Techne Writing - Persuasive Craft

Providing my beefing-with-publishing-industry origin story 😁

A literary agent got back to me and told me that my novel’s literary framing and young character cast point to different audiences. When I got this comment I knew that self-publishing was the path for me. The publishing industry is obsessed with genre buckets, and they don’t like the idea of a so-called literary novel being narrated from the voice of an eighteen-year-old and his crew of younguns.

Throw other factors into the mix, like zombies with different levels of sentience and communication abilities, government conspiracy, shifting group dynamics, a more street-style prose and character cast, and ethnic and immigration threads, and you get a whole genre mess that is sure to put the very white liberal publishing industry in a kerfuffle.

My novel, The New Roswell project, isn’t the first “ethnic/literary zombie novel” — there is also Ling Ma’s Severance. Although that wasn’t very street or young 🤔

I used to teach english literature to high school students. They were smart kids 😤 we need not dumb down fiction for them.

Please follow, like, and leave a comment to support my (Junaid’s) path to self-publication!🫡

As a creative type, Maybelle can’t help wondering why the round apple emblazoned at the back of every Macbook decorating your average Starbucks looks the way it does 🍎💻 Although the bite mark was originally designed so the apple wouldn’t look like a cherry 🍒 scaled down, the bite is still a beckoning in the end — of the consumer to the shiny product, one that is soon consumed by the consumer enjoying it. In other words, the Apple logo exposes the subconscious desire to enjoy that’s at the root of every act of consumerism 🐍

Curiously, the first Apple logo was an illustration of Isaac Newton sitting under the tree and witnessing a falling apple, which led to his incredible scientific knowledge 🌳📖 This, plus its connotations of enjoyment, gestures at the forbidden fruit that led to sin for Adam and Eve — even if the logo designer, Rob Janoff, has roundly denied this connection. But even if this link wasn’t there, we can’t help wondering if it is: this originary Apple, in our imagination, becomes not only enjoyment but also knowledge, transgression, and in the end, death. It was after this originary transgression, that Adam and Eve had to die 🥀🥀

With late stage capitalism upon him, Junaid theorizes that the proliferation of niche publishing market categories suggests that fiction now is the equivalent of human centipede sh** 💀🚽

This is because writers first and foremost seek not to replicate their own experiences and relationships, but rather to replicate pre-defined genre categories, as established by the publishing industry. And so the phrase “write what you know” has come more to mean “write the genre you know” rather than “write the life experiences you’ve had.”

If we are to use philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s definition of genre as works classified together which have a “family resemblance” to one another, then we can also posit that this human centipede phenomenon is new and not so applicable to authors of pre-post-modern (I realize the silliness of that word) times, because such authors, without the burden of genre obsession and big-5 publishing practices, were able to focus more on replicating form and style rather than genre, the latter of which is typically more content, trope, and archetype-focused — all of which make these niche fiction works read as very similar to one another, despite their apparent subcategorical differences from one another. And so a Bangladeshi diaspora urban fantasy is likely to read very similarly to other urban fantasies, or urban fantasies focused on a different diverse experience, and so on and so forth.

Think for example of (I shall use the silly word again) pre-post-modern works which built off one another: Homer’s Iliad, Virgil’s Aeneid, John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick all share the form of the epic, yet are vastly different from one another. Or if we trace the AI sub genre of science fiction in the 20th century: Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot; Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey; and William Gibson’s Neuromancer all tackle the theme of artificial intelligence yet read vastly differently from one another 🧐

It’s another muggy September day which means we have the perfect conditions to talk about the ad Sidney Sweeney did for sports betting company Novig.

In many ways the uproar we are seeing over this advertisement — pro athletes, amateur athletes, women, and just everyone for that matter (except huh-what’s-the-problem? dudes you might find in comment sections) decrying how the ad sets back womens’ sports to being about the bodies of women rather than the performance of women — is a smoke screen for us to not think about the nefariousness and pervasiveness of modern sports betting: how it’s right there in our phones, at our beck and call 24/7, and how it’s destroying people’s lives by making them addicted and putting them into debt, and also infecting pro sports as well as the sanctity of the game (even athletes and broadcasters are advertising for them, live, during games 💀).

We can look to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard to see how this is our simulation world at work. In simple terms, he posits that we’re living in a simulation due to our alienation from labour and how media images precede reality. And so social media is now a kind of fourth order or hyperreal simulation tricking us into thinking our outside-of-social-media lives are real and unsimulated. In social media we seek and “enjoy” things, like the sleazy, anti-women Sydney Sweeney ads that abhor us. This is our rage p**n. We’re turning to French-Bulgarian Psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva and the idea of “jouissance” to hopefully try to explain this 😮‍💨

All this on the heels of another sports betting viral moment: the “my mayor Muslim” chant, which was made viral by sports betting company Kalshi, during the Knicks’ playoff run.

Junaid decides to one-man-army it against the publishing industry by claiming that literary fiction isn’t just dying; it’s dead💀🪦

He attributes this deadness to the long stay of realism as literary fiction’s prose and genre choice. Realist novels focus on the everyday, inner lives of characters, and have a prosaic prose style to match, characterized by blunt, declarative writing. MFA (Master of Fine Arts) workshops in graduate schools across the Western world have caused this style to stay in vogue for so long; it’s the result of a culture of being risk-averse and ensuring your writing is hard to scrutinize🧐

AI platforms like ChatGPT, which are reducing people’s media literacy and ability to read more complex prose, is also a likely culprit in publishing industry execs’ reluctance to champion more complex prose styles.

Junaid also references writers of the past generation — what we might call the last great generation of writers: Philip Roth, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood and others. These writers had a variety of complex yet rhythmic prose styles, and wrote speculative fiction as well as generation-sweeping (even epic) novels that sought to unveil the human conditions of the worlds they lived in. So who are the next great writers?

Most critics point to Sally Rooney, Irish writer and author of Normal People, among other novels. They say she is the voice of the millennial generation — she also happens to be a realist writer… is this solidifying yet another generation of realist writing?? 💀 How about a change of style? Even skinny fit in the fashion industry had its downfall… when will realism aka skinny fit in literary fiction also fall?🤔

It’s another bright summer day which means we gotta compare the over-nuance of the past with the lack-of-nuance of the present, thanks to the rise of social media, algorithms, and low attention spans. For an English Literature student in the 2010s, it was very easy to write an essay that was super smart and sounded theory-packed, but also wasn’t really saying much at all 💀 because it could not answer the question, “so what?” or “what’s the significance of this argument?” This was kind of a sign of too much nuance.

Fast forward to today and discourse has shifted into being super basic and didactic. We’ve seen this in our feed with debates about R.F Kuang, and whether or not it is appropriate to say she writes for a white audience. Booktok and other literary influencers are putting a shutdown on this conversation, even though academic and literary circles have taken her under their wing, and these academic and literary circles are of course run by white liberals, so why aren’t we having a nuanced conversation about this?

Oh, also, we reference Philip Roth and The Human Stain — a big moment in Junaid’s literary awakening 🔮

Raised in the childhood wonder of Ikea’s Smaland ball pool🔴🔵, Maybelle returns (to the furniture store only) as an adult: the appearance of low prices, the siren call of Swedish meatballs, draws her to its impenetrable maze even if she can’t remember what she’s supposed to get. 🙈🪑One night, after looking for more hard-to-build furniture, Maybelle wandered into the women’s washroom and encountered a glimpse of originary trauma: that underneath the fantasy of Swedish collectivity🇸🇪, where small children can act big, death lurks around the fringes of our being. This is where the Lacanian Real arguably operates: the place where one constantly returns to, that is “always in the same place.” This warning against leaving small children behind… is perhaps Ikea reminding us of the death to which we all return.🧿

Readings: Jacques Lacan, Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis

WATCH THE FULL VIDEO ON OUR TIKTOK AND YOUTUBE🗣️

Attempting to continue our media literacy advocacy by suggesting that Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey adaptation, genre-wise, is apocalyptic fiction — specifically pre-apocalyptic fiction, if such a genre demarcation exists 😮‍💨

In this video we gather up all the things people are mad about (Black Helen played by Lupita Nyong’o, the not Bronze Age-appropriate armour of the Greeks, the Laestrygonians’ armour, Agamemnon’s Batman armour, Nolan’s white maleness, lack of feminism, and more) and toss it all away in the name of suggesting that a media literate reading of the film would incorporate Nolan’s authorial/directorial intent into the discussion, rather than solely the aforementioned things 🗣️ And that intent appears to 1) suggest we are in an apocalypse, and 2) suggest that apocalypse is the result of the breakdown of “Zeus’ law” in our own time.

This is the second time we watched the film — and it was in IMAX 70mm at 11pm on a work night because those were the only tickets available that weren’t bad seats right in front of the screen 💀

This also might be our longest video yet 😮‍💨 even after many edits. I guess… such is the cost of media literate content??? Invested time😩

On Wednesday at 6am, Maybelle woke up to sheets of water rolling against her window: the first of the pouring storms, quarter-sized hail, and tornado warnings that rolled through southern Ontario for 12 hours straight that day. ⛈️🌪️When the the storm ended, she embarked on an odyssey, of watching Nolan’s Odyssey (again) in IMAX 70 mm, “the way Nolan intended it”—prompting her to reflect on the force of the apocalypse.🌊

In The Odyssey, angry gods rise up once humans cross their boundaries: hurting Poseidon’s son, eating Apollo’s cattle. 👁️🐄That’s what starts the tumultuous storms that Odysseus crossed at sea, and which claimed the lives of his crew. Maybelle wonders if there’s a parallel to what we’ve brought on today in our increasingly severe weather. Southern Ontario has always seen sudden thunderstorms in its humid summers, but the size and scale (hundreds of kilometres on Wednesday, large areas and roads flooded) are on a different scale.

Have we ourselves broken Zeus’s law in bringing about climate change?🤯🫡

We both have English degrees so we have a lot to say about them — are they useful? Will they get you a job? Are they too preachy (forcing you to be woke?) Will they make you a better writer?

Junaid, with his Master’s of English and Bachelor’s of English metaphorically in hand, answers this last question.

Much of the writing training you will (or will not) receive during your university/college degree depends on whether your program makes the study of rhetoric mandatory. Rhetoric is the art of persuasion in speaking and writing, and its study is focused on helping people improve grammar, sentence formation, syntax, and other literary devices focused on persuading people.

Then there is also the theory obsession in English degrees, which often takes precedence over the primary texts you’ll be reading. And don’t forget who the target audience is of all those essays you’ll be writing: your professor, who is lost in the theory clouds. This is not the average person you’ll need to persuade in the real world after you graduate!