Reading Why We Write and seeing the world’s elite authors dissect the process that made them flourish forced me to confront a brutal truth: I am not a real writer.
All those decades of grinding out abysmal, unreadable novels weren’t acts of literary craftsmanship—they were performance art, a cosplay so convincing that even I fell for it. I played the role of “the unappreciated novelist” with such dazzling commitment that I actually believed it. And what was my proof of authenticity? Misery and failure.
Surely, I thought, only a true genius could endure decades of rejection, obscurity, and artistic suffering. Surely, my inability to produce a good novel was simply a sign that I was ahead of my time, too profound for this crass and unworthy world.
Turns out, I wasn’t an undiscovered genius—I was just really, really bad at writing novels.
Misery is a tricky con artist. It convinces you that suffering is the price of authenticity, that the deeper your despair, the more profound your genius. This is especially true for the unpublished writer, that tragic figure who has transformed rejection into a sacred ritual. He doesn’t just endure misery—he cultivates it, polishes it, wears it like a bespoke suit of existential agony. In his mind, every unopened response from a literary agent is further proof of his artistic martyrdom. He mistakes his failure for proof that he is part of some elite, misunderstood brotherhood, the kind of tortured souls who scowl in coffee shops and rage against the mediocrity of the world.
And therein lies the grand delusion: the belief that suffering is a substitute for talent, that rejection letters are secret messages from the universe confirming his genius. This is not art—it’s literary cosplay, complete with the requisite brooding and self-pity. The unpublished writer isn’t just chasing publication; he’s chasing the idea of being the tortured artist, as if melancholy alone could craft a masterpiece.
Which brings us to the next guiding principle for Manuscriptus Rex’s rehabilitation:
The belief that the more miserable you are, the more authentic you become. This dangerous belief has its origins in a popular song–none other than Steely Dan’s brooding anthem, “Deacon Blues.”
Like any good disciple, I’ve worshiped at this altar without even realizing it. I, too, have believed I’m the “expanding man”—growing wiser, deeper, more profound—while simultaneously wallowing in self-pity as a misunderstood loser. It’s a special kind of delusion, the spiritual equivalent of polishing a rusty trophy.
To fully grasp this faith, I point you to The Wall Street Journal article, “How Steely Dan Created ‘Deacon Blues’” by Marc Myers. There, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker peel back the curtain on the song’s narrator—a man who could’ve just as easily been named Sad Sack Jones. He’s a suburban daydreamer, stuck in a dull, mediocre life, fantasizing that he’s a hard-drinking, sax-blowing rebel with women at his feet.
Fagen admits the character was designed as a counterpoint to the unstoppable juggernaut of college football’s Crimson Tide—a gleaming machine of winners. In contrast, Deacon Blues is the anthem of the losers, crafted from a Malibu piano room with a sliver of Pacific Ocean peeking through the houses. Becker summed it up best: “Crimson Tide” dripped with grandiosity, so they invented “Deacon Blues” to glorify failure.
And did it work. “Deacon Blues” became the unofficial patron saint for every self-proclaimed misfit who saw their own authenticity in his despair. He was our tragic hero—uncompromising, self-actualized, and romantic in his suffering.
But then I read the article, and the spell broke. We were all suckered by a myth. Like the song’s narrator, we swallowed the fantasy of the “expanding man,” not realizing he was a con artist in his own mind. This isn’t a noble figure battling the world’s indifference—it’s a man marinating in his own mediocrity, dressed up in fantasies of scotch, saxophones, and self-destructive glamour.
Walter Becker wasn’t subtle: the protagonist in “Deacon Blues” is a triple-L loser—an L-L-L Loser. Not a man on the cusp of greatness, but a man clutching a broken dream, pacing through a broken life. Fagen sharpened the knife: this is the guy who wakes up at 31 in his parents’ house and decides he’s suddenly going to “strut his stuff.”
That sad, self-deluded basement dweller? That was the false prophet I’d built my personal religion around. A faith propped up by fantasies and self-sabotage.
The man who inspired me wasn’t a misunderstood genius. He was a cautionary tale. A false path paved with jazz, liquor, and the comforting hum of failure.
The slacker man-child isn’t just a tragic figure crooning in Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” No, he walks among us—lounges among us, really—and I knew one personally. His name was Michael Barley.
We met in the late 1980s at my apartment swimming pool while I was teaching college writing in Bakersfield, a place that practically invents new ways to suffocate ambition. A failed musician who had dabbled in a couple of garage bands, Michael was in his early thirties and bore such a stunning resemblance to Paul McCartney that he could’ve landed a cushy gig as a Vegas impersonator if only ambition hadn’t been a foreign concept to him. He had it all: the same nose, the same mouth, the same melancholy eyes, even the same feathered, shoulder-grazing hair McCartney rocked in the ’70s and ’80s. Sure, he was shorter, stockier, and his cheeks were pockmarked with acne scars, but from a distance—and, really, only from a distance—he was Paul’s sad-sack doppelgänger.
Michael leaned into this resemblance like a man squeezing the last drops from a dry sponge. At clubs, he’d loiter near the bar in a black blazer—his self-anointed “Beatles jacket”—wearing a slack-jawed half-smile, waiting for some starry-eyed woman to break the ice with, “Has anyone ever told you…?” His pickup strategy was less a plan and more a form of passive income. The women did all the work; he just had to stand there and exist. The hardest part of the night, I suspect, was pretending to be surprised when they made the McCartney connection for the hundredth time.
And then he disappeared. For six months, nothing.
When Michael resurfaced, he wasn’t Michael anymore. He was Julian French—an “English musician” with a secondhand accent and thirdhand dreams. He had fled to London, apparently thinking the UK was clamoring for chubby McCartney clones, and when that didn’t pan out (shocking, I know), he slunk back to Bakersfield to live in his parents’ trailer, which, in a tragicomic twist, was attached to an elementary school where his father worked as the janitor and moonlit as a locksmith.
But Michael—excuse me, Julian—was undeterred. He insisted I call him by his new British name, swore up and down that his accent was authentic, and we returned to our old haunts. Now, at the gym and in nightclubs, I watched him work the crowd with his faux-charm and faux-accent, slinging cars and cell phones like a man with no Plan B. His Beatles face was his business card, his only sales pitch. He lived off the oxygen of strangers’ admiration, basking in the glow of almost being someone important.
But here’s the truth: Michael—Julian—wasn’t hustling. He was coasting. His whole life was one long, lazy drift powered by the barest effort. He never married, never had a long-term relationship, never even pretended to have ambition. His greatest challenge was feigning humility when people gushed over his discount McCartney face.
Time, of course, is undefeated. By middle age, Julian’s face began to betray him. His ears and nose ballooned, his jowls sagged, and the resemblance to Paul McCartney evaporated. Without his one-note gimmick, the magic died. The women, the friends, the sales—they all disappeared. So, back to the trailer he went, tail tucked, learning the locksmith trade from his father, as if turning keys could unlock the door to whatever life he’d wasted.
And me? I didn’t judge him. I couldn’t.
Because deep down, I knew I was just as susceptible to the same delusion—the myth of the “Expanding Man.” That romantic fantasy of being a misunderstood artist, swaddled in self-pity, wandering through life with the illusion of authenticity. Like the anti-hero in “Deacon Blues,” Julian wasn’t building a life; he was building a narrative to justify his stagnation.
And wasn’t I doing the same? By the late ’90s, I was approaching 40, professionally afloat but personally shipwrecked—emotionally underdeveloped, the cracks in my personality widening into canyons. I, too, was toeing that fine line between winner and loser, haunted by the possibility that I’d wasted years buying into the same seductive lie that trapped Julian.
That’s the genius of the “Deacon Blue’s” Doctrine—a religion as potent as opium. It sanctifies self-pity, addiction, and delusions of grandeur, repackaging them into a noble code of suffering. It convinces you that stewing in your own misery is a virtue, that being a failure makes you authentic, and that the world just isn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate your “depth.”
But here’s the truth no one tells you: eventually, life hands you your ass on a stick. That’s when you find out which side of the line you’re really on.
