Boorstin: The 'pseudo-event'

“Great unforeseen changes—the great forward strides of American civilization—have blurred the edges of reality. The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, and more persuasive than reality itself.

We cannot say that we are being fooled. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that we are being ‘informed.’ This world of ambiguity is created by those who believe they are instructing us, by our best public servants, and with our own collaboration. Our problem is the harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs. It is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events—in all kinds of packages, in black-and-white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms—is the work of the whole machinery of our society. It is the daily product of men of good will. The media must be fed! The public must be informed! . . .“

— Daniel Boorstin, The Image, 1961. Quoted by Susan Bordo in BordoLines, 2024.

If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write on Medium.

Writing complex topics that feel accessible — and other writing tips

On the "single stark element" that's with you all along in your narrative, something that "underpins the whole thing," Charlie Jane Anders says today:

"I have a feeling my stuff errs on the side of 'deceptively complicated.' I write things that have a million things whizzing around, but they boil down to one or two simple ideas. Or at least, I hope that there’s one or two main ideas when you look past all the fancy whizzbangery on the surface, or else you are left with just a mickle of a muddle. Right?

* * *

But if something is deceptively complex, how do you keep it from becoming just straight-up overcomplicated and messy? I wish there was a magic bullet – but I think part of it is that if you want to be able to strip away all the layers of complexity and find something stark underneath it all – a single stark element – then that needs to be there the whole time. You have to have one idea that you keep coming back that underpins the whole thing."
— Charlie Jane Anders, "The Difference Between Deceptively Simple and Deceptively Complex," Buttondown, January 10, 2024

Her book on writing:

What is it useful for me — or for us — to say?

You have a standpoint. You're positioned. Think about your standpoint and do the most useful thing for you, based on who you are. Sometimes that's individual. Sometimes it's collective.

But what makes it serious?

Be your theme simple, complex, or somewhere in the middle like "deceptively complex," what makes it serious?

Sometimes you have to write it to find out and let the reader decide.

An affirmation: My essay theme "may seem silly" and "probably is silly, which is a shame, considering that I’ve got this whole essay about it now." ("This is What Makes Us Girls: On the Lana-Del-Rey-to-Red-Scare Pipeline." Jude Doyle (on Ghost). 11 Jan 2024.)

Do journalism

Library research may not be enough. You may have to pick up the phone.

Ask lots of questions

Ask questions, e.g.,:

• "What words would you use to describe the most important values held by people in your culture?"
• "Who taught you those values? Why are they important to you?"

And so on.

Those two questions, and a few more, are from "50 Possible Questions to Open Israeli-Palestinian Dialogues," Kenneth Cloke, Mediate.com, January 26, 2024

Ask one big question

"The personal essay can be about almost anything," Aimee Liu writes, but is "rooted in a central question." The writer writes themself into the frame as the person who is raising the question, a recognition that is central to what makes it a personal essay. It doesn't matter so much if the question is answered. The personal essay "doesn’t necessarily seek to make sense out of life experiences; rather, these essays tend to let go of that sense-making impulse to do something else, like nose around a bit in the wondering, uncertain space that lies between experience and the need to explain or organize it in a logical manner."

This is from "Picture Your Structure" in her Legacy & Lore (Substack, February 16, 2024):

"Like a memorist, an essayist always writes two essays simultaneously, overlapped as transparencies, one exploring what Vivian Gornick calls the situation, the other what she terms the story. Poet Richard Hugo talks about a piece’s 'triggering subject' and its generated, or real, subject. Phillip Lopate describes the 'double perspective' that an essayist needs, the ability to both dramatize and to reflect. I’ve always talked to my writing students about the narrow subject and the larger subject."

Know the answer to 'did they or didn't they'?

"Fitzgerald had to know whether Gatsby died in that pool in the end. If he wasn’t sure, he wasn’t sure which story he was telling..." — George Saunders, "De Maupassant, Part Three," Story Club, April 4, 2024

'Yes' and 'no' can contain multitudes of possibilities

These little words are clear-cut on the surface, but depending on context, they can mean different things.

Based on Jackie Duden, "The Word No Shapes Us," May 9, 2024: A no can be a form of protection (e.g., when you tell someone to stop for your good or for theirs), a statement of values (e.g., when you say what you won't permit and try to teach it to others), a longing (e.g., when you tell yourself you can't have something), or an expression of hope (because it's not for now, but it might be for later).

There's no one model to explain all of human psychology

Paul Tournier explained in The Violence Within that there are “schools of scientific psychology” that “set up a doctrinaire model into which they attempt to fit the whole of human behaviour in terms of a few relatively simple mechanisms — projection and introjection, identification and differentiation, unconscious repression and liberation of complexes, drives and resistances…” While these may contain insights that are “true and valuable,” Tournier says that when we give too much weight to them (exactly “in the very fact of their being elevated into systems”) we risk “the infinite diversity of life and of the mind,” and we may forget that “the essential problems are not about mechanisms, but about values, not about functions but about the person, problems which cannot ever be reduced to an inventory of functions. Literary psychology cannot be learnt—it is too rich, too varied, too subtle, because it never allows itself to be reduced to any sort of model. It may be looked at as one might contemplate a big bunch of wild flowers…the bouquet as a whole does not deliver up the secret of its harmonious unity.”
Paul Tournier. The Violence Within. Translated by Edwin Hudson, 1978. New York: Harper & Row, 1982, (originally Violence et Puissance, 1977) pp. 64–65.

Get specific

"Show, don't tell"? Maybe, but don't oversate it. After all, George Saunders says, "something told specifically enough...becomes showing." The show-don't-tell distinction breaks down. It's really about specific-not-vague. Being "specific" doesn't mean the writer judges or states. Instead, the writer suggests but gives so many details that the reader can complete the idea in their own mind. Such "showing" makes us feel "as if we’re learning/seeing/experiencing something. Something new appears in the textual reality. And there’s a quality of openness, of unfolding discovery - a non-static quality. We 'buy into' that little morsel of fictive reality."

(See: George Saunders, Show? Tell?, Office Hours, August 8, 2024)

Be willing to use a controversial word

While sometimes your goal is to tone down a controversy and build bridges, sometimes you want to truth-tell and provoke thought with your vocabulary choice.

Facilitate good conversations

"Before starting an activity, ask yourself what's most essential. This insight helps you know what can be cut if needed or expanded upon. Engaging participants in reflective debriefs can open new avenues for conversation and deepen the learning experience. For example, asking participants what they felt during an activity, what they noticed, and how it relates to their work can turn a simple exercise into a profound discussion."
Douglas Ferguson, President of Voltage Control, LinkedIn, August 2024

Technology exists to solve a problem

"...if you took a 1988 Toyota Hylux and dropped it into another historical period – the Peloponnesian War, the Islamic Golden Age, the Mongol Empire, the Aztec Empire – it wouldn’t really change much. Sure, they probably wouldn’t be able to turn on the damned thing and you’d be limited to one tank of gas, but if you gave a demonstration of its capabilities, I still don’t think that many of the recipients of that demonstration would be interested in taking it. Even if you explained all of the steps needed to make the required materials, the one technological artifact that you’re discussing implies a whole world and I don’t think that these inhabitants of other cognitive and social worlds would be interesting in moving wholesale into the one that you’re demonstrating.

That’s because technology exists to solve a problem, so – similar to how you write a character in a work of fiction – the question becomes one of want and need. What problem do you want and need to solve?"

— Cameron Summers, What is Technology? (Contraslop, Part 1), Broken Hands, June 19, 2024

Summers adds that a technology may be "brought in to do one thing, and then it achieves something else as a side effect because it can extend its function in an interesting and novel way."

People have feelings about what they do

"I can’t think of a way for a character — fictional or otherwise — to pull off a convincing redemption story without experiencing and expressing true remorse ... feeling remorse is a valuable and cathartic experience that empowers change. Whether personal responsibility is an illusion or not, feeling responsible and taking action to change our behavior, is a powerful thing."
— Steven Toews, How to Write a Convincing Redemption Story, The Writing Cooperative, Feb 8, 2024

More fiction tips

'The 10 Best Writing Tips I’ve Ever Heard: A Weird Circular Guest Post by Alex Kingsley.' August 2, 2024

People can reflect on their arguments

To reduce fights, reflect on:

1. "Why the conflict happened"
2. "How the conflict should have been handled"
3. "How conflicts should generally be dealt with"
4. "How people should generally respond to conflicts in their relationship"
5. "Why this kind of response makes sense"
6. "What would be most helpful for dealing with future conflicts"

"6 simple questions that reduce relationship fights — from a psychologist." Mark Travers. Forbes. April 18, 2024.

People can be open to possible worlds that do not exactly mirror their current lives

"...white people want their sci-fi and fantasy media to remain just as exclusionary as their real lives...the vast majority of white Americans live, socialize, matriculate, shop, and worship segregated among themselves."

— Rod T. Faulkner, The Basic Reason White People Hate Black Representation In Onscreen Sci-Fi And Fantasy, Medium, March 3, 2024

The importance of representation

Even when "the term 'trans' didn't yet exist; in the best cases, they used 'transsexuals,'..." (Portero, p. 51), one may have been thinking in a trans way:

"I had already internalized trans fatalism and convinced myself that a life of loneliness awaited me. I was sure that I'd be trapped in a closet for a long time, pursuing relations with men and with women to reinforce my lie and end up alone, tormented by what could never be. The very few stories of women like me that I had seen and read always ended that same way. Even the all-powerful emcee in Cabaret spends the entire movie without a name and winds up in front of an audience filled with Nazis as a drumroll accompanies a firing squad."

— Alana S. Portero, Bad Habit, originally published as La mala costumbre, 2023, translated from the Spanish by Mara Faye Lethem, 2024. HarperVia, 2024. p. 81.

Also: "Everything that had to do with my identity, when I was rehearsing possibilities of explaining it, sounded like a confession, of a crime or some unforgivable sin. Having grown up with the language of guilt disseminated from every corner as the only way to refer to trans lives was disheartening." (Portero, p. 100)

If you have representation in literature, not only do you have basic terms to describe what you are (e.g., trans), but you can loosen assumptions of eternal loneliness and original sin tied to simply being who you are.

People can imagine a version of themselves with different opinions and reactions

"Sometimes you’re in the middle of an experience. You don’t really understand this experience, it’s intense, it’s really overwhelming. One option is to write about it autobiographically, or in autobiographical fiction. There’s a character like you, they’re having the same experiences, you can alter the narrative, and that’s one way to work through it. I think, had my life gone a little bit differently, that’s what I would be doing. ... Then the restraint, the constraint, is not to impose my own experience on the thing I’m writing about. That’s, I think, the sort of different challenge: 'I think this is a crisis. I’m writing about someone for whom it wasn’t a crisis. Is there a way in which my experience is not a crisis, actually?' Does this cause me to reflect and better understand what I’m going through? Was my initial instinct not the full story?"

— The Problem of Other Minds: Maggie Doherty, interviewed by Merve Emre. Episode Nine of “The Critic and Her Publics”. New York Review of Books. June 11, 2024

What cost does someone refuse to pay?

"For many of us, we can't pay the cost of defunding the police or any other act aligned with justice, as soon as there is any cost at all for doing so. We'd rather pay the much higher cost of funding the police, and treating the many symptoms of supremacy as "the way things are," meaning "the way things have to be."
And the question for me then is: what is that cost we can't pay?
I think it's our share of supremacy — whatever that share might be for each of us."
— A.R. Moxon, interviewed by Parker Molloy (Patreon), May 30, 2024

The character is trans

5 Questions For Writers To Explore Being Transgender: A former editor for best-selling and award-winning authors offers five storytelling hacks to help you explore being trans. Stephenie Magister, Prism & Pen, Apr 20, 2024.

Be the friend

"The pathway to what Paul Linebarger called 'psychological disarmament' begins when we find that friend — or when we are that friend. We have to work together to find the guy who is messing around with the gas lamps, and get the receipts to prove it. Unfortunately the problem that confronts the United States now is that the gaslighter is not just one guy. We are in an era of stochastic, decentralized gaslighting — and the traumas we suffer from psychological attacks began generations before we were born. Even if we as individuals get really good therapy, we cannot recover fully until our communities are also given the tools to recover. That's because the secret of psychological warfare is that it is not purely about vibes. It's about politics. And the only solution to political trauma is political transformation."

— Annalee Newitz, Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind. W. W. Norton, 2024. Chapter 6: Dirty Comics.

What would the world look like after the oppressors were gone?

Annalee Newitz talks about 19th-century colonization in North America and "indigenous tribes pushing back with a movement that gets called the Ghost Dance. This is a spiritual and a political movement. It's an anti-colonial movement. It takes the form of tribes coming together, and dancing and singing. The Ghost Dance itself is about describing the world as it would be without the white settlers. And it becomes this really powerful way of pushing back against the war — but more importantly, against these psyops of stealing kids and trying to teach them to reject their indigenous history. And the psyops of trying to manipulate tribes by writing down all of their traditions and using this against them. This is a way that many, many Western tribes reasserted the importance of their histories and were able to have these peaceful gatherings, where they articulated what the world would look like once these horrible white settlers were gone. In a way, it's science fiction. It was speculative worldbuilding."
—

"There's No Way You Can Talk Back to a Gun": On Psychological Warfare. Annalee Newitz, interviewed by Charlie Jane Anders. Happy Dancing. May 28, 2024.

What possibilities would be open to people in a better world?

Looking outward is also looking inward (emphases mine):

"In the evenings, after getting home from the mountain, I switched from writing non-fiction to fiction. I was tired of mining my personal history, I told K. I wanted to look outwards rather than inwards for a while. I read Kelly Link, Abbey Mei Otis, Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado. In their stories, the line between internal and external world became blurred, porous enough that a character’s desires or fears might shape the world—but never in the ways one might expect. Puppets came to life and manipulated their owners, children had to sacrifice parents to protect their homes, a handbag or a tent might offer a doorway to another world. Much like in Everett’s thesis, person and environment became intimately and confusingly entangled. Looking outwards could, in other words, also be a way of looking inwards."
— Many Worlds and the Queer Imaginary: Imagine three possible futures for yourself. Let your future selves be bold..., Emet North, Reactor, May 8, 2024

North leaves us with a question (emphasis mine):

"One final piece of the thought experiment, this one particularly for my queer and trans community. Imagine an alternate version of yourself, one that has received all the acceptance and support the world so often denies us. An alternate self whose parents greeted their queerness or transness with joy rather than anger or fear or disgust. A self that didn’t have to hide, who never held the doors to the closet shut for simple self-preservation. A self whose government hasn’t tried to take away their rights, their access to care. Who hasn’t had their body politicized and made a talking point for self-righteous politicians. Here’s what I want to know now: How would that version of you move through the world? What possibilities are open to them?"

To awaken others to your moral vision: 'Control the context', 'refuse the monotone', 'fall in love', 'manifest spectacular goodwill'

Matthew Frye Castillo writes in Prism & Pen:

"I think of Audre Lorde describing the responsibilities of ethical people, whom she called warrior poets:

“That is the work of the poet within each one of us: to envision what has not yet been and to work with every fiber of who we are to make the reality pursuit of those visions irresistible.”

Gran Fury and ACT UP made 'those visions irresistible' by controlling the context, refusing the monotone, and falling in love."

Or:

[P] Reading an old Vulture interview with Dropout TV CEO Sam Reich, and I felt this quote all the way down through the bottom of my shoes. It angers me how rare this sort of philosophy is.

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— Paul and Storm (@paulandstorm.bsky.social) Aug 26, 2024 at 1:43 PM

What can you do to awaken and "manifest" the reader's "spectacular goodwill"?

What's 'universal' is reaching out to people who already want to get it and giving them permission to similarly lean into who they are

Grace Loh Prasad points out the common assumptions that "true literary craft should be divorced from questions of identity and marginalization" and that "art has authority when it is recognized by the widest possible audience without the need to explain itself." She says: "I started to recognize a persistent, troubling flaw in my writing: I was over-explaining myself" and that this was "a way of trying to justify my presence instead of exhibiting confidence in my authority and expertise....Seen another way, it’s my way of spoon-feeding a lazy reader who I am assuming is different from me, rather than rewarding a curious reader and trusting them to fill in the gaps or look up anything they don’t automatically know." In doing so, "I had unconsciously internalized the indifferent reader — the person who could not be bothered to make any effort to know me better." So, "rather than thinking of them as hurdles for the unfamiliar reader, unexplained or untranslated concepts can be seen as a gift to the people who understand them–to your best and most ardent audience." You can "focus on the people who need your story, who have been longing to see themselves reflected in books, who have waited their whole lives for someone to articulate something that approaches their experience." So: "Invest your energy in reaching the people who are already on your side, who are rooting for you and want you to succeed," and "give permission to others to do the same–and this, in the end, is what will make your story universal." ("It’s OK If Your Writing Isn’t for Everyone," May 21, 2024)

Does the group have a mind?

"The group, like the person, was assumed to be sentient, to have a form of mental activity that guides action. Rousseau (1767) and Hegel (1807) were the early architects of this form of analysis... [Many social theorists after them] were willing to assume that the group has a mental life that plays a part in the patterning of group behavior."
Wegner, D.M. (1987). Transactive Memory: A Contemporary Analysis of the Group Mind. In: Mullen, B., Goethals, G.R. (eds) Theories of Group Behavior. Springer Series in Social Psychology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4612-4634-3_9

Pick a compelling title

Michael Gallant gives some tips in How to Write a Book Title That Gets Attention, BookBaby, January 11, 2024:

• "Be clear and concise."
• "Use strong, evocative language."
• "Be original and unique."
• "Make sure your title is relevant to your book’s content."

Present well

8 Tips for Practicing Scripted Scholarly Presentations by Erin K. Maher, PhD

Use paper?

"Paper Regimes of the Publishing World: A Bird’s Eye View on the Materiality of Global Book History" is published in open access in the journal Globalgeschichte / Global History, vol. 3.2 (2025), pp. 1-28, DOI doi.org/10.13173/GG.... Here is a link: www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/ddo/artikel/... 3/3

[image or embed]

— Daniel Bellingradt (@dbellingradt.bsky.social) December 18, 2025 at 1:49 AM

Brian Evenson: 'Denarration....you're told something and then it's removed'

The Horror Is What We Don’t Yet Know (and Maybe Never Will): Brian Evenson Interviewed by Rob Goyanes, BOMB Magazine, Jun 25, 2019

One of his books is "Last Days, about an amputee cult who captures an unwitting messiah."

From the interview:

RG
You use repetition, in terms of wording and syntax, to create an unsettling effect. What other devices do you consciously employ to produce this?

BE
Most of my work in revision is about sound and rhythm, trying to figure out what is going to really serve the story. I'm working with those things to try to manipulate the reader. A lot of my work uses a process of “denarration”, by which I mean it presents something, narrates it as if it’s real, then it takes it away. A lot of things are qualified or taken away or compromised, or you're told something and then it's removed. That is a big part of the unsettling effect, of destabilizing the story’s world.

Evenson continues:

"So much fiction has this idea: there's a character, they confront something, they change, and then they're different people. If you're around humans for long enough, you realize that that's the exception rather than the rule. It so rarely happens that people actually change in a meaningful way. I've always been a little skeptical of character development, but then what do you do with fiction? My sense is that maybe it’s about conveying mental states and changing the reader. That, to me, is more important than conveying some kind of change in a character in a world that doesn't look like our world."

This reminds me of what William Maxwell enjoyed in novels (1955)

William Maxwell, in a 1955 speech at Smith College, said: "These forms of prestidigitation, these surprises, may not any of them be what makes a novel great, but unless it has some of them, I do not care whether a novel is great or not; I cannot read it." (see: The Writer as Illusionist: Uncollected & Unpublished Work by William Maxwell. Copyright © 1955 by William Maxwell. Introduction Copyright © 2024 by Alec Wilkinson. Excerpted with the permission of Godine. Reprinted in LitHub, January 24, 2024.)

The reader stays to find out whether "there will be more neighbors turning up than the narrator expects, or else he will very much wish that they had." The characters don't know something because "they are at sea, pulling at the oars in an open boat; and so are you." You're introduced to a character, and "you have entered into a personal relationship with a stranger, who will perhaps make demands on you, extraordinary personal demands..." Or: "A door opens slowly in front of you, and you cannot see who is opening it but, like a sleepwalker, you have to go in." Or the narrator "has not actually set eyes on this interesting new person that everyone is talking about. She is therefore all the more interested. And meanwhile, surprisingly, the reader cannot forget the lady, or the dog, or the seafront." Or the writer gives special voice, attitude: "A way of looking at people that is ironical, shrewd, faintly derisive, and that suggests that every other kind of writing is a trick (this is a special trick, in itself ) and that this book is going to be about life as it really is, not some fabrication of the author’s." And "the writer invokes a time: He offers the reader a wheat field on a hot day in July, and a flying machine, and a little boy with his hand in his father’s. He has been brought to the wheat field to see a flying machine go up. They stand, waiting, in a crowd of people. It is a time when you couldn’t be sure, as you can now, that a flying machine would go up." Trust: "If he is a good novelist, you can lean against his trees; they will not give way. ...you ought to be able to shake them until an apple falls on your head. (The apple of understanding.)" As in "the shop of the live fish, toward the beginning of Malraux’s Man’s Fate. ... As the hour that the assassination will be attempted is mentioned, the water on the surface of the bowls begins to stir feebly. The carp, awakened by the sound of voices, begin to swim round and round, and my hair stands on end." Timing: "a fatality about the timing of these visits; he always comes just when she has washed her hair. She is presented to the reader with a bath towel around her wet head, her hair in pins, in her kimono, sitting on the couch in the living room, silent, while her parents make conversation with the suitor. All her hopes of appearing to advantage lie shattered on the carpet at her feet. She is inconsolable but dignified, a figure of supportable pathos."

More reading (if you've got a Medium membership)

Medium members: Check out "The Worst Philosophy Paper I Ever Wrote."

Even with limited options, nevertheless, we can change

Charlie Jane Anders’ writing craft book Never Say You Can’t Survive isn’t a philosophy book, except that, well, take a look at this. Here, she talks about how characters can change. As writers and readers, we view their fictional world from the outside, and we also see that they have free will. Maybe we see things about the characters that they aren’t aware of about themselves. When the character has fewer options, they — and we — might perceive their situation as worsening. Still, despite their limited options, the character can change. Almost always, a breakthough is possible.

Here are three brief passages from the book:

Fiction can work all kinds of magic during horrendous times: inspire us to resist evil, expose the reality of the world, create empathy, and help us to understand complex systems from a vantage point that could be hard to reach in nonfiction. But the most powerful thing that fiction can do is show that people can change, and that we all have the potential to be different. That’s where I get a lot of my hope when everything around me feels hopeless.

* * *

Almost every story is some mix of character stuff and plot stuff, and the mix can vary from page to page and chapter to chapter. Character is action: people aren’t just a collection of feeling and opinions and habits, but rather the sum total of all the choices they take. Meanwhile, even the plottiest plotfest needs to have characters who we root for, or else none of the secret codes and countdowns will matter worth a damn.

* * *

I increasingly find it helpful to think in terms of ‘options become constrained,’ rather than ‘things get worse.’ It’s not so much that the situation deteriorates — it’s more like doors are slamming shut, and the protagonists have fewer and fewer courses of action open to them.

— Charlie Jane Anders, Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories, Tordotcom (2021), Chapters 8, 9, 10

I appreciate philosophy wherever and in whatever format it appears.

Previously published July 8, 2022 to the Episyllogism blog. That blog is offline, so now this article is here.

I'd like to add this sentence from Benjamin Harnett's novel The Happy Valley (Serpent Key Press, 2022): "He then had what I'd call an accidental recovery — some people do everything right and still tumble into the abyss, others tumble into the abyss and then one day you find they have stepped up out of it, on the far side, wholly sound."

See also Philip Kinsher's 12 Character Archetypes to Know Before You Start Writing, BookBaby, July 11, 2023. These roles are:

• The hero
• The villain
• The mentor
• The trickster
• The guardian
• The herald
• The shape-shifter
• The sidekick
• The love interest
• The underdog
• The femme fatale
• The jester

On encyclopedic urges

Four quotes:

"I see. You desire a catalog of all imaginary creatures from the dawn of time until the present day. From the ancient Greeks with their Minotaur to the Norsemen's All-Father." Dr. Flowers smiled, cherishing the absurdity of the request. "From the Fair Folk to the leprechauns. From the mermaids of the deep to the vampires of Serbia — "
— T. Baggins. Soulless. 2013.

“In the realm of language, the opposite of a monster is a catalogue.”
— Del Samatar and Sofia Samatar. Monster Portraits. Brookline, Mass.: Rose Metal Press, 2018.

“Encyclopedias provide factual information, but they, like all texts, are authored, constructed so that subjects become captured. Things can be held under a magnifying glass one entry at a time, forever. Does that permanence give them a sort of truth that they are still existing? How, I wonder, does a writer account for the ways time is written into entries? Surely, definitions shift. Things change, and therefore so do meanings—but on the page, the words are impervious to adaptation, to learning. Maybe I can gain something from that sort of cataloguing now. After all, it was those books I went to so often back then, when I wanted to understand something.”
— Kristin Keane. An Encyclopedia of Bending Time. Baltimore: Barrelhouse, 2022. p. 33.

"We as a culture have been content to analyze melancholy and intellectualize depression since we had the words for either, and likely even before this walls were strewn with highbrow marks about some hunter’s lost prey. Not being above that, there is doubtless some desire to utilize academic means or the analytical part of me to understand why my brain seems to want to set itself on fire. However, knowing mere analysis will only lead to further analysis, some dimension had to present itself to disrupt that tendency. Thus, much of the work here has been rewritten, and unwritten in an atypical approach to nonfiction. I don’t think that I believe in nonfiction. Language is as subjective and impossible as depression itself, so I have not attempted to reach anything like objective truth. I've sought a means of transmission, and what remains of it in reception seems beyond my grasp. I have warped old journals and papers and rewritten them because that is depression to me, that is anxiety and addiction and the only true means I’ve found of escape is through, as the old poem goes. So through the documents, the feelings, the intellectualizing and not, the anger, the sorrow, the misery, the piss, the blood, the wasted days and weeks and months and lives in seas of ugly rotting sentiment, or sediment, the only means that seemed to make any sense was total inclusion, and abjection in turn."
— Grant Maierhofer. Peripatet. Inside the Castle, 2019. pp. 295 – 296 of PDF

"Ecologists have reoriented their field as a 'crisis discipline,' a field of study that’s not just about learning things but about saving them. We technologists need to do the same."
— We Need To Rewild The Internet: The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists. Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon, Noema, April 16, 2024

If these ideas interest you, you may want to know that I wrote a biography of a man with encyclopedia-writing tendencies. The book is Ten Past Noon: Focus and Fate at Forty.

On the unhappiness of the frustrated writer more generally

Elif Batuman (Jul 08, 2026):

"...the part of my own book that I’m working on right now, which is about Selin in the first few years after college...

...why am I still writing about that? But my core belief is that that very avoidance is worthy of examination. I mean, so many people feel that way about their 20s—and at the earliest opportunity they escape it into the dignity of actual adulthood, a stable relationship, etc.; and then that has a way leading into parenthood (“I have way too much to think about now instead of just obsessing over my dumb self”)—and then their kids are in their 20s and then they can’t wait to not think about it anymore. So I want to think about it.

Anyway, for me (and Selin), the defining “problem” of those years was wanting so much to be a novelist, and having no idea how to do it. And that’s just what The Magician and Famesick are about, at least at the beginning: someone in their early 20s who desperately wants to be a writer/ artist, and can’t produce at the level of their desire, and has no clear career path or trajectory, and how bad it feels. And then there is the “relationships and sex” B-plot, which is also depressing, and becomes part of that same “unhappiness” that later they don’t take seriously.

I recently had coffee with one of my best friends from that time in my life, and she said, of our 20s, “Remember how unhappy we thought we were?” As if what we had then was only an idea of unhappiness—not actual unhappiness, which we didn’t know yet. And to an extent that is what it now feels like: like that was such an “innocent time.” But I don’t think this feeling now is more true than that feeling was then.

Change: How it feels in the moment, what it means in retrospect

Gems from Charlie Jane Anders in the writing craft book Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories (Tordotcom, 2021).

About personal change over time, how we piece together reality in the moment and, later, in retrospect.

— "A story can show change happening in real time." (Chapter 8)

— "People often talk about characters having an 'arc,' which brings to mind the image of an arrow shot in the air, curving upward only to come down again. But another useful image is a piece of coal coming under immense pressure and becoming a diamond. People don't change when life is easy and straightforward — they change when life is a bloody confusing nightmare." (Chapter 8)

— "The texture of reality is made out of random details, and it's especially weird what you'll notice when your emotions are working overtime. You might be in the middle of a relationship-ending fight with your partner, but your eye might land on a tiny candy wrapper on the sidewalk..." (Chapter 15)

— Writing is "like doing a jigsaw puzzle where we have to carve the pieces as we assemble them, and some of the pieces will turn out to belong to a different puzzle entirely." (Chapter 16)

— "I usually feel like every story has a point where it stops pushing uphill, and starts rolling downhill. ... So a good structure will not only let the reader know what the big turning points in the story are, but show how the consequences of those turning points are piling up. This is a big part of why I say the ending is the beginning: once you have an ending that you love, that feels like it pays off the themes and the character arcs of your whole story, then you can go back and shape all that raw material into something where every moment serves to build up power that you can discharge at the end." (Chapter 24)

Image of an incandescent bulb taken by Stefan Krause, Germany.
© Free Art License Wikimedia Commons.

'Writing was sympathetic magic'...

Today, in high-information environments, people may see writing as "logorrhea," or worse, a force of destruction and entropy. Writing can cause something simple to destabilize and to become unnecessarily complex.

But in low-information environments (and especially long ago), people have been amazed by writing and grateful for its contributions.

Writing seemed to make an idea immortal.

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"To the ancients, writing was wizardry. ...the discovery of a method to project one’s self beyond a single life span seemed nothing less than miraculous." Leonard Shlain. The Alphabet Versus the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image. New York: Penguin/Compass, 1999.

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This also seemed to reinforce the truth of a myth. If the myth had seemed true enough to begin with, writing the myth made it tangible and permanent and thus made it seem more real. Writing something seemed to make it true.

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"First-century people just didn't have the same sense of factuality that we do, or of writing either. Writing was sympathetic magic, we should remember: writing something down was to an extent making it so, it was a creative rather than mimetic act..."
John Updike. Roger's Version. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986.

"While the story of Christ was in many ways a typical hero myth — the virgin birth, the supernatural acts (miracles), the rebirth into immortality — in one respect it was unique: it claimed not to be a myth at all. It claimed to be history. Traditional societies do not distinguish between myth and history in the way that we do. Mythical events were not thought to have literally happened; yet in another sense they were true, as if they had. ‘These things never happened, they are always’, wrote Sallust sublimely (86-34 B.C.). Conversely, historical events are always mythologized (the Trojan war, for example). It is as if what literally happened is less important than what metaphorically happened. But the two are combined to create what ‘really’ happened.
When the story of Christ was held to be history, its events literally true, myth suffered a blow. It began to acquire its modern meaning of something unreal, imaginary (as opposed to imaginative) and merely fictional. At the same time, truth and reality began to be measured by their literal truth and reality. Literalism began with Christianity."
Patrick Harpur. The Philosopher's Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination. p. 81.

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Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All, Carl Zimmer, NYT, June 8, 2021:

"...Dr. Zeman and his colleagues have heard from more than 12,000 people who say they don’t have any such mental camera. The scientists estimate that tens of millions of people share the condition, which they’ve named aphantasia, and millions more experience extraordinarily strong mental imagery, called hyperphantasia.

In their latest research, Dr. Zeman and his colleagues are gathering clues about how these two conditions arise through changes in the wiring of the brain that join the visual centers to other regions. And they’re beginning to explore how some of that circuitry may conjure other senses, such as sound, in the mind."

Though people with aphantasia "had little trouble recalling things they had seen," such as that pine needles are a darker shade of green than grass, they "don’t do as well as others at remembering details of their own lives. It’s possible that recalling our own experiences — known as episodic memory — depends more on the mind’s eye than does remembering facts about the world." They may be "more likely than average to have a job that involved science or math." They "may escape some of the burdens caused by reliving traumatic experiences, because they don’t have to visually replay them." Zeman says: "Anecdotally, they’re really good at moving on."

By contrast, people with hyperphantasia have "intensely strong visions." Cognitive neuroscientist Joel Pearson explains: “It’s like having a very vivid dream and not being sure if it was real or not" — such that remembering watching a movie is "indistinguishable" from actually watching it. This "may open the way to false memories" and may "give rise to regret and longing."

"Dr. Zeman and his colleagues estimate that 2.6 percent of people have hyperphantasia and that 0.7 percent have aphantasia."

For more info, see the Aphantasia Network.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Quotes: On deep reading, writing, and meaning

Annie Murphy Paul ("Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer," Time, June 03, 2013):

The deep reader, protected from distractions and attuned to the nuances of language, enters a state that psychologist Victor Nell, in a study of the psychology of pleasure reading, likens to a hypnotic trance. Nell found that when readers are enjoying the experience the most, the pace of their reading actually slows. The combination of fast, fluent decoding of words and slow, unhurried progress on the page gives deep readers time to enrich their reading with reflection, analysis, and their own memories and opinions. It gives them time to establish an intimate relationship with the author, the two of them engaged in an extended and ardent conversation like people falling in love.

This is not reading as many young people are coming to know it. Their reading is pragmatic and instrumental: the difference between what literary critic Frank Kermode calls 'carnal reading' and 'spiritual reading.' If we allow our offspring to believe carnal reading is all there is — if we don’t open the door to spiritual reading, through an early insistence on discipline and practice — we will have cheated them of an enjoyable, even ecstatic experience they would not otherwise encounter. And we will have deprived them of an elevating and enlightening experience that will enlarge them as people.

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William Poundstone (Labyrinths of Reason:  Paradox, Puzzles and the Frailty of Knowledge, New York: Anchor Books, 1988. p. 200):

Most rational people do not ponder Newbold's and Levitov's cases long before rejecting them. To say exactly why we reject them is something else. Susan Sontag defined intelligence as a "taste in ideas." It is difficult to codify that taste.

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Prince Shakur. When They Tell You To Be Good: A Memoir. Tin House, 2022:

Queer Black people quite literally create new words out of the space that we share with each other, and our appreciation of their power helps us create stories.

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Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet. Edited by Maria Jose de Lancastre. Translated by Margaret Jull Costa. London: Serpent's Tail, 1991 (a collection of writings that were unorganized upon Pessoa's death in 1935). p. 258):

To say things! To know how to say things! To know how to exist through the written voice and the intellectual image! That's what life is about: the rest is just men and women, imagined love and fictitious vanities, excuses born of poor digestion and forgetting, people squirming beneath the great abstract boulder of a meaningless blue sky, the way insects do when you lift a stone.

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Aline Kilmer, (quoted by the AP, quoted in The Week, Feb. 5, 2016. p. 19):

Many excellent words are ruined by too definite a knowledge of their meaning.

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Akwaeke Emezi. Freshwater. (Grove Press, 2018):

We don’t have to swallow our work or be afraid that it’s too deviant to do well; there is, in fact, no canon we cannot touch. Even when seized by a thousand fears, we can make strange and wonderful things simply for the sake of the strange and the wonderful, we can create without permission, we can write into the unknown.

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Mallarme (quoted in Anatole Broyard (d. 1990). Kafka Was the Rage: A Greenwich Village Memoir. New York: Carol Southern Books, 1993. p. 32):

If a person of average intelligence and insufficient literary preparation opens one of my books and pretends to enjoy it, there has been a mistake. Things must be returned to their places.

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Queen Quet Marquetta L. Goodwine, chieftess of the Gullah/Geechee Nation. Interviewed by Leah Penniman. Black Earth Wisdom: Soulful Conversations With Black Environmentalists. Amistad, 2023. Chapter: "Rising Waters."

"One thing that people always hear me say came to me as a vision from my ancestors and became the motto for the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, and it’s this: Hunnuh mus tek cyare de root fa heal de tree. You must take care of the root to heal the tree. If you want to get to the root of a problem, you need to dig for it, because roots that are really solid are not on the surface."

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Uzma Aslam Khan (The Geometry of God, Clockroot Books, 2009. Kindle location 1718):

Until now we were stepping outside the box the lines were loose. But now Nana wants to follow the laws he wants a legal ghazal [poem]. While we think of one Nana says, 'Everyone understands love through the images of love like the bulbul and the rose or the hunted bird or eye lashes like daggers or we have made up our own. But a ghazal in English is illegal!'

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George Saunders (Office Hours, Substack, March 7, 2024):

"Every second we spend writing, we are enacting a stance toward life itself.

The way we ought to feel, according to me: 'I am in this dream called life, living it, sometimes feeling trapped in it, sometimes feeling blessed to be in it, and I want – well, I want to leave something lovely behind, for those who will follow me (and for those who are out there in it with me right now), something that, through its complicated beauty, will bear testimony to how crazy and intense and nice it was being here. I hope to reassure and console with this work. (But not falsely.)'"

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Willis Elliott (Flow of Flesh, Reach of Spirit: Thinksheets of a Contrarian Christian. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1995. p. 114):

Your 'soul,' by which here I mean your interiority, is compounded of all the conversations you’ve ever had — with other human beings, with God, and with yourself. That’s only one angle from which to describe your soul, but it’s a vital one, theoretically developed by social-psychologist George Herbert Mead (as the social origin of consciousness), and clinically tested and developed by a man I studied with, Hugh Missildine (as 'the child of the past within'). Mead died before I could get to him, but he got to me through his writings. Both men have been important in the shaping of my understanding of interiority and thus in my devising the Thinksheet genre.

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James Baldwin, quoted in The San Diego Union-Tribune which was then quoted by The Week, July 28, 2017, p. 17:

"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.

Call me a liberal or whatever, but I do think we should be broadly concerned that we are witnessing the death of the writer as a concept. And not the way literary theorists mean it.

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— Jess Is Away Resting (@jessothomson.co.uk) January 9, 2025 at 7:18 PM

Hobbes: Bullshit artists make "nothing but words"

Image by prabha karan from Pixabay

Some people's writing has "increased science" while that of others has "increased nothing but words." Why? Because "the former were written by men that knew, and the latter by such as knew not, the doctrine they taught..." — Hobbes

Apart from what we may think of Hobbes —

Wouldn't most people prefer to belong to "those" people who contribute to human knowledge, rather than to "these" people who clutter the Internet and waste pages?

Source:
Thomas Hobbes. Elements of Philosophy Concerning Body. Part 1: Computation or Logic. Chapter 1: Of Philosophy. (1655, Latin; 1656, English.)

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You might be interested to read my post on this blog about Harry G. Frankfurt's The Importance of What We Care About.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium.

See my thoughts on Joel Edward Goza's America's Unholy Ghosts, a book that discusses Thomas Hobbes. My article is a 5-minute read, and the link I provided is unpaywalled.