September 23rd, 2019 - Wide Spot

Dear TNY,

Ugh.  “Wide Spot”.

Like, what the fuck is the point of this story?  How many weeks in a row can you offer up a literary crime?  This is the most mundane, unoriginal, uninteresting, fucking bullshit.  No one is likeable.  More importantly, no one is real.  The only character that has any substance is the vulture.  There’s no arc.  No opportunity for transformation of any of the characters.  It sounds like a fucking writing exercise where a group of fledgling writers were given a time limit and the constraints of said time limit prevented the story from actually turning into…well, a story.  So it’s a scene.  Really fucking grand, TNY.  Refer to “Hills Like White Elephants” if you are looking for a single, brief scene that can round the bend and become a story.  Or “Why Don’t You Dance?” 

Guys, I hate you so much.  I do this fucking bullshit every week.  You break my heart every goddamn week. For the last year I got out of school at 1700 on every Monday, drove to the bar, and noodled through your destruction of literature while developing a friendship with the local bartender.  She’s a fucking wonder, by the way.  Spectacular. Real.  More real than any of the characters I’ve seen from you recently. By leagues.

And the rest of the week I would go to this school that teaches traditional wooden boatbuilding.  So imagine that.  Eight hours a day building boats the same way they did 100 years ago.  Not because anyone wants these boats.  Not because it’s a marketable skill.  No no.  It’s eight hours a day trying to master the skill of sweet lines and invisible joinery for the pursuit of the goal itself.  Eight hours a day with people that care enough about something that has been done exceptionally for millennia, a vocation that was fucking necessary for human progress, that they quit their fucking lives for a year and spent that time trying to get a handle on skills that take a lifetime to perfect.  Imagine people that respect the beauty of wood, the craftsmen and women before them, and the human effort that it takes to make a pile of lumber into a fucking vehicle that will carry other humans and goods over the surface of this planet’s largest areas; a vehicle that looks stunning at the same time.  Imagine pouring all of your effort into a gap no bigger than 1/128th of an inch because you know you can make it go away. 

You, TNY, have no fucking idea what craft is. Your gap is as wide as an ocean.  You represent the end of a beautiful thing.  You are the tip of the spear of the end of literature.  You are the fucking antichrist.

Fuck man, maybe it’s me.  Maybe I care too much about things that were done well way back when.  I certainly can’t stand the way the world is going now.  No one seems to care about a thing done well.  To do a thing well because it means something to oneself.  I assume the vast majority of your readers completely disagree with my perception of what you are doing to literature.  Maybe I’m the antiquated outlier.  Maybe summary is true storytelling and I’m just another old tool rusting away as the world moves past me.

But fuck ‘em.  As a former POTUS once stated, we don’t choose to go to the moon because it’s easy.  We choose these things because they are hard. That last 1/128th of an inch is the most important one.  Writing a perfect story is nearly fucking impossible. This trash you are force-feeding humanity…that ain’t hard, toots. So go, you dumb motherfuckers.  Cater to the reality TV fans.  Continue to fawn over your self-importance.  Alter the whole fucking course of an artform for financial gain at the expense of humanity’s empathy. 

I won’t bend.  We, the few, will be back here.  Taking the beach.  Going to the moon.  Tearing our fucking hearts out and smearing them on the page.  Closing that 1/128” gap.  No matter what you do, you can’t own us.  We live in the heady realm of freedom known to those few who have nothing left to lose.

We’ll be here when you wise up. We’ll be the ones leaning into it. Grinding ourselves into glorious dust. Shimmering with the effort of it. Doing what you can’t. Doing what’s hard.

Nick