April 16th, 2018 - How Did We Come to Know You?
Dear TNY,
It’s another Monday. And I actually popped out of bed this morning looking forward to this week’s story “How Did We Come to Know You?”. What a fucking regrettable use of energy that turned out to be.
As you may have guessed, or read on the landing, I’m obsessive. I don’t obsess about everything, though. I tend to choose things that I don’t understand but I am interested in. I will dig into them, ferret out that understanding, and leave with a skill or deeper knowledge of the gears turning behind the mechanisms of this world. This methodology is not without fault, though. I will become hopelessly stymied if I wander into inexplicable discord. And that's where your magazine and my obsession reach crescendo. You purport to publish the best writing, yet you do not. And no matter how hard I try to understand your selection process (in hopes to maybe better understand literature or myself), I find I am at the wrong end of an uncomfortable and undesirable ass-fucking perpetrated by none other than yourself (not that there is anything wrong with ass-fucking to be sure; note that I said “uncomfortable and undesirable”).
In the noble pursuit of data for that understanding, I have been digging deeper. I would like to submit the following quote by your current fiction editor:
What is important for us is that a story succeed on its own terms. If the writer’s goal is to be linguistically inventive, he or she needs to pull that off and do something fresh; if his or her goal is to have an emotional impact, that must come through in some powerful way. The styles and approaches can be as different as is humanly possible, as long as they’re effective.
Now, back to “How Did We Come to Know You?” Let’s consider the phrase “writer’s goal” for a moment. There are as many philosophies on authorial intention as there are writers. I run FTNY, so we'll talk about mine. I believe that the story should tell itself. That the only intention the writer should ever bring to any written work is to wholly remove themselves from it and bolster the world the story wants to create. Further reading in this endeavor should be directed to the works of experts, two of which are “The Half-Known World” by Robert Boswell or “The Art of Fiction” by John Gardner. You see, TNY, a writer with an intention is a dangerous thing. No matter the expertise of the writer, the intention either directly or indirectly adjusts the course of the story away from itself. This intention disallows for the white-hot heat of witnessing (and documenting) creation. Instead, intention requires supreme engineering skills. Can a writer develop the engineering skills necessary to create universally empathizing fiction? Maybe, but it's highly doubtful that it could be done consistently without leveraging sentimentality. What I’m saying, TNY, is the basis for your selection process is flawed because it requires intention other than the paramount intention: The writer is allowed to have the intention of letting the story tell itself. I did notice this was missing from your examples which is very depressing considering it’s the only one that matters.
Back to the question posed by your little literary rag: Does this story succeed on it’s own terms? Yes. If those terms are mediocrity, forgettability, mass, and having all the sentimental ingredients to charge the reader with empathy but ultimately failing to do so. Oh, it also succeeded in being so fucking bland that this critic isn’t even going to bother with why it's a failure.
As expected, you let me down this week. This is hurtful considering how well you did last week. And just so that you and I are clear, a streak of one week isn’t “The Best Writing Anywhere. Everywhere.”
Here’s to someone in your cliquish inner circle breaking up your self-congratulatory and pretentious mirror-preening,
Nick
