The Ritual

On writing, and figuring out what the hell I'm doing.

In the background of all the essays I've written so far, there has been one persistent, nagging question:

What am I writing for?

Nobody needs to be told about the litany of woes faced by artists in These Dark Times. We’ve heard them all before. I’ve griped about them in previous posts.

But then again—a reminder never hurts. 

Briefly:

• Digital media has created an effectively infinite supply of diversions, which means that the market value of those products has fallen to nearly zero. The people who are making serious money on contemporary entertainment are rarely the individual creators; the vast majority are working twice the hours at half the pay, buying lottery tickets for a shot at becoming famous (i.e. no longer impoverished.)

• As if that wasn’t depressing enough, Artificial Intelligence came along and turbocharged the volume of content in an already-crowded marketplace. While the bots might not be able to compete head-to-head with human creators in terms of quality (yet) they can certainly drown us in zero-cost noise, inundate digital media with good-enough distractions, and make it even harder for individual artists to stand out.

• It’s hard to know what’s worth creating when the world is tearing itself apart. All the usual bromides about lifting people's spirits and the redemptive power of art are hard enough to justify during peacetime (if such a thing exists anymore, or ever did). When there’s fresh blood in the streets, the idea that anything less than truly transcendental art will make a whistling fart worth of difference starts to feel—for me, at least—like monumental hubris. “Great news, everyone! I did some soul-searching, and realized that the thing I really enjoy making is, coincidentally, the exact thing that everyone needs to heal from this tragedy! My interpretative dance quintet is like a gift from the gods for this troubled world¹!”

All of this goes double for writers.

While visual artists and musicians may be struggling, they can take solace in knowing that their work is ideal for digital media. Audio-visual art has a future. People want stuff to look at and listen to. Even if the market is saturated, a song or a picture, a podcast or a video can be easily enjoyed on a smartphone. It’s still a long shot. But at least there’s the hope of finding a big audience for those works, without having the problem of obsolete technology to overcome.

Writers, on the other hand, have some hard choices to make.

The two mainstays of non-academic, non-technical writing—novels and journalism—are effectively dead. Up until a few decades ago, people with a knack for long-form prose could make a decent living in one or both of those industries. Gone are the days when you could hope for a steady paycheck in exchange for an assigned word count. It’s all freelance now. If you want one of the few half-decent writing gigs left on the planet, you not only need to be a solid writer, but also a ruthless self-marketer with a brigand’s eye for opportunity. The quiet, bookish types, for whom writing used to be a refuge, aren’t well-suited to this mercenary reality.

And goddammit—it’s tough to let that dream die.

There were a few golden centuries when it was culturally acceptable, not to mention profitable, to be a certain kind of introverted misanthrope. The archetypal figure of the reclusive wordsmith exists for a reason. Some people choose to be writers; others are driven to it. Until very recently, if somebody was born with a lack of social grace and still knew how to turn a phrase, there was a form of socialized care in place for them: push the finished pages out through the mail slot of your unopened front door, and we’ll slide some money in from the other side. The reading public gets newspapers and novels; the staring, yammering types who are better off tucked away with a keyboard aren’t forced to be professionally social in order to keep themselves fed and housed. Everybody wins.

I’m being glib, but I also have a long string of professional failures behind me, because (absent any major pharmaceutical intervention) there are exactly two things I’m wired for: manual labor, and fishing words out of the air.

If I can’t pay the bills doing either one of those things, what the hell else am I supposed to do?

For most of my life, answering the question of what I’m writing for would amount to this: “Because I have to.” I started building myself a fortress of words when I was very young. Writing was a form of self-rescue. In hindsight, I probably should have followed that inclination sooner—thrown caution to the wind, gone straight for writing fiction. I would have saved myself a long detour through journalism, right when the bottom was falling out of a doomed industry. Might have gotten a book or two into print before the hammer came down on publishing as well.

Of course, I’d probably still be at this same crossroads now, and having an even harder time letting go of that dream.

If I can’t make a living from writing, and the world doesn’t need my self-published novel, what am I writing for?

I think I’ve been stuck on the form of the work, rather than the substance. It’s hard to let go of that bygone dream: making a living by being professionally insane, cutting loose on a keyboard for a solid middle-class wage. But that lifestyle was always a fantasy, anyway—subsidized by wartime profits and outsourced misery.

My trek through phasmatopia helped me realize that, beyond the specific form of a novel, what I’m really working on is a counter-spell for modernity.

All creative work is a form of enchantment, if we’re being honest with ourselves. This often gets flattened into a metaphor—art is like magic—but it’s literally true. Art is nothing less than the rearranging of reality in accordance with the will of the artist. We take things that don’t exist and make them real. Simple as.

This is far from an original observation. Alan Moore’s views on art and magic got me thinking seriously about creative writing for the first time in my life, and

Matt Cardin

is a modern advocate for the ancient tradition of creative work as a kind of spiritual invocation. However—while there’s no shortage of advice on how to approach art as magic, there’s very little guidance (nor should there be) for what that magic ought to produce.

Things clicked into place for me with the idea of modernity as its own enchantment, the magic circle I described in Part 3. From that perspective, the enchantments of every contemporary artist are either done within that central magic circle, or outside of it; strengthening it, or trying to counteract it.

This sounds antagonistic. But it doesn’t need to be. 

There’s certainly dark magic at play. The enchantments of art can be used to justify the domination of the world by specific groups of people. Our mundane term for this is “propaganda”—a weaponized form of modernity’s magic circle. Countering that brand of sorcery is vital work (although it demands a very clear understanding of the stakes².)

Outside of that genuinely frightening phenomenon are the people who recognize the grim excesses of modernity, but still believe in its central promise: that the world is better under human management. They’re also working to strengthen that magic circle. However, they’re doing it to help people, rather than to subjugate them. I’d put utopian creators like

Elle Griffin

in this camp; as I said throughout my exchange with Elle—while I might quibble about some of the externalities that these utopian enchantments tend to obscure, I can’t fault the underlying ethos, and wouldn’t dream of preventing those people from doing their work. (I’ll settle for a friendly rivalry.)

Then there are the people who stand either partly or completely outside modernity’s magic circle, taking the view from the wilderness—or, if you like, phasmatopia.

For those people, the imposition of modernity is just too much, despite its advertised benefits. It costs too much—financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually—to fully inhabit the world that modernity conjures up. These people aren’t always revolutionaries (although some are³). Many of them just need some counter-magic to get a bit of breathing room within the confines of the modern world. And some of the crazier ones are looking ahead to the time when modernity’s magic circle finally flickers out, building enchanted shelters to ease the transition for those who suddenly find themselves living in the real world.

That’s where I want to be.

From this perspective, when approaching the question of “what I’m writing for,” the weight of expectation falls off. 

Thinking of myself strictly as a writer or an author or, most perilous of all, a novelist—those titles are all wedded to a particular form of work, and the outmoded economies that supported it. 

A writer is one who writes; for the past few centuries, published work in the form of a book has been the hallmark of a serious writer. The path to success in that direction is narrow and crumbling. If publishing isn’t worth it—if you’ve got kids to feed and no time for trying to write your own lottery ticket—what does success look like, for an author?

On the other hand—if I’m not “a writer,” but a… what? (Metaphysicist? We’ll go with that for now.) Success looks very different then. The work looks very different. The Good Stuff doesn’t have to be extruded into the shape of a saleable object. It might be a traditional book-length story; then again, instead of something with a beginning and an end, made to fit within a cover, it might also be an ongoing transmedia narrative that creates a liminal space between fiction and nonfiction. That’s where the real magic is anyway.

Will it be profitable? Who the fuck knows! But what is, anymore, really. Might as well try something new and hope for the best, rather than resigning myself to a familiar genre of obscurity.

Best of all: some of this work can be done outdoors, in all kinds of weather, without sitting at a keyboard, staring at a screen, and trying to wring little drops of imagination out of my brain.

It’s not a plan yet—just a direction of travel. If anybody has any ideas, drop me a line. But in the meantime, for now, I think I’m done with fiction⁴.

Hopefully, things will get weird.

1. The spectre of Gal Gadot & Co.'s horrific "Imagine" singalong from the beginning of the pandemic has taken up permanent residence in my mind as a kind of anti-muse. That whole episode (the worst thing to happen to John Lennon since Mark David Chapman) was brought to us by a group of people who earnestly believed in their messianic role as big-letter Artists. Not mere entertainers—not just overpaid human puppets in Hollywood's perpetual Punch & Judy show—but seers, wisdom teachers, demigods reaching down from the heights of their art-school Olympus to lift up the despairing groundlings. Whenever I’m tempted to feel like I'm doing something Really Important, I hum a few bars from "Imagine" and think about being a plumber instead.

2. Ask me again in a few months and maybe I'll feel differently. This week, I'm feeling very cynical about the "Love Conquers Hate" brand of magic(al thinking) that passes for resistance these days. We need something more durable than love. Love is a passive emotion. Intense feeling doesn't stop bullets. If we're going to prevail, we need to feel strong, and love is a great source of strength—but we also need some no-bullshit, reality-shifting Big Magic if we’re going to push back against the forces of evil. Moralistic browbeating is the opposite of enchantment.

3.

Lincoln Michel

has a great analysis of magical realism's complexity as a genre. For me, the defining feature of magical realism only makes sense at the level of enchantment: magical realism is the literary counter-spell of marginalized people trying to push back against modernity. It’s distinct from “fantasy,” which is a genre that respects modernity’s ontological bracketing. Insofar as these designations are useful—fantasy stories are understood to take place in a separate reality from ours, for the purposes of escapism. Magical realism takes a more confrontational approach to modernity by insisting that magic can/should exist in our world, bending the (supposed) rules of our reality to push back against real-world power dynamics. Fantasy uses magic as a stage prop; magical realism, done right, is the performance of actual magic.

4. (Except for finishing “All Green,” the short story that I am definitely not avoiding by procrastinating and writing about other things. Next week, probably.)