Apple-Obsessed Author Fella

Writer Resolution, 2020: Write With A Knife To Your Back, The Cliff’s Edge At Your Feet

Every year, for those who don’t know, I like to do a kind of writerly resolution — a mission statement to guide you, and us, meaning mostly me, into the new year and out the other side. It’s not marching orders. It’s not even meant to be good advice. It’s a springboard, an idea, a notion, and one that will work for some and not for others.

You know the thing you do where you try to figure out, “If I had six months to live, what would I do in that time?” Learn basejumping? Fight a bear? Fuck a robot? I dunno. There is of course the authorial version of this, which is, what book would I write? What book would I write if i didn’t know if anyone would read it, if I’d even get to finish it before The End gets me, if it would even matter at all? What weird-ass, particular-as-hell, little-or-big book lives in the deep of my heart and would emerge ululating its mad goat song upon hearing a potential death sentence? What curious narrative creature would crawl out and hiss, giddily: “It’s my time, now, penmonkey!” — ?

Well, you’re dying.

Here it is: your terminal diagnosis.

You’re gonna die.

Whole world, too. Gonna die.

Kaput. Kathunk. Dead. Doornail. *fart noise* *flush sound*

No, I’m not saying it’s soon — I’m not standing behind you with, as the title suggests, a knife to your back. I don’t have ESP. But I needn’t be an oracle to confirm for you that it is, in fact, eventual. Assuming of course that you’re not Mumm-Ra the Ever-Living —

— you and me and everybody else are gonna eventually meet our makers. (Spoiler alert: your maker is a rogue 3-D printer in Schenectady.) And, I dunno if you’ve looked around recently but, uhhhh.

*clears throat*

Shit is weird.

Shit is weird.

SHIT

IS

W E I R D.

It’s not even that it’s bad —

I mean, ha ha, it is. It definitely is. But it’s also just fucking goofy. Our world is theater, and it’s currently being staged by a gaggle of goony dipshits. Political upheaval and social chaos and huge leaps forward in technology and regressive tumblebacks of justice and progress — it’s weed and fireworks and drones, it’s Twitter President and hellscape wildfires and flat-earthers, it’s coins to witchers and yoda-babbies and for some reason people are watching Friends? It’s way the fuck off the map. It’s not really dystopian — it’s dyspeptic, it’s twist-topian, it’s what-the-fuck-a-lyptic.

We know that. We can see it.

And we can then couple that with the recognition that, yep, we’re all dead. Not today, probably. Ideally not tomorrow. But tock’s ticking. Fuse is hissing.

Pair those facts together, and from that you get what is for me — and maybe also for you! — a writing resolution for 2020.

And that resolution is this:

The world has gone weird.

So meet it on equal footing.

Get weird in return. In revenge. In recompense.

Write whatever the fuck you want. Because, honestly, why not? This year, I’ve had the privilege of continuing to know and meet writers of great repute and wonder, who are telling stories that are brave and bold and uncompromising — and I don’t mean “unflinching” in the sense of wow that was brutal, I mean uncompromising in the sense that these writers did not compromise against anybody else’s vision. Sure, they have publishers, and yes they have editors, but the book that exists — be it Starless Sea, or Steel Crow Saga, or Cabin at the End of the World, or Book of M, or Calculating Stars, or The Warehouse, or Nobody People — are books that came not merely from these authors but rather, out of them. Like a spirit, summoned. Books that are emblems of these writers, that are (or at least feel like) the culminations of who they are and what they think and what gives them both fear and hope. These books are summations, the end of an authorial equation, and I really love that. In a less dire, more consumerist age, I think the advice would be (or used to be): you need to write to a market. Examine what sells. Blah blah blah.

But, as noted, shit’s weird.

Nobody knows what sells.

Nobody knows what the audience wants, or needs.

It’s all gone cuckoo. The old rules are broken. The expectations of what is ABC ends up being XYZ — the compass is spinning wildly and we cannot figure out what the alethiometer is trying to tell us.

So? Fuck it.

Not “fuck it” as in, don’t write anything.

“Fuck it” as in, write the thing you wanna write because there are no guarantees anyway. There’s no certainty it’ll get published. Or you won’t be dead before you finish. Or the world won’t die under the fist of a meteor we somehow didn’t notice. There’s no way to know if there will be an editor for it, or an audience to read it, or anything. But we hope. We write. We pull something out of us and then we pull another half-dozen things out, and we mash them together and see what monstrous thing we have made. We meet weird with weird. We tell the tale that our heart must tell.

I’m not saying to tell it poorly. Or not to think about an audience — that first draft is for us, but all the subsequent drafts are for them, for the audience, for you more than for me. This isn’t saying your narrative vision is impervious to criticism, that no editorial oversight is needed to course correct. You still want to tell the best version of that story, whatever it may be. But don’t pre-reject your weird-ass idea before it’s out there. Give it legs, let it run.

I’m often noting that writing is a song sung into the void — a song of hope, where we hope our words will reach someone else’s ears, and that the act of telling a story is a plea with the universe that begs, please tell me I’m not alone. If even one reader out there likes the curious peccadilloes you popped onto the page, that’s not nothing. It’s something. It’s a huge something, because it means there are others like you out there. That you’re not alone. Storytelling is that act: setting down in front of the firelight with the hope others will come to join you and hear whatever tale you gotta tell.

So, do that.

Tell the tale. The one that’s yours. The one that’s weird. The one that feels off-kilter, that other people aren’t sure about. This is not a safe era, and so we are not beholden to safe storytelling. Go as big and bold or as small and strange as you see fit. The world’s gone wacky and we gonna die (someday!), so step into the firelight, and we’ll join you by the fire to hear what you have to say.

And together we’ll push back the dark.

Cheers.

Onward into 2020.

Go write.