The only “interventionist god of integrity” I wish for is one who forces every young writer to grapple, at the outset of their careers, with Freddie’s thoughts on the industry / internet culture in general
I find your weary ombudsman routine an essential tonic. Every time you lay out the case for these criticisms, it reminds me that at least someone is assigned to this task.
This means I can focus my time on the craft-beveling that you suggest is probably not going to help me make money in this industry.
Why all of this is something I WANT to read isn’t entirely clear to me. But I think it’s because I find your arguments convincing, and I can’t see how NOT knowing the truth would be better.
Keep up the good work! You are a happy paradox for us in the bleachers; a successful gadfly who actually cares about people who’ve had less success, and makes an effort to help them. Do we deserve you?
I relate to your generous take on this, but I'm not there yet.
A very close fiction-writer friend of mine, someone I loved very much, dumped me as a friend. It was partly because I kept saying things on social media that upset her - she followed mainstream liberal ideology very religiously and acted utterly terrified around any deviancy whatsoever. I obviously never said anything bigoted - just mildly heterodox. Everything I said was pretty mild in the scheme of things. It didn't really matter. She wanted to be around people who never upset the program. She created a new account and just added back everyone except for me.
Part if it may have been that I didn't have money the way she did. She came from money, and was perpetually puzzled and faintly scornful that I never quit my job to become an adjunct professor. She had no idea what the implications of that were. I never had the time to write the way she did.
I used to want to write fiction but I'm not sure anymore. It's upsetting and sad, honestly. Maybe I'll get over this.
I find myself appealing to the "great dictionary in the sky" whenever people use the word "fascism" to describe people or institutions they just don't like. I know definitions change over time, but that word, for me, sounds and feels as horrible as the thing it was coined to describe. Corporatism is too soft and jargony.
When I finished Walls' 2018 biography of Thoreau, I cried. I feel sorry for the cool kids who find it necessary, for whatever reason, to rebut Thoreau's life and writings as, "he went home on weekends."
Hi Freddie 👋 I’m a newer reader of yours so I’m experiencing much of this as a summary of a long set of arguments never won. Just contextualizing myself before I offer a response!
I can empathize with your insistence on “craft,” because “craft” is also enormously important to me. All the same, I wonder if we might have to expand the notion of “craft” in the sense that there are people who really loved Schulz’s “Walden” piece, and clearly not because it was well-researched, well-thought out… but maybe because it scratched some itch behind the ear to take down a vaunted figure — white, male, more or less canonical — in a show of intellectual acuity. Rather like watching professional wrestling, or something.
Can “craft” be extended to an uncanny sense of who or what people want to see smashed? If it cannot, we surely must also acknowledge whatever THAT sense, THAT skill is, because you also have it — in your instinct to critique the worst excesses of the left, for example. We do not merely turn to writing because we hope it gives us better, more accurate, more insightful thoughts about the world but because those thoughts enact a kind of proxy violence that gives us a sense of relief.
Perhaps it’s the part of writing that is most tied to orality, or the origins of writing as storytelling. Obviously the storyteller must know what topics will get their audience riled up… there is less immediacy for the written word, but the audience still haunts our work, I think. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
The rest of your critique is so valid — and I see, one could say, well Michelle, this isn’t even about audience really, it’s about nepotism and friendship and substituting these other irrelevant things for a writer’s command over “craft,” however broadly defined. You are probably right about that. I am myself at the beginning of writing more publicly in my life. If you are right, I sense I am at the waiting end, still, of a slew of rejections from major publications due not to the quality of my writing but due to the quality of my network. I hope things have changed. But also, if they haven’t, it also feels special to me to be producing work at a time when publications like the New Yorker matter less than they ever have. Which is not to dismiss the work they have done to surface and celebrate amazing writers at all.
For my part I think a lot about audience; it is the fuel I need to write well. I know the New Yorker has an enormous audience but to be honest, I have trouble seeing them in my mind’s eye. Better for me is knowing the handful of subscribers I write to each week, some old friends, others internet acquaintances, and still others complete strangers, anonymized even down to their emails. I like the orality in my work, the sense I am creating not a monument but a ripple. Writing is a shitty road to immortality, and whether that temporary sense of having made it is based on perfecting our “craft” or being published in the Times, we already have what we wanted from our work, right? It’s just to write, and to do it in a way that so pleases us that the rest doesn’t matter.
On the whole I agree with this, but I have to say I'm a little confused about the Tolentino example. I literally hadn't heard of it till just now, so all I know is what she wrote. Maybe there's more detail I'm missing out on, but it seems like saying the story is about "human slaves" is a point of contention, unless you consider anyone on an H1B visa to be a slave, which...I get what you'd mean, but that seems like an inflammatory characterization. And while I agree that "poor Jia Tolentino" is a dumb takeaway from the story, and don't doubt that many writers had that takeaway, the Jonathan Blanks piece to me seems to be using it as a jumping off point to discuss the American criminal justice system, which is quite fucked up! I'd say the story is at least as much about that as it is about modern indentured servitude (which is also fucked up, to be clear).
Like I said, on the whole I agree and get where you're coming from, I just found that example strange.
The best writing is honest and authentic, but it doesn’t mean writers can behave that way in their professional lives. They can get real about their childhood, or dating in New York, or existential angst….. but not about how publishing is bullshit and everyone hates [famous person] and major prizes are a joke.
It’s the same for everyone who relies on the goodwill of others to stay employed. I can’t go to work and announce that senior leadership is a clown show, the strategic plan is infeasible, and the hot new hire clearly lied on his resume. I can shit talk with trusted peers, but that’s it.
In addition to my day job, I write in niche genre, and we have all the same problems Freddie describes. Recently, an author got fed up and started posting rants about how the big reviewers in the genre are biased. Friendships and politics matter more than quality (etc). The author is now canceled. Authors know not to promote this person’s books, because the reviewers will turn on them too—and readers follow what their favorite authors say.
Nobody can talk about it except for people who are too big to cancel. Or in Freddie’s case, an independent income from an audience that already knows his opinions.
A lot of writers resent the truth-tellers because they don’t have the same freedom. But many others find it validating and cathartic, that someone finally said it.
This is a remarkable essay that says more about your personal evolution than the complaints you're (correctly) describing. I don’t think you’re going soft or admitting defeat. I think you’ve tasted the beginning of a fulfilling personal life (uh oh….he’s in love!!!!) and the inevitable acquiescences one’s body and mind make in early middle age. This was lovely.
So, the thing about the ombudsman is they often don't actually have any power besides maybe a bully pulpit. To the extent that writing as a profession can have one...I mean, saying it's you sounds pretentious, but, well, yeah.
And I think this is a place where the argument on 'this is not normal' actually fails. To the extent it's trying to appeal to some authority figure, I think it fails. To the extent it's attempting to appeal to the vast majority of Americans who long for normalcy and is not an attempt at appeal to authority, but appeal to popularity, it strikes me as fairly good politics...
I think this impulse goes beyond writing, and is maybe a personality trait in those who care deeply about anything. I am forever groaning on about hypocrisy and unfairness and performativity over substance in all the areas that I care about, at the same time that I KNOW there is no authority to appeal to. It’s the primal scream of “why isn’t the world better?” I can’t stop asking the question and casting about for an answer even though I know that I don’t have power over any behavior except my own. And thank goodness, because I also know I can’t be trusted with any kind of real power. But somehow I assume others should shoulder that burden well.
This is hardly germane to the most important points here, but if you're looking for uncompromising, interesting interviews with smart people, you should really check out the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast, where Tyler Cowen talks to people from myriad disciplines. A representative spread: Will MacAskill (very recently), Thomas Piketty (but oh the sound quality on that one), classics professor Shadi Bartsch, Ezra Klein, Margaret Atwood, Amia Srinivasan, Paul Krugman, and many many more (including a lot of people in business).
I'm surprised that you of all people didn't point out the obvious role of socio-economic status and class in this. Nearly all the people working at publications like the NYT are coastal elites, born into those families. Do you think the child of a working class Midwesterner would ever win a fellowship like that, no matter how brilliant they are? Because I don't.
"Politics is about power. You learn to push its levers or you lose. Appealing to the intangible does nothing but makes you feel good, and even that only fleetingly."
I agree with the thrust of your argument; simply appealing to justice or fairness by itself doesn't accomplish much. But those senses of justice and fairness and morality are often what drive action of various kinds, even indirectly, even when they merely shroud one's ambition. I think it does matter to appeal to these things because they can give you the perceived authority (and the power that attends) to make more material changes. Regrettably, this kind of power seems to be used more commonly to reinforce the status quo and to change the status of oneself rather than to buttress just actions.
There’s no ombudsman, but there are people listening and nodding along and taking notes, and some of them may someday be in a position to effect change. In science, they say that paradigms don’t really change until the old guard dies off—but from what I’ve seen, the seeds of the new paradigm were often planted by the sensible middle-aged scientists who just couldn’t get a critical mass of people to openly agree with them until the older heavyweights went away. There are always people in the younger generation who will eventually overthrow at least some of the pieties of the older generation, and you may be inspiring some of them without knowing it. The thing about old dogs baying at the moon is that they usually get other dogs to bay with them.
I think the good news for writers is that an ombudsman is on the way, the audience. Now that the middlemen are vanishing because of the internet craft will be king. Your prayers are being answered, and which is why you are already getting rewarded. I'm lucky, I work in a much less subjective industry so craft is mostly what is rewarded cause it's much more obvious.
They are absolutely not empty gestures. Legit exposure of hypocrisy and phoniness always has meaning.
The only “interventionist god of integrity” I wish for is one who forces every young writer to grapple, at the outset of their careers, with Freddie’s thoughts on the industry / internet culture in general
I hope this comment feels like consolation.
I find your weary ombudsman routine an essential tonic. Every time you lay out the case for these criticisms, it reminds me that at least someone is assigned to this task.
This means I can focus my time on the craft-beveling that you suggest is probably not going to help me make money in this industry.
Why all of this is something I WANT to read isn’t entirely clear to me. But I think it’s because I find your arguments convincing, and I can’t see how NOT knowing the truth would be better.
Keep up the good work! You are a happy paradox for us in the bleachers; a successful gadfly who actually cares about people who’ve had less success, and makes an effort to help them. Do we deserve you?
That’s a rhetorical question.
I relate to your generous take on this, but I'm not there yet.
A very close fiction-writer friend of mine, someone I loved very much, dumped me as a friend. It was partly because I kept saying things on social media that upset her - she followed mainstream liberal ideology very religiously and acted utterly terrified around any deviancy whatsoever. I obviously never said anything bigoted - just mildly heterodox. Everything I said was pretty mild in the scheme of things. It didn't really matter. She wanted to be around people who never upset the program. She created a new account and just added back everyone except for me.
Part if it may have been that I didn't have money the way she did. She came from money, and was perpetually puzzled and faintly scornful that I never quit my job to become an adjunct professor. She had no idea what the implications of that were. I never had the time to write the way she did.
I used to want to write fiction but I'm not sure anymore. It's upsetting and sad, honestly. Maybe I'll get over this.
I find myself appealing to the "great dictionary in the sky" whenever people use the word "fascism" to describe people or institutions they just don't like. I know definitions change over time, but that word, for me, sounds and feels as horrible as the thing it was coined to describe. Corporatism is too soft and jargony.
When I finished Walls' 2018 biography of Thoreau, I cried. I feel sorry for the cool kids who find it necessary, for whatever reason, to rebut Thoreau's life and writings as, "he went home on weekends."
Hi Freddie 👋 I’m a newer reader of yours so I’m experiencing much of this as a summary of a long set of arguments never won. Just contextualizing myself before I offer a response!
I can empathize with your insistence on “craft,” because “craft” is also enormously important to me. All the same, I wonder if we might have to expand the notion of “craft” in the sense that there are people who really loved Schulz’s “Walden” piece, and clearly not because it was well-researched, well-thought out… but maybe because it scratched some itch behind the ear to take down a vaunted figure — white, male, more or less canonical — in a show of intellectual acuity. Rather like watching professional wrestling, or something.
Can “craft” be extended to an uncanny sense of who or what people want to see smashed? If it cannot, we surely must also acknowledge whatever THAT sense, THAT skill is, because you also have it — in your instinct to critique the worst excesses of the left, for example. We do not merely turn to writing because we hope it gives us better, more accurate, more insightful thoughts about the world but because those thoughts enact a kind of proxy violence that gives us a sense of relief.
Perhaps it’s the part of writing that is most tied to orality, or the origins of writing as storytelling. Obviously the storyteller must know what topics will get their audience riled up… there is less immediacy for the written word, but the audience still haunts our work, I think. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
The rest of your critique is so valid — and I see, one could say, well Michelle, this isn’t even about audience really, it’s about nepotism and friendship and substituting these other irrelevant things for a writer’s command over “craft,” however broadly defined. You are probably right about that. I am myself at the beginning of writing more publicly in my life. If you are right, I sense I am at the waiting end, still, of a slew of rejections from major publications due not to the quality of my writing but due to the quality of my network. I hope things have changed. But also, if they haven’t, it also feels special to me to be producing work at a time when publications like the New Yorker matter less than they ever have. Which is not to dismiss the work they have done to surface and celebrate amazing writers at all.
For my part I think a lot about audience; it is the fuel I need to write well. I know the New Yorker has an enormous audience but to be honest, I have trouble seeing them in my mind’s eye. Better for me is knowing the handful of subscribers I write to each week, some old friends, others internet acquaintances, and still others complete strangers, anonymized even down to their emails. I like the orality in my work, the sense I am creating not a monument but a ripple. Writing is a shitty road to immortality, and whether that temporary sense of having made it is based on perfecting our “craft” or being published in the Times, we already have what we wanted from our work, right? It’s just to write, and to do it in a way that so pleases us that the rest doesn’t matter.
Times be damned! I have enough.
On the whole I agree with this, but I have to say I'm a little confused about the Tolentino example. I literally hadn't heard of it till just now, so all I know is what she wrote. Maybe there's more detail I'm missing out on, but it seems like saying the story is about "human slaves" is a point of contention, unless you consider anyone on an H1B visa to be a slave, which...I get what you'd mean, but that seems like an inflammatory characterization. And while I agree that "poor Jia Tolentino" is a dumb takeaway from the story, and don't doubt that many writers had that takeaway, the Jonathan Blanks piece to me seems to be using it as a jumping off point to discuss the American criminal justice system, which is quite fucked up! I'd say the story is at least as much about that as it is about modern indentured servitude (which is also fucked up, to be clear).
Like I said, on the whole I agree and get where you're coming from, I just found that example strange.
The best writing is honest and authentic, but it doesn’t mean writers can behave that way in their professional lives. They can get real about their childhood, or dating in New York, or existential angst….. but not about how publishing is bullshit and everyone hates [famous person] and major prizes are a joke.
It’s the same for everyone who relies on the goodwill of others to stay employed. I can’t go to work and announce that senior leadership is a clown show, the strategic plan is infeasible, and the hot new hire clearly lied on his resume. I can shit talk with trusted peers, but that’s it.
In addition to my day job, I write in niche genre, and we have all the same problems Freddie describes. Recently, an author got fed up and started posting rants about how the big reviewers in the genre are biased. Friendships and politics matter more than quality (etc). The author is now canceled. Authors know not to promote this person’s books, because the reviewers will turn on them too—and readers follow what their favorite authors say.
Nobody can talk about it except for people who are too big to cancel. Or in Freddie’s case, an independent income from an audience that already knows his opinions.
A lot of writers resent the truth-tellers because they don’t have the same freedom. But many others find it validating and cathartic, that someone finally said it.
This is a remarkable essay that says more about your personal evolution than the complaints you're (correctly) describing. I don’t think you’re going soft or admitting defeat. I think you’ve tasted the beginning of a fulfilling personal life (uh oh….he’s in love!!!!) and the inevitable acquiescences one’s body and mind make in early middle age. This was lovely.
So, the thing about the ombudsman is they often don't actually have any power besides maybe a bully pulpit. To the extent that writing as a profession can have one...I mean, saying it's you sounds pretentious, but, well, yeah.
And I think this is a place where the argument on 'this is not normal' actually fails. To the extent it's trying to appeal to some authority figure, I think it fails. To the extent it's attempting to appeal to the vast majority of Americans who long for normalcy and is not an attempt at appeal to authority, but appeal to popularity, it strikes me as fairly good politics...
I think this impulse goes beyond writing, and is maybe a personality trait in those who care deeply about anything. I am forever groaning on about hypocrisy and unfairness and performativity over substance in all the areas that I care about, at the same time that I KNOW there is no authority to appeal to. It’s the primal scream of “why isn’t the world better?” I can’t stop asking the question and casting about for an answer even though I know that I don’t have power over any behavior except my own. And thank goodness, because I also know I can’t be trusted with any kind of real power. But somehow I assume others should shoulder that burden well.
This is hardly germane to the most important points here, but if you're looking for uncompromising, interesting interviews with smart people, you should really check out the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast, where Tyler Cowen talks to people from myriad disciplines. A representative spread: Will MacAskill (very recently), Thomas Piketty (but oh the sound quality on that one), classics professor Shadi Bartsch, Ezra Klein, Margaret Atwood, Amia Srinivasan, Paul Krugman, and many many more (including a lot of people in business).
I'm surprised that you of all people didn't point out the obvious role of socio-economic status and class in this. Nearly all the people working at publications like the NYT are coastal elites, born into those families. Do you think the child of a working class Midwesterner would ever win a fellowship like that, no matter how brilliant they are? Because I don't.
"Politics is about power. You learn to push its levers or you lose. Appealing to the intangible does nothing but makes you feel good, and even that only fleetingly."
I agree with the thrust of your argument; simply appealing to justice or fairness by itself doesn't accomplish much. But those senses of justice and fairness and morality are often what drive action of various kinds, even indirectly, even when they merely shroud one's ambition. I think it does matter to appeal to these things because they can give you the perceived authority (and the power that attends) to make more material changes. Regrettably, this kind of power seems to be used more commonly to reinforce the status quo and to change the status of oneself rather than to buttress just actions.
There’s no ombudsman, but there are people listening and nodding along and taking notes, and some of them may someday be in a position to effect change. In science, they say that paradigms don’t really change until the old guard dies off—but from what I’ve seen, the seeds of the new paradigm were often planted by the sensible middle-aged scientists who just couldn’t get a critical mass of people to openly agree with them until the older heavyweights went away. There are always people in the younger generation who will eventually overthrow at least some of the pieties of the older generation, and you may be inspiring some of them without knowing it. The thing about old dogs baying at the moon is that they usually get other dogs to bay with them.
I think the good news for writers is that an ombudsman is on the way, the audience. Now that the middlemen are vanishing because of the internet craft will be king. Your prayers are being answered, and which is why you are already getting rewarded. I'm lucky, I work in a much less subjective industry so craft is mostly what is rewarded cause it's much more obvious.