About this episode
This is episode one, on reading, writing, metaphysics, literacy, and elitismHaving read so many of your original stories, I wanted to share my thought process for judging, and explain how I think about stories There are of course the bare concerns regarding prose quality, or technical skill in the management of pacing, framing, foreshadowing, and these types of thingsFor a story to be good, all of these things must be good.And for many aspiring writers, they are still struggling with these fundamentals of composition. Indeed, this is a lifelong struggle, because we can always find ways to improve our technical abilitiesThere is no trick to improving at this; you must spend time reading good books, and you must practice copying their structure and flow.But when you are starting out, it is a common pitfall to be too ambitiousDo not begin by trying to write the great novel of your life, or by imitating intricate stories that cleverly break the rules of compositionModern and post-modern stories have violently rejected such things as narrative structure, and so they make poor modelsThe artfulness of a writer like Barthes or Pynchon or Wallace can only exist as an adjunct to the classical forms of storytelling which they subvertBut aspiring writers tend to mistake such colorful detours for the main road, and they end up writing from a place of insincerity because they are trying to capture a certain feeling these writers have given them without understanding the source of that feelingIt is easy to mock technically deficient writing, but in truth, technically competent writing is table stakesthe real game begins only once you are seated at the tableThe real game is played in a metaphysical arena — now this word, metaphysics, this may be a vague word, it’s not always clear what people mean by it, but the definition I will offer you today is a bit different to what you will find on wikipediaIf the plot of the story is the “what” of it — as I have said before, it is not is not just a sequence of events, but a sequence of human events, a sequence of intentions and emotions — Then the metaphysics of the story is the “why” — it is the level of mechanics which governs the physicsTo make it clear, here is an example from the passage prize submissionsMy purpose here is not to insult, so to the author of this story, I thank you for submitting it; it was technically competent, you made it through the gate. And I am not trying to pick on you. I hope you will keep writing.There was a story I read about an arrogant chef who ran a Michelin star restaurant. In the story, the chef does not believe in the possibility of gluten intolerance. One of his guests indicates a gluten allergy, and he lies to her about serving her special food to accommodate her, because he believes that spoiled yuppies make up food allergies for attention.
