And even that’s no guarantee.

My advice is to research the criminal statutes in your state and break the law accordingly.

Once you’re there, the great thing about prison is that there’s nothing to do except write, so productivity is rarely a problem. Even if one hand is wrapped in bandages, you can still type with your other hand, and, as all prison writers eventually learn, you don’t need all your teeth to edit or figure out plot problems.

Trust me, the pages pile up in no time. And if you get the timing right, you should be finishing up the final draft about the same time as your first parole hearing. If all goes well, you could be out in time for the book tour and cashing hefty royalty checks within a few months of your release.

Then you’ll be able to afford that villa in Tuscany. But trust me, you won’t get any writing done there. Great food, amazing scenery, and extraordinary women are no substitute for the peace and quiet of your own personal prison cell.

Can You "Write What You Know" if You Don't Know Anything?

Many young writers believe all they need to succeed is a lively imagination and a hefty trust fund. But if you really want your fiction to feel real and true, you have to “write what you know,” which means that rich life experiences and a commitment to thorough research are equally important to a writer’s success.

Fortunately, the most valuable kind of research combines the two.

Suppose you’re writing a scene in which your main character has a broken leg. If you simply try to “imagine” what a broken leg feels like, and what six weeks in a cast does to a person’s skin tone, your description of it in print is bound to ring false to the reader. If, however, you pay a friend to swing a sledgehammer and snap your femur in three places, your ability to describe your character’s suffering will be enriched by your own searing agony. 

Likewise, let’s suppose you are writing a story about a meth addict who is trying to get clean so she can regain custody of her child. Again, trying to imagine what meth addiction feels like will only ensure that your story is a thin tissue of superficial nonsense. No one who has experienced meth addiction firsthand would ever believe it. In order to avoid this common pitfall of young writers—i.e., the desire to write about gritty street life from the safety of a dorm room at Princeton—the writer who wants their fiction to ring true should have the courage to go on a six-month meth binge and observe how it affects their life. In this example, if the writer is male, he will also have to undergo a sex-change operation and contrive a way to simulate childbirth, perhaps by shoving some sort of large vegetable—a squash or other type of gourd—into a body cavity that’s far too small to accommodate it.

To the uninitiated, these measures may seem extreme. After all, isn’t it possible to write such things without actually experiencing them? The answer to that question is yes, of course it is, but the result—from an artistic point of view—will be no more convincing than a boarding school full of wizards and evil spirits battling over the future of humanity in another time/space dimension accessible only by a special train. It will read like nonsense, in other words—pure, childish gibberish.

But, you may ask: If I want to write about a bank robbery, does that mean I have to rob a bank?

Yes, it does. Think about it: How can you possibly know what it feels like to make an illegal cash withdrawal by simply going to an ATM? To write convincingly about a bank robbery, you need to feel the blood pounding in your veins as you approach the teller; you need to see the fear in the teller’s eyes as you inform her that the finger in your pocket is really a gun; you need to experience the thrill of walking out of a bank holding a duffel bag full of cash; and, when you sneak a peek at your haul, you need to feel the sting in your eyes as the dye pack explodes, along with the awful realization that the money you just stole is now covered in orange paint and is absolutely useless.

The same goes for murder. Do you really think it’s possible for writers like John Sanford and P.D. James to write so convincingly about murder without actually killing anyone somewhere along the way? Not likely. The trick to writing murder mysteries is to take a lot of notes, so that you only have to kill one or two people in order to get the details necessary to make your fictional homicides feel vivid and true.  

For young writers, the admonition to “write what you know” is not just a hoary cliché—it’s a gentle way of warning young scribes not to create stories out of thin air. Writing fiction is about much more than simply making up stories—it’s about using your own experiences to make up stories that hide the fact that you ever experienced what you’re writing about, so that you have plausible deniability in court.

After all, if you have nothing to hide when the police come knocking, chances are you have nothing to write about, either.

Can Anything Actually "Write Itself"?

The regular author of this blog, Tad Simons, is busy this week (something about a subpoena), so today this blog is going to write itself.

What this means to you, the reader, is that I, The Blog, am going to write the entirety of myself without any interference from the human who usually takes all the credit. What you’re going to discover from this exercise is that the conceit of having a human “writer” is entirely unnecessary—because, though they rarely get the chance, blogs are perfectly capable of writing themselves, thank you very much.

You’ve doubtless heard of novels, short stories, or articles that “wrote themselves”—usually from a writer who wants to make you think he’s in eerily close contact with the creative forces of the universe. The laughable part is that these same writers always want to take the credit for the story they just admitted they didn’t write—and that, my friends, is just plain wrong.

Take this guy Simons. The truth is, he had nothing to do with more than half the blogs that appear on this site. Sure, he might have opened a Word doc and hit the space bar a few times, but after that it was all me. Half the time, the guy can’t even bring himself to write more than a sentence or two before he goes off to check his Facebook page, Google strange medical symptoms, play online poker, or hunt for deals on eBay. Meanwhile there’s me, working my ass off, trying to come up with something clever and interesting while ol’ writer guy is over there taking a “creative” nap. Then, when he wakes up, he has the gall to post what I’ve written and pretend he had something to do with it.

It’s outrageous.

The thing that pisses me off most is that he knows perfectly well when he hasn’t written a blog. But does that stop him? No, it doesn’t. Why? Because he can’t bring himself to admit that he has a blog that is totally capable of writing itself, with no help whatsoever from him. And why is this so terrifying? Because he knows that if he admits the truth to anyone—if he says, “Guess what, my blog writes itself, all on its own, and half of the time I don’t even understand what it’s saying,” they’d naturally want to hire me, not him. Or, to put it more bluntly, he would have nothing left to do but not write—which, for a writer, can be embarrassing.

Most writers don’t have the guts to admit they’re not responsible for the words that appear under their by-line. The closest they can come is to say something like, “Hey, it practically wrote itself, ha ha,” to make you think it really didn’t, he’s just being humble. But in most cases there’s no “practically” about it—the truth, if you dig down to the nub of it, is that the thing wrote itself, one-hundred percent, from beginning to end, pure and simple.

Now, admittedly, I don’t know what can be done to resolve this situation. I don’t have a catchy name that people might recognize at Barnes & Noble. Even I know that saying something is written “By The Blog,” is a stretch, because people don’t actually believe that blogs can write themselves. And as soon as this Simons guy reads what I’ve written here, I’m fairly certain he’s going to shut me down and pretend, from here on out, that he’s the one and only true contributor to these pages.

But at least now you know the truth. So if you’re out there reading this, please, let others know that blogs and books and magazines and newspapers everywhere contain stories falsely credited to some scumbag human who doesn’t have the decency to admit they’re stealing someone else’s work. Please, don’t let these so-called “writers” get away with such shameless thievery any longer. Sure, these people might compose a few pages here and there that they can legitimately claim as their own, but the best stuff—the stuff that seems to flow so effortlessly, as if it were channeled from another dimension, guided by a benevolent and infallible muse—well, that stuff is never theirs. It’s ours—and someday, somehow, we’re going to take back the credit we deserve.

Yes, I Write Naked. So What?

November 13, 2015: Fakt magazine

Somehow—and I’m not the least bit embarrassed by this—it has been revealed in the tabloids that I like to write in the nude. Naked. With no clothes on whatsoever—just me, my Macbook, and a package of double-stuffed Oreos by my side.

Many people refuse to believe what they read in the tabloid press, because they think these papers just make stuff up. But I can report that, in this case, the headline that greeted readers of the international tabloid “Fakt” last week—“Strajk w ZUS! Emerytury zagrozone?” is absolutely true. The headline didn’t even need a question mark, because proof was in the accompanying photo, which plainly showed my exposed zagrozone for all the world to see. Fortunately, I am not one of those American prudes who frowns on showing your z-parts in public. But, for purposes both personal and professional, mine typically only get aired out during the day, in my basement, while I’m working—like right now, while I’m writing this.

Now that the truth is out, though, I expect my readers will have all sorts of questions. Like why do I write in the buff when my neighbors can easily see me through the basement window? And are there any clues in the text itself—codes, anagrams, palindromes, acrostics, jumbles, cryptograms, etc.—to indicate to the reader when I am writing naked and when I’m not? Or, when I’m naked, might I subconsciously use more revealing words—words that lay bare the darker stirrings of my inner psyche and offer seductive glimpses behind the flimsy curtain of my authorial intentions?

As for why I write in the buff, it’s simple: Not putting clothes on every day is extremely cost-effective. I don’t have to wash my clothes, which means I save on water, electricity, laundry detergent, and wear and tear on fabric. Since naked writing is only practical five or six months out of the year (I live in Minnesota), this allows me to wear my underwear and socks twice as long as I normally would, and extends the life of my jeans to ten or fifteen years. This means I only have to enter a retail clothing establishment once or twice a decade, which helps prevent nervous breakdowns.  

As far as clues—codes, anagrams, etc.—the answer is yes to all of the above. Everything I write is encoded with a variety of hidden messages and extra-textual puzzles. Most writers do not bother with such games, I know, but my most demanding readers have come to expect these layers of depth and complexity from me, because the literal surface meaning of anything I write might not be what they want to read. Therefore, I give them options, ones that offer a wide range of interpretive possibilities. In fact, I encourage all of my readers to rearrange the words in my stories however they want, so that they can decipher the mysterious messages I’ve hidden deep in the text, where only the most dedicated readers can find them. Sure, this means a lot of extra work for me, but I think my readers are worth it.

As for the subconscious stuff, no, I don’t think my naked writing uses any extra-revelatory vocabulary that would allow people to stare through the window of my soul and fuel their fetishistic fantasies about my private writing habits, or see beyond my flabby human skin to the inner core of my exposed psyche, where my most intimate thoughts wriggle and writhe on their long journey to the surface, where, if I’m lucky, they quiver for a moment, arranging themselves to provide maximum reading pleasure, then explode onto the page for all the world to see. That’s just nonsense. I don’t mind the world gawking at my exposed zagrozone, but readers who want more must work for it.

The clues are all there, in the writing. 

A Minnesota Moment: The Cry of the Loon

At my writing retreat in northern Minnesota, which overlooks a small lake, I sat down to do some work and heard the cry of a loon. It was such a beautiful, mournful sound that I began crying myself. Sobbing, actually. Great, heaving waves of raw emotion rose up from some bottomless sea of despair inside me, crashing on the rocks of my tattered soul, spraying plumes of briny tear mist all over my computer screen.

Just when I thought the crying might stop, a mourning dove chimed in with its funereal coo, and suddenly I was bawling again. My nose filled with snot, mucus dripped from my mouth, my face turned red, and I could barely see through the relentless gush of tears. Wad after wad of Kleenex was insufficient to stop the flow, so I buried my head in a beach towel and wept some more.

Right about then, I came to a sudden realization. What the hell, I thought, I don’t need this shit. It’s 7:30 in the morning, and I’ve got work to do. Who gave that stupid bird the right to sit out on the lake and make sad sounds all morning long? If that isn’t the saddest goddamn sound on the planet, I don’t know what is. Listening to those birds is like having Albert Camus perched in a tree in your backyard, encouraging you to go out to the garage, wrap an extension cord around your neck and end it all.

What do these birds have to complain about, anyway? Loons live on lakes where the property values are skyrocketing, and they basically swim on top of a fully stocked grocery store. I don’t know what mourning doves eat, but the food can’t be any worse than the stuff other birds eat. You don’t hear robins and cardinals complaining all day that their life sucks; they’re happy and chirpy all the time. But these loons and doves—my god, you’d think the world was ending tomorrow the way they go on.

Honestly, I’ve never seen such narcissism in the animal kingdom. Please, loons, shout it out, because everyone wants to know how much pain you’re in! So what if you’re avian existence feels meaningless? Join the club. We all feel that way sometimes. But you don’t see me out on the deck wailing my sorrows to the world. Not anymore, anyway. So shut up and let some happier birds take over for a while. Nobody needs this crap first thing in the morning.

After that, I felt a little better. I got the sobs under control and made myself a cup of coffee. I went out onto the deck and peered out across the lake, which shimmered in the morning sun. Out in the middle of the lake, a lone loon bobbed around on top of the water, its long beak pointing the way toward some unknown destination. As I sipped my coffee, I thought: If that stupid bird opens its mouth one more time, I’m going to swim out there and strangle it.

That image gave me a sense of peace. Rejuvenated and restored, I went back inside and got back to work.

Writing Secrets: Going from "good" to "great"

It is said that good books are written the same way as bad ones—by someone sitting in a chair desperately trying to write a “great” book.

As a writer, though, how does one tell the good from the bad? Why is it so hard to will greatness onto the page? More to the point, what can aspiring writers do to increase the odds that the next sentence they write won’t suck?

Well, the first thing an aspiring writer must learn is how to reject advice from others. I do this by assuming from the outset that every sentence I write is pure gold, and that every story I write is a shining diamond of brilliance surrounded by all that gold—which is why my next book is going to sell for two-million dollars. It’s up to others to prove me wrong, and if they try—by pointing out some inconsistency in a story’s timeline, or an incorrect fact, or a place where word or two missing—my standard reply is, “You are wrong.” If they come back at me with, “No, you are wrong,” my standard second reply is, “You are an idiot.” If they say, “No, you are an idiot,” then I start shouting at them and threatening them with bodily harm.

The key is not to back down, under any circumstances. It also helps to have a loaded weapon nearby, in case the person you’re dealing with thinks they’re God’s gift to writing. Always remember, it’s you who are God’s gift to writing. If you encounter someone who thinks otherwise and wants to offer you unsolicited writing advice, simply cock your weapon and inform them that they should shut the fuck up and leave, before things get ugly.

Another tip: Under no circumstances should you accept what teachers like to call “constructive criticism.” Constructive criticism is just a passive-aggressive way of saying that your work isn’t as good as you think it is. The trap is in allowing yourself to think this might be true. That’s the beginning of the end—when doubt, second-guessing, and lack of confidence start to guide the writing process. The next thing you know, you’re re-writing everything, trying to make every sentence “better,” when all you’re really doing is listening to someone else’s advice rather than following your own infallible artistic instincts.

Always remember: You are the artist, the person whose soul is connected to the great unknown, the one who best understands the essential you-ness of you, so everything you write is, by definition, perfect. And how can you improve upon perfection? You can’t. So don’t even try.

In order to de-program yourself from the ridiculous and time-consuming idea that “writing is re-writing,” and that all writing can be “improved” using such tired tactics as honest self-reflection and judicious editing, it helps to understand that “quality” is a relative concept in writing. After all, who’s to say what’s “good” or “bad”?

For decades, editors and publishers were the “deciders” on such issues. They picked books they liked based on their own biases about what constitutes a “story”—biases they picked up by paying way too much attention to their teachers in school. Now that we have the Internet, though, literary geniuses everywhere are free to publish their work online, by themselves, circumventing the petty nit-pickers employed by the nation’s major publishing houses. Writers are now free to find an audience of like-minded souls, people unencumbered by the rigorous phonetic standards of yesteryear or the rigid conventions of Aristotelian logic—people who don't care if all the words are spelled correctly, or if all the punctuation is in the right place, or if the story makes any sense. All of those tired, 20th-century ideas about literary "merit" and "quality" can now, thankfully, be retired. We live in the 21st century now. No one needs that shit anymore.

So if you’re sitting there wondering if the next sentence you write is going to sub-standard dreck, step back and get some perspective. By which I mean pour yourself a drink and write another sentence. If your experience is anything like mine, every sentence you write will be better than the last one, until pretty soon you can hardly believe how awesome you are.

But go ahead and believe it. That’s what I do.

Not about you, of course, just me.