Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Art of Humble Submission

    The Art of Humble Submission

    When you’re a writer, you draft, revise, despair, polish again, and then perform an ancient ritual of humility: you submit. Whether your offering goes to a magazine, an agent, or a publisher, the act is the same—a small bow before the gatekeepers. In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche seizes on this word—submission—as the perfect metaphor for the writer’s life: a posture equal parts hope and humiliation. “Writers live in a state of submission,” he observes. “Submission means rejection. Rejection is the condition of the practice of submission, which is the practice of writing.” And digital culture has intensified the ordeal. With online forms and instant attachments, rejection arrives at industrial scale. A determined writer can now collect hundreds of dismissals a week. Ninety-nine percent will never land a deal, and those who do may make less than the barista who hands them their morning latte.

    So what exactly is a writer submitting to? Not just editors. Not merely algorithms. A writer submits to the dream that the private mind might earn a public life—that interiority, sculpted into sentences, might sustain you financially and spiritually. You write in the hope that your imagined worlds might become someone else’s emotional reality, that your pages might matter to strangers.

    Marche’s advice is blunt: persistence is not optional. Writing success is not a meritocracy but a lottery with a talent filter. The more tickets you buy, the better your odds. “Persistence is the siege you lay on fortune,” he writes—a relentless knocking at a door that may never open, but sometimes does for reasons no one fully understands.

    And this capriciousness is not unique to writers. Marche notes that actors secure roles only 7 percent of the time because of talent; the rest depends on age, look, market trends, and even “box office value in China.” Painters, dancers, musicians, designers—all create under the same unstable sky. To make art is to gamble against indifference. Persistence isn’t noble; it’s necessary, because fate occasionally rewards the stubborn.

  • From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    From the Literary Golden Age to Algorithmic Wasteland

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche dismantles the fantasy that writers can transform themselves into entrepreneurs and save the craft through hustle. He has watched brilliant minds waste their genius on branding decks and content calendars, convinced that a marketing plan can substitute for a literary life. Everyone, he notes, now arrives armed with a social-media strategy; even legacy writers chase streaming deals. Yet the “digital ad revenue” that was supposed to be salvation barely buys groceries. This notion of self-promotion on a social media platform may work for a handful, but for most of us, this plan is all chicanery. Most  writers would earn more working part-time at Starbucks than posting their book excerpts on Instagram. 

    And still writers persist, driven by an ancient question: How do you make a living by thinking? In a world where platforms shift beneath your feet, young writers must reinvent themselves with exhausting frequency—editing careers as relentlessly as they edit sentences.

    Marche reminds us that postwar America once had sturdy literary institutions: robust magazines, influential newspapers, university presses, publishers willing to cultivate voices rather than chase viral heat. That era nurtured Boomer writers who could achieve cultural celebrity and economic stability. But those scaffolds have collapsed. We live among the ruins of that golden age. Institutions fray, readership declines, and the professional writer now sits on the same endangered-species list as the white rhinoceros.

    With writing now fully digital, the terrain resembles a lawless frontier. The deep, contemplative reading that literature requires has been replaced by rapid-fire commentary. Instead of essays and books, the culture rewards short-form skirmishes and performative certainty. As Marche put it to Sam Harris, America’s most profitable export is now “the peddling of moral outrage.” Rage scales. Nuance suffocates.

    This erosion of the writing life carries consequences beyond the page. When outrage becomes the ambient air, critical thinking dries up, public trust decays, and democratic habits atrophy. To lose serious writing isn’t merely to lose an art; it is to endanger the civic imagination that sustains a republic. The crisis of literature is not an aesthetic inconvenience—it is a political warning flare.

  • The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    The Homelessness of the Modern Writer

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche shows zero patience for the self-help fable that “failure leads to success.” The myth says: suffer now, triumph later; keep grinding and the universe will eventually reward you. Marche calls this narrative pure nonsense. His friendships with writers who have made millions and basked in praise only confirm the truth: acclaim doesn’t cure insecurity, fame doesn’t dissolve alienation, and even celebrated authors carry the bruises of obscurity under their tuxedos. They remain misunderstood, jealous, anxious, and haunted by irrelevance. Success doesn’t banish failure—it merely decorates it. Celebrity is not salvation; it is a spotlight that makes the neediness easier to see.

    Marche believes the situation is worsening. We live, he argues, in a cultural moment where institutions are collapsing and traditional literary prestige has been replaced by digital noise. Novelists chase television deals. Journalists pivot into professional outrage machines. The literary public square has splintered into algorithmic micro-audiences. And in this fractured landscape, the writer’s deepest fear is not rejection—it’s evaporation. Not being debated, but forgotten.

    Even the “independent writer revolution” gets little mercy from Marche. Platforms come and go, each proclaimed the future of writing, each eventually forgotten. “Every few years there’s some new great hope—right now it’s Substack,” he writes. Then comes the hammer: “Substack will die or peter out just like the rest.” The point is not cynicism for sport; it is a reminder that technology cannot build the cathedral that literary culture once occupied. The medium keeps changing; the instability remains constant.

    As a reader drowning in subscriptions, I find his skepticism refreshing. I can’t reasonably pay $60 to $120 a year for dozens of Substack writers I admire. If I did, I’d be shelling out ten grand annually just to keep up. That is not a sustainable model for anyone but tech-company accountants. So yes, blogs collapsed, digital magazines buckled, and Substack may be next. Writers are still wandering, looking for a home that isn’t a platform built on a countdown timer. We are living in a literary diaspora—talent everywhere, shelter nowhere.

  • Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    Why Publish a Novel When You Can Rant Weekly?

    In On Writing and Failure, Stephen Marche reminds us that roughly 300,000 books appear in the United States every year, and only a few hundred can reasonably be called creative or financial successes. Most books by “successful” authors flop. Most writers are failures. And then there is the vast shadow population: the would-be writers who never finish a book, yet earnestly introduce themselves at parties as working on one. If they are legion, it’s because failure in writing isn’t an exception — it’s the baseline condition.

    Lately I hear a parallel refrain: “Everyone has a podcast.” The cultural fantasy of “being a writer” — once the preferred badge of intelligence and depth — is being shoved aside by the fantasy of being a podcaster, which is the new intellectual flex. Instead of the solitary novelist hunched over drafts, we get booming-voiced men with battle-hardened beards and canned energy drinks, thumping their thighs as they dismantle “the mainstream narrative.” And if that theatrics doesn’t suit your tastes, you can choose from endless niches: politics, wellness sermons, nostalgia rants, paranormal confessionals, or gentle whisper-therapy for anxious brains. The point isn’t content; the point is talking.

    Marche dissects the layers of literary failure, but he forces us to consider a stranger threat: failure may be vanishing simply because writing itself may be vanishing as an arena where one can fail. You can’t fail at spearing a sabre-toothed tiger in 2025; the task no longer exists. Likewise, journaling and “mindfulness notes” have replaced drafts and essays, but only matter once they’re converted into soundbites on TikTok or a monologue in a podcast episode.

    If writing once demanded endurance, rejection slips, and a skin thin enough to bruise yet thick enough to keep showing up, now the danger is different: a discipline can’t hurt you once it stops being culturally real. Increasingly, I wonder whether writing, as a vocation and identity, even exists in the same form it did twenty years ago — and if it doesn’t, what exactly does it mean to “fail” at it anymore?

  • Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Stephen Marche, veteran journalist and author, says the secret to becoming a writer isn’t inspiration or networking or the right MFA program. It’s endurance. Grim, stubborn, occasionally delusional endurance. His slim volume On Writing and Failure makes one argument with relentless clarity: if you want to write, prepare to suffer. Forget talk of “flourishing,” “mentorship,” and “encouragement.” Writing isn’t a wellness retreat. It’s a trench.

    Marche opens with the perennial questions writers whisper to each other after one rejection too many: Does this get easier? Do you grow thicker skin? The response he quotes from Philip Roth is a gut punch: “Your skin just grows thinner and thinner. In the end, they can hold you up to the light and see right through you.” In other words, the longer you write, the more naked you become. Vulnerability isn’t a side effect of the craft; it is the craft.

    Marche’s bleak comfort is that every writer feeds off failure. Success is accidental—a borrowed tuxedo, worn briefly. Failure is the body underneath. Even the authors smiling from dust jackets look like rescued hostages, blinking at daylight before returning to the bunker of their desks to keep going. They don’t do it because it’s glamorous. They do it because not writing would be worse.

    I understand the pathology. After decades of cranking out what I believed were novels, I finally admitted I couldn’t write one—not at the level I demanded, not at the level worth inflicting on readers. That revelation didn’t spare me failure; it merely revealed strata of it. There’s the failure of rejection, the failure of the work, and the quiet, private failure of recognizing your own limits. Perhaps I could’ve spared myself time and spared literary agents grief. But failure has its curriculum, and I attended every class.

    Marche’s book is a sober reminder that writing is less a triumphal march than a pilgrimage carried out on blistered feet. Failure isn’t a detour; it’s the terrain. Rock layers of it: topsoil doubt, subsoil rejection, shale humiliation, limestone stubbornness. Dig deeper and you hit coal—compressed ambition under impossible pressure, black and combustible.

    Failure isn’t fashionable grit or a TED Talk slogan. When executives brag about “learning from failure,” they’re dilettantes. Writers are the professionals of defeat. To be a poet today is to live like a post-apocalyptic monk, scribbling in candlelight, shadow thrown against the cave wall, not out of masochism but because there’s no other way to stay human. The world may not care, but the work insists.

  • My White Stallion from Hell

    My White Stallion from Hell

    Last night I dreamed someone repossessed my sensible car and swapped it for a giant white truck — part Tonka toy, part overcaffeinated stallion. This thing didn’t drive so much as impose its will, snorting diesel and self-actualization. It anticipated my needs, turned on by itself, and barreled toward destinations like it had read my calendar and resented my free will. Worst of all, it absorbed my own impulses, amplifying my compulsive streak like a steroidal spirit animal with road rage.

    It respected nothing. Barriers, fences, construction zones — all mere suggestions. The truck treated civic infrastructure like bubble wrap: there to be popped for pleasure.

    Then the fever dream deepened. The truck stretched, swelled, and reinvented itself as a boat, because why limit your delusions? It ferried my wife and me to Newport Beach and slid us over a canal toward some sleek restaurant where every entrée probably came with a life coach. The sunset was cinematic; my subconscious apparently has a generous production budget.

    After dinner, my wife asked for a beach walk. Romance, surf, a soft breeze — what could go wrong? I swapped my dress boots for sneakers. That’s when the truck, apparently offended I could ambulate without it, snatched me like a jealous cyborg Labrador and plopped me behind the wheel. Off we launched, fishtailing across the coast like a toddler steering a cruise ship. I mashed the brake pedal; the truck laughed and kept accelerating — a mechanical id with horsepower and zero boundaries.

    We plowed through so many barricades I’m amazed dream-me didn’t receive a lifetime ban from California. When I finally woke up, grinding beans and stirring steel-cut oats felt like absolution. Nothing like coffee and civilized porridge to remind you you’re still in charge — at least until your subconscious reschedules its next rebellion.

  • What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    For the past few months, I’ve been devouring true crime docuseries with tireless fascination. The more I watch, the deeper my appetite grows—not for gore, but for the raw human stories that unspool behind every case. There is, of course, a price for such voyeurism. Nearly every episode revisits the same dark origins: homes scarred by domestic abuse, children numbed by neglect, and adults who turn to drugs and alcohol to quiet the pain. Whole worlds of criminality form around these wounds—ecosystems where cruelty becomes normal, even rational.

    Then there’s law enforcement. Most detectives and officers I see in these stories are decent, sharp-minded people pursuing justice through an endless fog of human wreckage. They face so much depravity that it exacts a psychic toll. They carry the collective sorrow of others, walking the earth with hearts cracked open by everything they’ve witnessed.

    There’s a strange repetition to these lives of crime—an awful sameness—but also a singular fingerprint on each story. Some criminals are narcissists, intoxicated by their own chaos. Others are the broken offspring of violence, haunted by demons they now unleash on others. Many strike out in panic, wielding a mallet where a scalpel would have sufficed.

    I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’d transpose it this way: All paths to decency share a pattern—discipline, love, structure—but the paths to ruin twist in countless variations, each marked by a wound that never healed.

    This is what keeps me watching. Too many fictionalized crime dramas can’t resist the tidy seduction of redemption—some tearful confession, some sentimental coda of forgiveness. True crime spares me that. It denies me comfort. No background music softens the horror, no clever dialogue redeems it. These stories show the human condition not as we wish it to be but as it is: excruciating, broken, and endlessly complex.

    In that sense, I find myself siding less with Steven Pinker’s optimism and more with Robert Kaplan’s realism. Pinker argues that humanity is improving—that violence is receding and irrational behavior is on the decline. Kaplan, in Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis, sees something else entirely: that the struggle between good and evil is eternal, and evil often enjoys the advantage because it fights without restraint and acts as if it has nothing to lose. Kaplan isn’t a pessimist. He’s a realist.

    If I’m to prepare for life, I’d rather confront the world as Kaplan does—without illusion, without sentimentality, without anesthetic. Pinker’s optimism feels like comfort food for the mind. Kaplan, like true crime, gives me the bitter taste of reality—and that’s the kind of nourishment that lasts.

  • Thou Shalt Remember That All First Dates End in Either Ecstasy or Insurance Claims

    Thou Shalt Remember That All First Dates End in Either Ecstasy or Insurance Claims

    It was my sophomore year, and I was about to experience that sacred American ritual—the first date. My friends, those benevolent saboteurs, set me up with Elizabeth Lane, a British exchange student whose accent alone made her sound too sophisticated for our zip code. Six of us crammed into Gil Gutierrez’s orange Karmann Ghia, a car roughly the size of a lunchbox. Rick Galia and his girlfriend, Cheryl Atkins, volunteered to ride in the trunk, which should’ve been an omen that this night would go sideways.

    Dinner was at a pizza chain—where all romance goes to die—and then we saw One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest at a theater in Hayward. It took me about ten minutes to realize that a film set in a psychiatric ward wasn’t ideal for stirring teenage lust. Meanwhile, I was sweating through my shirt like a man auditioning for Fear Factor. I couldn’t stop thinking about a puberty documentary I’d seen in biology class—the one where a trembling boy on the phone with a girl exposed a massive pit stain to the audience. The thought haunted me.

    Midway through the film, Elizabeth rubbed her boot against the metal back of the chair in front of her. The sound—sticky, squealing, soda-coated—was the mating call of mortification. She did it again. Heads turned. Shushes hissed. I sank into my seat, spiritually liquefied, praying for the mercy of a stroke.

    To my left, Rick and Cheryl were making out like postwar lovers at a train station. When the credits rolled, Rick announced, “I have no idea what that movie was about, but I sure had a great time.”

    Back in the car, Gutierrez drove while Rick and Cheryl wedged themselves into the back seat with Elizabeth and me, a sardine orgy of hormonal chaos. As we climbed Greenridge Road, my heart was pounding in that dumb, hopeful way teenage hearts do. When we reached my house—an Eichler with glass walls, juniper bushes, and a kumquat tree that never bore fruit—I told Elizabeth I’d had a good time.

    She removed her gum, leaned in, and kissed me. Her tongue entered my mouth like a diplomatic envoy. The flavor was cinnamon, fierce and chemical, like a fireball candy soaked in gasoline. It was the first real kiss of my life—and possibly the last before divine punishment intervened.

    Suddenly, something primal overtook me. I emitted a guttural scream—a noise that belonged in the fossil record—and shot upright so violently that my head ripped through the fabric roof of the convertible. The others stared in awe as my torso protruded from the car like a deranged periscope.

    Gutierrez was horrified. “What the hell did you do, McMahon?”

    “I don’t know,” I said. “But I think I’m stuck.”

    Neighbors emerged, lured by my banshee howl. Thor, Cal Stamenov’s monstrous Great Dane, barked with glowing eyes like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hell.

    “You destroyed my brother’s car!” Gutierrez shouted.

    “The car can be repaired,” I said. “But my psychological damage is irreversible.”

    He glared. “What are you talking about?”

    “In what world do I come out of this with a shred of dignity?”

    The crowd laughed. My father arrived with a police flashlight, his expression hovering between despair and amusement. “Jeff, is that you?”

    “Unfortunately.”

    He extracted me from the car like a sword from the stone. I brushed flecks of torn fabric off my shirt and muttered, “Don’t worry, I’ll pay the deductible.”

    Gutierrez sighed. “Forget it. Migliore’s dad owns an auto shop.”

    Galia grinned. “That must’ve been one hell of a kiss, McMahon. Sent you straight to the moon.”

    I went inside, dignity in shreds, adrenaline still sizzling. In bed, reading a bodybuilding magazine for moral repair, I confessed my disaster to Master Po.

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “you must treat yourself gently.”

    “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

    “You are a sacred vessel, yet you try to manhandle your emotions like barbells. Control is your idol. But The Way requires grace.”

    “Grace?” I said. “I just decapitated a convertible.”

    “Then perhaps,” he said, “next time, breathe gently and let go.”

    “I can’t,” I said. “I’m a control freak. Controlled by the need to control.”

    “That,” said Master Po, “is why you tear through roofs. You follow the path of excess, not balance.”

    I stared at the ceiling, still tasting cinnamon gum. “I’d love to ponder that,” I said. “But right now, I’m too busy chewing on the flavor of humiliation.”

  • Thou Shalt Remember That Silence Can Wound More Deeply Than Cruelty

    Thou Shalt Remember That Silence Can Wound More Deeply Than Cruelty

    It was a Friday night at Castro Valley High, that weekly pageant of teenage aggression disguised as school spirit. The bleachers were packed with hormonal thunder; the air reeked of nacho cheese and Axe body spray. And then the rain came, that democratic force that flattens everyone’s hair and dignity alike.

    Across the stands, I saw her—the girl the boys called Tasmanian Devil. I didn’t know her name. No one did. She was a broad-shouldered girl with a face that inspired the cruel kind of laughter—the kind that hides insecurity behind volume. Her twin brother was in the special ed class with her, and their father, the school’s enormous janitor, lumbered around campus in denim overalls so faded they looked ghostly. His ears were so large they could have doubled as warning flags—and he had passed them on to his children, a hereditary curse of ridicule.

    They lived in a trailer next to the football field, an eternal reminder that some people never get to leave campus. That night she sat alone in the bleachers while the rain came down in cold, merciless sheets. Her hair clung to her forehead like seaweed, and black mascara streamed down her face like ink from a wounded pen.

    She stared out at the field with a look that broke something inside me—a look that said, I know the joke, and I know I’m the punchline. I know no one will ever love me, and I will always be an outsider.

    I wanted to call her over, to hand her my jacket, to do anything that resembled decency—but I did nothing. I sat there with my friends, pretending to watch the game, while she drowned in rain and loneliness.

    That night, guilt chewed through me like battery acid. I told Master Po about it—my silence, my self-loathing.

    “Master Po, I can’t forgive myself for doing nothing.”

    He looked at me the way only the wise can—equal parts compassion and indictment.

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “being angry with yourself achieves nothing. Flogging yourself achieves nothing. Shoveling hatred over yourself achieves nothing. If you wish to help those who have no place in this world, you must first make peace with yourself. The wise help others not because they are saints, but because they are whole.”

    I lay awake that night thinking about the girl in the rain—how she seemed to know her fate, and how I had rehearsed mine: a spectator of suffering, paralyzed by self-awareness. It was the night I learned the cruelest sin isn’t mockery. It’s inaction dressed up as reflection.

  • Thou Shalt Remember That Unsolicited Advice Is a Sacred Path to Humiliation

    Thou Shalt Remember That Unsolicited Advice Is a Sacred Path to Humiliation

    It was junior year, and I was inspecting the high school football team’s weight room—a dank temple of testosterone and tobacco spit. As a self-anointed expert (and Junior Olympic Weightlifting champion, lest anyone forget), I felt entitled to critique everything: the dumbbell selection, the ergonomics, the hygiene, the very air of the place. The floor looked like it had been carpeted with sunflower shells and Copenhagen runoff.

    I had just begun my sermon on the spiritual poverty of their equipment when the team’s starting linebacker, Erik Simonson—a slab of muscle with the conversational subtlety of a freight train—paused mid–military press. His gray-blue eyes locked on me like radar.

    “Is someone paying you to be an asshole,” he said evenly, “or are you doing volunteer work?”

    The weight room erupted. Even I laughed, because the line was perfect—surgical in its cruelty, poetic in its timing. But laughter has an aftertaste, and when I got home that night, the sting of public mockery still clung to me. I turned to my spiritual advisor, Master Po.

    “Master Po,” I said, “why did I invite that kind of humiliation? My criticisms were valid.”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, sipping tea with an aggravating serenity, “you must not go through life believing people crave your opinions. You are not a paid social commentator, though I know your heart yearns to be one.”

    “But weren’t my criticisms legitimate?” I persisted.

    “Legitimacy,” said Po, “is irrelevant. The truth is like chili powder—best applied sparingly. Even those who beg for feedback rarely mean it. They desire flattery dressed as honesty. Therefore, you must learn the art of selective silence. Speak briefly, and when possible, not at all.”

    I sighed. “But I love the sound of my own voice.”

    Po smiled the smile of a man who’s been disappointed by many students before me. “Yes,” he said, “but what sounds like sweet music to your ears may strike others as the shriek of ignorance, emotional poverty, and uninvited arrogance.”

    The next day, I returned to the weight room and said nothing. The linebackers grunted and lifted. I stood in silence, spiritually enlightened and socially intact—a monk in a monastery of iron plates.