Every culture on earth needs its literary whizz kids, enormobrains fresh out of college who become overnight sensations, twatting the old guard with their hip novels that describe the new age in bold new ways. Even Papua New Guinea probably has its Couplands, its Easton Ellises, its Selfs, its Welshes, its Palahniuks. Though they're obvs gonna focus on the growing influence of tractors on agriculture than the information security implications of the superdominance of Google.
And you can be one of them too. Don't look so surprised. That semi-autobiographical novel about witty coffee shop assistants? That's your ticket out of Cafe Crème. All you need to do is change practically everything about it.
Personal Ingredients
Have two last names that aren't hyphenated (Safran Foer, Easton Ellis).
Have your own amazing backstory which is also fiction. Also known as the Frey approach/DBC Pierre tack. That way, you get two waves of pre-book publicity. The first concerns your gripping life. The second concerns the shameful public realisation that all of that was lies. Particularly canny operators will get a third: the one where you actually start lapsing into all those habits you'd previously made up.
Plot
Not very important. If necessary, use like scaffolding to build the book, then edit out of the final draft.
Characters
Satirise society's vapidity by using lots of shopping and fucking.
Characters should embrace irony. If they work in an office, there should be a doll of Mr T in the corner. They should all talk in long monologues about their first childhood experience of watching Mr T, and how schlocky TV provided the only sanity within their disintegrating post-nuclear families.
They buy into paradoxes like fakeness being its own authenticity, and thus worship things simply because they are superficial. One of them ends up in a supermarket queue behind Suzi Quattro. Big news. They are aware of how Apple is just as bad as Microsoft, and it has made them even more disillusioned. They constantly spout ironic business jargon at each other.
Popular music should form a virtual backbeat to every act. If a song comes on the radio, it's a kitsch classic, say 'Crazy Horses' by The Osmonds, not something cutting-edge that will date. All characters should be able to quote Lou Reed at length, and have intensely detailed theories about their favourite popstar.
Technique
Have some zany punctuation habits. The easiest is to randomly insert dashes, the crazy dogfucking ADDs of the punctuation greenfields, bulldozers scoring the playing fields brown. Eg: “the hobos drink on – whassup Julius, you comin tonight – don't ditch me now Donna Karan's gonna be there heycanigetthatwrapnow?” Arrange them into long breathless sentences that suck in everything that might be happening at that moment.
There needs to be an unconventional time sequence. Duh! For beginners, maybe write the whole story backwards. Begin with being killed. Then work your way step-by-step towards the chic niterie where your narrative begins nine minutes earlier.
Write yourself into the book... suddenly, on page forty two, you appear and your own story starts to overtake those of the characters. Occasionally, you meet up for coffee with the main characters. You can obviously read all their thoughts, and this starts to bug them, as does your habit of making them pay the bill for the coffee, until – uh oh! - they plot to kill you. The death of the author, baby. That's philosophy right there.
The characters should all talk to each other in witticisms which convey at once that they are: a) very nasty people and b) v. v. good looking.
Like this:
“Cheer up. I've just fucked your sister. I'd pay your analyst bills in compensation, but that might count as prostitution.”
“You think you're the first premature ejaculator to say that to me? I'm not down. I just can't move my facial muscles since the temazepam we had on that weekend in Nagasaki.”
Bingo.
GAVIN HAYNES
does anyone know who he's talking about here? i dont read any of this shit. i tried reading delilio and franzen but i thought they were shit. same with the fortress of solitude guy. who can be fucked? a lot of people obviously.
william gay is good though.
seems like all the shit that comes out these days is aimed at fat middle aged women and has to have something to do with exotic ethnicity.
i would like to check out james freys new one, but it'll probably fucking suck.
can any smart people recommend some new people to read?
please, thanks.
Posted by: buttcunt | 03/12/2008 at 02:45
This is really funny, I actually did this when I was 17. The difference is, I got over it, took the death of the author seriously, and have been focusing on game design since.
Posted by: Patrick | 03/12/2008 at 13:55
Sounds like Eastin Ellis to me.
Posted by: Mikey Terror | 03/12/2008 at 15:41
the Easton in Easton Ellis is actually just a middle name
Posted by: chris b | 03/12/2008 at 15:57
the Easton in Easton Ellis is actually just a middle name
Posted by: chris b | 03/12/2008 at 15:58
argh, throw us some bones, does anyone have a blog that i can learn about books?
i want to read some new guys but dont know whos what.
that ludmilla petrushkavaya or whatever that vice published in the story issue was AMAZING.
who else is worth checking out?
please, dont be ashamed etc.
Posted by: buttcunt | 04/12/2008 at 00:19
funny article, i think that all of us ('us' being not retard shut-ins/pretentious fucks) like to bag out the authors of our time.
But we know its a guilty pleasure because they're still by far the best of our time.
Posted by: Mr Van De Lay | 27/05/2009 at 15:08
Nam Le and Aleksandar Hemon are the best writers I've read in the last year. Nam Le is way too artistically ambitious to simply play the multicultural card -- his best stories include one about a 14 yr old hitman in Colombia experiencing sort of an existential crisis and another featuring an American college girl visiting Tehran who gets in sort of over her head. Aleksandar Hemon is from Sarajevo and writes about that a fair amount but it doesn't feel limiting. Nami Mun is also good, a Korean-American writing about a teenager of goth sensibilities out on the streets and/or becoming a low-end escort in New York. I used to review for the LATBR until they changed editors about 10 yrs ago... and all of a sudden about 18 mos I decided I wanted to see what was really out there right now. There's a lot of good stuff.
Posted by: Innocente | 03/06/2009 at 15:15
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Posted by: www.temazepam.biz | 14/09/2011 at 22:03