Here's Why If You Want to Be a Great Writer, Study Isn’t Enough. You Must Live

By Daniel Gavilovski

Daniel Gavilovski

returns with a response to

Frater Asemlen

’s essay. Upon reading Frater’s claim that lived experience doesn’t really matter when it comes to writing great literature, he immediately let us know that a response would be forthcoming. At the time, he seemed incensed. Having read the essay below, I can say that the interceding weeks have not cooled him off.

This essay is going to be fairly different from others that I’ve written. As it stands, it wasn’t in my plans at all, but having read this post I couldn’t stop from writing a piece giving my own take on things. So, forgive me if parts seem messy or rushed, because the truth is they are. Were it up to me, I’d keep this as private correspondence, but since readers of the Unreal Press Substack have taken time to read and respond to Frater’s admittedly lackadaisical philosophy, I think it only makes sense that this “response” is public as well.

Frater, your argument hinges on the idea that the key to being a successful writer is the study and imitation of past authors. In order to become better at evoking the emotions one desires in his writing, the writer is obligated first and foremost to study and deconstruct his literary antecedents. This by itself is perfectly understandable. If a writer of, say, a gangster book wants to become the foremost gangster writer he of course should familiarize himself with The Godfather and Wiseguy, to refine and improve on them where necessary. My problem with your argument, Frater, is that you seem so intent on proving this point that you totally neglect the importance that life has on the substance of one’s writing. In fact, life is indispensable. By this I don’t just mean the ability to suck air and go through the non-negotiables of bodily processes. I mean that, as a writer, it is your duty to observe reality around you and to transform this into an evocation of sensorial qualia, feeling, thought, or the myriad of states that the best writing is able to convey.

You say the whole range of writing is nothing more than a question of conscious ability to write well and the conscious mastery of the techniques. I take issue with this. Taken to its logical conclusion what you’re arguing for is art as rote ingestion and reformulation which frankly I find unappealing.

Fiction writing has some elements in common with carpentry it’s true, but what you describe is more artist as plumber or artist as electrician, as if great art is nothing more than the summation of one’s study, to be consciously analyzed through textbooks and manuals and rejigged when needed in the case of a gummed up fuse or offset cornice. Yes, a writer must study the greats who came before him: that’s non-negotiable. But do you really believe, for example, that the best pornographer can ever be one who has not experienced sex? It’s obviously ridiculous, and yet that’s essentially what you’re arguing for. Great fiction draws from the reality of the writer’s life.

You say “if it was simply life experience, each old man would be an utterly idiosyncratic stylistic master”. Incorrect. You neglect that not every old man dies having lived with “life experience” and that seeking it out is as much a soldierly pursuit as is the study of the canon. It is a vocation. One must pay attention to that which is happening around him, because only by keeping his eyes open can a writer tabulate unique insights or unique sensations. This is the only way to create a literary tradition that is alive and beautiful and it’s one of the great embarrassments of modern writers, who idolize information accumulation in the form of TvTropes.com and screenwriting guru principles. If one can accrue talent from the analysis of texts, then is there any reason for you to say that one cannot accrue talent from the study of actuality? I will give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are being provocative.

I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

-Henry David Thoreau

Yes, Thoreau was a lover of Homer, Milton, and the Bible. But could he have ever come to Walden through reading alone? It’s an impossibility. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. A myriad of excellent writers have taken this philosophy and, by deliberately affecting the course of their life into strange, unexplored or dangerous territories, produced exceptional fiction, like Thompson, Orwell, and Jack London.

Textual study cannot teach you that which has not been written. By ceding yourself from reality and towards information accumulation, you are effectively divesting yourself, Frater, of the one thing which differentiates you, as far as your art is concerned, from an LLM chatbot. If you see the raising of an eyebrow this evening on your commute, you may write about it because it is real and you saw it. An LLM may only write about it as a document.

In this same vein you are negligently and obtusely shooing away the entire tradition of journalism as literature. Twain. Daniel Defoe. Robert Louis Stevenson. These are all writers who made their bones writing about true experiences.

Perhaps the best argument against rote study and for life experience is – take a single look at the state of the self-publishing scene which you yourself occupy. Look at the state of the dissident right as headed by the likes of Lomez of Passage Press, Cairo Smith, Raw Egg Nationalist, even your very own Unreal Press and see what stories are being printed. Here are writers who have every opportunity like no generation before them and no contemporary besides to study and analyze and refine previous traditions into epochal masterpieces. What do we see instead? Cormac McCarthy knock-offs, post-apocalyptic movie pastiches, Cyberpunk-noir, and the old reliable True Detective Season 1 homage. This short list encapsulates about 70 to 85 percent of dissident right publishing. Surely someone would have emerged from this (notoriously chronically online) scene with a book that truly exemplifies the genius of the studied craftsman? No one? Not one? What all these writers have in common is that they take as the basis for their art past masterpieces, just as you say. They proudly call themselves derivative, brush their hands, and go tend to their middle-class spouse or remote job. Maybe they’ll schedule a tweet before bed. That’s to say nothing of the fantasy genre as it exists both in samizdat and tradpub. This is the most abundant genre of fiction we have. It fills KDP printers like a fat berg fills a sewage pipe. And it is totally and absolutely derived from Tolkien and Tolkien derivatives in MMORPGS, games, comix, cartoons etc. There is no devotion to reality here. Frater, what would you say when faced with this glut? Would you say it's excellent literature? I’ve known you long enough to know how high your standards are, so no you wouldn't. You'd say it's shit. You might say, as per your philosophy, that the foil of the modern fantasy writer is that he has not studied his own genre extensively enough.

But do we really think there's any truth to this? Okay. The fantasy writer accepts the gauntlet, and he begins to study his predecessors rigorously. He makes it his full time vocation. He quits his day job. He reads the whole lineage of modern fantasy, maps out the genealogy of his teachers and their teachers too. He might emulate their sentence structure, their forms, and ideas.

Once he completes studying the usuals he moves to the adjacents of his immediate literary antecedents. Rather than Tolkien, Lewis, and Howard he begins to study Machen, Clark Ashton Smith, and Lord Dunsany. Eventually and suddenly, our fantasy writer is struck by a torrential terror. He realizes that the deeper he goes into the past, into Dunsany, into the Decadent movement etc, the further he strays from what makes fantasy primally enticing, which is the civilizationally archetypal in fusion with the actuality of the reader's milieu. Our subject’s rubric has failed to make his writing any more enticing except as an academic curiosity. The fact remains, Frater: the stranger the concept the writer operates in, the more necessary it is for him to draw from the marginalia of his surroundings. You mention Leonardo Da Vinci, but it’s Da Vinci who would haunt passersby with physiognomies he deemed unique, and do so until they allowed the artist to sketch their faces¹.

Writing informed wholly by your predecessors will inevitably be an unconvincing simulacrum, a fun house mirror. Recall the pornographer who's never had sex?

What separates the artist from the carpenter is that the very best works of writing are often conceived spontaneously.

Now, this is admittedly something of a pet notion of mine, but it seems to me that many of the greatest strands of fiction, and of artistic endeavor generally, can be traced back to an unconscious conception. I like to call this the Original Nightmare. The “nightmare” itself is loose – it can refer to any sort of dream, hallucination, vision, pitch, or momentary din in consciousness. Throughout history, such states have given rise to passable derivatives. Did, for example, Helena Blavatsky, the progenitor of the Sword and Sorcery genre as we know it today², arrive at the tenets of Theosophy through endless calculation, contemplation, and pastiche? You know as well as I do that she did not! Her philosophy was by her own admission delivered to her by a second consciousness or a “lodger” of which she acted as a transcriber. Blavatsky’s philosophy eventually was consciously refined into western occultism, psychoanalysis, and esoteric Nazism. In short, the most powerful symbological systems of the modern world. I must clarify here for a moment: I am certainly not trying to argue that Blavatsky's epiphanies were imparted on her by a Prime Mover. That she is a Receiver of supernatural theia mania is certainly a respectable position like any other, but it's my personal belief that this genius is the culmination of the totality of her experiences up until that point. The travelled and adventurous life which Blavatsky had led up to that point finally gave rise to epiphanies which could no longer be ignored.

In any case, we see this “trickle-down” even in pop arenas. A food poisoning induced fever dream had by one James Cameron spawned not only the Terminator franchise but a slew of imitators, knock-offs, parodies, and, yes, refinements. When Bruce Joel Rubin began scribbling down the screenplay for Jacob’s Ladder in the middle of the night, it was prompted by a nightmare of “terrible despair”. That same brilliant picture would spawn the Silent Hill and Resident Evil games.

I find it endlessly curious that you mention Edgar Allen Poe as being representative of genius only being arrived at by a “replication in finer and finer procession”. How do you feel, Frater, that the entirety of the Gothic vein, in which Poe wrote, as we know it can be traced to a nightmare suffered by Horace Walpope one night in 1764, which inspired the very first Gothic novel The Castle of Otranto.

I’m not the only one who thinks that the greatest talent cannot be arrived at deliberately. Speaking through the character of Socrates, Plato argued: Ion’s talent as an interpreter cannot be an art, a definable body of knowledge or an ordered system of skills," but instead must come from the divine inspiration of the Muses. Poetry, he argued, is the art of divine madness.

With all that said, Frater, I think Plato goes a touch too far for the both of us. The fact is, ninety-nine percent of artists do require diligence and hard work to make something of themselves, no matter how naturally talented they may be. But that talent does not come from only the study of books.

I also find your commentary on poverty confused. You say that “the first conceit is that the starving artist dedicates the bulk of his time to his art, in reality…”

Wrong. That’s not the conceit. The conceit of the starving artist is of one whose time is dedicated to fighting hunger, cold, and crime. For evidence of this, look at Knut Hamsun’s Hunger which follows the protagonist’s life of material penury in early 20^th century Oslo. Notice how the book very deliberately excludes moments of relief and material comfort, and instead ends a given vignette right when the hero receives whatever payment or lifeline he’s managed to scrounge. The book also obliquely ignores any instances of writing. What this illustrates is that poverty is valuable because it exposes one to situations which, to put it crudely, make for good stories, not because, as you suggest, it imparts some nebulous and implacable virtue on the writer which magically increases their writing ability. However salient your example of King Solomon may be, the fact is that many otherwise financially well-off individuals deliberately left a comfortable life to live “Spartan-like” as Thoreau said. George Orwell, for example, was the son of an imperial agent in the Indian Civil Service and famously rejected a cushy job as an officer in order to “tramp”, as documented in the wonderful Down and Out in Paris and London. Henry Miller, too, left the “air-conditioned nightmare” for the bed-bug infested slums of Paris and the result was Tropic of Cancer, a great novel with a prose style that has no immediate predecessors. They did this not because they were duped by a pernicious modern mythology, but because, as you yourself say, destitution has very real and observable consequences for its victims, consequences which are fertile ground for observations on the nature of humanity and the society in which it resides.

It's a shame Unreal Press felt the need to publish your post, Frater. It’s full of inconsistencies, leaps in logic, and uninteresting and transparent trolling. There’s no reason you shouldn’t troll on your own time. It’s the right of all men to whittle a stick or hum a tune, but as you yourself once said, exposing yourself publicly and calling it poetry makes you no better than the man on the street corner handing out burned CDs.

Read more from Gavilovski here:

Stop! Don’t Use That Pen Name | Essay published in Futurist Letters

Man Cooking: A Pagan Story | A play published in two parts

The Holy Martyrdom of Albinus of Isaac Abbey| Story published in minimag 55

1. Plato knew intuitively that imitation of nature, or Mimesis, is superior to imitation of past artists. The latter could only create technically appreciable but uninteresting derivatives

2. Robert E Howard, of Conan the Barbarian fame, was a theosophy enthusiast and along with other Weird Fiction writers, saw Blavatsky’s writings on magic, race, and ancient civilizations as supremely influential