Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • The Book That Ruined My Life (and Made It Worth Living)

    The Book That Ruined My Life (and Made It Worth Living)

    Alice Flaherty opens The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain with a quote from Roland Barthes: “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

    Problem? That word hardly does justice to the affliction. A problem is misplacing your car keys or forgetting to pay the water bill. What I have is more like a life swallowed whole, a case study in obsession so severe it borders on the pathological. Writing isn’t just a habit; it’s an all-consuming parasite, a compulsion that, in a just world, would require a 12-step program and a sponsor who confiscates my pens at night.

    But since no one is shipping me off to a remote cabin with nothing but an axe and a survival manual, I’ll have to settle for less extreme interventions—like seeking solace in Flaherty’s musings on the so-called writing “problem.”

    As it turns out, my affliction has a clinical name. Flaherty informs me that neurologists call this compulsion hypergraphia—the unrelenting urge to write. In their view, I suffer from an overactive communication drive, a neurochemical malfunction that ensures my brain is forever churning out words, whether the world wants them or not.

    Yet Flaherty, a physician and a neuroscientist, doesn’t merely dissect the neurology; she also acknowledges the rapture, the ecstasy, the fever dream of writing. She describes the transformative power of literature, how great writers fall under its spell, ascending from the mundane to the sacred, riding some metaphorical magic carpet into the great beyond.

    For me, that moment of possession came courtesy of A Confederacy of Dunces. It wasn’t enough to read the book. I had to write one like it. The indignation, the hilarity, the grotesque majesty of Ignatius J. Reilly burrowed into my psyche like a virus, convincing me I had both a moral duty and the necessary delusions of grandeur to bestow a similarly deranged masterpiece upon humanity.

    And I wasn’t alone. Working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, my coworkers and I read Dunces aloud between customers, our laughter turning the store into a kind of literary revival tent. Curious shoppers asked what was so funny, we evangelized, they bought copies, and they’d return, eyes gleaming with gratitude. Ignatius, with his unhinged pontifications, made the world seem momentarily less grim. He proved that literature wasn’t just entertainment—it was an antidote to the slow suffocation of daily life.

    Before Dunces, I thought books were just stories. I didn’t realize they could act as battering rams against Plato’s cave, blasting apart the shadows and flooding the place with light.

    During my time at the wine store, we read voraciously: The Ginger Man, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moravia’s Contempt, Camus’ Notebooks, Borges’ labyrinthine tales. We never said it out loud, but we all understood—life was a dense fog of absurdity and despair, and books were our MREs, the intellectual rations that kept us alive for another day in the trenches.

    Books were our lifeline. They lifted our spirits, fortified our identities, and sharpened our minds like whetstones against the dull blade of existence. They turned us into a ragtag band of literary zealots, clutching our dog-eared pages like relics, singing the praises of Great Literature with the fervor of the Whos in Whoville—except instead of roasting beast, we feasted on Borges and Camus.

    Which brings us to Flaherty’s lament: the Internet is muscling books out of existence, and when books go, so does a vital piece of our humanity.

    What would my memories of Jackson’s be without the shared reverence for literature? It wasn’t just a passion; it was the glue that bound us to each other and to our customers. The conversations, the discoveries, the camaraderie—none of it could be replicated by an algorithm or a meme.

    How can I not think of this in the context of a country still staggering through its post-pandemic hangover of rage, paranoia, and despair? Where the love of books has been trampled beneath an endless scroll of digital sludge, and where human connection has been reduced to strangers launching spiteful grenades at each other across social media—those lawless arenas ruled by soulless tech lords, their pockets fat with the profits of our collective decline?

    Flaherty confesses that her need to dissect the spark of writing—the thing that makes it so irrepressibly human—was an uncontrollable urge, one that made her question whether she suffered from hypergraphia, postpartum mania, or some deeper compulsion to explore what she calls the “Kingdom of Sorrow” after the devastating loss of her prematurely born twin boys. Her search for the root of her writing obsession reminded me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet: the only writing worth doing is that which one cannot not do.

    Beyond hypergraphia—an affliction rare enough to keep it from becoming a trendy self-diagnosis—Flaherty also tackles the more mundane but far more common malady of writer’s block. She attributes it to mood disorders, procrastination, repressed anxieties, and perhaps a sprinkle of nihilism. I used to wrestle with writer’s block myself, particularly between short stories, back when I entertained the delusion that I might carve out a name for myself in literary fiction. But whenever I think of writer’s block, I think of the one person I’d most like to share a meal with: Fran Lebowitz.

    Lebowitz’s writer’s block has lasted for decades, so long, in fact, that she’s upgraded it to a “writer’s blockade.” If Blaise Pascal was an acid-tongued intellectual defending faith, Lebowitz is the sharp-tongued patron saint of the New York literati, delivering high-caliber cultural commentary with the precision of a diamond-tipped drill. That she doesn’t write is a cosmic joke. That people care she doesn’t write is part of her legend. That her off-the-cuff witticisms are more electrifying than most books in print makes her, without question, my literary idol.

    And yet, my devotion to Lebowitz only reveals the terminal nature of my writing affliction. If a genie granted me the chance to swap lives with her—to tour the world, bask in standing ovations, and deliver effortless, unfiltered cultural critique to sold-out crowds—but on the condition that I could never write another book, I would turn it down without hesitation. This refusal confirms the depths of my sickness. In this hypothetical scenario, books themselves are mere shadows compared to the brilliance of Lebowitz’s conversation. And yet, here I am, clinging to the shadows, convinced that somewhere in those pages, I will find the thing that makes existence bearable.

    Surely, no specialist can diagnose a disease like this, much less cure it.

    Reading Flaherty’s sharp and introspective book, I found myself circling a familiar question: is the urge to write both a pathology and a gift? This led me straight to The Savage God, A. Alvarez’s bleak yet compelling account of depression, suicide, and literature. Across history, writers afflicted by melancholy, madness, or sheer existential despair have been cast as tragic geniuses, indulgent sinners, or misunderstood romantics, depending on the prevailing religious and literary winds.

    Take Sylvia Plath, the confessional poet who sealed her fate at thirty, or John Kennedy Toole, the tortured author of A Confederacy of Dunces, who asphyxiated himself at thirty-one. Conventional wisdom holds that Toole’s despair stemmed from his inability to publish his novel, but Tom Bissell, in “The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces,” suggests a more tangled story—one of creeping paranoia and the pressures of academia, where Toole, at twenty-two, was the youngest professor in Hunter College’s history.

    Like his doomed creator, Ignatius J. Reilly is possessed by the need to write. His screeds, stitched together from the wisdom of Boethius, function less as arguments and more as the existential flailings of a man convinced that writing will bring him salvation. He writes because he must, the way a fish swims—to stay alive.

    Bissell’s most cutting insight isn’t about Toole’s life, but about his novel’s fundamental flaw: Dunces is riddled with indulgences—flabby with adverbs, allergic to narrative structure, and populated with characters so exaggerated they teeter on the edge of cartoonhood. He argues that Dunces is “a novel that might have been considerably more fun to write than it is to read.” This line stopped me cold.

    Why? Because Dunces was my Rosetta Stone, my gateway drug to the idea of becoming a comic novelist. And yet here was the brutal truth: the very book that set me on this path was a wreck of undisciplined excess. If Dunces ruined my life, it did so not because it failed, but because I absorbed its flaws as gospel. I inhaled its bloated exuberance, its unshackled absurdity, and made it my literary template.

    To undergo a religious experience from a flawed book is to risk a kind of artistic contamination—you don’t just inherit its brilliance, you inherit its sins. My writing compulsion is perhaps nothing more than Dunces’ worst tendencies metastasized in my brain.

    And so, as a recovering writing addict, I am forced to sit with this painful revelation and digest it like a bad meal—one that demands an industrial-strength antacid.

    At the beginning of this book, I claimed that A Confederacy of Dunces ruined my life. It was a ridiculous, melodramatic statement—fatuous, even. But after considering its messy influence over my work, I can’t help but think: there’s more truth in it than I’d like to admit.

  • Greatness Adjacent: My Life as a Literary Delusionist

    Greatness Adjacent: My Life as a Literary Delusionist

    After churning out one literary failure after another across five decades, I’m forced to ask myself: Is my perseverance a virtue, the kind of tenacity that gets celebrated in self-help books and motivational speeches? Or is it a pathological compulsion, a lifelong affliction keeping me from my real calling—whatever that may be? And if the notion of a “true calling” is just a fairy tale we tell ourselves to make existence more bearable, then perhaps I should at least free up some time to do the dishes.

    To grapple with these existential questions, I turned to Stephen Marche’s slim but merciless On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer. His thesis? Failure isn’t an anomaly in the writing life—it’s the default setting. The occasional success, when it happens, is a fluke, an accident, a glitch in the system. Failure, on the other hand, is the well-worn coat writers wrap themselves in, the skin they inhabit. And mind you, he’s not even talking about unpublished failures like myself—he’s extending this bleak diagnosis to the published ones, the so-called “real writers.”

    Marche backs up his grim pronouncement with numbers: Three hundred thousand books are published every year in the United States, and only a microscopic fraction make a dent in public consciousness. It doesn’t matter how famous you are—your book is still more likely to sink into obscurity than to make any meaningful impact. If you’re not sufficiently depressed yet, Marche then drags in examples from literary history: beloved writers who, despite their modern-day veneration, spent their lives begging for money, wallowing in debtors’ prisons, or drinking themselves into oblivion.

    Marche’s goal with this book—barely longer than a grocery receipt—is to strip writing of its romantic pretensions. Forget divine inspiration, artistic calling, or the fantasy of making it; writing is just stubbornness on repeat. But here’s where he really twists the knife: That whole narrative about failure eventually leading to success? Utter nonsense. “The internet loves this arc,” he writes, “low then high; first perseverance, then making it all; all struggle redeemed; the more struggle the more redemption. It’s pure bullshit.” The truth? Most writers fail, period. And even the rare successes are plagued by existential misery—forever misunderstood, chronically isolated, and shackled to a relentless hunger for recognition that can never truly be satisfied.

    Worse still, even the successful ones live in constant anxiety over whether they’ll ever be successful again. Literary triumphs don’t lead to security; they lead to paranoia. Marche describes the “psychology of failure” as an inescapable affliction that forces writers to cling to the smallest scraps of validation, inflating minor achievements to salve their chronic inadequacy. His case study? A professor who once had a letter published in The Times Literary Supplement and framed it on his wall like a Nobel Prize, using it as a talisman against irrelevance.

    Reading On Writing and Failure is like stepping into a room full of my own ghosts—writers far more accomplished than I am, yet still plagued by the same desperate need for affirmation, the same self-inflicted torment, the same inability to simply be content. It’s almost comforting, in a bleak sort of way. All those books about “maximizing happiness,” “daily habits of highly effective people,” and “radical gratitude” are useless against the unyielding hunger of the literary ego. If failure is the writer’s natural habitat, then perhaps the real victory isn’t in succeeding but in learning to fail with style.

    What struck me most about Marche’s book is just how desperate writers are for validation—so desperate, in fact, that we cling to the tiniest scraps of approval like a Jedi clutching a lightsaber in a dark alley. As proof that I was destined for literary greatness, I have spent the last three decades obsessively revisiting a single one-hour phone conversation I had in 1992 with the retired literary agent Reid Boates. At the time, I was hawking The Man Who Stopped Dating, a novel the publishing industry (correctly) determined should never see the light of day. But Boates, to my eternal delight, told me my synopsis knocked his socks off. That one phrase sent me soaring. If a mere synopsis could strip a seasoned agent of his footwear, surely I was on the brink of glory.

    Perhaps the memento I cherish even more is a letter I received from Samuel Wilson Fussell, author of Muscle: Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder. After devouring his memoir, I wrote him a fan letter detailing my own bodybuilding misadventures and name-dropping a few of the lunatics I recognized from his book. Fussell responded enthusiastically, telling me that he and his friends had read my letter out loud and collapsed to the floor, clutching their bellies in laughter. Over the years, I’ve sometimes wondered: Were they laughing with me… or at me? But in the moment, it didn’t matter. In my mind, Fussell’s response confirmed what I already knew—I was a man of literary consequence, a peer among published authors and esteemed literary agents, a rising star on the precipice of greatness.

    And here’s the kicker: I can still remember the pure, uncut euphoria I felt after talking to Reid Boates and receiving Fussell’s letter, and I am convinced—convinced—that the high would have been no greater had I seen my best-selling novel displayed in the window of a Manhattan bookstore.

    Marche is right. My neediness was so profound that I mistook these small flashes of recognition as irrefutable proof of my imminent rise to literary celebrity. But unlike Marche, I find no solace in knowing that I am not alone in this affliction. I can only speak for myself: I am a writing addict. My compulsion produces nothing of value, it embarrasses me, and I am in desperate need of rehabilitation. And so, in a cruel twist of irony, I write about my recovery from writing—even though my so-called recovery demands that I stop writing altogether. My misery, therefore, is guaranteed.

  • Writing in the Time of Deepfakes: One Professor’s Attempt to Stay Human

    Writing in the Time of Deepfakes: One Professor’s Attempt to Stay Human

    My colleagues in the English Department were just as rattled as I was by the AI invasion creeping into student assignments. So, a meeting was called—one of those “brown bag” sessions, which, despite being optional, had the gravitational pull of a freeway pile-up. The crisis of the hour? AI.

    Would these generative writing tools, adopted by the masses at breakneck speed, render us as obsolete as VHS repairmen? The room was packed with jittery, over-caffeinated professors, myself included, all bracing for the educational apocalypse. One by one, they hurled doomsday scenarios into the mix, each more dire than the last, until the collective existential dread became thick enough to spread on toast.

    First up: What do you do when a foreign language student submits an essay written in their native tongue, then let’s play translator? Is it cheating? Does the term “English Department” even make sense anymore when our Los Angeles campus sounds like a United Nations general assembly? Are we teaching “English,” or are we, more accurately, teaching “the writing process” to people of many languages with AI now tagging along as a co-author?

    Next came the AI Tsunami, a term we all seemed to embrace with a mix of dread and resignation. What do we do when we’ve reached the point that 90% of the essays we receive are peppered with AI speak so robotic it sounds like Siri decided to write a term paper? We were all skeptical about AI detectors—about as reliable as a fortune teller reading tea leaves. I shared my go-to strategy: Instead of accusing a student of cheating (because who has time for that drama?), I simply leave a comment, dripping with professional distaste: “Your essay reeks of AI-generated nonsense. I’m giving it a D because I cannot, in good conscience, grade this higher. If you’d like to rewrite it with actual human effort, be my guest.” The room nodded in approval.

    But here’s the thing: The real existential crisis hit when we realized that the hardworking, honest students are busting their butts for B’s, while the tech-savvy slackers are gaming the system, walking away with A’s by running their bland prose through the AI carwash. The room buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and surrender—because let’s be honest, at least the grammar and spelling errors are nearly extinct.

    As I walked out of that meeting, I had a new writing prompt simmering in my head for my students: “Write an argumentative essay exploring how AI platforms like ChatGPT will reshape education. Project how these technologies might be used in the future and consider the ethical lines that AI use blurs. Should we embrace AI as a tool, or do we need hard rules to curb its misuse? Address academic integrity, critical thinking, and whether AI widens or narrows the education gap.”

    When I got home that day, gripped by a rare and fleeting bout of efficiency, I crammed my car with a mountain of e-waste—prehistoric laptops, arthritic tablets, and cell phones so ancient they might as well have been carved from stone. Off to the City of Torrance E-Waste Drive I went, joining a procession of guilty consumers exorcising their technological demons, all of us making way for the next wave of AI-powered miracles. The line stretched endlessly, a funeral procession for our obsolescent gadgets, each of us unwitting foot soldiers in the ever-accelerating war of planned obsolescence.

    As I inched forward, I tuned into a podcast—Mark Cuban sparring with Bill Maher. Cuban, ever the capitalist prophet, was adamant: AI would never be regulated. It was America’s golden goose, the secret weapon for maintaining global dominance. And here I was, stuck in a serpentine line of believers, each of us dumping yesterday’s tech sins into a giant industrial dumpster, fueling the next cycle of the great AI arms race.

    I entertained the thought of tearing open my shirt to reveal a Captain America emblem, fully embracing the absurdity of it all. This wasn’t just teaching anymore—it was an uprising. If I was going to lead it, I’d need to be Moses descending from Mount Sinai, armed not with stone tablets but with AI Laws. Without them, I’d be no better than a fish flopping helplessly on the banks of a drying river. To enter this new era unprepared wasn’t just foolish—it was professional malpractice. My survival depended on understanding this beast before it devoured my profession.

    That’s when the writing demon slithered in, ever the opportunist.

    “These AI laws could be a book. Put you on the map, bro.”

    I rolled my eyes. “A book? Please. Ten thousand words isn’t a book. It’s a pamphlet.”

    “Loser,” the demon sneered.

    But I was older now, wiser. I had followed this demon down enough literary dead ends to know better. The premise was too flimsy. I wasn’t here to write another book—I was here to write a warning against writing books, especially in the AI age, where the pitfalls were deeper, crueler, and exponentially dumber.

    “I still won,” the demon cackled. “Because you’re writing a book about not writing a book. Which means… you’re writing a book.”

    I smirked. “It’s not a book. It’s The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict. So pack your bags and get the hell out.”

    ***

    My colleague on the technology and education committee asked me to give a presentation for FLEX day at the start of the Spring 2025 semester. Not because I was some revered elder statesman whose wisdom was indispensable in these chaotic times. No, the real reason was far less flattering: As an incurable Manuscriptus Rex, I had been flooding her inbox with my mini manifestos on teaching writing in the Age of AI, and saddling me with this Herculean task was her way of keeping me too busy to send any more. A strategic masterstroke, really.

    Knowing my audience would be my colleagues—seasoned professors, not wide-eyed students—cranked the pressure to unbearable levels. Teaching students is one thing. Professors? A whole different beast. They know every rhetorical trick in the book, can sniff out schtick from across campus, and have a near-religious disdain for self-evident pontification. If I was going to stand in front of them and talk about teaching writing in the AI Age, I had better bring something substantial—something useful—because the one thing worse than a bad presentation is a room full of academics who know it’s bad and won’t bother hiding their contempt.

    To make matters worse, this was FLEX day—the first day back from a long, blissful break. Professors don’t roll into FLEX day with enthusiasm. They arrive in one of two states: begrudging grumpiness or outright denial, as if by refusing to acknowledge the semester’s start, they could stave it off a little longer. The odds of winning over this audience were not just low; they were downright hostile.

    I felt wildly out of my depth. Who was I to deliver some grand pronouncement on “essential laws” for teaching in the AI Age when I was barely keeping my own head above water? I wasn’t some oracle of pedagogical wisdom—I was a mole burrowing blindly through the shifting academic terrain, hoping to sniff my way out of catastrophe.

    What saved me was my pride. I dove in, consumed every article, study, and think piece I could find, experimented with my own writing assignments, gathered feedback from students and colleagues, and rewrote my presentation so many times that it seeped into my subconscious. I’d wake up in the middle of the night, drool on my face, furious that I couldn’t remember the flawless elocution of my dream-state lecture.

    Google Slides became my operating table, and I was the desperate surgeon, deleting and rearranging slides with the urgency of someone trying to perform a last-minute heart transplant. To make things worse, unlike a stand-up comedian, I had no smaller venue to test my material before stepping onto what, in my fevered mind, felt like my Netflix Special: Teaching Writing in the AI Age—The Essential Guide.

    The stress was relentless. I woke up drenched in sweat, tormented by visions of failure—public humiliation so excruciating it belonged in a bad movie. But I kept going, revising, rewriting, refining.

    ***

    During the winter break as I prepared my AI presentation, I recall one surreal nightmare—a bureaucratic limbo masquerading as a college elective. The course had no purpose other than to grant students enough credits to graduate. No curriculum, no topics, no teaching—just endless hours of supervised inertia. My role? Clock in, clock out, and do absolutely nothing.

    The students were oddly cheerful, like campers at some low-budget retreat. They brought packed lunches, sprawled across desks, and killed time with card games and checkers. They socialized, laughed, and blissfully ignored the fact that this whole charade was a colossal waste of time. Meanwhile, I sat there, twitching with existential dread. The urge to teach something—anything—gnawed at my gut. But that was forbidden. I was there to babysit, not educate.

    The shame hung on me like wet clothes. I felt obsolete, like a relic from the days when education had meaning. The minutes dragged by like a DMV line, each one stretching into a slow, agonizing eternity. I wondered if this Kafkaesque hell was a punishment for still believing that teaching is more than glorified daycare.

    This dream echoes a fear many writing instructors share: irrelevance. Daniel Herman explores this anxiety in his essay, “The End of High-School English.” He laments how students have always found shortcuts to learning—CliffsNotes, YouTube summaries—but still had to confront the terror of a blank page. Now, with AI tools like ChatGPT, that gatekeeping moment is gone. Writing is no longer a “metric for intelligence” or a teachable skill, Herman claims.

    I agree to an extent. Yes, AI can generate competent writing faster than a student pulling an all-nighter. But let’s not pretend this is new. Even in pre-ChatGPT days, students outsourced essays to parents, tutors, and paid services. We were always grappling with academic honesty. What’s different now is the scale of disruption.

    Herman’s deeper question—just how necessary are writing instructors in the age of AI—is far more troubling. Can ChatGPT really replace us? Maybe it can teach grammar and structure well enough for mundane tasks. But writing instructors have a higher purpose: teaching students to recognize the difference between surface-level mediocrity and powerful, persuasive writing.

    Herman himself admits that ChatGPT produces essays that are “adequate” but superficial. Sure, it can churn out syntactically flawless drivel, but syntax isn’t everything. Writing that leaves a lasting impression—“Higher Writing”—is built on sharp thought, strong argumentation, and a dynamic authorial voice. Think Baldwin, Didion, or Nabokov. That’s the standard. I’d argue it’s our job to steer students away from lifeless, task-oriented prose and toward writing that resonates.

    Herman’s pessimism about students’ indifference to rhetorical nuance and literary flair is half-baked at best. Sure, dive too deep into the murky waters of Shakespearean arcana or Melville’s endless tangents, and you’ll bore them stiff—faster than an unpaid intern at a three-hour faculty meeting. But let’s get real. You didn’t go into teaching to serve as a human snooze button. You went into sales, whether you like it or not. And this brings us to the first principle of teaching in the AI Age: The Sales Principle. And what are you selling? Persona, ideas, and the antidote to chaos.

    First up: persona. It’s not just about writing—it’s about becoming. How do you craft an identity, project it with swagger, and use it to navigate life’s messiness? When students read Oscar Wilde, Frederick Douglass, or Octavia Butler, they don’t just see words on a page—they see mastery. A fully-realized persona commands attention with wit, irony, and rhetorical flair. Wilde nailed it when he said, “The first task in life is to assume a pose.” He wasn’t joking. That pose—your persona—grows stronger through mastery of language and argumentation. Once students catch a glimpse of that, they want it. They crave the power to command a room, not just survive it. And let’s be clear—ChatGPT isn’t in the persona business. That’s your turf.

    Next: ideas. You became a teacher because you believe in the transformative power of ideas. Great ideas don’t just fill word counts; they ignite brains and reshape worldviews. Over the years, students have thanked me for introducing them to concepts that stuck with them like intellectual tattoos. Take Bread and Circus—the idea that a tiny elite has always controlled the masses through cheap food and mindless entertainment. Students eat that up (pun intended). Or nihilism—the grim doctrine that nothing matters and we’re all here just killing time before we die. They’ll argue over that for hours. And Rousseau’s “noble savage” versus the myth of human hubris? They’ll debate whether we’re pure souls corrupted by society or doomed from birth by faulty wiring like it’s the Super Bowl of philosophy.

    ChatGPT doesn’t sell ideas. It regurgitates language like a well-trained parrot, but without the fire of intellectual curiosity. You, on the other hand, are in the idea business. If you’re not selling your students on the thrill of big ideas, you’re failing at your job.

    Finally: chaos. Most people live in a swirling mess of dysfunction and anxiety. You sell your students the tools to push back: discipline, routine, and what Cal Newport calls “deep work.” Writers like Newport, Oliver Burkeman, Phil Stutz, and Angela Duckworth offer blueprints for repelling chaos and replacing it with order. ChatGPT can’t teach students to prioritize, strategize, or persevere. That’s your domain.

    So keep honing your pitch. You’re selling something AI can’t: a powerful persona, the transformative power of ideas, and the tools to carve order from the chaos. ChatGPT can crunch words all it wants, but when it comes to shaping human beings, it’s just another cog. You? You’re the architect.

    Thinking about my sales pitch, I realize I  should be grateful—forty years of teaching college writing is no small privilege. After all, the very pillars that make the job meaningful—cultivating a strong persona, wrestling with enduring ideas, and imposing structure on chaos—are the same things I revere in great novels. The irony, of course, is that while I can teach these elements with ease, I’ve proven, time and again, to be utterly incapable of executing them in a novel of my own.

    Take persona: Nabokov’s Lolita is a master class in voice, its narrator so hypnotically deranged that we can’t look away. Enduring ideas? The Brothers Karamazov crams more existential dilemmas into its pages than both the Encyclopedia Britannica and Wikipedia combined. And the highest function of the novel—to wrestle chaos into coherence? All great fiction does this. A well-shaped novel tames the disarray of human experience, elevating it into something that feels sacred, untouchable.

    I should be grateful that I’ve spent four decades dissecting these elements in the classroom. But the writing demon lurking inside me has other plans. It insists that no real fulfillment is possible unless I bottle these features into a novel of my own. I push back. I tell the demon that some of history’s greatest minds didn’t waste their time with novels—Pascal confined his genius to aphorisms, Dante to poetry, Sophocles to tragic plays. Why, then, am I so obsessed with writing a novel? Perhaps because it is such a human offering, something that defies the deepfakes that inundate us.

  • Manuscriptus Rex: My Life as a Delusional Writing Addict

    Manuscriptus Rex: My Life as a Delusional Writing Addict

    I am a writing addict, at least in part, because I was indoctrinated by the twin cults of positive thinking and unrelenting perseverance. Never quit. Fight like hell. Success is inevitable if you just want it badly enough. And if it doesn’t come? Well, then you’re just not a real American.

    By the time I hit kindergarten, I was a true believer in the gospel of hard work. My worldview was a Frankenstein’s monster stitched together from children’s books, Charles Atlas bodybuilding ads wedged between comic book panels, and the propaganda of Captain Kangaroo. The formula was clear: effort equals triumph. I swallowed this doctrine whole, with the blind conviction of a kid who thought that eating all his vegetables would one day grant him the ability to fly.

    My optimism knew no bounds. It was untethered, soaring on the helium of pop-culture platitudes. The Little Engine That Could had me whispering “I think I can” like a monk chanting a holy incantation, convinced that sheer willpower and enough push-ups could bulldoze any obstacle. It didn’t occur to me that sometimes you think you can, but you absolutely cannot—and that no amount of stubborn persistence will turn a delusion into destiny.

    And then came the night of October 16, 1967—a date I would later remember as the day the universe gave me a cosmic swirly. Twelve days before my sixth birthday, I sat cross-legged in front of the TV, ready to revel in another episode of my favorite show, The Monkees. But what played out before me was a betrayal so deep it made Santa Claus feel like a Ponzi scheme.

    The episode, “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” featured my hero, Micky Dolenz, getting steamrolled by Bulk, a slab of human granite played by Mr. Universe himself, Dave Draper. Bulk wasn’t just big—he was the walking embodiment of every Charles Atlas ad come to life, the muscle-bound colossus I had been taught to revere. And right on cue, Brenda, the bikini-clad goddess of the beach, ditched Micky for Bulk without so much as a backward glance.

    This was a crisis of faith. How could the Monkees’ resident goofball, my spiritual avatar, lose to a guy who looked like he bench-pressed telephone poles for fun? Desperate to reclaim his dignity, Micky enrolled in Weaklings Anonymous, where he endured a training montage so ludicrous it made Rocky Balboa’s look like a casual Pilates class. He lifted weights the size of Buicks. He chugged fermented goat milk curd—a punishment so grotesque it could only be described as liquefied despair. He even sold his drum set. His very essence, his identity, was on the chopping block, all in pursuit of the almighty muscle.

    But the final twist? Brenda changed her mind. Just as Micky was emerging from his trial by whey protein, she dropped Bulk like a bad habit and swooned over a pencil-necked intellectual—a guy who looked like he could barely lift a library book, but there he was, nose buried in Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. Brenda, the same woman who had once melted for a walking slab of muscle, now found transcendence in a man contemplating lost time in a cork-lined room.

    It was then that the tectonic plates of my worldview shifted. Muscles weren’t the real source of power—books were. The secret wasn’t in deadlifts or protein shakes but in the right combination of words, strung together with enough elegance, insight, and authority to bend the universe to your will. The revelation landed with the force of a divine decree: if you wanted to shape the world, you didn’t need biceps—you needed prose.

    That night, my inner writing demon was born. It didn’t arrive with fanfare but stealthily, like an assassin—hijacking my ambitions, whispering to me that if I truly wanted to matter, I needed to trade in my devotion to squat racks for an obsession with syntax. The real alphas weren’t the ones flexing on the beach; they were the ones commanding attention through the written word, weaving sentences so powerful they made bikini-clad goddesses switch allegiances overnight.

    ***

    Picture a five-year-old boy glued to The Monkees, absorbing every absurd twist and turn, when suddenly—a revelation. Not from a heroic feat, a rock anthem, or a daring stunt, but from a pencil-necked geek buried in Remembrance of Things Past. The sheer audacity of it! This bookish weakling wasn’t just reading—he was brandishing literature like a weapon, as if cracking open Proust conferred an instant intellectual throne.

    That moment rewired my brain and began my transformation into Manuscriptus Rex. I wanted that kind of power. I wanted to be indelible, undeniable, and necessary—a man whose words carried weight, whose sentences etched themselves into the fabric of cultural consciousness. And when, at twenty-three, I read A Confederacy of Dunces, my mission crystallized. It wasn’t enough to be intelligent or insightful. No, I had to be a satirical novelist, an ambassador of caustic wit, a statesman of irony, and just self-deprecating enough that people wouldn’t hate me for it. I saw myself as a literary assassin, razor-sharp, unignorable, the kind of writer who forces the world to take notice.

    What the writing demon conveniently failed to mention—what it actively conspired to keep from me—is the vast and merciless chasm between the actual process of writing and the seductive fantasy of literary fame. To ignore this gulf is to court a special kind of stupidity, the kind that can waste an entire lifetime.

    Writing is a protracted act of self-torture, an endless loop of revision, self-doubt, and existential agony. J.P. Donleavy, author of The Ginger Man, had no idea what fresh hell awaited him as he wrestled his novel into something that met his own impossibly high standards. The process was not romantic; it was a war of attrition. Tedium, solitude, mental torment—these were his constant companions. But he and his book trudged forward, bloodied but breathing, as if the act of creation itself were some cursed form of survival.

    Meanwhile, I was high on a much glossier hallucination. I wasn’t going to be some embattled craftsman drowning in rewrites—I was going to be the genius, the confetti-drenched literary deity, basking in the ovation of an enraptured public. This was the demon’s cruel joke. The more reality smacked me in the face, the deeper I dug into the delusion. It wasn’t just self-deception; it was a pathology, a spiritual affliction.

    F. Scott Fitzgerald mapped this sickness in “Winter Dreams,” the tale of Dexter Green, a man who squanders his entire existence chasing Judy Jones, a capricious cipher onto which he projects all his longings. She isn’t a goddess—she’s an empty shell, a faithless mediocrity. No matter. His fantasy of perfection keeps him shackled to his own vanity, blind to the fact that life is passing him by.

    Dexter Green is a sucker. He doesn’t know how to live—only how to worship an illusion. He believes in moments frozen in time, in pristine, untouchable ideals, instead of the mess and movement of real life. And that, of course, is the problem. As therapist Phil Stutz puts it in Lessons for Living, “Our culture makes the destructive suggestion that we can perfect life and then get it to stand still… but real life is a process.” The ideal world is a snapshot—a slick, frozen fantasy that never existed. But still, these images are intoxicating. There’s no mess in them. And that’s precisely why they’re a trap.

    I cannot overstate the self-imposed destruction, loneliness, and sheer dumb misery that comes from being seduced by these moments frozen in time. To underscore my point, let’s rewind to 1982—a memory buried so deep in my psyche it took writing a book about the dangers of writing a book to dig it up.

    Back then, I was in college, drowning in an evening statistics course taught by a professor who looked like he’d been yanked straight from the pages of Dickens. His wild white hair defied gravity, his darting blue eyes seemed permanently lost in a private existential crisis, and his nose—aggressively red—suggested a longstanding love affair with whiskey. His aura? Pure, unfiltered eau de liquor. But he was kind, in the way that only deeply tragic people can be.

    The class itself was a slow-motion car crash. By week four—when the sadistic monster known as “standard deviation” reared its head—half of us were openly contemplating dropping out. Among my classmates was an elderly African American couple, dressed for church every single day, like they had wandered into the wrong building but decided to stay out of sheer politeness. The husband, Clarence, announced on day one that this was his seventh attempt at passing statistics. His wife, Dorothy, wasn’t even enrolled—she was there as his Bible-toting, knitting, long-suffering support system.

    Clarence’s approach to learning was… improvisational. While the rest of us shrank into our seats, he would leap up mid-lecture, cane clattering to the ground, and hobble to the chalkboard. Pointing an accusatory finger, he’d declare, “That’s not the answer I got! Let me show you!” Then he’d scrawl his “solution”—a series of indecipherable symbols that looked more like an alien distress signal than math.

    The professor, possibly fortified by whatever he had stashed in his desk, took these interruptions with monk-like patience. Dorothy, meanwhile, would bow her head and whisper prayers to “sweet Jesus,” presumably asking Him to either deliver her husband from his statistical afflictions or at least save her from public humiliation. The rest of us stifled laughter behind our hands. I sat there, torn between secondhand embarrassment and the creeping realization that this was pure comedy gold, something straight out of Saturday Night Live.

    After class, I’d drive home, pop in a cassette of The Psychedelic Furs or Echo and the Bunnymen, and drown in existential dread. I’d replay the scene over and over: Clarence’s quixotic battle with numbers, Dorothy’s quiet suffering. And then, like clockwork, I’d start crying. Not because I was flunking statistics or because my social life was a wasteland, but because that couple had shown me something profound: the power of love.

    Not the saccharine kind from movies, but the kind that trudges alongside you through seven failed attempts at statistics. The kind that withstands public embarrassment, dashed hopes, and sheer futility. The kind that endures.

    And here I was, wasting my life chasing a mirage. I was too caught up in my grand illusion of literary immortality. In my fevered fantasy, writing wasn’t grueling labor—it was divine alchemy. I would conjure brilliance with effortless flair, radiate tortured genius with an insouciant smirk. The world would see. The world would know. I would be whole. Complete. Immortal.

    But, of course, none of that happened.

    Decades passed. The literary world remained profoundly unaffected by my absence. The holy grail I had obsessed over wasn’t stolen—it simply… never materialized. And so, left standing in the wreckage of my own delusion, I did the only logical thing: I started writing a book about how foolish it is to write a book.

    And in that act of failure, I dug deep. In this memoir, which I am forbidden to write according to the terms of my sobriety, I excavated my past, peeling back layers of delusion, tracing the origins of this writing demon, this unquenchable hunger to be heard, to be distinct, to matter.

    Now, with some clarity (if not closure), a bigger question looms: What threatens me now?

    My war isn’t just with obscurity. It’s with a world surrendering to algorithms, generative AI, and the hollow dopamine drip of social media engagement. As a college writing professor who lives in the shadow of Manuscriptus Rex, I see my own relevance dangling by a thread, held hostage by an era where a bot can churn out a passable essay in seconds, where language itself is becoming disposable.

    So here we are. If I’m to survive, if my voice is to matter in this algorithmic wasteland, I must confront the existential question:

    How do you assert your presence in a world that is actively erasing the need for presence at all?

  • Zen and the Art of Overwriting

    Zen and the Art of Overwriting

    I’m fully aware of the irony—here I am, writing a book about why neither you nor I should write a book, all while suspecting that the very act of doing so is just another cruel trick played by the same deranged demon that has spent decades squandering my life. This demon doesn’t care about reason, practicality, or viable creative outlets. No, it thrives on delusion, whispering sweet nothings about literary immortality while leading me, yet again, down another fool’s errand disguised as a grand artistic mission.

    And sure, this book has a certain rigor, a dash of élan, even a seductive frisson that keeps me going—but haven’t I felt this before? Haven’t I mistaken obsession for genius, compulsion for destiny? As much as I’d like to believe this time is different, I can’t shake the creeping suspicion that I’m once again doing the demon’s bidding, marching in circles, convinced I’m breaking new ground.

    For all I know, the writing demon has plucked this topic—why you shouldn’t write a book—the literary equivalent of a half-eaten donut fished out of a dumpster, held it up like a divine relic, and declared, “Behold! The sacred sustenance for the book that will change the world!”

    I have to wonder why this demon remains so incalcitrant, why it refuses to release its grip on my psyche. And I suspect it was baked in during my formative years—the 1970s—when books weren’t just books; they were sacred texts, maps to enlightenment, portals to a better world. Back then, the right book could change everything. And no place embodied this belief more than the Co-Op grocery store in the San Francisco Bay Area, a socialist utopia disguised as a supermarket.

    Co-Op wasn’t just a store—it was a temple of countercultural righteousness, a fluorescent-lit commune where food was political, capitalism was the enemy, and books were the gospel of enlightenment and revolution. The employees, mostly bearded men in survivalist gear and women in flowing skirts, looked like they had just emerged from a transcendental meditation retreat in Big Sur. The store carried everything necessary for the well-intentioned ascetic: wheat germ, carob honey ice cream, tofu, Japanese yams, granola by the truckload. In one corner, you could buy an alfalfa sprout home-growing kit; in another, you could pick up a well-worn copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book section—small, but potent—was a who’s who of 70s countercultural essentials: The Secret Life of Plants, Chariots of the Gods, The Peter Principle, and the vegetarian bible of all vegetarian bibles, Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet.

    Shopping at Co-Op was an act of ideological purification. You weren’t just filling your pantry—you were waging war against The Man. Your grocery list was a manifesto. Brown rice instead of white? A stance against industrial food tyranny. Organic honey? A protest against corporate sugar slavery. Granola? The fuel of the revolution.

    But here’s the problem with turning your diet into a moral crusade—it comes with unintended consequences. Specifically, Granola Belly.

    The self-styled revolutionaries of the Co-Op era, those brave warriors against the forces of corporate food oppression, were inadvertently overeating their way to oblivion. Granola, wheat germ, and honey—pure, untainted by corporate greed—were caloric landmines. Yet they shoveled it down in righteous indignation, their burgeoning bellies a testament to their dietary zealotry. They waddled through the aisles, draped in North Face survival gear, looking ready to disappear into the Alaskan wilderness at any moment—if only they weren’t weighed down by their own moral superiority.

    Granola enthusiasts of the 70s were, in essence, a contradiction wrapped in a paradox and coated in raw honey. They raged against consumerism, yet consumed with a ferocity that would make a glutton blush. They preached self-discipline while mainlining carbohydrate ecstasy. They railed against corporate food tyranny, but the only thing expanding faster than their political righteousness was their waistlines.

    But Co-Op wasn’t just about the food—it was about the books. If the aisles were the body of the revolution, the books were its soul. They were blueprints for enlightenment, roadmaps to utopia. Talk to plants, replace animal protein with soy, meditate your way to cosmic awareness, learn the wisdom of the ancient aliens—everything you needed to build a new world was right there, tucked between the sacks of lentils and jars of miso paste.

    Which brings me back to my writing demon.

    Just as the Co-Op faithful believed books could transform civilization, I have spent my life believing the same about my own writing. The demon isn’t just some compulsive need to write—it’s the insatiable hunger for literary immortality, the delusion that one book—one perfectly crafted book—could define me, complete me, redeem me.

    It’s the same old obsession, wrapped in different packaging. My granola bowl is now a manuscript, my utopian blueprint now a satirical screed. I am still that wide-eyed Co-Op kid, convinced that books can reshape the world. But instead of reading the gospel, I am trying—foolishly, obsessively—to write it.

  • Applause Fatigue and Other Addictions

    Applause Fatigue and Other Addictions

    Once The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict hits bookstores, I’ll be contractually obligated to endure the book tour circuit. My ideal stop? The Dick Cavett Show. Never mind that it no longer exists—I refuse to let reality get in the way of my delusions of grandeur.

    There I’ll be, perched in a velvet chair, resplendent in a custom-tailored suit that exudes effortless literary gravitas. Cavett, ever the urbane host, will hold up my book and, in his signature droll tone, read my opening line: “I’ve been given the most self-defeating assignment imaginable: I must write a book about my recovery from compulsive writing so that the telling of my recovery violates the terms of my sobriety.”

    He’ll pause, shaking his head in slow-motion admiration, as if momentarily overwhelmed by the sheer genius of what he’s just read. Then, locking eyes with me, he’ll say, “Mr. McMahon, I can say with the utmost confidence that this is the most stunning opening line in the history of literature. I just can’t tell you what a privilege it is to have you here this evening.”

    Not missing a beat, I’ll flash a knowing smile and reply, “Why thank you, Mr. Cavett, it is a pleasure to be here.”

    And that, my friends, will be the apotheosis of my existence. At last, I will be whole, and I will never need to write anything again. 

    Of course, this will never happen. Cavett is 88 years old and long retired, and I have about as much chance of appearing on his show as I do of discovering a lost Hemingway manuscript in my garage. But what’s the point of being a recovering writing addict if I can’t indulge in the occasional vanity-fueled fever dream?

    There’s something to be said for vanity. It fuels ambition, sharpens our skills, and occasionally tricks us into believing we’re on the brink of something great. 

    But there’s also a fine line between vanity and outright intoxication—the kind of fevered delusion that warps reality and blinds us to our own foolish pursuits. That line, precarious and often ignored, is summed up with brutal clarity by Lester Freamon in The Wire when he delivers a verbal gut punch to Jimmy McNulty, a cop too drunk on his own self-importance to see the inevitable crash ahead. Lester doesn’t sugarcoat it: “A parade? A gold watch? A shining Jimmy-McNulty-day moment, when you bring in a case so sweet everybody gets together and says, ‘Aw, shit! He was right all along. Should’ve listened to that man.’ The job won’t save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole, it won’t fill your ass up.”

    Freamon’s words aren’t just for McNulty—they’re a public service announcement for every poor soul who believes that work, achievement, or applause will stitch together the holes in their existence. The writing demon, in particular, suffers from this same pathology. It whispers the same lie to every desperate novelist: that one book, the book, will be the great reckoning, the masterpiece that finally justifies the years of toil, obscurity, and rejection. That single, seismic literary triumph will be the author’s redemption arc, a vindication of every abandoned manuscript, every humiliating book-signing with three attendees (one of whom just needed to use the bathroom). The magnitude of this delusion is staggering.

    Of course, if we define religion as an artist imposing their will on the culture so forcefully that they alter it for generations, then yes—certain artists have effectively founded religions. Take Sly Stone, whose music from the early ’70s didn’t just change the sound of funk, soul, and rock—it rewired the DNA of modern music entirely. His influence still echoes today, pulsing through the beats and harmonies of artists who weren’t even alive when There’s a Riot Goin’ On dropped. But did this cultural omnipresence make Sly Stone whole? Far from it. As Questlove’s documentary Sly Lives! (aka The Burden of Black Genius) reveals, Sly Stone’s genius was too expansive and untamed to be neatly packaged. Yet, when the world saw him as a prophet, they tried to shackle him to their own expectations.

    Every political movement, every special interest group wanted to claim a piece of his vision, to make him their voice. But Sly wasn’t a mascot—he was an artist, too grand and complex to be hijacked by anyone’s agenda. The weight of that expectation crushed him.

    And that’s the thing about cultural prophets—whether they’re musicians, writers, or even McNulty-level workaholics. The world cheers them on when they’re building their temples, but those same temples can become cages. The parade never comes. The gold watch doesn’t arrive. The moment of glorious, all-encompassing validation? It’s a mirage. And the writing demon, ever hungry, never learns.

  • Holy Flex: When Arnold Was a God and Comedy Was Salvation

    Holy Flex: When Arnold Was a God and Comedy Was Salvation

    I spent five different decades writing novels not out of some noble artistic calling but out of sheer ego, self-aggrandizement, and the desperate hope of achieving wholeness. My faith wasn’t in literature—it was in the idea of a book, a symbol of permanence, a self-mythologizing gospel that would ensure my immortality. The writing demon that drove me wasn’t interested in craft or connection—it was fueled by compulsion, blind ambition, and existential terror. The kind of fear that makes a person scramble to ward off the specter of death by chasing a “Moment Fixed in Time”—to borrow therapist Phil Stutz’s phrase—is the kind of fear that guarantees bad writing. Too much desperation, not enough strategic detachment and self-critique.

    The ego has a singular focus: obsession at the expense of reason. This can’t be emphasized enough. Every self-improvement book touting the virtues of discipline, daily writing habits, and relentless perseverance should include a bold disclaimer: If you don’t regularly stop to scrutinize, revise, and—when necessary—abandon ship, you’re not being disciplined; you’re being delusional. But here’s the problem: the ego does not like reality checks. The moment it invests time and energy into a project, it refuses to let go, clinging to the wreckage with all the grace of a drowning man hugging an anvil.

    The most terrifying realization I’ve had in writing this book is that my ego craved something impossible—not just to create a book, but to create a book so earth-shattering it transcended art itself, becoming a kind of religion. A work so revelatory that it would stop people in their tracks and change their lives forever. And why did I believe such a thing was possible? Because I had seen it happen before.

    When I was fifteen, I was a competitive Olympic weightlifter, fully convinced of my athletic destiny. And then, in 1977, I saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, and my resolve crumbled faster than a poorly made protein bar. I had seen Arnold before, but this was different. Watching him on screen was like witnessing the second coming of Hercules—except with a better tan and an Austrian accent. And I wasn’t alone. Arnold wasn’t just a bodybuilder; he was a messiah, and we were his disciples.

    One afternoon, at Walt’s Gym, I worked out with a firefighter who had recently been a finalist in the Mr. California bodybuilding contest. He was a walking relic of 1970s masculinity—tall, tanned, blond, with a thick mustache that could have doubled as a broom, and black horn-rimmed glasses that made him look like a muscle-bound Clark Kent. After casually repping 300 pounds on the bench press, he stood up, flexed, and stared at himself in the mirror with the reverence of a man gazing upon a religious icon. “When I first saw Arnold,” he said, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. ‘There stands the Messiah,’ I said to myself. ‘There stands God Almighty come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    He wasn’t just speaking for himself—he was speaking for all of us. Arnold was our savior, our Pied Piper of Pecs, leading us to the promised land of biceps, triceps, and quads capable of crushing watermelons. Bodybuilding stopped being a hobby and became a movement, spreading through gyms like a protein-fueled religious awakening. The only cure? More reps, more protein shakes, more flexing, more relentless, never-ending pursuit of physical perfection.

    But then I went to college, and something shifted. I read Kafka, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov, studied classical piano, and discovered that intellectualism had its own form of flexing. Suddenly, it wasn’t enough to be physically powerful—one had to be smart, profound, an artist. And then came A Confederacy of Dunces, right when David Letterman was ushering irony into the cultural bloodstream, and I realized that the ultimate flex wasn’t just intelligence—it was humor.

    Reading Dunces was a punch to my pompous, self-regarding gut. I was Ignatius J. Reilly in my own way—socially awkward, excessively self-serious, painfully convinced of my own importance. And then, suddenly, a comic novel liberated me. It didn’t just make me laugh—it pointed me in a new direction. My life’s mission was clear: I would carry the torch of John Kennedy Toole, Philip Roth, David Letterman, and George Carlin, making people laugh their way to salvation.

    I would write comedy as a religious experience.

    It was a fool’s errand, and only someone with a pathological ego would embark on something so misguided.

  • A Confederacy of Dunces Ruined My Life

    A Confederacy of Dunces Ruined My Life

    If I was indeed possessed by a misguided writing demon in the mid-’80s—courtesy of reading A Confederacy of Dunces on repeat and subsequently squandering decades chasing a fool’s errand to capture some fraction of Toole’s novelistic splendor—then one could argue, with a certain tragic flair, that A Confederacy of Dunces ruined my life. Of course, that’s a spectacular oversimplification, but it has a nice literary ring to it, the kind of statement that cries out for a memoir deal. A perfect hook for a writing addict who, in theory, is supposed to have sworn off writing books but is secretly mainlining one on the side. It’s theatrical, adolescent, irresistibly neat. But let’s indulge the idea for a moment: a novel ruined a young man’s life. Decades later, the question remains—what do we do with this squandered life? Do we ignore it, dismiss it as a useless souvenir, or can something be salvaged from the wreckage?

    If there’s anything worth extracting from my own literary misadventures, it’s a warning to younger, equally deluded souls who might be possessed by the same demon of ambition. And make no mistake—ambition alone will not get you anywhere worth going. Yes, it will drag you through years of toil, ensure you hit your daily word count, and convince you that sheer willpower equals literary success. But ultimately, ambition alone will lead you into a tunnel with no exit. You’ll work hard—but not the right way. You’ll write, but without joy, without connection, without meaning. You will produce, but you will not matter.

    So instead of chasing the illusion of grandeur, you should be asking yourself four crucial questions. First, are you having fun with the creative process? If not, why are you doing this? The comedian Tiffany Haddish once said that Eddie Murphy pulled her aside and told her that if she wasn’t having fun on stage, the audience would sense it—and once she embraced that, her career took off. The same applies to writing. If your joy doesn’t translate onto the page, don’t expect anyone else to find it. Ambition will get words onto the page, but it won’t make them worth reading. Second, are you the only person in the world who could write this book? What unique gifts, obsessions, or quirks of personality make you the best person to write this, or are you forcing an idea simply because you think it’s marketable? If the demon of ambition is blinding you to your weaknesses, rest assured that agents and editors will see them clearly—and they will tell you to go home. The demon, of course, won’t listen. He never does.

    Third, why this book? Can you articulate—persuasively—why your book matters? Will it survive in an attention economy where a two-minute TikTok can go viral while your ten-year opus sells six copies? Do you know what your book is competing against? Can you justify its existence? 

    Imagine, for a moment, that you’ve never been published and have no social media following to catapult your debut novel into relevance. How exactly do you think this book is going to survive? Picture a horde of baby sea turtles, freshly hatched, flopping their way toward the ocean. Before they even touch the surf, they’re picked off by seagulls, crabs, raccoons, foxes, coyotes, frigatebirds, herons, egrets, snappers, jacks, barracudas, dolphins, sharks—the list of assassins is endless. The ones that do make it into open water face even worse odds. And yet, statistically, they still have a better shot at survival than your novel has at flourishing into a living, breathing piece of art that embeds itself in millions of imaginations.

    So before you get too deep into your literary fever dream, you need to ask yourself a sobering question: Is there enough juice for the squeeze? Best-selling author Sam Harris certainly asked himself that before shifting his focus away from books to his wildly successful Making Sense podcast. I remember him breaking it down with ruthless efficiency: writing a book can take five grueling years—writing, editing, publishing, book tours—and even after all that, sales might not justify the effort. Meanwhile, he can record a podcast in a few hours and reach millions instantly. No torturous rewrites, no endless editing loops, no begging the world to care.

    And that’s a best-selling author speaking. You’re not one. You’re a nobody with a dream, convinced that your fragile little hatchling of a book will somehow defy the gauntlet and fulfill your delusions of literary immortality. You have lost your mind. More than likely, the book won’t be read. Which brings us to your final, painful reckoning.

    Will your book actually connect with anyone? Or will it be yet another tree falling in the forest with no one around to hear it? Failure to connect isn’t bad luck—it’s bad writing. If your prose exists in a silo of delirious echoes, unread and unloved, then it isn’t literature—it’s literary vapor, ghostly and weightless, doomed to drift into oblivion. And here’s the cruelest truth of all: your writing demon won’t make this distinction. He’ll tell you that writing is writing, that piling up pages is progress, that if you just keep going, success is inevitable.

    It isn’t.

    Had I asked myself these questions before chasing my writing demon down every blind alley, perhaps I would have written with purpose instead of compulsion. But I was too busy obeying the demon to pause and think. If you’re an aspiring writer, don’t make the same mistake. Ambition can drive you forward, but only if it’s tethered to something real—joy, originality, necessity, and connection. Otherwise, you’re just manufacturing words, filling pages with the sound and the fury, signifying nothing.

  • The Urge to Write Is the Urge to Dominate

    The Urge to Write Is the Urge to Dominate

    Looking back, I’m torn between admiring my audacity and filing a restraining order against my judgment. How, exactly, did I manage to pin so much hope on novels that, despite their half-decent opening chapters, quickly spiraled into the literary equivalent of a stalled elevator—going nowhere and deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved?

    In contrast, my short essays were clearly sharper, more potent—but I refused to let reality intrude on my mission. No, I was going to write the comic novel.

    This compulsion was never about art. It was about pain—the kind so deep that Jonathan Franzen famously coined Ache to describe the existential condition of adulthood: the rude awakening that we are not, in fact, the center of the universe and that our desires will always outrun our ability to satisfy them.

    Manuscriptus Rex feels this Ache acutely and has embarked on a fool’s errand to silence it with literary fame. But why this brand of glory? Why not build a real estate empire, become a movie heartthrob, or invent the perfect bed that guarantees twelve uninterrupted hours of blissful, coma-grade sleep? Because Manuscriptus Rex is too much of a narcissist for mere wealth, beauty, or utility. Writing a book—one that matters—offers something more intoxicating: the power to hijack people’s brains.

    And that’s what you really crave—not just admiration, but full cognitive occupation. You want your words burrowed into the minds of millions, your dream world dictating their thoughts. Your need for validation is so bottomless that only mass literary infiltration will mollify you. That this ambition is wildly improbable, driven by pathology, and guaranteed to bring more suffering than satisfaction? Irrelevant. The mission is all that matters. And the mission is literary dominance.

    My wife once observed that men, with their colossal egos, often wake up with sudden revelations, epiphanies so grand they feel compelled to start religions. She’s not wrong. The novelist, the polemicist—what are they really doing but trying to ignite a movement, disrupt the world, and bask in the glow of their own importance? Their gospel isn’t about some grand truth—it’s about them, standing center stage, ablaze with self-appointed brilliance.

    Religion is the ultimate expression of literary dominance. I think of the Apostle Paul himself, scribbling his epistles in a manic frenzy, waging rhetorical war in the bustling marketplace of spiritual ideas, demolishing rival orators, and confessing his own unhinged nature in Romans—his theological magnum opus, a mini-Bible inside the Bible. Only eighty pages in total. That was the sum of his obsessive writing, and yet his literary dominance is established. He’s been the talk of the town for over two thousand years. Whether they like him or not, people still want to hear what he has to say about the human condition. 

    This was the novelist’s role five decades ago, back when novelists were secular prophets, summoned to The Dick Cavett Show to pontificate on the issues of the day—because, once upon a time, their opinions mattered.

    And that’s what I loved about Cavett. Even as a ten-year-old, I grasped the show’s implicit assumption: the intellectual life was its own parallel universe, just as electrifying as Paul’s eschatological one—except with better punchlines.

    Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of my literary delusion, setting the stage for a demon that would fully blossom into madness a decade later when I read A Confederacy of Dunces—then Portnoy’s Complaint and The Ginger Man. If I could write something as riotously funny as those masterpieces, I wouldn’t just be funny—I’d be brilliant, important, part of the conversation. My name would be etched into the pantheon of literary wit, my shattered self-esteem miraculously restored. I would find completion.

    And lest you think this was mere posturing, let me be clear: my aspirations weren’t some carefully curated cool pose. I was, without question, funny—not in the “guy who recycles late-night monologue jokes” way, but in the gimlet-eyed, take-no-prisoners way that slices through the world’s absurdities like a scalpel. I was an ally of Kafka, wielding my literary axe to shatter the frozen ocean of human folly. My quest was real, my voice authentic, my success inevitable.

    Except, of course, it wasn’t.

    I failed. Repeatedly. The novels kept coming, and to my credit, they got better—sharper, wittier, good enough to attract literary agents, which was dangerous because it fed the delusion. This wasn’t a phase. It became a lifelong affliction. In my twenties, thirties, forties, fifties—hell, even my sixties—the novels kept churning, like those chocolates on the conveyor belt in I Love Lucy, coming faster than I could process, devour, or even appreciate.

    The demon was still in business.

    And how good were these books as the result of all my literary effort? “Just okay.” Which, in an attention economy, is about as useful as a dial-up modem in the age of fiber optics. “Just okay” might sell 300 copies—a number so pitiful that the editor who championed your book could lose their job over it.

    But sure, let’s keep the dream alive.

    Having failed to write my grand, world-shaking book and having let A Confederacy of Dunces derail my life, I am left standing amid the wreckage of my literary ambitions, clutching at whatever scraps of wisdom I can salvage. Something must be redeemed, after all. And what better way to salvage a wreck than by turning it into yet another book? The Confessions of a Recovering Writing Addict.

    But of course, that’s just the demon running its mouth again. The same devious little imp that once whispered sweet nothings about my inevitable literary greatness now insists that my failure is my brand, my gimmick, my golden ticket to the book that will finally rock the world.

    And what is this seismic masterpiece, this literary game-changer? Oh, just a book about aspiring writers so starved for attention that they write not as artists, but as junkies, chasing the next fix of validation. A cautionary tale wrapped in a confession, packaged as a sales pitch—because irony, it seems, is the one thing I have mastered.

    Writing with an ego hellbent on domination, we writing junkies reveal an uncomfortable truth—we all have a little Paul in us. We insist we write out of sincerity, fueled by a pure, burning need to communicate something true. But let’s not kid ourselves. Deep down, what we really crave isn’t truth—it’s importance. Recognition. Veneration. And, above all, relevance.

    We aren’t just stringing words together; we’re mounting a last-ditch offensive against oblivion, hammering out prose as if sheer verbosity might hold off the reaper a little longer.

    In the end, we place our hope in something as fragile as a glue-and-paper book in the digital age, believing—despite all evidence to the contrary—that it will elevate us, transcend us, and make us immortal.

  • The Great American Fashion Mistake

    The Great American Fashion Mistake

    The breeding ground for writing my many unreadable novels was the California desert, where my catastrophic literary judgment was rivaled only by my crimes against fashion. Allow me to paint you a picture of excess so garish that even Liberace would have staged an intervention.

    There I was—a freshly minted full-time professor in a sun-scorched town, drunk on a heady cocktail of naïveté, unresolved teenage angst, and the disastrous influence of International Male and Urban Gear catalogs. To my 27-year-old mind, these catalogs weren’t mere collections of overpriced polyester; they were sacred texts, blueprints for the modern alpha male—or at least a man who looked like he managed a European nightclub and occasionally fled the country under mysterious circumstances.

    But even my delusions had their breaking point. The pinnacle of my sartorial madness arrived in one final, glorious misstep—an outfit so egregious that it shattered the patience of my English Department Chair, a man whose tolerance, until that moment, had been almost biblical.

    At first, my colleagues generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance” from a Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrive three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells? 

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    Word of my fashion blunder made it to Moses Okoro, our distinguished Chair, a no-nonsense scholar in his fifties who had traded the vibrant streets of Lagos for the dull sands of this backwater town. Moses prided himself on being a man of deep thought, the kind who savored life’s complexities and relished philosophical debates like a connoisseur of fine wine. In the rarefied circles he once frequented, he had been celebrated for his intellectual rigor, a reputation largely sustained by an essay he penned two decades earlier on a celebrated Nigerian novelist. The essay, which dissected themes of post-colonial identity with surgical precision, had been lauded as groundbreaking in its time, securing Moses’s place as a respected voice in academic and literary discussions. But the years had passed, and that once-prominent essay had become a relic—he still leaned on it like a crutch, bringing it up whenever the opportunity presented itself, hoping to rekindle the admiration it had once inspired. 

    By the time I got the midday summons to his office, I knew I was about to get the fashion red card. I walked in, and there was Moses—feet ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering monstrosity draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.” 

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the small-town way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

    ***

    I had no clue back then, but my tragic fashion choices as a young professor in the desert in the early ‘90s were the desperate impulses of a kid who’d missed his shot at feeling special and was clawing to reclaim a glory he’d fumbled away when he was a teenage bodybuilder. 

    As a recovering writing addict, I feel duty-bound to interrogate the roots of my affliction. I suspect my obsession with literary fame was a desperate attempt to fill the void left by a glory that always felt just out of reach. Surely, if I could be famous, I’d finally be whole. The restless gnawing inside me would stop.

    This fantasy—this belief that success would grant me some grand, existential healing—must be the defining delusion of Manuscriptus Rex, the pitiful beast I have become. Like Linus in the pumpkin patch, I waited, not for the Great Pumpkin, but for the Great American Novel to descend and bless me with meaning.

    I convinced myself that basking in literary fame would erase the sting of a squandered youth, a time when I was too clueless, too underdeveloped, too timid to seize life with the lust and gusto it demanded. That lost youth left a wound, and Manuscriptus Rex clung to the belief that writing—great writing—would be the magic salve. If I couldn’t reclaim my past, I could at least immortalize myself on the page.

    It was a beautiful, seductive lie.

    Flashback to 1981: I was working a job loading parcels at UPS in Oakland, on a low-carb diet that shredded me down to the bone. I was this close to contending for the Mr. Teenage San Francisco title. With a perfectly bronzed 180-pound frame, my clothes started hanging off me like a bad costume. That meant one thing: new wardrobe. Enter a fitting room at a Pleasanton mall, where I was trying on pants behind gauzy curtains when I overheard two attractive young women debating who should ask me out. Their voices escalated, full of hunger and competition, as if I was the last slice of pizza at a frat party. I pictured them throwing down on the store carpet, pulling hair and clawing at each other’s throats, all for the privilege of walking out with the human trophy that was me.

    It was the golden moment I’d always dreamed of, my chance to bask in the attention and seize my shot at feeling like a demigod. So, what did I do? I froze like a deer in headlights, slapping on a look of such exaggerated indifference it was like laying out a welcome mat that said “Stay Away.” They took one look at my aloof facade and staggered off, probably mumbling about how stuck-up I seemed. But here’s the truth: I wasn’t a man full of myself—I was a coward hiding behind muscle armor.

    For a short, fleeting period—from my mid-teens to early twenties—I was the kind of guy who could’ve sent Cosmopolitan’s “Bachelor of the Month” candidates sobbing into their pillows. But my personality was still crawling in the shallow end of the pool while my body was busy competing for gold medals. I had sculpted a physique that would make Greek gods nod in approval, but socially? I was like a houseplant that wilts if you talk too loudly. Gorgeous women practically threw themselves at me, and I responded with the warmth and enthusiasm of a mannequin. Behind all that bronzed, chiseled muscle was a scared little boy trapped in a fortress of self-doubt.

    The frustration that consumed me as I stood there, watching those two retail employees squabble over me, was the same frustration that hit me like a truck a week later at the contest. I entered Mr. Teenage San Francisco as a “natural”—which is just a polite way of saying I didn’t juice and therefore shrank down to a point where I looked more like a wiry special-ops recruit than a bodybuilder. At six feet and 180 pounds, I had the lean, aesthetic “Frank Zane Look” just well enough to snag runner-up. But the guy who beat me was a golden-haired meathead pumped full of steroids and Medjool dates, which gave him muscles that looked inflated by a bike pump and a gut that seemed ready to explode from cramping. 

    The day after the contest, I was laid out at home, basking in the almost-victory and recovering from the Herculean effort of flexing through a nightmare lineup. Then the calls started pouring in. Strangers who’d gotten my number from the contest registry wanted me to model for their sketchy fitness magazines. Some sounded more like basement-dwelling creeps than actual photographers. I turned them down with all the enthusiasm of a nightclub bouncer dealing with fake IDs. But then one call stood out—a woman claiming to be an art student from UCSF, asking me to pose for her portfolio. Tempting, sure, but I politely declined. 

    Why? The reasons were as predictable as they were pathetic. First, I was drained from cutting down to 180 pounds and just wanted to curl up in a hole. Second, I was lazy. The thought of expending energy to meet a stranger sounded about as fun as a root canal. But the main reason? I was a professional neurotic, a certified worrywart who avoided human interaction like it was an airborne disease. The idea of meeting this mysterious woman in a San Francisco coffee shop filled me with a dread so profound that I felt like a cat eyeing a room full of rocking chairs.

    By turning down those offers, I was throwing away the golden advice handed down in Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder. According to the Gospel of Arnold, I should’ve been leveraging my physique into acting gigs, business ventures, and political fame. But here’s the thing—I didn’t have Arnold’s larger-than-life charisma, his zest for adventure, or his overpowering drive to turn everything into a money-making opportunity. While Arnold was out charming Hollywood and turning flexing into fortune, I was content to crawl under a rock and avoid all forms of adventure and new connections. If there had been a way to market my body without ever leaving my room, I would’ve been the undisputed king of the fitness world.

    Instead, I took a different path—one paved with introversion and leading straight to a career as a college writing instructor in a backwater desert town. By the time I hit twenty-seven, I was finally catching up socially—just in time to fantasize about all the chances I’d blown. Strutting around the desert in flamboyant outfits like a peacock trying to reclaim lost glory, I was determined to make up for all the opportunities I’d wasted, finally embracing the ridiculousness of who I’d become.