Saturday 2/10/24
The problem, if you're one of these people doing what you're doing and refusing to stop doing it, is not going to go away. You're going to keep being exposed. You're going to keep being embarrassed. Laughed at. I'm not going to forget, I'm not going to move on. I may write 10,000 words a day, but I'll keep finding the time and energy to hold you accountable. I'm going to make a point of showing people what you are and what you're doing. And that will only stop when there's justice and things have been made right. You have say in that.
That prefatory remark out of the way, how about a prose off?
This time we'll use three stories from Granta--which is supposed to publish the best fiction there is, and everything in which is better than anything I've ever written in my life, or so you're meant to believe--and for a further spin on the prose off conceit, this one will feature but a single paragraph from each author. Sound good?
This paragraph is from "The Blind" by Ewan Grass.
Grandma Seaside got her name because she lived in a sheltered home by the seaside, and to distinguish her from Grandma Mindy, who was inside, organising the drying of the dishes, and was named for the dog that she had christened after Mork & Mindy. It was true that an easier way to distinguish Grandma Seaside would be to call her ‘great-grandmother’, but this no one in the family seemed to do. It felt strange to think that Grandma Seaside was Grandma Mindy’s mother, and so the boy often forgot.
I don't buy this and neither do you. Grandma Seaside? You're straining so hard as a writer to be inventive or clever, and you just don't have it. That's not believable. Grandma Seaside? Stop it. She wasn't called that. You're doing your "Look, I'm really a writer" thing. The Mork and Mindy thing doesn't work and the attempt to deliver that information is done ham-fistedly. You'd need to turn a phrase there in order to bring that off, not repeat a word in "Mindy." It's like having a word in a song lyric that you use twice to have it rhyme with itself at the end of two lines. As for the rest of it: Who cares? What's here for us to care about? What's indelible in this language? What's memorable about the language? What do you savor in the language? What will you remember?
Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.
Now, I'm doing this with paragraphs, but we should be clear: What I'm saying is germane to the entire story containing the paragraph above. Someone might want to be like, "Okay, so that paragraph was doing that, but then the next one was the good and interesting one."
First of all, no, it isn't. You can go see for yourself. And second of all, it doesn't work like that. Everything in an amazing story must be amazing. Every single part. You can't give anything away, you can't have four whatever sentences and then the "good" one you led up to. That's not how great writing works.
But obviously this isn't great writing.
Doubleday will be putting out his debut novel in July 2024. And what I can promise you--because once you've seen one example of how one of these people write, you've essentially seen them all--is that said novel will read like what you just saw. This person has an agent. That agent doesn't think they're any better at writing than I think they are. That book was bought by an editor at Doubleday who also doesn't think this writer is any better at writing than I think they are. Because that's not how it works. And this writer can do nothing else. They do this. What you just saw. They don't write about this subject. They do this one limited thing. Blandly.
Next we have a paragraph from "Green Shade," by E. De Zuleta, which in and of itself is a name that someone like Sigrid Rausing and Luke Neima will be inclined to like, and that can be most of the battle.
I could write to tell her that the jungle is home to the largest flower on the planet, it is called the corpse flower. They call it this because it stinks of rotting flesh, it is pollinated by carrion flies who are attracted by the smell. It has no stem, no roots or leaves, it exists as a network of thread-like mycelium which embed themselves intimately into the tissue of its host, drawing from these tissues everything it needs to survive. When it is ready to reproduce it sends out reddish-brown knobs which grow into huge fleshy flowers. I wonder if every person is simply an endless series of variations on the same theme, the same flaw.
Here we see one of these writer robots that could be easily replaced by AI, and AI would do a better job. As we witness time and again, you have people working with nothing. They don't have ability, they don't have a story to tell, they don't even really have a single damn thing to say. They try to cover that up, and one method they use is an artificial attempt at voice.
Unfortunately for them, though, you can't fake voice. It has to be real, or it won't work. You can't shoehorn a voice. That's what this author is trying to do with by repeating "it is" and "it" where they do, like after a comma. It's unnatural. We don't believe that that's how this character talks. This is doing awkward syntax for the sake of doing awkward syntax as though that were voice.
You'll see this tidbit approach, too. The tidbit approach is slightly different than the name drop approach, which we saw in that dreadful story from the cat guy in The Missouri Review when he just dropped in The Magic Mountain and Bach. Here's something funny, too: You see how Zuleta is trying to show you how smart he or she or they or whatever is by using the word "mycelium"? They're not using it naturally. Go back and look at the dreadful cat story in The Missouri Review. What's the very first word of that story? "Mycelial." Was there a sale on that word at the hey-we-suck-at-writing store recently? It's amazing how similar all of these people are. Pod people.
In this Granta story, we have someone who looked something up on Google, and now they're putting that in--the part about the largest flower--like they're deep and all of that. But this doesn't have anything to do with anything. We don't need this. It isn't deep. You're not dazzling anyone with your perfectly chosen metaphor. This reads like someone who has to try and fake it. And it's published by people like Sigrid Rausing and Luke Neima because that's also who they are. This isn't great writing. It's not brilliant writing. It's not even close to good writing.
How would classify this in terms of its quality? Is it mediocre? Let's say you're not a writer. Could you do this? Why would you think you couldn't? And I'm sure you don't think you couldn't.
And how could anyone be convinced by the last sentence? How does this work? Each person boils down to one flaw? Or is that everyone there is boils down to that same flaw? Do I get this one flaw and that person in the next apartment has a different one flaw?
This is a paragraph from "The Full Package" by Zoe Dubno.
Shopping was generally a not fun thing for me. The girls at my school wore a uniform of riding boots, down puffer vests and a specific brand of black yoga leggings. At one point I considered adopting this uniform, but my mom said she would not pay the 100-dollar price of the yoga leggings. She said I clearly lived in a different tax bracket than she did and that I could get normal yoga leggings at one-tenth the cost. Obviously the point of those specific yoga leggings was that they were 100 dollars, so that left me nowhere. I didn’t even like how they looked, or much else about the girls in my school, but I still desired their approval for obvious reasons documented in all films and media about teenagers.
Are you trying to bore us or can you not help bore us? is what I find myself asking when reading this paragraph. If you look at the story in full, do you see how monochromatic everything is? It's even visually monochromatic on the page.
Look at that last clause: How lazy are you? Rather than convey something that is consequential to this character, the author just has that character in essence go, "Eh, you can check out all of these other things--media--to know what I'm talking about."
You're sending us elsewhere? Shouldn't your story be what we care about and where we stay? How is anything here interesting to anyone? Do you, as the reader, care about the leggings and the price of them? How does this qualify as great writing? What's amazing? What is more basic than this? Are you getting insight? Are you entertained? What is this writing doing for you?
The answer is nothing. There is no value in any of this. There's no artistic value, no entertainment value. That's not why it's done, and that's not why people like Sigrid Rausing and Luke Neima publish it.
Zubno has a novel coming out called Happiness and Love. Are you even trying? That's your title? That is the best you can do? What's more trite than that? Anyone think that's going to be an awesome book? Come on.
Her bio also tells us that her fiction has been published in a venue called Muumuu House. Muumuu House was founded by author Tao Lin, who is an alleged rapist and plagiarist. I use the "alleged" just barely. Go look into him on Google. Type in "Tao Lin rape" or "Tao Lin plagiarist."
And you know what? Granta loves to support Tao Lin. When he has a book come out, they publish an excerpt. He's all over their website. That's who Sigrid Rausing likes. That's who she stands with and stands for. An awful writer, and there he is doing what it seems like he does a fair bit of.
These are bad people who couldn't care less about the quality of what they publish, because what they publish has nothing to do with that writing being any good. That's what you have in a publisher and editor like a Sigrid Rausing and Luke Naima at Granta.
I mean, come on--how do you think Dubno got her fiction published in Granta? You know exactly how.
I feel like we've had quite a build-up here. We've looked at three paragraphs from recent stories in Granta, each of which is supposed to be some of the best fiction in the world. Does anyone believe that? Clearly no one does, and obviously no one could, and obviously no one is going to rally to the defense of these examples, or any of the examples included in this journal, or call me out and say, "Fleming, you're wrong, this was amazing because of this, this, and this," because that's not possible to do. We've talked about those three paragraphs, and now I'm going to put in one of mine.
These are things I turn over in my mind at breakfast with my wife and daughter and we’re all focused to various degrees on what our respective days will entail. I used to hope that the latter would think that I was pondering cool subjects like the stock market and how I was about to take my consistent, quietly heroic self up to the roof to muck out the gutters without requiring acknowledgement of my efforts—for I was the kind of man who just did what needed doing—or whether she should ask me about her shooting form before tonight’s game and if her elbow was itself doing what it was supposed to be doing. But the truth is I would be happy with knowing that she was thinking about me at all, whenever she does. Not for this or for that. But because. A because in need of nothing further, including the fulfillment of the rest of a sentence. And I mean that in a totality of gratitude sense rather than some kind of defeatist, “I’ll take what I can get” concession within myself. It’s hard to let people know what we think. It’s hard to know what we think, you could even say.
And along those same, what can we say about the contrast? We have writing replete with life. Writing of stakes and consequence. Depth. We have something deeply personal to a character which moves to the universal. We have language that is indelible in every instance. This writing is not florid--it's rich and textured. But it's also accessible. No reader is left behind. The voice is true and it connects. We see the various facets of a human. We see what they know, what they're trying to understand, what they care about, their strength, their failings, what they've learned and are learning. We see something of their dreams, or what their dreams have become. We are close to who they are, and a real way, within their world and their life. At their essence. And that essence isn't some readymade commodity. This is someone who has searched, learned, gotten things wrong, managed to understand some things properly. There are tones within the tones, music within the presentation of a subsuming musical work, and of which this paragraph, and each line of it, each clause, each word, is part of larger whole containing this whole, if you will, each of these wholes, in the sense of the story.
There is more in this paragraph here than in everything the people above will write in their lives if you were to combine it all. There is bravery in this writing. There is a daily human bravery in this character. And for all that is happening here, who else is privy to what he's saying or thinking? Because these aren't things he's going to say in conversation with his daughter. We are getting these things. We are privileged and in on something, and that makes us a part of this story. We're participants. Do you understand how important that is? It's vital to true art. We must be a part of it ourselves. He's going to be with her a certain way that, perhaps, conveys these things. He is. But we are being afforded a glimpse into something very special, very human, and so alive.
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