Hello, I’m back. Where have you been for the last three months? I hear you ask. Or maybe that’s just the voices in my head. Because I’m pretty sure none of you even noticed I was gone. But I was! Very gone indeed. And now I’m back, and I’ve got some stuff to tell you.
One thing I’ve learned in the last three months is, if you want to be around a lot of sane, reasonable, ordinary people, don’t go and work at an artists’ residency in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, if it’s too late, and you are already working at an artists’ residency in the middle of nowhere, don’t hang around with the writers. Writers are the worst people in the world. This is so evidently true, in fact, that when you do meet a nice writer, one of the things you’ll bond over is how utterly awful most of the others ones are.
The awfulness of writers has been a concern for me for a while now, but recently I came up with a genius hack to make it stop mattering, which is to give up writing and become an artist instead.
Artists are much nicer than writers.
Get this: artists saw me making art and they did not patronise me or neg me or use me to make themselves feel superior or steal my ideas or demand to know my opinions on various hot topic issues before they would care about my work. Instead, they actually helped me. They gave me materials to make art with. They spent time teaching me techniques and shortcuts. Writers would never dream of doing any of that - unless you were paying them money. (And even when you give them money, they’re wont to come out with crap like, “Don’t try to write scenes with more than two characters in them, because it’ll be too difficult.” (Literal writing tuition that I literally paid for.))
But artists are built differently. They paid attention to my work,and talked about it with respect and patience. They were cool and fun. They let me in. In short, they behaved like humans who cared about art, and not like a bunch of bastards who only cared about how much better it would make them feel if I failed, or never even got started in the first place.
I wanted to be a writer since I was a tiny kid, and part of the reason I stayed so invested in that path as an adult was because somewhere along the way I got the idea that writers were iconoclastic, obnoxious, loud, drunk, passionate, troubled, lonely, lovestruck, hilarious, weird, wild, off-grid, fun people, given to duelling and conducting intense romances with one another when not dashing off raw untutored works of genius. That is, that they were just like me. But if that was ever true, those days are gone.
Most writers are in fact deeply boring and conventional people given to internet addictions, veganism, academia, and groupthink. Indeed, if you ever go to a writers’ convention, you’ll notice that, far from getting you drunk and snogging you in a hotel lift, most writers you talk to will be more interested in looking over your shoulder to see if there are other, more important writers they could be talking to instead. That’s fun for these people.
But those writers can breathe a sigh of relief on my account, because I am no longer one of them. I’m over it. I’m done.
Feels good.
I know what some of the writers reading this will think: a real writer never gives up writing. But that’s okay. I’ll be glad to be excluded from a group of people who in the last ten years have mainly become known for being censorious ideologues and book burners who burst into tears whenever someone says, “I disagree.”
“The only way to fail at writing is to quit,” those people say, congratulating themselves on the fact that they’ve never quit, despite their lack of success or talent or originality; and also ignoring the fact that there are oodles of ways to fail at writing. You could fail by writing a novel about queer werewolves, for example. Or by writing a load of ostentatious purple guff that sounds like it was farted out of Will Self’s arsehole to cover up the fact that you actually have nothing interesting to say. Or by self-censoring so much that your writing reads like it’s been vaccinated, sterilised, and squeezed out of a tiny plastic sphincter instead of a pen.
Many writers are about to go out of business anyway, as their work is so basic, formulaic, and spiritually empty that robots can do it better. Failing because you quit seems like a much better option to me than failing because an insentient soulless machine wrote your book better than you could.
So there it is. Kafka said a non-writing writer was a monster courting insanity. But I say a somewhat-writing non-writer is a different kind of monster altogether. Maybe a bit insane, sure. But also, bound to be a good-looking, charming, witty, and delightful monster, who’s fun to talk to at parties and might even snog you in a lift.
On the practicalities of this epic flounce sensible decision: I’ll be writing this substack every week as usual (and I’m starting a new one - don’t judge, it’s not ready yet) but I’m making it completely free. Partly because I’m no longer a writer, obviously. But mainly because I don’t want to have to answer to anyone. I don’t want to think about what I need to write in order to get people to pay for my writing. Which is not to suggest that I don’t love and appreciate the people who have given me money for my words – I deeply love and appreciate you. And I do still want and need money! But not enough to write anything that isn’t either true or fun for me to write. So, you know. Do what you’ve got to do - I won’t be remotely offended if you unsubscribe or change your plan. The only way to fail here is to give me a lot of advice about how I should never give up. Too late! I’m the avant garde of not doing this shit anymore.
I will keep reading your writerly not-a-writer posts because I enjoy and will enjoy whatever you put out into the world. I saw your note yesterday about writing failing you and wondered if you had made a big decision and here we are. I look forward to your new stack, too. Change is good! (Despite what people tell us. Those people don't like that other people can make decisions and move on from things that no longer serve them. Sillies.)
You're right, I'm sorry to say. I think my first post was titled 'Why Are Writers Arseholes?' Because they are. I know some exceptions, but not many. I had noticed your absence, by the way. I've kept up the rants but my fiction has lain dormant for some time. The entire industry is rotten. Agents and editors are even worse than writers. Western literature is probably over.