Do Writers Need to Suffer?

Depends on your audience

Here I go with my class warrior shit again, but I finally came up with an answer to the age-old debate over the question every young writer faces when heshit is deciding whether to accept their shitty life for “material,” or rob a bank so they can have a decent life:

“Do writers need to suffer?

“…or does the best work come from the kind of refined reflections on life and death that can only be crafted by the leisured aristocracy?”

Well, it depends on who you want for an audience, and what you want to do to them.

But fear not: The answer lies in the hedonic treadmill, and you do not need to go out and suffer on purpose.

You merely need to pick an audience of people who haven’t suffered any more than you have.

Relativity of Relatability

Everyone feels they have suffered greatly. Even if the monumental trauma that is etched into their soul is that one time they were hungry for an hour. Or when they got kind of hot at Coachella.

Everyone wants to be understood. Everyone wants a book to read that they feel will understand them, even though it’s an inanimate object. Well, except for people who don’t like reading fiction; and yes, I guess when I put it that way, it sounds like those are the sane people, who don’t have parasocial relationships with inanimate objects.

But that’s a little disingenuous: The magic of a book is in the fact that it is an inanimate object though which we can give others contact with our own living mind, even after the brainham’s tissue is dead and gone.

And yes, math geniuses: at first glance, it looks like this should mean that writers who suffer more should automatically get a better shot at having a larger audience.

It should work out in the same way that stupid things do better online, right?

The Math

In case you haven’t heard me explain this before, math is why the Internet has made everything—and everyone—stupider.

Because nobody clicks on things they can’t understand.

Once you see it, you can’t un-see it: People vote for what gets seen with their clicks. They click on things that are either at their level, or below. And this creates a stupidity spiral.

Remember what George Carlin said about half the people being even stupider than average?

That entire half will ignore things that are written for a person of average intelligence.

If your writing (or, let’s be real, your Tik-Tok) caters to the intelligence of even someone as dumb as the average person, half of the people who see it are going to not understand it, get mad, and click away or dislike it, punishing it in the mysterious curse-tablet bowels of the algorithm.

If your writing is made for smart people, well, good luck with that. Due to all the dullards who will vote against it, not even your target audience is likely to see it on their feed.

The smart people who would love your intricately carved hard sci-fi tale are instead going to half-heartedly open up their feed, see yet another video about Johnny Somali, and sigh. And get dumber, because we are all affected by the swamp ecosystem that is swallowing us.

This is why there are so many stupid people making “content,” by the way:

Because smart people realise that even if you win at “content,” your prize is spending the rest of your career dumbing everything down to the ever-sinking common denominator.

The smartest people are not on Substack, much less YouTube. They’re either doing astrophysics, inventing yet another convenience that will help more idiots breed their way into the next generation, or building a gun-turret fort in the desert, depending on how old and cynical they are.

When the Math Stops Working

Thus, via the same mechanism, you would think that writers who suffer more should have a larger audience, because most people at least THINK they have pretty shitty lives.

If people will only click on things that are dumb enough for them, surely they will also only click on things that are bleak enough to identify with. Right?

Most people in most societies suffer quite a bit by definition, even if it’s merely relative poverty in what’s left of the first world. Even easy office jobs can be made to be very unpleasant, especially for spergs; I would rather do menial labor than work in an office with an HR lady. The majority suffer buckets of social pain, money worries, manipulation, limited and ever-shrinking options, and worst of all hopelessness.

The lower you are down the relative chain of suffering vs pleasure, the fewer readers there are who will pick up your work and think: “Seriously? This Dunham bitch thinks that getting TOO MUCH access to food is a real problem?”

Should work out for you. In theory. Writers who have it too easy should be suppressed by the algorithm, just like writers who write for smart people.

However, this formulation assumes that channels of distribution treat everyone fairly.

And, well, unfortunately…

Sprinters of the hedonic treadmill

The more you’ve suffered in life, the less likely you are to know people in traditional/prestige publishing. Grosso modo.

I used to think that people were lying when they said they enjoyed Lena Dunham, or Lorrie Moore, or any of the rest of the comfy, boring, say-nothing AWFLS whom the mainstream publishing establishment have been shoving down our throats for half a century.

At first it seems like the boutique nature of those tippy-top-of-Maslow’s-pyramid problems would be a handicap. If all you have to write about is how sad it is when your dad dies and leaves you the money, you should be crippled in the market of fictional ideas by math (see above).

But the market segment of people who have 30 bucks to spend on a new hardback book that is so flimsy they can read it in an afternoon are ALSO the market segment who IDENTIFY with having no problems beyond “hangnails hurt and death is sad.”

If you’re an AWFL or a boomer ponytail dude, Bridget Jones or Rabbit really might seem deep to you. Their tempests in teapots resonate with you and your “problems.”

These are the audiences that read prestige book reviews. They don’t want to hear about your ironic and absurd poor-people tragedy. They can’t relate. Just like you can’t relate to Lena Dunham. But you are not the target market for litfic.

And if you ask Aristotle, this actually makes sense.

Death is the one big problem that brings us all together, even if other problems can bring it into such sharp perspective that it no longer seems like a personal insult. Maybe if death is the only problem you have, you genuinely are going to be the best at focusing on it.

And mainstream literature’s self-image is happiest when the crap they publish contains a story about a life that is as non-mainstream as possible. The one percent is not the mainstream (math again)—but they have been, since stupid Aristotle, the agreed-upon proper matter for high literature.

That’s what elitism is all about—and for a long, bourgeois, royal haul, we have been confusing classiness with artistic merit, at least when it comes to those who aspire to be more than carnival barkers.

To be considered for publication by a prestige outlet, literature must appear to want to be better than mere market forces, which is the American definition of literary merit. I mean, you still want it to make money, but you don’t want it to LOOK like it wants to make money.

And that means, unless you agree to be a genre writer—more on that below—your material must either :

1. Appeal to the hipster segment of the “better kind” of people (the castes will always be with us, even amongst mohawked Exploited fans in 1993… akshuully, probably ESPECIALLY amongst those types, if my experiences with trust-fund crusties were anywhere near the median…)

and/or

2. Be smugly aspirational for the potential hicklib/strivers audiences who will actually make a financial sacrifice in purchasing that 30-dollar hardback, but do it happily in the subconscious hope that they will be accepted as a “better kind” themselves one day. This is a meritocratic caste system, after all!

In theory, Bridget Jones’ Diary, being both of these things, was the ideal early 21-st century mainstream literary velve@ta.

All that Harry Potter crap was ideal as well. It worked for people who felt special for no reason they ever earned AND people who felt unfairly deprived.

But while enthusiastically distributed by mainstream publishing, and written about at least upper-middle-class protagonists, they were still considered pop fiction, because they were cheerful. Going back to Aristotle again, if a story ends in a marriage, it’s comedy; if it ends with someone being walled in to starve, now, THAT is serious talk.

Bridget Jones is about the mating dance, not the end of life. Describing the silly love problems of the upper middle class is comedy; writing about their parents dying or their trip back to the East Coast where they realise how deep they really are is tragedy—or what Americans call litfic, serious fiction.

At least Aristotle was honest when he decided that only rich-people problems are legitimate literature; modern American litfic types, who bear the unfortunate burden of needing to be communists, have to go around in poor face, or at least vague-oppression-face, pretending that their garret was ever anything but a purchased movie set.

The jerk who called you a slur while you were purchasing the movie set? That is genuine suffering to some people. And if you have some literary talent, and that is the level at which your suffering has been set, there is your audience.

Suffering Envy

I know, it’s tempting for writers who enjoy this stratum of suffering to be envious of people who have real problems, and to try to make sure we don’t get anywhere in the literary world, but don’t worry:

Your daddy has already taken care of that, my dear literary equivalent of Lily Depp, even if you did have to go to the audition. You’ve got a pretty good deal. Leave the rest of us alone. Better yet, let us have our market slice. You do tragedy; stop pretending to do gritty, that’s our turf…

Yeah that’s never going to happen, but you can make the request.

When they refuse, you will move up in the suffering ranks.

Lucky you.

The Other Half

I kind of sort of understand this suffering envy, because people are perverse. And in theory, the bigger potential audience is out there: People who worry about making ends meet at the end of the month.

This vast sea of the quietly desperate is not being targeted by mainstream literary publishers, because publishers who care about both money and prestige want their serious stuff that loses money to at least be about REAL tragedy, ie rich-people problems.

But in theory, the audience for high-suffering writing is out there.

This unreachable, phantom audience could recognise your suffering as theirs. They can’t imagine being hurt by getting the wrong colour of car for their sweet 16, but fortunately neither can you—not till you put on your fiction writing shoes and create that trustafundian character. You can imagine any level of suffering.

Lucky you! You can write honest and sincere things that have potential appeal to the masses instead of making 99 percent of the population roll their eyes.

Why Normal People Won’t Click on Your Short Story

Unfortunately, most people who suffer a lot are too fucking tired to read.

Or at least too tired to read the bullshit the New York Review of Books wants them to read.

For a brief period of general literacy in the 20th century, it was not that way, and not merely because Tik-Tok wasn’t an option and there were only three channels on TV.

Even back when jobs were usually more physical, ordinary people still used to read good books, which seems like a mystery until you pick up an old Kingsley Amis or Tom Wolfe book, for instance, and compare it to some AWFL writing today and you see how exponentially FINER fine literature used to be.

It might have been about rich people, but damn, the Great Gatsby had a lot of interesting friends. A great writer, after all, can take whatever he has suffered and make it universal to all. Even if his problems ARE hangnails.

But the shit that’s been shoved down everyone’s throat since the MFAs and agents and woke editors took over is not written by great writers.

It is written by RIGHT writers. People with the right parents, who went to the right programs, who have the right politics, the right ethnicity that is fashionable at the moment; writers who write things exactly like the creative writing professor said, except with just a liiiiiiiittle more pixie dust than the next daughter of a publisher’s friend.

And this has destroyed the reputation of ALL modern fiction.

Normal people with normal suffering no longer associate “fine” literature, assigned-in-class literature, with universal resonance, or any kind of greatness at all.

They associate it with boring mind-numbing well-edited politically-correct neposlop that they are too intimidated to admit they don’t understand. The secret is, there’s nothing to understand, but most people are too busy paying their bills to investigate the question of “Why don’t I like Lorrie Moore?”

The answer people half-articulate is usually “it’s my fault,” because commoners by definition tend to be psychologically battered, but that doesn’t stop them from being quietly resentful about the way they’re made to feel.

So they ignore your attempt at fine literature, even when it’s fine literature about people like themselves, because not only does fine literature suck ass in their experience, while it insults their intelligence, YOUR book wasn’t even published by a REAL publisher, so it must REALLY suck.

The Addiction solution

So most people of humble backgrounds who want to write don’t bother trying to do this. We cannot be taken seriously as deep catharsis, largely because deep catharsis has been ruined by our betters, and incidentally because we aren’t qualified for it because of who we are.

So we go the JK Rowling route: If you can’t write for greatness, try to write for the other lane:

ADDICTION.

Otherwise known as entertainment. Page-turners. Monkey brain stuff.

Fuck your suffering, is the addiction formula; catharsis is too hard and uncertain to hook in people who barely trust the written word—and they’re used to their suffering being ignored anyway—so the genre writer must do an end run around catharsis and dole out pure pleasure.

Let people have a few hours of easy escape. Sure, hint about suffering at the beginning, that’s where you set up your conflict in the formula; but the bulk of the text will be hollow, sugary, greasy, wonderful wish-fulfilment and fantasy.

It won’t help anybody work through their shit or grapple with their puny poor-person mortality, but they won’t be able to put it down.

You’ll probably have a midlife crisis and slit your wrists when you realise you’ve wasted your talent and your time… but hey, wasting your talent and your time being read for addiction/escapism purposes is better than wasting your talent and time on not being read at all.

Nobody

Which, let’s face it, is what happens to 99.99999999999 percent of commoners who try to write fine, literary fiction. Statistically, nobody even knows you are there, because every avenue of momentum is blocked by shit that stupid trustafundians did to the reading public before you even got the chance to clamber up to the backstage rafters.

So you aren’t alone… but you are alone.

If the world were one of those great big orca tanks we all feel guilty about now, commoner-writers of sad stories and our audiences are less than an eyedropper full of water. Even though, if suffering worked like stupidity, we should mathematically be floating to the top of the tank.

The Bright Side

But even if trying to write serious fiction that is relatable for most people is an uphill battle through hoops of fire with elephants trying to stomp you into the mud, while your so-called friends throw salt in your wounds, the potential audience is STILL THERE, which is what makes trying to reach them such a tempting, tantalising project.

Fortunately, trying to carry out this near-impossible but valuable project will inevitably move you up the ranks of suffering.

Trying to write something cathartic, in your role as a little-people, born-unqualified fine-fiction writer, is guaranteed to result in at least a solid decade of narrowly escaping death in shithole neighbourhoods, humiliation at the hands of cartoonish assholes, and hard-core poverty, or at least spirit-breaking exhaustion from your day job. The system works!

But careful: if suffer too much, you get into the other tail of the bell curve. Just like intelligence, suffering has an elite, and it is not necessarily an advantage to belong to it.

You’ll feel like you’re from a different planet from even most of the commoners, and you’ll sound like it, too. Even more strategically damaging is the intense suffering envy you will give to assholes, who will put their hands in their pockets and whistle as they shuffle over to stand in your way.

The worse you have it, the more likely people are to assume someone else is already helping you, you lucky jerk.

So DO writers need to suffer?

The answer is yes.

But don’t worry. You have suffered exactly enough. Whatever level of suffering has been your lot, your audience is going to be people who have suffered like you. And if you suffer enough, maybe you can break through that tail of the bell curve and go to Mars.

It might be hard to get eyes on your work, but moving up in suffering weight classes is EASY! So smile.