Fiction isn't fiction at all
First published in The Study of Light, on Substack, on October 7, 2025.
First published in The Study of Light, on Substack, on October 7, 2025.
The lesser-known French painter, René Perdu, had a particularly insidious creative obstacle. Call it painter’s block; it was in fact a prostitute who he routinely inserted between his palette and his easel. She had been hired to model for the painter, but became instead a model distraction, such that the middle-aged husband and father lost his patron, his family, and eventually his passion. Or perhaps he misplaced his passion, for it no longer yielded anything worth his care, save some sighing and some exhilarating memories. Perdu is less famous for it
The poet Feeney Warmer kept a bottle of whiskey as her centerpiece. Every night she sat to write, and wrote until she couldn’t keep her head up. In the morning, she stumbled back to her papers, to rework the scribblings from the previous night. Mid-day was given to the pursuits of sustenance. In the evening, again, she lit her candle, and wrote herself into exhaustion. Eventually she propped her head up with her whiskey bottle, and her strange, wonderful thoughts became strange, drunken thoughts. Eros left the building, and Glen Fiddich filled the void. Despite illusions to the contrary, Warmer’s writing suffered, died, and was buried, leaving her alone with the glass bones of Fiddich. Nothing came between them but her enlarged liver, and she passed prematurely. She left a small pile of chapbooks in her wake, and more than a few empty bottles.
You’ve never heard of me. I am an unpublished writer, with a head of dreams and great ideas. I have lists of bestsellers, in my journals, none of which I have actually written, which doesn’t make me special, at all. What sets me apart is that they are truly great stories, and I really do have the command of my language and the will, um, to put my tales to paper. There are no women in my life, for good or bad, to lure me from my craft. I have little taste for alcohol, and for that I am grateful.
What has happened to me is that my legal pad was sacrificed, for an IBM Selectric typewriter, in the early 1980s.
Then the personal computer advanced to the level of sophistication that corrections could be made without White-Out, or knowledge of Basic, or Fortran programming languages. I traded up for the glorified word processor. It was the headiest time in all my writing life, for I could slip my six pound, folded up electric typewriter thingy, then named a laptop, into a back pack or a briefcase, and take it to the woods. I could print, and reprint, or pass my words on a firm plastic card, called a “floppy disk.” I could use this machine to count the words of my manuscript, which I often did. I could use it for a calculator, or to draw a crude picture of the car I was selling, which I seldom did. It was the greatest writing machine I have ever known, and though my work from that time is pre-formed, and naive, I have never been more prolific.
Four desktops and three more laptops later (all of them Macs) I now own a glorious IMac desktop computer with a twenty-seven inch screen. It has a RAM more bounteous than the bosom of Perdu’s mistress, and a hard drive deeper than the storage basement of an ancient Scottish distillery. My machine is MIGHTY, and I have the tax write-offs to prove it.
Situated in my precious computer is an all together different sort of demon. Not he or she, not at all chemical or tasty or organic. World-wide, its web ensnares me each time I sit down to write. It is used against me by my worst enemies; they ply me and they spy upon me, they watch what I do, and read what I read, and offer me opinions with which I will surely agree, and then try to sell something to me that I hadn’t known existed. My nemesis informs me of every development around the world, whereas before I had to rise and walk to the kitchen, and grasp the newspaper, or wait for the new one to come the next morning. The fiend invites me to every conceivable bit of information; it is all-knowing, more seductive than any oracle, and more generous with its images. Her, his, its worst face is Facebook, but the New York Times, Instagram, X, and Substack are also insidious. Together, with every other of the billions of data sprinklers, they transform my full colored, hyper-”intelligent” word processor into something tastier than good scotch. All the prostitutes of the world are pictured here.
I daresay Perdu and Warmer had it easier. Sex and booze are distractions enough, but internet surfing is a far more addictive and prevalent habit. More creativity is squandered before the screen than is being spent, and writers and poets everywhere, film makers, musicians, theorists and thinkers are demoted to fascinated receiving sensors, drugging themselves with stories of hope, and films of skateboard tricks, and videos of their favorite song from 1972.
Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. A pad of paper, a typewriter, a word processor are all one sort of thing, and a computer in 2025 is something else entirely. Only the hard-disciplined will create anything of value now. The rest of us are consuming dumpsters of images and thoughts. We are making flaccid, useless, drunken fools of ourselves.