The Writer is a myth

Reject modernity! Embrace fish brain tradition!

Hello, Substack! Apologies for the delay. This essay has taken me too long to write. I mentioned in my last post that I’d be traveling to Morocco for two weeks starting in late June, so I did that, but now I’m back in San Francisco, where I’ve been for two weeks, dawdling dawdling dawdling.

I blame two things: 1) Jet lag, which if I’m being honest I didn’t really get in the traditional sense of being awake at the wrong times, but more in the vibes sense of I don’t want to do work now, and 2) the fact that this is an essay about communication—about how the writer’s only job is to articulate complex ideas with imprecise language as well as they possibly can, how writers often get caught up worrying about the finished product and the implications for themselves as the creator of that finished product, and how this trap saps them of their energy to actually create something and instead leaves them pursuing aesthetics alone.

And if it wasn’t obvious already what I’m about to say, the problem with writing an essay about what a writer should and shouldn’t be worried about is that now I’ve “Don’t think about elephants” incepted myself and I’ve fallen right into the trap I’m trying to rage against. Oh, to have a blog is to toil! Now I’m stumped and too far into the weeds and you know it’s really just a lot easier to play Tears of the Kingdom. But alas I persist, a little to deconstruct the myth of the capital-w-Writer, but mostly so I can practice ideal writer behavior, which is just to say what I’m trying to say and then move on.

The Writer as Myth

Before traveling to Tangier I’d begun to hear a lot about William S. Burroughs and the Beats, the American writers in the 1950s who, more or less, hung out in the city, called it seedy, wrote bestsellers, and (ostensibly) made it famous. Several friends and colleagues mentioned them in the few weeks before we left, and then Johny and I watched the Parts Unknown episode on Tangier, where Anthony Bourdain, for all his genuine curiosity, drove most conversations with local interviewees back toward this sexy but short-lived slice of Tangier’s history. It turns out there is little tribute to the Beats in Tangier today. Go there and you’ll learn that because of its seat on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa, it is a city of perpetual strategic and cultural importance—and by Tangier’s own count of its greatest historical hits, Naked Lunch does not seem to make the cut.

So the legacy presented in the Parts Unknown episode is not the reality. Of course, Burroughs did indeed write in Tangier, and I’m sure his stay was as kooky crazy swirly whirly as his writing style, but the story Bourdain had cherry-picked from all of Tangier’s long and juicy history wasn’t really about Beats at all, but about the kind of person who—given the right exotic setting, the right brilliant mind, the right degree of brokenness—maybe could write like them. How fitting for a food show: Here was a recipe for the myth of the Writer.

The Writer myth goes like this: The Writer is born different, born special, touched with an obsession with the magic of words and a prodigious talent for articulation. He¹ sees more pain and more beauty in the world than everyone else, because he is too more wounded and more brilliant than everyone else. It’s a curse, really, but he has a divine responsibility to translate the mysteries of the universe to the people in some form of narrative—and if they don’t understand it, it’s actually no fault of the Writer but only of the people’s inability to parse his genius. He hates himself, he’s obsessed with himself, he’s the only one who gets himself. Try as they might, all the corporate drones and happy normies gumming up the world will just never understand; they are regular, he is an artist.

When we put it like this, it’s obvious that the persona is contrived and unrealistic, but if you see it enough you can start to believe in it, and the Writer is hard to avoid. The Writer as myth is the Riverdale writers giving Cole Sprouse-as-noir-writer-Jughead the “I’m a weirdo” monologue. It’s Sam Levinson writing his own defense into Lexi’s playwright arc in Euphoria season two (and tbh his whole persona for real). It’s every movie about a middle-aged recently-divorced man finding himself by finishing his novel. It’s the introduction to Asteroid City, a black-and-white shot of Edward Norton, hunched in front of a typewriter, chain-smoking, chain-drinking, chain-bathrobe-wearing, furiously hammering out the titular play. The Writer also appears, like a creation myth, in writing courses, in journalism school, in MFA programs, in well-meaning advice from pretentious intellectuals. To write is to suffer! they’ll say, failing to mention that to work literally any job is to suffer, to be alive is to suffer, and that the moments of suffering are both offset by moments of joy and also far outnumbered by moments (read: long stretches) of mundanity, and that you will in all likelihood live a pretty normal life whether you like to write or not.

Unsurprisingly, all the characters I mentioned above do all the actual work off camera. Anyone cozy with the process of writing knows that in reality most of it is very tedious, generally uncool to behold, and something you’re usually sick of by the end of a project (and not in a torrid love affair way but in, like, a Sunday NYT crossword way). Because the mythology says that for Writers the need to write is as intrinsic as the need to breathe, once you stumble upon something or someone that tells you that your engagement in very common behaviors—writing things down, making up stories, and trying to make sense of the world around you—is actually a symptom of a very rare and special birth defect of sorts, it’s easy to believe you’re a Writer in every sense and you’ve been one all along. And so if you believe that to write is to suffer, you may begin to create suffering so you can write properly. If you believe that to be a Writer is to hate yourself, you may tell yourself you hate yourself and slowly begin to do so for real. Shockingly, very rarely do depression and shame create conditions conducive to getting any writing done, so it begs the question, why do people still buy into the myth? I think the answer falls into two general categories: The sociological, and the personal.

Sociologically, people want the glory, the special attention and privileges that come with being considered a Great Writer. This desire of course is not limited to writers. It comes up in all artistic disciplines (see this work if you’re dying for theory) and even in fields (arbitrarily) not considered “creative,” like science, tech, teaching, etc. Many people want desperately to cross fame’s inflection point, the threshold past which all output from an individual is regarded as genius despite the quality of any particular piece of content, probably because “making your mark on the world” is supposedly super similar to immortality, and frankly no one wants to die! But the thing about writing as a discipline is that, rather than visual art or music or what have you, it deals directly in narrative. This presents the perfect opportunity for writers to self-mythologize, to categorize writers as a different breed, and to best position all people of such a breed, themselves included, at that magic point past which they’ll only have to do the bare minimum in terms of actual craft and still be applauded.

And what I find the most heart wrenching is that so many writers, nowhere close to clearing fame’s inflection point (which is fine, by the way! I suspect being idolized does not feel as good as we think it would), remain devoted to the identity anyway, and here we have the personal answer to our earlier question. To be a Writer (or more specifically, to be seen as one) is shorthand for being deep, erudite, important—special. It’s basically no different from that one paragraph in that one Rayne Fisher-Quann essay, the one about Types of Girls and the consumable aesthetics of illness, all of which have little to do with actual qualities of actual girls and much more to do with what the girls want to signal about their identities. And so writers do it with being Writers, and it remains, almost entirely, an aesthetic pursuit.

Out of curiosity while writing this piece, I also googled the word “writer” to see the internet’s skim of writer-chatter: I got straightforward definitions; related, panicky questions (“What qualifies you as a writer?” “Am I a good writer?” “How much does a good writer make?”); news on the current writers’ strike (if that answers the question about how much a good writer makes). But what really caught my eye was the first related image: A stock photo framed almost exactly like the shot in Asteroid City, of a guy sitting in front of a typewriter in a Newsies-pilled getup, marveling at his own words, which are literally flying off the page.² 

………lol

In its defense, the Writer depiction in Asteroid City is self-aware and campy. Many modern writer-as-myth characters are. But just because the Writer myth calls itself out does not mean it is not seductive anyway, and like I said, I am not immune. In Tangier, I sat in the Gran Café de Paris, a very colonial-looking place widely associated with the Beats era, and I felt for the first time in a long time the urge to get romantic about writing. For an American on her first evening in Tangier (even in 2023, with all its globalization and internet), the Gran Café de Paris is a place very stimulating to the imagination. It made me want to light up a cigarette, wear a linen button down with the sleeves rolled up, romance a beautiful woman, order a whiskey neat, bust out a rusty typewriter, and pour consciousness onto the metaphorical page.

Notably, it did not make me want to pull out my stupid Macbook and do any of the very sober labor involved with crafting an honest and digestible text.

The Writer as Fish

So why even write? If not for glory, why even try to put esoteric experience into words for people, the majority of whom, if you’re commercially successful, you’ll likely never meet? Well, we can find reason not in the mythology or in the reality of writers, but in a secret, more ancient third thing: The behavior of deep-sea fish.

In the deepest parts of the ocean, where no sunlight could ever reach, there are fish who communicate with little flashes of light, to tell each other, “There is food over here!” “This is my territory!” “Hello, I’m over here!” Deprived of most sensation, light is their only vehicle for meaning. All communication, all language, all art are only more complex versions of this, and it’s the one true value of writing. Unlike the Writer myth, who writes because he is misunderstood, the writer fish writes because it seeks to understand and to be understood.³

If we articulate ourselves clearly enough for a reader to absorb some semblance of what we set out to express, we have written well. If we kept them engaged until the end, what a marvel. To communicate even something close to what you’re trying to say is both a full miracle and the basis for survival itself.

When I was younger and believed in the myth of the Writer, I wrote like I thought a Writer would write. I chose topics generally considered deep and serious and described them with words that sounded lyrically pleasant. On the merits of these crutches—because learning to write beautifully does still require some practice—I wrote for local newspapers and got into journalism school, and only much later did I realize the quality had plateaued. It was like I had learned to shoot a bow and arrow and make a very elegant arc in the air but had never considered that I might want to aim for a target. Writing is not purer than other artistic disciplines because it’s more bare bones-ed, as the myth would have you believe; it’s just more common and therefore more likely to hit. Everyone uses language. Everyone speaks. Everyone writes, and precision is the only true metric to evaluate the attempt.

Of course, precision is a slippery thing to imbue into writing. To do so it first requires a mental clarity on what you are trying to say, which requires an honest evaluation of the whole situation. And I don’t mean to say that the only good writing is plainly written essays. You may assess the sum of something’s message, context, texture, and so on, and decide that a haiku, or a series of spare vignettes, or a novella with no punctuation is the most precise way to transfer your idea to your reader. Or perhaps you change your mind and decide that it’s best expressed in a song, or a painting, or a thoughtful gift, or a primal scream, or a conversation with your friends. There are lots of avenues to connection, and labeling yourself as a Type of Artist only limits your likelihood to see and be seen.

So writers are not special! It’s embedded deep in our fish brains to pursue clarity in obscurity, harmony in conflict, objective meaning in total chaos. It will always be an asymptotic approach, and the mental grit required to keep trying anyway sprouts not from a numbness to futility but from a deep sense of optimism. I suppose it’s possible that for some people the Writer myth inspires action, but if you take it too seriously you run the risk of romanticizing your brokenness and ending up too fragile for craft, and you’ll miss the point entirely.

1. I’m using “he” because the Writer is a man basically always (even when he’s presented as a woman, NB, etc.), in the most gendered way possible.

2. All those results actually appear below the link to Writer.com, a language model AI. It’s not even a sponsored result, it’s actually just the most popular result when one googles “writer.”

3. Yes, it seeks to be understood. Fuck gender, we’re all fish!