Writing is masturbation

What is it that we're actually doing here?

Writing is the most masturbatory activity that has come into existence since the invention of masturbation.

‘Masturbatory’ is a common, devastating, and invariably perfectly accurate insult levied at much of creative output. Fiction with obvious self-insert characters, longwinded personal essays, lightly edited transcripts of one’s text roleplay or tabletop RPG adventure, rambling walls of jargon-filled text meant largely to demonstrate the author’s stature rather than communicate clearly—the whole teeming mass of words that were clearly very fun to produce and immeasurably tedious to read.

But here I go a step further. Self-indulgence is not the character of merely unskilled work, but all of it. That is the activity in which we are here engaged—wanking.¹

Your dreams are stupid and you shouldn’t follow them

Having desperately desired to be a Real Published Author since the age of seven, in 2019 I published a book. A real, physical book, distributed by a real small press. Copies of it ended up in the Barnes and Noble bargain bin and everything. Did I make any money off of it? Fuck no. Was it any good? Who gives a shit? It was a real book, made of sentences, and I hadn’t even had to humiliatingly self-publish it on some kind of infinite Amazon goonvortext. My inner seven-year-old self was glowing.

I hated it. I never wanted to publish another book again.

Here’s a piece of advice: when you’re seven years old, you don’t know anything and you’re basically completely stupid, so it is generally a bad idea to do things just because you wanted to do them since you were seven. What does that little shit know? Approximately dick about shit, so maybe consider that your inner seven-year-old would probably be just as happy with some Laffy Taffy and two hours of unrestricted cartoon time.

What I didn’t know when I (an idiot) set out to pursue my dream was that being a writer is basically all about being a social media personality—and, most importantly, jerking off other social media personalities. And I’m not even talking about the ascendant cannibalistic God #BookTok, without whose blessing any attempt to distribution fiction ends with instant annihilation to irrelevance by a heavenly beam of divine wrath. I just mean that I had to get on Writer Twitter.

Dante’s descent into Writer Twitter

If writing is masturbation, Writer Twitter is² an infinite transcendent circlejerk, an exalted tabernacle choir whose shining voices harmoniously raise together in a orgasmic conflagration of self-praise. We had all written some bullshit and we all wanted to make other people read it, and we had zero desire whatsoever to read anyone else’s bullshit.

Of course we didn’t! It was bullshit!

But we would pretend to. By God, yes, we would pretend to! Endless threads of “follow circles” where you could declare your existence to The Community, and The Community would follow you, on the expectation that you would follow The Community back in an endless hora dance of vanity. And having racked up thousands of followers and followees—even the smallest-time, woefully unread hacks could manage this—you could Promote Your Work, hawk your wares, wave your penis around, etc. Nobody would read any of it, of course, but they might pretend to, as long you extended the favor back.³

This is all of course base, low, vile, but really it’s just an extension to the limit of the central case of what writing is like.

The self-reference devours itself

You may have noticed that while I was dragging my own book, I simply couldn’t help myself—I just had to link to it. Maybe, thinks the sweaty, overeager pubescent boy inside my soul, just maybe, someone will click on that link, and look at that book, and read some of those sentences I wrote. Maybe even some of those paragraphs!

It’s something beyond pathetic, because not only was the book not much good, I didn’t even get a decent deal from the publisher out of it. In fact, shortly after the book’s publication, the publisher went out of business. Of course I’ll never know for sure, but I like to think it was my book that killed them.

It gets worse, of course. It’s one thing to bang out a silly story about space wizards for a nominally real publisher, but it can get so much worse. For example, the nearly 200,000 word lesbian fanfiction story I wrote for close to a decade. It had maybe three readers at the most at any given moment, and I lived for those bastards. I would have died and killed for any of them. There I was, disgorging thousands of words of extended emotional processing about my first real ex, and these beautiful saps not only wanted to read about it, they even wrote to me about the experience. The only thing that cured me of the habit was—appropriately—my girlfriend moving in and occupying my free evenings with less self-directed pursuits.

But once a gooner, always a gooner. I still linked you the story. Maybe, just maybe…

Here is another thing that writing is like

Most egg-producing hens live their entire lives in cages just about the size of their bodies. Unable to move, unable to really naturally exist; barely able to see that there are other hens around in adjacent cages.

That’s us! That’s what it’s like to be a human person with a human mind inside of a brain inside of a body. Here you are, imprisoned in your little cage, occasionally able to reach your scrawny neck down to your feeding trough, with the dim awareness of your fellow chickens all around you. You can’t touch them. You will never, ever, ever be able to touch another chicken.

But you can squawk. And the other chickens will be able to hear you. And they might squawk back.

The world beneath the world

The human condition is a real pickle. You’re locked inside yourself like a battery chicken in its cage, no hope of escape. Squawking is really all you have.

This is especially true for fiction. Not everything in the soul is expressible as a Message:

Readers — kids and adults — ask me about the message of one story or another. I want to say to them, “Your question isn’t in the right language.”

As a fiction writer, I don’t speak message. I speak story. Sure, my story means something, but if you want to know what it means, you have to ask the question in terms appropriate to storytelling. Terms such as message are appropriate to expository writing, didactic writing, and sermons — different languages from fiction.

The notion that a story has a message assumes that it can be reduced to a few abstract words, neatly summarized in a school or college examination paper or a brisk critical review.

If that were true, why would writers go to the trouble of making up characters and relationships and plots and scenery and all that? Why not just deliver the message?

That is all to say

I guess I’m starting a blog.

1. Sam Kriss thinks he’s such hot shit, speaking disdainfully about his own writing and his own audience, but I am outstripping him entirely by speaking disdainfully about all writing and all audiences. This is because I am straightforwardly better and cooler than him.

2. Or was—I can only hope the entire production decamped to Bluesky to curl up and finally die

3. And don’t even get me started on my brief and humiliating experience in a Royal Road writing group