Prose off, "Here's a sentence w/more in it than everything by these people combined" edition: Standard One Story tripe put forward by human affectations Patrick Ryan and Will Allison v. Fleming story

Tuesday 4/8/25

Been working this morning on "Hero of Mine"--which could both be understood by a five-year-old and thought about deeply and daily for the rest of a very wise adult's life--and "By Water." The latter is now at 5200 words. "Hero of Mine" is about 1100. There's more work to go--whatever form it ends up taking--on "By Water." There has never been a story structured like this one. It looks like it's going to be this, then that, then this, then that, and then this again, that again, and it turns out it's all of it, all while being extremely focused in its narrative thrust, which is no small thing to pull off here.

All of these works are so different from each other, in everything save quality. They all have to get to the same place--cross the same line, if you will. That's one of the many reasons these evil system people can't honestly say the "You don't do the kind of writing I prefer," unless, that is, they're talking about writing that sucks, bores people off their tits, and matches other writing that sucks and bores people off their tits--their credo being that of "suck, bore, match"--then sure, you have me there, frauds. Well done--now complete that reach-around.

Time is very important in life. It's not as important as energy--nothing is. But people tend not to know that. They'll bang on about time--just about everyone does, right?--but when do you ever see them speak of the value of energy?

What do we say? The value of a work of art is directly proportional to the amount of life it contains? Do you ever see any life whatsoever in the works by these other writers in these prose offs? Are you ever taken hold of by a force of life that reaches through the screen and embraces you? All but knocks you over? Sends you soaring?

It hasn't happened once with what these people write, because their work lifeless. Which is to say, it has no value. It's nothing. Someone's nothing is really no different than another person's nothing. That's why all off the fiction from these people is interchangeable. It could be any one of their names across the top of the page. Granted, it'd only be appearing where it did--like in a Granta, a New Yorker, a Paris Review, a Sun, a Zoetrope, a Threepenny Review, a Baffler, a Yale Review, a Conjunctions, a Harper's, an American Short Fiction, an Atlantic--because of the name, but none of it is ever more than nothing.

Lifeless nothingness.

Life is also energy. That presence, depth, and forth of life. The enveloping and infiltrating nature of it. Life fills both the outside and the inside. Life is about buoyant force.

And so is great writing.

Funny thing about these people which we should be explicit about: None of them actually believe they're any good. That's why they're so insecure, prone to envy, need to lock out, make sure there's no honest competition, and are miserable, evil, petty fucks, generally speaking. People who know they do something well and are secure in themselves don't do anything these people do. Such a person would never behave as these people behave.

A person who knew they were good at something and were secure in themselves would have grace and tact and humility, and would seek to learn from someone who could do things they couldn't, rather than hate and fear and wish to suppress that person.

Time is, of course, metronomical and measurable, but it's also malleable. What time is--and how time is--internally, can be--and feel, and resonate--much differently than time does externally.

I've talked about the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" a lot in these pages. I'll write a book about "Dark Star." One can listen to a thirty-five minute performance of the song, and it won't feel like thirty-five minutes. It may very well feel like no amount of minutes at all. You finish listening, and for all you know--as to what you sense internally--it's mere seconds after you sat down to do the listening in the first place.

When we see all of the bad writing by the people of the publishing system--the people without talent, who the other people of the system simply lie about, because that's how it works--we have a prevailing sensation.

Remember when you were in school and it was, say, your first day of AP history. You're taking classes like that, it's important for college, all of that jazz. You get your new textbook, you crack open the first page, you start reading a bit, and your eyes are glazing over. Your heart sinks in your chest, right? Because you see what a battle this is going to be. A slog. You're going to read the same page ten times in a row and it won't be sinking in.

Now, you probably adjusted, because you can do that with AP history. Whereas, you get that same sinking feel, you know it's going to be a horrible, horrible slog to read this MFA machined that you don't care about, that no one cares about, in which nothing of any consequence happens--ever--and there are no emotional stakes for either the cardboard characters who are typically stand-ins for the cardboard writer, or you, the reader.

People have to fucking care. Or they won't be engaged. Further, in this age, they won't engage at all. They'll move on to any of a million stupid things which, however stupid they may be--Instagram--will still hold their attention more because even those stupid things offer more than this kind of writing does.

And it's all this kind of writing.

With one exception. That being the person these people hate because this is so obviously true.

Complicated in a way, yes--given how much there is working against that person--but also pretty simple.

And axiomatic.

When you write, no matter what it is, you want to remove any chance of the slog. That crawling, crawling, God-this-is-taking-so-long feeling with time that is prevalent right from the opening paragraph of anything these people write.

A very short sentence has to feel like it contains worlds such that a person either doesn't consciously note that it's comprised of so few words, or does and marvels how so few words could say so much, with those words saying even more given how they're amplified by the power of context, and the power of the constituent workings that together become the staggering power of the whole.

This is an age of rampant narcissism. People think first, last, and at every point in between, about themselves. The most common exceptions is for parents with children, but that's also another whole thing to get into. Motivation, for instance. Root motivation in having children. Because that's often not about selflessness and love.

We know that people in publishing are considerably worse than people outside of publishing, which is remarkable, but true nonetheless. What we think of as "normal" people--granted, that's. term that means less and less every day in our devolving world--are not like the people of publishing. It's like they had to come here and colonize this space because they couldn't be anywhere else in society.

And to stop society from seeing how they behaved, what they were about, they had to put a militant form of isolationism into practice. Draw the curtains on their world, and one way they did that was to publish the worst work and, over time, to make it so that only bad work was written. If you wanted to be a part of this world, you had to be like the people in it, and that meant never being smarter, writing better, creating work that people could actually enjoy and care about. Never outshining the people of this twisted subculture of a world. You had to proceed through their channels, enter their world through those insisted-upon channels. That meant this school, then the MFA program, doing writing of the same stripe that all of the others did, then inculcating new people in that writing and these mores and funneling them into the system to then do the same.

Any good writing is an unholy wrench in that system to these people.

Think about your average person and how self-centered they are. But a publishing person? You're magnifying that narcissism a hundred fold. Yes, these people write stories about graduate school and writing programs because they can't think of anything--they are totally devoid of imagination--but they're also that fixated on their own navels.

To write well, you have to be all about other people. Other people are your first and overriding concern. The reader. What you are doing for the reader. What you are bringing to the reader's life. It's all about the reader. It's not about you at all.

How is the reader doing? Will the reader understand this? Will the reader care? is this worth the reader's time?

The better a work of writing is, the more selfless it is, and vice versa.

Do you understand? This is important. It's what it's really all about.

Do you see the likes of these evil people thinking about a greater good? About people beyond themselves? Do you see them getting around the shortcomings, their egos, their insecurity, to put the reader both first and last and, again, everywhere in-between?

That's absurd. None of them do it. Wouldn't occur to any of them to ever think this way. They're not capable of thinking this way, either intellectually, emotionally, morally, spiritually, or artistically.

These thoughts would be radical to them. They've never had them. They've never taught them, they've never gotten them from out of the mouth of a professor in an MFA program.

it's not how that works or how they work or how their writing works. Which is one of the many reasons their writing doesn't work at all, as anything, save as another example of the interchangeable nothingness from one of these writers to another, up and down the line of all of them.

These works that I write couldn't be more different from each other and this is true about every last one of them, and yet, they all operate from within a framework of these precepts I've been discussing here. They answer to, you could say, the same commandments.

The first ninety-one words of "Hero of Mine" is made up of eleven sentences. I checked today as I was working on a ninety-word sentence in "By Water."

These are the first two sentences--and paragraphs--of "Hero of Mine":

What is a hero?

Do you know?

Instant engagement. We are in. In the story. We're a part of it. The words seem simple, but also not so very simple if we apply thought to them. The reader is a part of this. Those sentences resonate differently depending on who one is, where one is in life, what one knows, and, crucially, what any of the people I've just described--and I just included all of us--thinks they know.

Up until that point.

What is that point? Precisely, now. Well, that point is the day when they met--and read--that story. There is before the story and after the story. A reader never should come out the far side of a story as the same person they were when they went in.

Not if it's a truly great work of writing.

With the two sentences/paragraphs, we are not conscious of their word-based shortness on account of their immersive refulgence. Here is a story and now we are in it and we are away. We're answering in our heads. We are participants. We're going to read the story, but the story is also reading us. We sense this. We are not trivialized or left behind. We have stakes. A horse in the race. And that horse--as we go along--is going to be a lot more than some beast of burden atop whose back we ride or that pulls the plow.

Instead of a horse, you're apt--in truly great writing--to find that what's really in that race, so to speak, is your heart and your soul.

This is what I do. It's not what these people do.

They can't allow us to mix. They have to keep me out. To preserve the illusion of what they are, to keep the artifice from being revealed by the contrast, and to live more easily with their lies, the things they have to tell themselves to get through another day of their lives, while scratching the ever present itch to be petty and tyrannical and discriminatory as a form of revenge without any initial offending cause or reason, save that this other person can do and embodies every day of his life, in every work he writes, that which they themselves are incapable of.

Two sentences, to paragraphs. You can count the words--run the word count--but you can't measure them. They don't have limits. Time isn't a factor. There's no slog. Keep that in mind when we get to what you'll see next from me. Because it will be very different, but also answer to the same principles.

But first, let's paste in a typical example of the fiction in One Story as selected by Patrick Ryan, who wants you to believe I've never written anything as good as anything in One Story and that he is not actually a massive, John Freeman-influenced bigot, when that is all he is in this world, more of an affectation of a human--and a bad one at that--than an actual person, and a coward like Will Allison who is going to ask himself, "What is it that Patrick most wants me to think and do as his bitch?" and answer to those suppositions, rather than the putting forward of writing that he knows to be infinitely better than his own.

This is from "Hey, Me," by Anthony Varallo--writing program professor at the College of Charleston who tried to get me to give him money to form reject my work--in One Story, and what do you know, there's a professor in it. But allowing that you haven't had a heart attack from the shock of learning that, take a look.

I’m checking to see if this works. Hey, this is me, checking to see if this works. Hello? Okay, I just checked, and this works. I’m back, even though you didn’t know I was gone. Ha, I say to you. Foolish you. So easily tricked by my mastery of technology.

I feel like I should say who I am and why I’m making this recording, but I think I’m the only person who will ever listen to it, unless I really do get up the nerve to send it to you, professor. Other than that happening, though, I guess there’s no point. Except to say, hey, it’s me, your one and only me, doing what you already know I’m doing and why. Today is Sunday. Weather: cloudy. Barometer: steady. Winds out of the direction they are out of.

Always the same, isn't it?

I should also tell you--because I know these people think--that the above is supposed to be clever and witty. That would never occur to anyone on their own, but that's what Varallo is going for there.

Another funny thing: If you rounded up the shit from 100 of these bad writers, or any number of them you wanted, and you took the names off the tops, and you showed it to frauds like Patrick Ryan and Will Allison, they'd have no chance of identifying what was by whom. They'd just be guessing.

There isn't any separation between these writers. It's like a big beige wave. Nothing that makes any of them stand out as them. Where you know it's them. It could only be them. It could be fucking any of them. They're incapable of creating anything distinguishable.

Now let's do a sentence from "By Water." Ready?

But as if by some miracle of a momentary, out-of-nowhere hand whose canny finger flipped an invisible switch, Mr. Kelber forgot about impressing Ms. Marquetta long enough to venture outside of himself, freed of previous considerations to claim what only becomes understood later, when it’s understood at all, as a personalized, practically dangled flash in time—the stretch of a blink within a timid man’s waking dream of a possible new dispensation before the standard gaze, the standby fears, and the shadowing doubts, locked into place once again.

I can do that and these people can't. And from that undeniable truth stems a lot of the issues. The issues stretching back decades. Why this journal--and this kind of documentation and proof and exposure--became a necessity.

That's an eighty-eight-word sentence. We know exactly who wrote it, who is the only person in the world who could write it. The example from "Hero of Mine" was made up of seven words. But if you saw that to open a story, you'd also know who it was by. See how totally different these works are--just going by these two examples from them--and yet how they operate within that framework of principles I detailed above?

The one that is "only" seven words doesn't resonate as only seven words. And the sentence of eighty-eight words flows such that it might as well be seven words long itself or a form of music that exists beyond the reach of music-music. You won't have to fight against it, fight your way through it--it moves you. Have you ever seen anything like that? Command of language like that? Prose of that nature? No. And you won't.

If you want to learn about writing, if you're someone who actually cares about writing as writing--and not as a form of stamped and processed ID papers in a warped system of jerrking off and being jerked off by talentless assholes--then don't get an MFA. Don't waste your money. Mom and dad's money. Don't be a dilettante. Don't be like Patrick Ryan and Will Allison. Don't look to your navel for inspiration. There's nothing in there but lint. You'll get more from reading a single entry in this journal like this one than you will in an unlimited amount of years in an MFA program.

And yes, I know they always look exactly like you expected them to.

Always the same in everything.

Save in one case.