Writing Update - April 29 2023
Social Media, Knowing and Being Known, old book reviews, and an SF Worldbuilding Project
It often takes me a long time to get things up here because I like to draft things by hand and then rewrite them but I want to up my input because I’ve found myself drifting back toward a dying social network that mostly brings me despair and I don’t want to do that. I created this blog/newsletter because the writing has to live somewhere and I need to write to live.
Writing, especially for free on the internet in the microblogs of social media, is a funny thing. It’s an invitation to be known and a plea for attention but so often for so many good reasons, writers don’t want to be known on the levels the audience might want to know them. And so often for so many good reasons people want the freedom to be themselves on social media and the freedom to not be known at the same time. The wanting to know, the receiving or observing end, could be curiosity or admiration and it could be offhand or deeply felt but either way the dynamic is just part of the process of having or being part of an audience.
One thing I’m writing right now that may never see the light of other people’s eyes is a fiction project that’s going to take forever because I’m building a world to place a story in. (Oscar Wilde said to start as close to the end as you can; Asimov said he wrote the end, then the beginning, then he figured his way out; I’m adding a whole new avenue of steps, or am I just extrapolating in my pre-work so that the real work is easy?) This project aspires to be speculative fiction, far-out SFF – science fantasy, really – but I’m trying to set it up by projecting how the world we live in could turn into an imagined far-flung future of space travel and technologies which border magic. My inspirations include a bunch of mainstream popular culture science fiction you’ve heard of (books, movies, comics, shows, games), some history and philosophy books I’ve read or am reading, and everyday life. But that’s not the point.
The point is that I’m trying to prognosticate the future knowing full well that it’s not really the science fiction writer’s job to predict, and that’s rather – to paraphrase what Sean McTiernan has argued on his new podcast SFULTRA (highly recommend, obviously) – something fans say to embiggen the genre, as if tech innovators and industry influencers aspiring to recreate fictional worlds is a sign of prescience on one hand rather than a lack of imagination on the other. My snide vaguely judgmental statements aside, Ray Nayler argued in the editorial for the upcoming Asimov’s Science Fiction (a link that will have shifted within a couple months to a different editorial) that it’s not about “prediction” but “predication,” that is to say: what might happen if a given set of circumstances came to be.
“What SF authors are involved in is not divination, but a more productive type of thought experiment—asking detailed “what-if” questions and then predicating their stories on the idea that those creative “what-ifs?” are, in fact, true.” -Nayler
And it’s impossible to know what’s coming next and there’s always a fear of being wrong, and being proven wrong so quickly in a way that irreparably damages the story. But there’s no such thing, really; because this prognosticating for the sake of predicating is just there to help me answer my own questions about what I want the stories to be, not to determine what they are. There just happen to be a lot of rapid technological changes taking place all the time right now that are interesting to turn over in one’s head, but difficult to project an end point to. So, my job in such instances is to pick one.
Humanoid robot slaves? Humans enslaved by robots? Transhuman hybridity?
But what I’ve really been thinking about in this moment that’s inspired this is the idea of social media as a form of privatized self-regulating surveillance that connects to a human want of voyeurism and exhibitionism, two impulses which match the celebrity-obsessed culture, and the influencer-obsessed culture, and who knows we might be watching these culture dies but in any case: we all know we’re the product, we all know the government is watching, as well as prospective employers, we all still have myriad unwritten rules and codes of conduct and expectations of etiquette, which obviously contrast across different online communities. People use social media to get jobs, to share opportunities, to make themselves known, and yet still, sometimes, very rationally, can fear being known.
I was reading a few weeks back one of the stack of unread New York Review of Books I acquired in the last year. There’s compelling stuff, I highly recommend if you both (a) like reading about the craft of literary writing and (b) have the time to read a bunch of review essays. I guess I should warn that some of the tonal or topical expectations you might have about the way the magazine is constructed could be right. But they might also be wrong. It strikes me as definitely a posh liberal set (but was once known as the magazine of “radical chic” so idk) but whatever you can’t expect to only read things that agree perfectly with you ideologically. How could you define and refine the way you felt about the world only reading things that already fit your preconceptions?
Anyway, in the November 3, 2022 issue, Sigrid Nunez starts the reviews off with an article called “Gored in the Afternoon” about Annie Ernaux’s Getting Lost, “a diary of a sublime love affair” and in the article Nunez puts Getting Lost in the context of Ernaux’s other work and that includes other things she’s written about this affair. And it’s fascinating. Because you’re briefly treated to these intimate details of the life of this author, this stranger, filtered through the work as she presented and then as Nunez read it and interpreted it, contextualized with other autofiction. And with all that transparency there’s the creation of opacity, a film, a “could this be real? Is this real? What is real?” sort of feeling. If an artist is brave enough to bear all their old emotional wounds for you, is it that they have nothing to hide or that their real secrets are much darker than hooking up with a married Soviet diplomat? There’s no way of knowing from here, but it was intriguing to read and witness. “What an interesting person whose even most mundane moments must have something mundane to them,” you might think, contributing to this cultural spirit of celebrity worship which is in fact an extrapolation of the human need to relate to one another.
The internet democratized art and writing in the sense of providing greater access to the tools to make it, in a way. Where democracy is still lacking is in the ability for workers to be assured of a sustained and sustainable livelihood from their labor. The best we can get is make everyone and no one feel special, apparently not a ton to do as far as making the work livable…
Later in that same issue of the New York Review of Books, Giles Harvey writes “The History Boy,” a review of Ian McEwan’s Lessons which begins by putting it in context with all of the other responsive contemporary literature which tries to speak to the current moment, and goes on to discuss how the long-view presented within the book keeps it from having the two-presentist perspective which can make a book a useful artifact but keeps it from being a compelling piece of art over a long period of time. I’m saying lots of books written in the last half-decade-plus or near-decade, according to Harvey, tries really hard to remind its audience of current events and, while some of them do it well, many of them create limitations for their future resonance as a result of focusing more on that presentism than on the craft of telling a good story.
And so, when writing a metafictional pre-story about how politics, society, and technology change over millennia, it’s interesting – and important not to get bogged down by – what’s happening right *now*. The problem is that *right now* is what inspires the story to be written in the first place. But that’s not that much of a problem, that’s an explanation, almost a solution.
I can’t predict anything that’s going to happen soon. I mean, I could, but I won’t, right now, in this moment. Because I need to focus on predicating.