What I mean to say is that for many contemporary writers today, they are not working from life itself. They are working from a mediation of life. They are working from a set of abstractions that have been conveyed to them via reality television and cinema and social media. Their reality is already a story world, and so when it comes time to... See more

I think in part because we are so accustomed to receiving life through the mediation of a screen. What these writers are writing is not life. They are writing a mediation of life in stock moves and maneuvers they have gotten from somewhere else without fully understanding them. How else does one arrive at the notion to write in first-person without... See more

A scene is not life. A scene is an orderly storytelling unit, set off by the filmic narrator or the editors, the person in charge of structuring the montage. So that while it might seem like life, it is actually highly ordered, designed to elicit a particular response or to achieve some greater narrative end. The arbitrariness that gives the sense... See more

That is, every time you write, She could hear or He could see or They felt , you are describing looking at someone while they undergo perception. You do not need that extra step of noting that someone is noting something. Where did that come from? I believe that extra step was inserted by cinema. You are so accustomed to looking at someone looking... See more

What do they present instead of thoughts? Instead of a context for the telling of the story? Physicality. Free-floating, detached from any narrative or dramatic context. It’s as if you’ve just turned on the TV and ended up in the middle of a television show whose plot you do not know and are forced to watch fifteen minutes of contextless action and... See more

What I mean is that for the writers of this new era, conveying the contents of a thought or even depicting the process of thought itself in language that does not aspire to the visual has the same foreign, baffling aspect as their trying to use a rotary phone. They simply do not know how to write thoughts.

The deracinated I is a filmic projection, dancing on cinema’s halogenic glow, but lacking the charisma and poetic force of cinema qua cinema. The first-person narrator without interiority, subtext, and indeed the very capacity for thought or judgement is the purest expression of the passivity that organizes much of contemporary life. This passivity... See more

“casting tape fiction,” which is really just first-person narration evacuated of interiority and dramatic context. A kind of consequence of misguided cinematization that I blame on reality TV, tbh. Though, looking back over it, it kind of reminds me of the “hyperreal.”