Embracing the Isolation of Social Media

Or, Why writers do not need to meet other writers

In 2013 Marilynne Robinson was the subject of one of the New York Times’s one-page “By the Book” interviews. They asked one of their stock questions: “If you could meet any author, dead or alive, who would it be? What would you want to know?” She answered:

A wonderful writer has given the best of herself or himself in the work. I think many of them are frustrated by the thinness and inadequacy of ordinary spoken language, of ordinary contact even with the people they know best and love best. They turn to writing for this reason. I think many of them are magnanimous in a degree their lives cannot otherwise express. To meet Emily Dickinson or Henry James would be, from their side, to intrude on them, maybe even to make them feel inadequate to expectation. I can’t imagine being a sufficient reason for the disruption. We do have their books. That being said, I would like to meet William James.

As far as I know Robinson is the only author who has answered this way. Everyone else names four or five guests they’d invite to what’s now called their “literary dinner party.” To me, the guest lists sound like recipes for long speeches or awkward silences.

I can image some authors would feel inadequate when faced by their posthumous admirers, but I suspect Robinson was just being polite. Part of what she’s saying here is that the question is wrong because novelists exist, optimally, in their books. Behind that, I think, is another truth: there are reasons for novelists not to be social.

Isolation in the age of social media

Fiction writing has become a gregarious and institutionalized activity. There are almost 20,000 applications each year to the 250 MFA programs in the US, and 15,000 people go to the AWP conference. Kindle Direct Publishing releases over 1,400,000 titles each year. Matt Wilkens, who teaches literature at Notre Dame, estimates 100,000 long-form prose works of fiction are published each year. According to another estimate 50,000 fiction titles are published annually in the US.

The Nonconformist site lists over 100 English-language literary journals, and Wikipedia has a list of about 400 titles. I teach experimental writing in Chicago, and my students and I have assembled a list of over 300 journals that are currently accepting English-language submissions for fiction and poetry: far too many, it seems, for anyone to read. Whatever the totals are, they suggest an enormous field, sustained by uncountable posts, reviews, and paid placements. This is the online energy field where we mainly live. It leads the poet and journalist John Michael Colón to say there’s no “bigger lie” than that every writer writes alone. “Writers not only don’t work alone,” he claims, “they can’t.” He sees a vibrant mobile community of writers talking to writers, with “editors and collaborators” who are “invested in questions of beauty, in histories of forms; in digging up the neglected works that always ought to have been classics… in ruthless mutual critique.” The sheer unmeasurable extent of the contemporary writing and publishing scene enables and foments this kind of gregariousness.

It might seem that in this crush of voices there is no longer room, in imagination or in fact, for a genuinely isolated writer. Yet in this essay I’d like to take Robinson’s side and argue in favor of solitude, both as fact and goal. Not the romantic loneliness of the stereotypical garret, but one that comes from acknowledging the gulf between the actual writing, which as everyone knows is necessarily done on one’s own, and its imagined reception. There is deep isolation hiding in the crowded noises of the internet, and yet, as Robinson says, there are reasons not to meet living authors, and even reasons not to entertain them in your mind.

The professionalization of the online community

Much of the literary world is fixated on success. People give and seek advice, share tips, sum up their problems and solutions. There’s a lot of networking and a fair amount of gossip. People are focused on this season’s most anticipated novel, the highest advance, the latest rumor about longlisting or shortlisting, the book that it seems everyone else has read, the most unexpected ebook breakthrough. It’s also professionalized. The majority of the literary fiction world is focused on novelists who begin in their twenties and thirties, go to MFA programs, write a number of novels, get reviews and maybe write some, tweet about literature, teach or get fellowships, and in general participate in the literary world.

I’m not immune to this. I read writers’ magazines, I go to conferences including the AWP, the MLA, and the SLS (Society for Novel Studies), and I subscribe to the London Review of Books, Bookforum, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Literary Review, The Hudson Review, The Paris Review, White Room, Fiction, Two Lines, Music and Literature, and some others. I try to keep up with the latest fiction. At the same time, I don’t feel I’m part of these conversations. The writers in most of these publications and conferences are nourishing careers or hoping to start them. They are submitting and publishing, gathering followers and readers. The publishers and self-publishers are advertising. The readers are reaching out for community. One of the most common literary posts on social media is the photo of the book someone’s just started, with minimal comment: it’s fishing for connections.

In all this it’s taken for granted that novel writing is a profession or a calling. If you publish a well-received first novel, you’re expected to write another, and ideally to keep coming up with a novel every year or two. This professional habit has produced a lot of poor novels. Even the best novelists are hobbled by the expectation that they continue to produce on a fairly regular schedule. Think of Atwood, Oates, Pynchon, Amis, Self, Proulx, Updike, Rushdie: each has written the kind of book that is clearly a stopgap, a way of assembling a couple hundred pages of marketable prose to keep their career going. It’s inevitable that some books will be major and others won’t quite work. If I compare books written as installments in ongoing careers with those written by writers who thought only of one book, and had no reasonable hopes of a career, the difference is stark. Compare Umberto Eco’s Mysterious Flame of Queen Loanna or Ali Smith’s Companion Piece (to take two examples, nearly at random) to Pessoa’s Book of Disquietude or Musil’s Man Without Qualities, and you can see the difference: Musil and Pessoa were not concerned with filling out 200 pages, making something their agent would like, that might fulfill a contract, work well in translation, or garner an invitation to speak or teach.

It’s a different world when the idea of a career and a steady public is not on the table. How many novelists would have changed direction if it weren’t for the necessity of making a living or living up to the expectations of the profession?

Being honest about fame and ambition

I think it’s important to be as honest about fame as possible. Unless you’re in the top fraction of one percent, in a couple of years your work won’t be read at all, and it almost certainly won’t be read in a decade or two, or after you’ve died.

There’s an art project in Norway called the Future Library, which commissions books that cannot be read for 100 years. The books will be printed a century after the manuscripts are deposited in the library. The artist who runs the project, Kate Paterson, solicited the first manuscripts from well-known authors including Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell. The assumption is that in 100 years people will be curious to see their books. I think history teaches otherwise: in 100 years neither Atwood nor Mitchell will be known to anyone except a few historians. In the future the Future Library might be of interest, but only as an early 21st century art project, and the books in the Future Library will not be any more likely to be read than the other 100,000 novels published each and every year.

The attraction of fame, as Lewis Carroll misquoted it, is the “last infirmity of noble minds.” That’s from the preface to his often forgotten novel Sylvie and Bruno, and Carroll is intentionally misquoting J.M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, who said ambition was the last infirmity. But fame is famously elusive and, like objects in the car’s side mirror, it may appear larger than it actually is.

I’d like to make the case that a serious approach to literature, from a writer’s point of view, depends on trying to think clearly about the fact that almost none of us are or will be famous, that virtually all of us will be forgotten, that social media will not help. Even novels by Booker and Nobel prizewinners are unlikely to be read a couple of decades after their authors have died. If you doubt this, you might consider how many people read the first two decades of Nobel prizewinners, from 1901 to 1921: that’s a bit over a hundred years in the past, which is as far back as the Future Library project imagines its future readers will want to look.

Writing as a way of learning about relationships, memory, and love

It isn’t easy to think about how we’ll all be forgotten, but it has a salutary effect. I can’t agree, for example, with writers who acknowledge that their works will fade from view but say they write for their own pleasure, or for “fun”: it’s only fun if you’re also privately imagining how your work might be read after all. I write novels because serious fiction seems like one of the most challenging things I can think of doing. I want to see what I can do, what I can understand. In the course of writing I have learned a tremendous amount about fiction, about reading, and about myself. I have a better sense of how narrative works, how voice creates meaning, how subtle and complex verb tenses can be. These things improve my writing, I hope, but they also affect how I experience other people, in real life and in books. I am more attentive now to the way a person emerges from the words she speaks, how people think of each other as fictions, how stories change the way we think of people we love, how our deceptive memories shape our lives.

By writing fiction I have discovered some surprising things: for example that describing memories does not necessarily bring them to life. It can be the opposite: in the process of writing fiction I have overwritten some of my own memories. The act of writing has replaced them with something different, and I’ve effectively lost some of my own memories to this project. I’ve also learned why some novelists don’t show their work in progress to the people in their family: it’s not necessarily because they are writing about embarrassing secrets; in my case, at least, it’s because the people I love occupy such a central part of my imagination that if I was to show them what I’m writing, my thoughts about their reaction would crowd out my ability to imagine things on my own. It’s a lesson in how powerful love is.

As Phil Jourdan says in the essay “On Writing Books for Nobody” (Litreactor, March 2017), writing without a thought of publication “is not just a massive act of dissociation.” Rather it’s “a way of reconnecting with disowned aspects of ourselves,” and, I’ll add, of understanding ourselves differently, and possibly better, than we can when we’re distracted by other people’s approval.

How to write for yourself

So here’s one of my morals: write for yourself, to help you understand how narratives work in life. At the same time you don’t need to write alone, and philosophers and literary critics will tell you it’s impossible anyway. There’s always an imaginary other, a “model reader” (to use Umberto Eco’s useful expression) who’s there in the corner of your mind. To write a novel or a poem, they say, you need to have a sense of a reader: your mental picture doesn’t have to be exact or personalized, but no work exists without an imaginary third participant. There’s always you, your work, and the idea of a reader, no matter how abstract. This is why it is never possible to write entirely alone, even though it is possible to write only for yourself.

Yet the model reader is a dangerous creature, because with just the tiniest nod of encouragement it grows into the monster of desire for fame. It’s a matter of keeping the model reader singular and imaginary. (Not multiple, like the panel of the Booker Prize, or professionalized, like an agent.)

When your model reader multiplies or begins to look like that editor who won’t look at your work, anxieties about success leach into the writing, turning it skittish or unstable, giving it a tone that’s not its own, making it untrue to itself. I know this from my own field: when I read the work of other art historians, I learn about Van Gogh or ancient Egypt, but at the same time I hear, in the writing, the historians’ anxiety about how their work will be received in the profession, how it will help their careers, how it will be accepted by famous art historians. The writing is supposed to be about art, but it is really about scholars’ insecurities and hopes. The exact same thing happens in fiction writing: when I read a new novel written by a young or mid-career writer, no matter what story it’s telling, I often hear the author’s concern about their career, about the famous authors or editors they’re writing for, the powerful critics they’re hoping to attract, or the previous novel they’re trying to surpass. The social world of literature is more than a distraction: it is a tidal force that pulls the work out of itself and onto a quaking ground of career insecurity.

My model reader is a person who has read the novelists I admire, and is open to long, complex works, the sort I try to write. I know a few in real life, but what’s more important is that my model reader doesn’t need to be any real person in particular: they’re a potential reader, often present in my imagination while I write. For authors like Joyce, Beckett, and Arno Schmidt, the model reader seems often to have been a conveniently unidentifiable version of themselves.

Writing fiction is an isolating experience. Writing fiction that is long and complex and does not meet market expectations for relevance is exponentially more isolating. “Experimental” literary fiction is produced at a loss for publishers. It seems even the most dedicated “experimental” novelists try to ignore these conditions, ornamenting their lives with social media, working hard on the few options for publicity. All this seems wrong to me.

The model reader helps prevent me from dreaming about amazing editors and agents, vast distribution, back cover endorsements, reviews in the New York Times, excerpts in the Paris Review, prizes, bookstores full of rapt listeners. I am not hoping to read an excerpt of my book onstage at a literary festival. The singular imaginary reader is the only strictly necessary public.

Putting the isolation of the internet into the writing

Mark McGurl says Amazon has become so entangled in publishing that it has changed what literary fiction is. “The influence of Amazon on contemporary literature,” he says, “is more abstract but also more pervasive” than MFA programs. Writers of literary fiction should work with an awareness of their actual social conditions: Substack, Kindle, self-publishing, online reviews, and the hegemony of Amazon should be infused in our work no matter our subject.

This means, in particular, that the peculiar contemporary form of writer’s isolation should also be part of fiction. We aren’t isolated in the ways authors used to be, cut off unless we write letters, alone in our stereotypical garrets. We’re isolated in the way people are now: surrounded every day by hundreds and even thousands of posts and videos advertising successes and praising celebrity. Continuously reading unending streams of reviews, in Bookforum and TikTok, on Goodreads and in Critical Inquiry. Endlessly buffeted by likes, proclamations of connection, and the happiness they provide. Trapped in an anhedonic room, tangled in with what Guy Debord thought of as the spider web of the media spectacle. Isolated in a writing world dense with people. That’s our condition, and we should not try to put it aside when we write. It needs to be present — implicitly, pervasively — in whatever we write.

It is necessary to acknowledge this isolation at the level of the novel itself, and not just on social media. I have spent twenty years of my life writing fiction. My readers are the sum total of the people who wrote endorsements, and about a dozen others whom I know. Meanwhile every day I am exposed to the world of publishers, bloggers, reviewers, bookstore owners, publicists, and agents, who continue to broadcast their many connections. If I do not find a way to express, acknowledge, or embody that isolation in the book itself, no matter what its actual subject might be, I disconnect the fiction from a large part of the feeling that necessarily suffused its making. No “experimental” literary fiction should be written without traces of its author’s isolation. This applies even to Finnegans Wake, whose author was at once the world’s most famous writer and also spectacularly and apparently permanently isolated by his work. Using social media and hoping for publicity and success are not just unrealistic, they occlude the writing’s full expressive potential by dividing the writer into dedicated author and quixotic self-publicist.

That imaginary dinner

So if I could meet any author, dead or alive, who would it be? Stravinsky and Schoenberg lived ten miles from each other in Los Angeles, and never met. And indeed, why should they? After half a lifetime of listening to each other’s music, what would have been worth saying? Faulkner and Hemingway never met, and according to Joseph Urgo, one of the editors of Faulkner and his Contemporaries, they “never seemed even to want to meet.”

If I’ve read an author enough, their work suggests answers to my questions. If I have a simple question an interview or a letter might clear it up. Any deeper or more interesting question will be unanswerable by definition, because fiction is a complete world, and like any person, it makes assumptions, has prejudices, and nourishes blind spots that just won’t be cleared up by talking. You can see your author’s way of thinking, and you know that some questions just won’t register. Why bother to ask Houellebecq what he really thinks of France? Why waste time asking Sally Rooney what she thinks writing is aside from people? The best interviews, like the ones in the Paris Review, are artificial concoctions of many meetings, aimed at helping readers feel they know the author and the way they write. But if the writing’s good, all that is in the books already, and anything else is beside the point.

If I could meet any author, dead or alive, it would be Faltonia Betitia Proba, a woman who lived in Rome in the 4th century. Only one of her poems survives, and it’s a cento, a kind of poem made entirely of quotations from other authors, in this case Virgil. So we do have one thing she wrote, except that we don’t, because she didn’t write a line of her own poem. I’d like to ask her: Do you have anything else to show me?