[Stephen King] s a great writer because he lets it all hang out. His hopes and sentiments, his awful bitterness, those wounds that never heal and those scars across his body and psyche which he cannot help but count and re-count more frequently than he counts his millions, his essential kindness (which informs the avuncular tone of his work—King is like a cruel dentist who hates his own cruelty even while he reminds you of what a masochist you are for being in his chair), his outrageous inferiority complex vis-a-vis contemporary American realism and its publishing infrastructure, it’s all fucking there on the page. He doesn’t care whether or not he lives or dies, not in the sense we are discussing now, and he wouldn’t care even if he wasn’t the world’s most popular writer. Under another set of circumstances, S. King would still be the barstool intellectual and substitute teacher who writes a novel every six months and throws it out; he just married someone who didn’t dig the manuscripts out of the trash. He would write this stuff for free, as he himself has said. […]
Of course, King isn’t a very good writer. He loathes the sentence, doesn’t understand the paragraph, cannot write anyone not of his generation with any level of fidelity, is overly enamored with eye dialect, obviously phones it in when tired or bored, cannot edit himself (which is what makes him great!), and, like Ray Bradbury, cannot overcome his early childhood fascination with cheap tricks. Like Bradbury, however, he does get that they are tricks, and presents them as such. And that’s why he is great.
[Nick Mamatas, “How to be a Great Writer”, collected in Starve Better]
Never quite resolved the zen paradox of Writer Authenticity. If it’s all about exposing the Core, is everyone a potential Great Writer? Do traditional parameters like cultural reference or life experience even matter all that much? Am I a compost heap or a muddy field, waiting to be prospected for gold?
Can one be real while wanting to succeed? Can one be real while wanting to be real? It was these sort of “try, do not”, wu wei kind of questions that troubled me as a twenty-something trying to listen deep. I ended up waiting around for the Muse, who did occasionally show up, but then I couldn’t always gin up the courage to drop everything and go after her. (In hindsight, had I been less of a solipsistic apolitical little invertebrate, I might have become a leftie and read some Adorno. At least then these ruminations could have been anchored and productive.)
The upswelling of a naked vulnerability strikes me as the elixir sought after so many writing workshops and masterclasses, but this isn’t the authenticity what Mamatas is after here, undersold by my cropped quote, but authenticity of imagination. No paradox there. I imagine a writer like Ligotti might have soaked up all the horror and pessimistic philosophy in the world, then listened deep for the seething in the cracks of existence. It’s as fair a compromise as I expect.
One question remains though: superego aside, should anyone want to be a great writer? If we’re indeed fast approaching the death of meaning vis-a-vis biogenetic determinism and algorithmics, it might make more sense to approach writing as pure artisanship. Authentic inauthenticity might be more par for the course in late modernity. Writing as mass consciousness hacking rather than a prehistoric wail emitted by a lonesome genius.
Let’s close this off with a bit of Kafka the ascetic, straight from the notebook:
Before setting foot in the Holy of Holies you must take off, your shoes, yet not only your shoes, but everything; you must take off your traveling garment and lay down your luggage; and under that you must shed your nakedness and everything that is under the nakedness and everything that hides beneath that, and then the core and the core of the core, then the remainder and then the residue and then even the glimmer of the undying fire. Only the fire itself is absorbed by the Holy of Holies and lets itself be absorbed by it; neither can resist the other.
the Budafoki amended 