I knew a newsletter this weird was always coming.
I’m not sure what hating on a beloved literary writer, celebrating Bret Easton Ellis, and copping to Dean Wesley Smith, all in one month, will do for my ‘author brand’ but the flavour of the month is obviously DGAF.
Enjoy.
The Butcher Boy by Patrick McCabe
I read this for the following reasons:
I picked it up in a thrift shop
A friend of mine is called Patrick McCabe
It was $1
I was away and finished the other book I was reading.
Unfortunately, The Butcher Boy features my least-favourite storytelling technique — a child narrator. That said, McCabe’s book is pretty curious. A literary novel, it’s written in a wild first-person burst and I have to admit, I found passages deeply affecting. I felt bad for the protagonist and his shitty life, and the politics of childhood are acutely rendered. Then after a time, I felt bored, despite the violence and misery.
Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis
My memory is shot. But I can recall the exact month I read this novel for the first time. February 2003. Bryce Moorhead had a copy lying around his Zero Interference studio (his house, at the time) while my band Iron On was recording our debut EP. Almost twenty years later, I found a copy of this book in the same thrift shop mentioned above.
Truthfully, I didn’t love it the second time around. Ellis is a good stylist, but he took a while to come into his own, mainly because he was so young when he started. He was 21 years old when this was published. The magic parts of his later work (the first section of Glamorama, the opening chapter of Lunar Park), that's only hinted at here. While the book is ambitious, it’s also a bit of a mess.
What revisiting Less Than Zero revealed was some of the technique at play, mainly because Ellis is still getting his game down. A keen reader can see the mortar a little more. His surgical style isn’t as weaponised and defensive. Nor is the ever-present ultraviolence as affecting; I suddenly realised he uses the blood and cruelty quite structurally — an affective beat, rather than a story point. In all, it feels exactly like what it is: Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays draped over a satire that doesn’t quite land.
Writing Into The Dark by Dean Wesley Smith
I always outline my novels. It’s a big part of my process. I’m a relatively sane, moderate person — a chill, working father in a long-term relationship — but let me tell you, domination, megalomania, and refusing to indulge in romanticism, that’s the stuff that gets me going when I sit down to write. I don’t know why, but that’s my engine. For eight years now, I’ve been working like this. And recently, things haven’t been going so well.
In April I finished a 75,000-word crime novel and it took years to write — draft after fucking draft — and by the end of it, I was deeply unhappy. It wasn’t just that my obsessive need for control had finally blossomed into (predictable) boredom, but the energy it took to animate the book was gruelling. Something was up. I wrote The Student in four months.
It got so bad that I ended up back in therapy for the first time in 15 years. It was just a check-up — and you should always go to therapy if you can — but I had reservations about what this meant. My therapist plays a huge part in my biography: he’s the guy who got me started on writing. Maybe he was going to tell me to stop?
He didn’t. Fifteen years later, he got a bead on my writing problem in two sessions. The prognosis: Stop trying to be good.
Easier said than done, because — of course — I rushed out and read a book about not being good, as I defined it. I blasted through Writing Into The Dark, and while I learned a lot about how to write without an outline, I also learned to love Dean. He’s a modern-day pulp guy. A guy who writes Star Trek novels and self-publishes whatever he feels like writing. In addition to this, I read his book on drafting a whole novel in ten days. Then the one about writing a novel at a poker tournament. Throughout, he relentlessly pounded away at me with his cocksure Boomer vibes until that raw vitalist energy proved hard to resist. I put this book down with zero doubt that Dean Wesley Smith is having more fun than I am.
And that’s the part I'm going to change.
That’s all.
— IAIN
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