Academia

(This blog will be featured as a part of the Academia farewell anthology, The Masks We Wore: you can read more about its authors and release here!)

If my math is correct, having recently counted- when Academia wrapped up blogging in 2018, it ended with almost 150 blog pieces under its moniker, most traditional articles on literary theory, with a handful of joint blogs and interviews. Academia spanned two host sites, a plethora of topics, and a lot of colorful discussion. Academia was my baby from the beginning. My brainchild, and something I am so proud to have made.

In 2016, I started working for Inkitt as a Community Manager. One of my very first assignments on staff was to create a weekly project for a resident member, Joshua Grasso, who maintained a lot of popularity on the site. It was a hectic first week and the ideas about what Academia was were tossed about between several staff members before I finally settled on the idea of a weekly discussion board that culminated into a blog, inspired by my few English classes and their format. Academia was mine from the beginning. Most of the staff at Inkitt didn’t want to handle it or didn’t know how to (its host was known among staff with terms like “difficult” and “high maintenance”), so eventually, all management, social media, and organization was mine to maintain. All of the blogging and forum regulation fell to Joshua, but I was often shadowing the general discussion and did all of the finishing edits for Academia’s blogs. For seven months, the original blogs for Inkwell ran like clockwork, until I quit my job (a very long story all on its own) and my project partner and I ended the blog.

It was not my original intention to continue Academia after Inkitt, but something about the project stood out beyond the limitations of the “assigned task” I was given in 2016. What was Academia, if not a collection of blogs and discussion? I could probably make that happen anywhere. In 2017, I and Joshua Grasso relaunched Academia with a discussion on video games. My community of authors reknitted, and new people joined the fray, and it was like nothing had ever changed. I realized when Academia moved how genuinely special Academia was, and how proud I was to be a part of this project. That part of the story is, of course, the simplest way to describe Academia I can muster. Back and forth, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to convey what Academia meant to me, particularly as a retrospective sometime after the main blog finished. I am a different person, and by proxy, a different kind of student, than I was when I started Academia. I wasn’t even an English major yet when I was handed Academia, nor did I have a particular circle of English cohorts like I did in my final semesters of college. I was floating around community college, unmoored and discouraged from making many friends in my mostly petroleum-centered school. When I was handed Academia first, I was about to start my third English class ever, mostly out of entertainment because I had every intention of graduating with a degree in History. That English class was, interestingly, the 2nd worst class I ever took in college.

What changed my mind? Well, in a lot of ways, Academia did.

In 2016, knowing nothing about academic discussion, knowing less about the most literary nuances of English, I found something quite eye-opening about the week-to-week work of Academia. From the formulation of topics, all the way to the week’s blog: I loved them as much as any regular participant.  I had a fear of seeming lacking in earnest, since I was paid to keep Academia alive at the time, but nothing made me quite so happy at the time as watching Academia flourish. When it was revived as an independent project in 2017, I leaped at the prospect of writing for Academia instead of just organizing. Academia’s role in my life taught great lessons in teamwork and organization, but more than anything, Academia gave me a door to a love of literature. Through its original discussions and blogs, I recognized a new way to read, a new way to analyze, a new way to approach the books I wrote. There were some many (poor) attempts I made at mirroring the experiences of the blog into my English major. I realized that the knowledge passed down from Academia might take me years to refine, parse, and truly master. Just like writing fiction, my relationship with academic writing and literary analysis needed time, work, and revision before I could call its form my own. I still felt Academia’s ripples as I entered my junior and senior level English classes, saw their influence in the ways I approached my online discussions and assignments. I realized that even though I built Academia for other people, it had changed me so deeply and personally.

Often, sharing a blog with Joshua meant that we stumbled on the same- or similar, themes from blog to blog. Reading through Academia’s blog now, even if you can’t tell who wrote a piece by their style, you can usually tell by the topics and subjects they gravitated after. Mine are always about a personal experience, an anecdote or unusual story that I had on my mind. I grabbed for the personal, the humanistic, and infinitesimal in literature, even if I didn’t realize that was my angle at the time. Because for myself, Academia was about the infinitesimal: the tiny ripples left from a book, a movie, a blog, a story shared over coffee, words jotted on a discarded napkin- and how those words always, always impact someone. Particularly in this global, interconnected culture that we currently occupy, we do not exist in a vacuum: we are not an island. The words we share have an impact.

I have learned this quite thoroughly, not only in my time with Academia, but in making this anthology. There are so many people who I know, deeply affected by Academia’s influence. I think that’s quite evident in the anthology and its stories, but (perhaps unintentionally) in the theme of the anthology itself: “the masks we wore.” The original goal in the theme, way back in 2018, was to let authors read into the topic however they wanted. This freedom has given the anthology itself a colorful, diverse collection of stories that embody, in their own way, what each author considers a “mask” and how they approach their mask in fiction.

This blog is a bit of a mistitled one: I’m not parting with academia, as much as I’m leaning into academia with my whole self. I’m currently in the process of choosing my most preferred grad programs. I am less than 30 credit hours away from a BA in English, and then I dip the toe into my Masters. I have hopes for a PhD- I’d be the first in my family to get one. I have a whole world of academia sprawling before me.

It wasn’t always that way though. Much of this path was settled when I began work on Academia: Discussions and Blog (formally Inkitt Academia), a project that ended over the summer this year. Even with piles of senior level reading, and writings, and responses on my platter, I find myself missing the weekly rhythm of the discussions and blog. Ending the project was and remains something I grieve.

I wasn’t always like this. In 2015, when I first stumbled into a writing community, I was a History major. I was grieving the still-fresh wound of my uncle’s passing. I’d thought I had finished my second novel that January but had no intention of majoring in English. It was a subject I’d been told to avoid before I entered college: “everyone takes an English major because it’s easy- get a real major.” I’d settled on History because it seemed grounded, but I was coasting on Bs in my history classes, and high As in English. I refused to change, even when I called my 102 class “church,” even when I found a true passion in criticism and creative thought.

In 2016, I was offered a job at Inkitt Publishing, and subsequently, offered Academia as a parent project- “something new to engage readers.” Its naming, its structure, its moderation were all my ideas. The company suggested host, Joshua Grasso, was already someone I really respected at a distance. We became good friends thereafter, we talked about life outside of our respective fiction. He suggested I change my major to English. The job and, more importantly, running the blog- taught me something vastly important about myself, and I saw the possibility of changing majors more a reality.

Academia, and the community I gained with it, survived a lot. The week to week discussion, the occasional bout of drama. Then I quit my job with a dramatic fallout, I took all of my books back from the site and returned from Europe very different. A lot had happened, I could not face Inkitt Publishing again, nor did I want their fingerprints on my projects. I did not want to reopen Academia though, not knowing if my community would be along for the journey. It was such a nice surprise when- not only did my co-host want to bring the project, but everyone who had joined the discussions before was willing to return.

Running Academia as just Academia between 2017 and 2018 was the best time I ever had with the project: I was contributing to the blog, I was responding and reacting to discussions. It was the most alive I ever saw the group. In that time, I graduated from one university, I transferred to a bigger one for my BA: I registered as an English major, and I came into my new university armed to the teeth with so much writing and experience. Online discussions have never been a struggle, and I’d already sharpened the blade of literary criticism by simply, well… doing something I loved through Academia. I was always in the right field, I just had to learn to love that in myself too. I saw what kind of writer I was, week to week, and watched it pour into my education beautifully.

Perhaps I am the only one who felt so strongly about the project, perhaps I am too keen to find inspiration in every little thing I do. Academia’s two runs were not perfect, and I was not always a good community manager (who could be, at 23?) But I will always gladly admit that Academia made me a better writer, a cleverer academic, and stood as a reminder that what I created and contributed in the field of English truly mattered. I hope to continue that tradition with its anthology, and on into my education.

I also hope, somehow, that Academia inspired you too.

        If you’ve written and submitted for any length of time, chances are you’ve received a rejection letter. They’re not as scary as you were led to believe, and they’re certainly more approachable than the average critique session in an undergraduate creative writing course (those were brutal!). On the contrary, a rejection letter is typically quite innocuous: it almost apologizes for turning you down. If you only received one rejection letter, you might think you were the one rejecting them (almost). That’s because most rejection letters follow a standard, impersonal format with three main parts:

           (1) The letdown: typically, something like thank you for submitting, we really enjoyed reading your story. Unfortunately...

           (2) The explanation: some form of, it wasn’t what we needed; we couldn’t connect to it; we didn’t fall in love with it...

           (3) The best wishes: usually, writing is a very subjective activity, we wish you the best elsewhere, etc.

           So this begs the question, if rejection letters are so uniformly impersonal, how do you learn what you’ve done wrong? Or to state it more positively, how do make the next work stronger? The key is to read even the most generic rejection letter between the lines. Granted, there’s not much to go on, but here’s what I’ve learned to do with these pesky, anonymous notes.

           For starters, it’s not personal. It can’t be, since they’re not saying anything specific. If they said, “wow, you wrote about this? No one does that anymore!” okay, I would take it personally. But they never do. It’s always “this doesn’t work for us,” which means that “90% of the things submitted to us also don’t work for us.” So you’re in the majority! In other words, since they only have X number of slots in the magazine (or on their lists), they have to be highly selective. They’ve probably decided that they only want this kind of character, in this kind of scenario, with this kind of tone. So a rejection often means, “ah, you missed one or two of them.” It’s almost the same as buying dinner for a friend and having them say, “oh, sorry, I forgot to tell you, I can’t eat broccoli.” Is that a rejection? Or just a lack of information?

           Something else I’ve learned from these letters is they’re telling the truth when they say that writing, or the market, is subjective. It really is. Your good story is crap to someone else—and vice versa. Think of your favorite book, the one you read over and over again. Now recommend that book to a friend; what happens? Invariably, they read a few pages and go, “ah, I couldn’t get into it,” or “I don’t understand what’s going on.” They never love the book as much as you do, even though you know it’s an amazing masterpiece unparalleled in Western thought. The same is true for your work. It’s subjective. The story that gets turned down by one magazine or editor will find an eager audience in another—even if it takes fifteen or twenty submissions. Taste isn’t universal, as much as we like to think/hope it is, and even the most seasoned editor or agent ultimately falls back on their taste to guide them.

           Finally, it’s a small community. Don’t take it out on them. They can’t say ‘yes’ to everyone, even if they wanted to. When they thank you for submitting, remember, they don’t have to. They really are glad that there is an eager, excited community of writers contributing to their magazine or agency. It’s always better to have too much than too little, as this assures the highest quality rises to the top. If only five people submitted, and they needed five stories, what could they do? But when ten thousand people submit for five spaces, you get the luxury of picking and choosing, even though six thousand of those stories might be ideal for publication (and another thousand or two not far off).

If you spend any amount of time around the internet, you have encountered the occasional meme or comic strip in which a younger person is confused by what a book is; they’ll mistake for a “tweet” or a post or a text, or some other fun piece of jargon the artist heard about from their children. Haha, Millennials don’t know what books are. Isn’t that funny? And every time I see one of these, my eyes roll to the back of my head, because the words “I don’t read” are so uncommon in a young person’s world.

Contrary to common cliché, those between 18-29 are actually more likely to read, both for work and pleasure, than generations previous. A whole 80% according to PEW Research and Forbes, and that should come as no surprise: everything we do to connect with our world is done through text and writing, from our news to our schoolwork. But this statistic is paired with a recent uptick in hardback and paperback YA sales, as compared to the 35% drop in e-book sales. And a similar uptick in indie and used bookstores while corporate juggernauts like Barnes and Noble close doors all over the US. There have been several articles that cite this popularity may be due to an interest in community over convenience/price. The modern young person reads a lot; they still keep hold on the sensation and feeling of reading a book, and they want to share that experience with others.

The idea of a communal reading culture is nothing new, but this is a more sophisticated concept than most people expect from the modern reader. Having recently started a job at a used bookstore, I have watched this play out in real time: people who are seeking substance over style. They want to hunt for old books, good sales, and try out new books that were previously out of their price range. I often have the same conversation with college student customers and immigrant customers about how genuinely excited they are that they can afford to buy books again, after our previous bookstore shut down. Even as a writer, knowing my livelihood relies somewhat on sales, I’m compelled more by the idea of giving people easier access to the communal side of reading.

The modern reader is curious enough to take a chance on different works given the chance. And the older my customers are, the more likely they are to buy the same author over and over again- or just mysteries, just romances, just James Patterson tie-ins. Oftentimes, I just deal with older customers who are buying records or music, who tell me “I just don’t read.” We can give a side-eye to YA and Wattpad trends with young people if we like, but at least they want to read at all.

Many writers still struggle in the wake of new reading habits though, troubled by lower attention spans and very selective trends. In a world that only gives time to that which is easiest read and most familiar, what place does the average writer have?

That’s the nice thing about a communal culture in writing and in reading though; authors still have a foot in the door. We can reach out to readers in personal way now, particularly with social media at our fingertips. Much like the used bookstore, we form a space with our readers. It’s important that we connect with people in ways that make them feel like part of a community, which is why authors now try to reach fans more personally, though support of fan creations, conversation, and active sharing. The author isn’t a distant figure who writes books in an New York apartment, but encouraged to be humble and human with their readers.

If we took two books at random, especially from the same genre, would you be able to tell the author’s gender? Race? Political views? More importantly, should you be able to? Does it unfairly bias a reader for or against a work to know who is writing it? Or could we argue the opposite—that not knowing suggests that we return to the default setting: “the author must be a white male”?

Honestly, how many science fiction books (for example) have you picked up and assumed that it was some guy writing it, some scientist science nerd, or professor? And that this professor/science guy was probably white? We also know that in the recent past (and in some instances, even today) women have knowingly disguised their identity as ‘anonymous white male author’ so as not to be ‘outed’—and therefore, ignored—by a presumably white male readership.

The famous writer Andre Norton was a woman (Alice Mary Norton), who could write classic adventure sci-fi with the best of them—Time Traders, Sargasso of Space, Witch World, etc. On the one hand, disguising her identity allowed her to slip into the “Mad Men” world of publishing and grab a slice of the emerging science fiction pie. So good for her, right?  

Sadly, it also meant that science fiction and fantasy could maintain the lie that genre writing was only for boys, or worse still, that women just can’t write speculative fiction. Imagine what a young girl might have thought thumbing through the covers in a bookstore and seeing a science fiction book by Alice M. Norton? If nothing else, she would have thought, “wow, we can write this stuff?” I guarantee you that at least a few girls would have tried their hand at writing it, too.

Instead, it took decades for more women to break into the mainstream, even after the pioneering works of writers like Ursula K. LeGuin and Margaret Atwood. For many more decades, too, men pooh-poohed the attempts of women to write speculative (or imaginative) fiction, pointing to the seemingly irrefutable logic that “if women could write science fiction, they would have done so already!” (ignoring the fact that Mary Shelley virtually jumpstarted the entire genre in 1818).

For this reason, the publishing world vocally supports writers of diverse genres and races to tackle the traditionally male worlds of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and comic books (not a genre, but still). Not surprisingly, when women and minorities are allowed to enter into the conversation, they produce masterworks on par with their white male peers. Even comic books, easily the most ‘male’ medium in all literature, has seen an influx of amazing female talent, including such titles as Mockingbird, Ms. Marvel, Runaways, and Monstress. And while there has been significant backlash in some reactionary quarters (comic book boys—gotta love ‘em!), women continue to make their presence known in the field.

However, this begs the question: if you have to announce your identity like a name badge, do you really have an equal seat the table? For example, when a new science fiction work is released, we either hear one of two things: (a) it’s a hot new book about X or Y, OR (b) it’s a hot new book about X or Y by a WOMAN! or by a QUEER writer! or written from an ASIAN-AMERICAN perspective! My point being, it makes those who stray from the ‘default setting’ have to self-identity as if to say, “sorry, we’re not like everyone else at the table—can’t you tell?”

On the one hand, this helps them reach an audience who is desperately looking for their books, so all well and good. But on the other, it does mark them as “other,” the way a job application asks you to state your race. Should an author have to self-identify in this way? And even if the advertising campaign doesn’t trumpet the author’s racial credibility, the back cover blurb usually obliges with a full-color picture of the author. At worst, this might tempt some readers to put the book back, thinking, “oh, this is for black readers—not for me.” If so, serves them right. Or does it?

Wouldn’t it be more of a triumph to simply give these people a book they would fall in love with, and have them learn much later than, “oh, by the way, the author is a woman. And she’s black. Oh, and queer.” It’s much harder to dismiss a book you’ve already fallen in love with than one you’ve merely glanced over. I imagine many writers had to come to terms with the true identity of Andre Norton, some of them probably confirmed misogynists who once claimed, “chicks can’t write!” Only to learn that their favorite writer was one of those “chicks.”

I think it’s important for readers to know who is writing their favorite books—or any books, for that matter. We need to see the sheer diversity of writers on the planet, lest we assume that only certain people can write. However, if writing is to be truly democratic, we can’t segregate books into ethnicities and genders—which I’ve already seen happening at bookstores and on-line. This could further marginalize talented authors and make it harder to get their works into the mainstream. Besides, when you read a book by anyone, their identity slowly (or dramatically) creeps into the narrative. When reading Okorafor’s Binti, you have little doubt that an African writer is imagining this world. It embodies the term “Afro-Futurism” in the fullest (and most exciting) sense of the term.

Yet that certainly doesn’t make the story inaccessible to a white reader, any more than only an African American could read and enjoy Ellison’s Invisible Man—or to use a more modern example, the recent Black Panther film. However, I know some people refused to see Black Panther assuming it “wasn’t for them,” and I fear the same might be true for Binti (a shame, since it’s such an amazing little book).

I would like to tell people—read widely, read indiscriminately, and don’t look at the author. Just read and be amazed by the story. After all, the author is only a vessel: the book, the ideas, will live on long after the author passes away. Does it really matter any more who Shakespeare was (since we don’t really know)? Or Homer? Or Sappho? Sure, it’s important to know Sappho was a woman writing at a time when women have been all-but erased from history. But her work doesn’t survive as a token woman in antiquity; it survives because she was the greatest voice of her time, even though her work only exists in fragments. Imagine who she would be if we had her complete works—all eight or nine volumes of them (as they were reported to exist in the fabled library of Alexandria!).

In order to talk about bad writing, it’s important that we talk about a particular bad novel: my own, in its first draft.

Flashback to 2014: I am running my first novel by a small company of alpha readers, mostly unsure of what I’m doing or really editing. Somewhere in the mid-point of the original draft, there are several scenes that we might call “rough.” A lot of discussion surrounded these scenes, for the very out of character dialogue on my MC and my villain’s sudden ability to read minds. It was a laugh to my readers, and I decided to revise the scenes out eventually.

Because I hated this scene, and I hated talking about it so much. I buried the scenes in a file, but the joke persisted through the draft and on into others. I stayed a bit mad about it all.

Flash forward a few years: I have written much, much more than in 2014, and am revising other books. Somewhere in my work on my second book, I found room for That Scene again, this time framed in a more humorous manner. I found it worked.

“Never thought I’d use that dumb scene again,” I told my alpha reader. He shrugged: “It wasn’t dumb. We always liked them, and now that dialogue is even better because they have the right home.” This struck me as odd. I’d always cast aside the writing I didn’t use as bad, but was it, truly? Or had I just written it for the wrong book? This became an experiment of sorts. Since then, I have taken to exploring “lower” quality works, usually by way of Netflix and Hulu, to study what worked or didn’t work about films I found. Some of them I even remembered from growing up, and had also cast aside as silly or bad. I tried to revisit my fanfics too, things I had long shed as “childish” and “unpolished.” 

I was shocked: I was wrong about bad writing. And perhaps we all are, in our own way. We like to give “bad writing” a list of features and quirks, like beauty tips in magazines that suggest your freckles must be powdered and you should straighten those messy curls. We buy these ideas quietly, assuming that we (or our writing in this case) are doing something ugly to our work by arranging plots/characters/ideas a certain way, or dare I say- trying something different. How quickly this changes with the times, and how easily we lose good ideas in the cracks. We forget so often that writing and creativity is about learning, and playing, and doing things to get better at our craft. Badly executed films and stories are sometimes the product of careless conjecture and corporate greed, but more often than not, they are flawed films, trying out for something and missing a mark. They are early ideas and underdeveloped tropes. Critically-dogged “bad” projects, like Treasure Planet, Van Helsing, or Labyrinth have come back as cult classics with a considerable amount of love. They were all regarded as failures during their releases, and continue to hold poor rating. 

This went double for Clue, a strangely-macabre comedy based on the board game of the same name; critics have evn backpedaled about the film after it proved its merit over the years, now considered oddly ahead of its time for a comedy- much less one based on a child’s board game. Interestingly, the director of Clue went on to make My Cousin Vinny less than a decade later. The team behind Treasure Planet helped bring to life some of Disney’s great Renaissance films.

These weren’t the movies these directors got famous for. Still, that doesn’t make any of these stories badly written, just missing a few pieces in the eyes of their audiences. In fact, many of these films found new audiences in other generations, making them more ahead of their time than fundamentally flawed. Given the nature of the internet and its fondness for giving old things new life (just look at what’s happened to Toto’s “Africa” lately), this means that art never truly fails; it may simply need the right audience to find appreciation. The right time for someone to like them. After all, the same consideration could fall onto our own work some day.

What makes a really good story? Obviously, there are a million subjective answers, according to taste, interest, and subject matter. But beyond all of that, is there an actual, quantifiable definition of good storytelling? Could someone write a story that, even if you didn’t like the characters, the subject, the theme, you would be hard pressed not to admit that the story itself—its construction, presentation, ideas—was undeniably ‘good’?

The first (of many) definitions of “story” in the Oxford English Dictionary is “An oral or written narrative account of events that occurred or are believed to have occurred in the past; a narrative account accepted as true by virtue of great age or long tradition.” As a professor I believe in the power of close reading, and that every word in a sentence serves a distinct purpose. So reading this sentence closely, it’s no mistake that at the very root of the word story is “events that occurred or are believed to have occurred.” While this definition is no longer common, it was once true, just as the novel itself was once novel, or a “brand new” innovation.

So I think the first true qualification for a good story is that it has to seem real. Whether you’re writing about methane farms on Titan or dragon hunting on Iceland, we have to believe that somewhere, at some point in time, this is a “written narrative account of events that occurred or are believed to have occurred.” Even though fantastic, we need to have that crucial suspension of disbelief where, for a few minutes, hours, or days, we believe in the events of the story. We worry about the characters. We imagine ourselves going on just such an adventure. It’s that real to us through the words and construction of the story.

A few lines down, the OED provides another definition: “A short account of an amusing, interesting, or telling incident, whether real or fictitious; an anecdote.” This leads to my second definition of a truly ‘good’ story—it should be exciting enough, or pithy enough, to want to recount to someone orally. If you’ve ever seen a great movie with a trick ending, one that really floors you, you immediately want to run out and tell everyone about it. Stories were originally oral (see the first definition), meant to be told and re-told by a variety of tellers. Even though most stories are written once and fixed in time, they should still have that crucial element of on-the-spot narration. Every story, even the most epic fantasy yarn, should have a kernel of the “anecdotal” about it. It should make you want to tell it yourself—and possibly, improve it with the retelling (at least, in your own imagination).

Towards the bottom of a laundry list of definitions, the OED offers a final, pithy definition: “7a. A lie.” And here is the third qualification for any successful story. It needs to be an exaggeration. Stories don’t have to be fantastic, per se, and can be about a simple man or woman on a single, ordinary day of their lives. However, it should be more fantastic or illogical or extraordinary than anything they normally experience. We should see the ordinary through a new perspective, even if they only go to work, go to the drive-thru, and eat in front of the TV. If that’s all that happens, that’s not a “lie”—that’s just the same, ordinary “truth.” A story takes something that might have happened, or could happen, and makes it improbable. And therefore, fascinating. Worth hearing and worth re-telling.

A great example of all three definitions is a rather obscure (for American readers, anyway) short story by the Japanese writer, Akutagawa, called “Horse Legs.” The story is about a completely ordinary fellow who does an honest day’s work, is married to a woman he respects if not quite loves, and seems to have a completely average, enjoyable life. And then he dies. But here’s where the “lie” kicks in. He wakes up before two functionaries who are started to realize that he is the wrong person: that is, his name is Hanzaburo, and the man who was slated to die was an American named “Henry Barrett.”

A typical office snafu, just in heaven this time. So the functionaries need to send him back to Earth ASAP, and bring back Henry in his place. The problem: Henry cannot be found, and Nanzaburo’s legs are rotting away. The only solution is to borrow the legs of a newly-deceased horse and transplant them before he returns to his life on earth. Shortly thereafter, Hanzaburo wakes up in his coffin, during the funeral, with horse-legs and has to explain his miraculous recovery and go about leading an ‘ordinary’ life.

It’s a darkly comic story, but one you want to hear and re-tell to others, if only to hear them go, “what kind of story is that??” However, Akutagawa writes the story in such a dry, matter-of-fact manner (at least in the translation) that you almost doubt whether the story is fiction (and he assures you several times it is not, even using newspaper accounts to verify his facts). But we’re not fools—we know this is a “lie,” since he takes the joke to absurd lengths, even having Hanzaburo start kicking people across the room and finding himself unable to walk forward when a horseman cries “back! back!” to his horse.

While some readers might find this story baffling, or even distasteful, it has all the ingredients of a truly ‘good’ story. Akutagawa knew that stories captured the absurdity of trying to tell the truth about the world (impossible—there are too many versions) while also trying to entertain his audience (which prefers ‘lies’). So he gave us both in equal measure, and knew that, in re-telling them to others, we would exaggerate and distort and make the story even more real, and even more false. A good story can afford to be bent and twisted in this manner, which is probably why we’ve been telling and re-telling The Odyssey, everything by Shakespeare, and the Bible for so long.

When an author encounters another author’s work, especially work that is in direct competition with their own, one of the following scenarios typically occurs:

1. Oh my god, their work is so much better than mine. It even LOOKS better on the page—the font is somehow better, and the way they write sentences, and that sentence in particular...it’s also so...so...professional. I feel like a fool trying to compete with this kind of work. What was I thinking?

2. Oh my god, this is garbage, my work is so much better than theirs. Mine even LOOKS better on the page—the way I write sentences, and the flow of my narrative, and the way my dialogue crackles on the page—it’s infinitely superior to this tripe. How did this get published? What were they thinking? How dare they get the attention that I so richly deserve?!

Of course, if we’re being honest, we often have both responses at once, feeling admiration and envy in equal measure. Why is this? Why can’t an author take refuge in the fact that he or she has written the best work they can, and leave it at that? Why can’t we be confident that our work will speak for itself, and stand on its own two feet without needing to vilify ourselves—or another writer? Why are writers so insecure?

The easy answer is to say that only beginning writers feel this way. Young writers just starting out are a complex and contradictory jangle of nerves, and are just as likely to hide in a closet as attack another writer on-line. So is it safe to say we grow out of this uncertainty? If so, seasoned writers would be the picture of health and magnanimity. Unfortunately, that isn’t so. Even experienced writers fall prey to the ‘impostor’ syndrome, worrying that this or that author is so much better, so why even try? Throughout history, even the greatest artists have hated one another, feeling jealousy at one another’s success, even though one bestseller hardly diminished the talent or the prospects of the other.

The answer, then, must lie somewhat deeper—perhaps in the very nature of writing itself. On one level, writing is imitation: your style evolves from the writers you love, taking a bit of this, and a whiff of that, until you’re a unique amalgam of disparate sources. And that’s where the ‘fraud’ comes in: is that all I am? Just a literary thief? Would I be anything without my heroes? Why does everyone else find a unique voice and I, alone, have to steal?

(Prometheus steals the fire from Zeus while the god rests with Ganymedes. 3802: Christian Griepenkerl, 1839-1916) 

We forget that even these heroes were borrowers themselves, stealing, adapting, and reworking familiar themes into new shapes and ideas. No one can be truly ‘new’ in writing, and yet we’re fooled into thinking that most people are—except us. That’s one of the great roots of literary insecurity: fearing that everyone else gets it, but we had to bribe and sneak our way into the game. The truth is we’re all frauds, we’re all wearing masks, and we’re all terrified of getting caught.

Another problem lies in the intense nature of writing: you lose yourself for weeks or months or even years in a work, identifying so strongly with the story and the characters. It’s a little like falling in love (okay, it is falling in love). So when you finish a work, you can’t believe that anyone really has a relationship like yours. Sure, they say they have, but no one can feel what you did—and by extension, the work that resulted must have been pure, original, and one-of-a-kind.

The reality is that everyone fell in love with their writing. They all produced love-children that they believe are more beautiful, special, unique, and one-of-a-kind than anything you could dream up. So imagine that: millions of writers running around in love with their creations, and bitterly jealous that someone else can claim to have the more beautiful child. Even when they only have a face the proverbial mother can love.

Perhaps the best thing to remember as a writer is that you’re not unique, and you don’t have to be.

You don’t have to be the only person who fell in love over writing.

You don’t have to be the best.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel—or in this case, the novel, etc.

And most importantly, not everyone has to like your work.

It’s been said that as an artist, the only person you’re really competing with is yourself. And this is true, since other writers will come and go, but you are the constant in your own life. How does what you’re writing compare with what you wrote last month—or ten years ago? Are you growing? Evolving? Having fun? That’s the only competition (if we even want to use that word) that matters. Someone will write a better story, novel, or poem than you—that’s a given. On the same token, you will write a better story, novel, or poem than someone else. You will feel jealousy for others; they will feel jealousy for you. That’s how writing works. The trick is to stop seeing it as you vs. them and simply to think about how to write better as you.

Think of it this way: you’re only tall or short in relation to other people. If you lived alone on the moon and never came in contact with another living creature, would you be tall or short? Ugly or pretty? Boring or the life of the party? You would be whatever you made of yourself, by your own values and standards. And that’s the only way to truly be unique: to develop your own scale of measurement, and not decide that you should look like him or sound like her. That’s how we start as writers, but not how we have to end—and certainly not how we continue to grow.

(James Patterson in one of his many TV spots).

There is a universal truth within all writing, no matter what you publish or how you publish it, that someone will not like your book. Someone may not even finish your book, forever leaving it shelved and dogeared, swearing “I’ll finish it one day.” There will be people, sometimes, who finish it feel so passionately angry about it that they tear it to shreds in reviews. Congratulations, you’ve done something right.

Now, most authors don’t feel that way when this reaction comes along. I’m no exception, and tend to feel mortally wounded whenever people forget to read vs. when people dislike my work. Dislike means you’ve actually read it enough to care, after all. Everyone varies though, and many writers take negative reviews and early rejection personally, which no one can blame us for. Rejection smarts, and readers can seem fickle for not giving books a better chance.

But I wanna reframe this argument for a second- if you’ll follow me. We’re going to the bookstore!

See, if you walk into a bookstore and we go into a random section- not guaranteed to be the usual one you venture towards. You grab a random book from the shelf and start reading; what’s the percentage that says you’ll buy it, or finish it? If the book is romance or sci-fi, and you don’t even like those genres to begin with, it’s probably slim. And sometimes, we don’t just jive with the writer’s voice, style, or storytelling- and life is too short to read things you don’t like. Sometimes we set aside books because it’s not the right time for them, and years later, we find ourselves enraptured by a story the right way. In this way, stories are more akin to a soul connection than entertainment- something I think humans do more than we’re aware. Stories must sing to us for them to matter.

So, when agents and readers aren’t wild about something right away, it is both impersonal and personal. They are looking for a connection to something that matters to them- whether that be a certain criteria of commercial fiction, or just books like Stranger Things, or whatever else they see as important. Writing and humanity’s personal interests are so deeply entwined that it’s difficult to remove the human element, which is why you now see so much criticism levied at corporate concoctions like The Emoji Movie and we raise eyebrows at algorithms that claim to find publishable works. Without human flaws and passion, writing and publishing would grow closer to the worlds of cyberpunk, where media is shown to be easily manufactured, pornographic, and appealing to the basest parts of our nature. Our society is moving fast, yes, but we aren’t there quite yet, so let’s keep it that way.

There is a lot of criticism to levy at the finicky reader and the slow-to-act publishing world, but as a writer, I think a little self-evaluation is important too, which is why it’s super important to remind ourselves we are owed nothing. We are not guaranteed a big audience, an agent, reviews, or immediate praise. Writing isn’t about that, though the way social media is structured for writers might have you believing otherwise. The writer communities on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram are decorated with screenshots of other people’s lives and successes, on marketing hype, and sales, sales, sales!

…Not that I’m not guilty of this, nor do I dog people who are great at social media like myself. It’s a skill, but it also feeds the beast known as “instant gratification” that eats at us a bit. If we aren’t the most liked, the highest selling, the one with fan art, the one with strangers reviewing our work, then we aren’t doing enough. We aren’t good enough. I’m reminded of a lyric from The Chainsmokers’ popular EDM hit and oft-misunderstood parody, #SELFIE: “I only got ten likes in the last five minutes, do you think I should take it down?”

We’ve gotten bad about that in recent years as a culture, haven’t we? It doesn’t help that so much is measured in ratings and early numbers, on how fast something can get popular. My feed was full of Solo this week, all worried think pieces on why the film didn’t preform as well on one day when compared to the other Star Wars movies (and even with flaws, Solo was quite fun). And all I can wonder about is “who cares?” This isn’t about how well something is speaking to a culture at the moment, this concern is about money and popularity- something Star Wars isn’t in danger of losing. Spare me.

Bringing this into the small-time writer world, it’s important that we strike a balance on what we want out of sales and readers, and really- how important they are to the value of a work (a clue: the answer is they’re not). Just because something isn’t ‘marketable’ doesn’t mean you shouldn’t share it or create it; success is happiest when measured personally, not professionally. You’re a writer when you contribute your voice, whether you’ve sold things or not, or earned enough reviews in x number of years to be considered a hit.

When I was younger, I loved the moment before I started writing a story. When I had the idea, but not the words. In that never-never land of thought and possibility, I could be on the verge of writing the greatest story in existence (or at least in my genre). However, the second I put down a word, then a sentence, then a page, the percentage would fall. 80% chance of writing a masterpiece...65%... 15%...and on down to, “well, it’s a book one or two people might love.” Once I inevitably got to the end of the story, or even the end of a long process of editing, what I had was far from a masterpiece. I would even debate if I could comfortably call it “good.” Somehow, it seemed to lack that quality that all great writing had, even though I had kept those ideas in mind as I wrote. Yet what I ended up with was merely okay, a flawed hodgepodge of good intentions. Not a great work of art.

Over the years, I’ve often challenged myself to define the difference between “good” and “great” works of art, particularly in writing. I’ve read so many books over the course of three degrees and forty-four years, and though I’ve enjoyed many of them, only a few dozen would qualify as truly “great.” Because it’s not subjective (not entirely), and it’s not just about enjoyment or pushing an individual’s buttons. No, great writing is something quantifiable, something you can notice and examine and emulate (even if it’s impossible to replicate). And of course, you might strongly dislike a work even while knowing with every page this is a great work of art. I’ve done it—disliked, even hated, a masterpiece. Because “loving” can’t be the sole criteria of art, or even a viable one. There has to be more to telling stories and crafting sentences than falling in love.

Here are a few criteria I’ve compiled over the years to determine the worth of a truly great book—though note that these are rough sketches, rather than definitive rules.

#1: A Great Book Loves Language

By this I mean that the writer enjoys writing for the sake of writing. Words mean something, and are not just empty vehicles to drive a story. Even a writer who hoards his or her words and writes very succinctly can do this. But as you read, note how the sentences unfold. Read them out loud. At some point, the words should dazzle you, the sentences should drive you wild. There have to be passages that make you think, “I know what he/she is saying but I never thought about it like that!” In short, some of the prose should occasionally read like poetry. And poetry isn’t just ornate like Shakespeare or Milton; e.e. Cummings and Raymond Carver also wrote poetry. And both of them loved language.

#2: A Great Book Initially Seems Wrong 

Ever picked up a book and thought, “what the hell is this writer doing? You can’t start a book like that? You can’t switch narrators like that? You can’t end a scene like that? You can’t use the tropes like this!” No one is more opinionated or dogmatic than readers, particularly in genre fiction. We like books to follow carefully prescribed rules and enforce these rules zealously as self-appointed gatekeepers. Great writers, however, like to experiment; they simply can’t help themselves. They like to subvert, to turn upside-down, to tell a story backwards instead of forward. Sometimes, granted, the experiments don’t work or seem pretentious. But when they do, it changes the way we think about books. Great writers always challenge the way a story is told and why we read them. Behind every great book is a ton of bad reviews and skeptical readers. Until someone finally gets it and goes, “we should have been doing this from the beginning!” And then we do.

#3: A Great Book Knows Other Books and Traditions

This seems obvious, but it’s vitally important. When you read a great book, you can see/hear the other books and stories behind it. They not only make allusions to other works, but write variations on familiar themes and characters, illustrating that great writing comes from reading other great writing. Too many books pretend that they’re the only book in existence, that they exist in a vacuum, and worse still, that they’re not really writing a book. A book should read like a book (not a movie, or TV show, or something else); the writer should tell us, “look, we’re reading and writing a book together. So what usually happens in books? Let’s play with that.” Epic fantasy should be aware of the titans of Homer, Tolkein, Lord Dunsany, and scores of others in the rear view mirror. You don’t have to tells us you’ve read them (that’s boring and pretentious), but show us by how you tell your tale and the conversation you have with your characters. Good readers will figure it out.

#4: A Great Book Teaches 

Take this one with a grain of salt. Yes, books can simply be entertaining and “art for art’s sake.” But even so,  a great book teaches you something about yourself, or the world, or the genre in question. The authors can’t help it. A great book is so involved in the tradition of story telling and the interior lives of its characters that education will inevitably result. It’s like a teacher who goes into a classroom exhausted, burned out, but encounters a classroom of eager students who read the book and wants to have a meaningful conversation about it. Within minutes the teacher will be in love with life again. Ideas will spark up and the teacher will see connections that previously eluded him/her—as well as the students. When a writer is confronted by great ideas, more ideas result. Many of these ideas will be new to us and will change how we see the world.

#5: A Great Book Scratches an Itch

Simply put, a great book sees something that we’re all interested in, or worried about, or wanting to talk about but were afraid to speak up. The great book says all of these things and scratches that cultural itch. You can see this happen in real time. When a book explodes, it’s because it’s found one of our itches and goes to town scratching it. Harry Potter, Twilight, The Hunger Games, The Martian—these are all books that figured out what we worry and dream about and repackaged it for us in the most engaging, readable form. You can pooh-pooh these books all you like, and even question whether they’re that “great” at all (and this criteria alone wouldn’t make a book great). However, there’s no arguing with society...we know what we know, and when we embrace a book whole hog, there’s more than voyeurism behind it.

               Recent waves were made in the author community by one Faleena Hopkins, an indie author who decided that too many books could be confused with her series, and so trademarked the word “cocky” (though really, a logo version of her title) and proceeded to send out DMCA requests to other authors with the word in their title. The internet has, not surprisingly, reacted with laughter and shock. This really isn’t a word you can copyright, yes? We sorta raise an eyebrow at this attempt to draw attention to her books, given how negative the feedback has been. Does all press truly equal good press?

Hopkins isn’t the first author to get heat from the internet. Last summer, debut author project, Handbook for Immortals, was pulled from the NYT Bestsellers List for cheating the system, and in the years following the rise of KDP, several drama storms have been unleashed by authors picking fights with and threatening reviewers, antagonizing other authors, and all manner of other drama. The big dogs aren’t immune either, given recent incidents with Cassandra Clare and Terry Goodkind.

The internet and it community is hard to traverse at times, and controversy amongst authors is nothing new. A famous story from the Romantic Period comes from the summer of 1816, when Lord Byron, Percy and Mary Shelley, and John Polidori all ventured into a brutal winter and decided to start one of the most famous writing competitions in history. This story is remembered for Frankenstein and, less so, The Vampyre, but the contest is also known for becoming a stew of drama between the writers. Lord Byron reportedly went through fits and fainting spells that required restitution, and his doctor, Polidori, was so aggressive and toxic- attempting duels and fights with the other members of the party, that Lord Byron, the definition of drama by all accounts, kicked Polidori from the group when they departed. Their drama didn’t cease there, since The Vampyre came from an unfinished fragment of Byron’s writing. Later in 19th century, Edgar Allan Poe would gain a reputation of meanness from the way he reviewed other authors, and Oscar Wilde would continue this tradition in his own biting humor.

Authors aren’t kind people, and they certainly aren’t public figures like other creative folk. “Writers aren’t rock stars,” my English 102 professor said, a poet and introvert in his own right, and it’s true- because we’re not. Being a rock star isn’t an extroverted skill; many musicians have poor social skills and bad public image, but a bad public image does not always hurt the musician. A course, rude, or even outright destructive image can be part of a musician’s act, making them much closer to actors and actresses than the writer. There are masks you wear in art, but writers have to where a different kind of mask, since they get to wear all of them at once. When I was a child, I would tell you up front that I wanted to be a circus performer; a horse rider in particular, though I couldn’t really ride a horse. I also wanted to be a ballerina (no ballet lessons to be found), a pop star, an artist, a princess- the like. This was about the time I realized that as a writer, I could be all of these through characters and storytelling.

It is through this that the writer finds their inner actor, but that actor, you see, is focused on characters and creation, and not on persona. This, in the most unscientific terms, is likely why writers struggle with online and celebrity personas. There isn’t room for more characters to play.

Not only that, but as the age of the internet has shifted into being, more authors have been made to join the social limelight, breaking up the “late-night smoker who writes five books a year” image left by more famous authors with persona, like Stephen King and James Patterson, revealing those of us that aren’t likably stoic, introverted, and fitting of the writer image. There is some discussion to be had on whether or not this benefits the writer: when writers behave badly, it reflects poorly on all of us and, of course, our work and image are better expressed through their books themselves.  I wonder if Faleena Hopkins would agree?

When learning a second language, we inevitably come upon some grammatical structure that eludes us. Often, it has no exact equivalent in our native tongue, so the rules—no matter how many times we read them—sound like nonsense. Instead, we find ways to talk around the rule, constructing labored sentences or even speaking piecemeal rather than sounding completely stupid. Ideally, as your fluency increases, you hear people speaking the rule often enough that it becomes second nature and you master it, too.

But sometimes, the thing avoided can become a taboo—a passed-down law obeyed like religion. It reminds me of Goya’s famous saying, “the sleep of reason produces monsters.” If you hide from something, fear of that presence will inevitably haunt you in your sleep, becoming magnified and monstrous. Even among native speakers of English, many refuse to learn the dreaded difference between “lie” and “lay,” and so spend the entire writing careers avoiding situations that require them.

You can probably see how this relates to writing, since writing isn’t just an act of language but of imagination. It requires linguistic fluency as well as on-the-spot translation between the world of ideas and symbols (the imagination) to the world of poetry and pragmatism (a story). For no matter how poetic a story or poem, it must also make sense; the reader has to be able to read and process it on the surface level of language before diving beneath the depths. However, telling a story requires a bewildering number of devices, voices, and poses. Mastering first and third person is hard enough, but what about utilizing free-indirect speech, or the paradox of showing vs. telling?

Only the greatest writers can shift gears between all these techniques and devices, so the rest of us generally drive the terrain we feel most suited for. I know many writers who are terrified of narration and write entire novels of dialogue, with only small connecting sentences for context. On the other hand, there are those who feel mood and scene is everything, and bury their characters’ interactions between vast valleys of brooding description. Sometimes, we do this for aesthetic reasons; more often, we do it out of fear, confusion, doubt, anxiety, or simply because it feels “right.”

For example, most of the books I fell in love with were old-fashioned novels that celebrate the omniscient (or near-omniscient) third-person narrator. I grew to love the ability of a narrator to see into anyone’s mind and report accordingly—but only if they felt like it. Otherwise they would play coy with the reader, teasing things out or dropping a narrative bomb when it was least expected. That’s how I wanted to write. 

Naturally, I read a fair amount of first-person narration, but I felt less comfortable inhabiting a story from such a limited perspective. It immediately excluded so many points of view, so many narrative strategies, and would force me to know a character intimately, so the narration doubled as his/her thought process. Whenever I attempted a first-person story, it sounded like a poor translation of third-person narration. I even found myself reading other people’s thoughts and expounding upon information the character couldn’t possibly know. So I did the only sensible thing I could think of: I scrapped the story or re-wrote the draft it in third-person. Problem solved.

However, this begs the question: if the way you solve writing problems is by pretending they don’t exist, are you serving the best interests of your story? What if a story makes more sense in first-person? Saying “sorry, I don’t do that” is a bit of a cop-out, since if I had to be honest with myself, it’s not for any philosophic convictions; I simply don’t feel I can pull off first-person convincingly. Of course, for most of my writing career, I couldn’t pull off anything convincingly. I only got better through practice and a desperate will to succeed.  

However, this improvement—like many writers—stopped short of fluency. I got satisfied with my ability to make a story sound more or less the way I wanted. A few early successes told me, subconsciously, that I was on my way to rewards and riches. So I hunkered down and decided to become really, really good at what I was already good at, rather than becoming great at the entire process. And that’s the true danger of becoming good at anything, from writing to playing an instrument: you settle for second best.

Even some very successful writers do this. You see writers who are a household name studiously avoiding certain techniques with superstitious zeal (I won’t name any names). And why not? You don’t have to be a great writer to become a successful writer, just as you don’t have to be a great speaker of French to find your way to the bathroom. In fact, even saying “bathroom!” enough times in English will find someone willing to show you the way (if only to get you shut up, you damn American!).

But the real writers among us (I see you cowering in the back; come forward!), want to do more than offer bathroom directions time and time again. We want to invent a new bathroom—or change the way you look at toilets forever! After all, do you want people to say behind your back, “oh, he writes good books, but he’s never written a first-person narrative to save his life,” or, “she’s sold a million books but she still can’t use lay or lie.” Of course not. You want to be a master; you want to be in full command of your material, and never lose a story for your own fearful inability to try something new.

So for your next story, or novel, or poem, identify the one thing you never do. Not the thing you dislike personally or find offensive artistically (no need to write graphic erotica), but the thing you know you’re avoiding out of the fear that it will expose your deepest insecurities. It might be something small, like using a semicolon, or it might be somewhat bigger, like never using male narrators. Whatever it is, tackle it head on. If nothing else, it will ensure that your next story or poem says something new, reaching into a bag of tricks you kept artfully locked on the shelf, with the words “break in case of emergency!”

A great chef one said that if you’re not learning new things you’re already dead as a chef—you’re just repeating yourself. So in the words of the great poet Yevgeni Yevtushenko, “don’t die before you’re dead.” Learn something new, write like a new person; or maybe, you’ll learn to write even more like yourself. Breaking a single taboo be just what you need to make your final breakthrough.