A Few Notes on Novel Writing...

I'll need your help, if you don't mind.

Madeleine de Scudéry, author of the roman à clef

One of the lessons from my various legal travails is that it’s altogether dangerous to write on this Substack. To do so is to invite attack and whilst I have delighted in being the bait, I’m not yet ready to sacrifice myself entirely in my thirties. I hope you don’t find it cowardly to take up to novel-writing at this more adult time in my life.

Too few of you are paid subscribers — alas I have myself to blame as it’s designed to be free and no, I shan’t deviate from that but do pay up — and of course when one writes a true thing one telegraphs one’s position to the enemy, especially as I have rather quixotically by writing on this Substack. All labors of love cost us and writing my hopes and dreams and observations on the Internet has cost me. If the Straussians have taught me anything, they’ve taught me this: every writer has faced a measure of persecution. I am by no means exempt.

Fortunately neither Palantir nor much of Defense Tech works so I am not in any physical danger. No, but I am a bit in danger of being Gawkerized, the irony of which given my own role in ending Gawker I find altogether more funny than I ought to. It’s really true what the Tibetan Buddhists say — you can’t attack anyone without yourself being attacked. This was a life I chose and no regrets and all that but it’s time to move into domains that are more psychological and less adversarial, more introspective and less accusatory.

When it comes to the shadow war against the foreign funded oligarchs no can say that I have been silent or that I have acquitted myself in any way other than bravely so I’m cool with whatever happens.

I also have a very real sense that I have already won there so mustn’t rewrite the same damn thing over and over again. You get it. I get it. Let’s move on. Doesn’t it feel terribly gauche to keep bragging about how you’ve already defeated the enemies arrayed against you?

I’m writing about a murder, of course, and to do that you have to really get into the depths of someone’s psychology. To do it satisfactorily you have to make a case for the murderer to have gotten away with it.

How does one write a convincing roman à clef anyway? I am open to suggestions.

Here are two bits for your consideration:

As a species we struggle to pass things down intergenerationally. We hope, I think in vain, to carry a thing down across the ages. There can be no inheritance, not really. You can’t really take care of a thing you didn’t work for. You can be entrusted but unless you suffered for a thing you didn’t really appreciate it.

Every so often there are among us those of us who both government and good fortune have blessed with a life that is altogether more exciting than the hum drum quotidian every day hullabaloo that afflicts so many of us.

It is in this sense that we can be said to be privileged. But that’s the wrong word. It’s more like knighted. And a knight is expected to do great things for the king and the people. He is expected to obey lawful orders and he is expected both to life and die gallantly and altogether quietly.

Reality to such people is but a long slog from which excitement might be mined and legend might be constructed, carefully, lest the earthquakes of mortal life offend.

Tattling is an ever present danger to such people and the sharing economy — is it the snitching economy? — but an empty imprisoning place where the feudal lords of the data empires have their reign.

If you’re at all interesting you’ll summon the ghouls who hide out, lurking, looking to punish anyone and everyone interesting.

Thank you but I’ll keep my secrets to myself, thank you, very much. Or better yet hide them in a novel.

If you tell anyone about that stuff you are up to and they’ll think you are crazy and well, maybe you are.

But the craziest people recognize it in one another. They glide through life on the same frequency that animals know one another.

So it was with my teachers who spotted me through the vastness of the American empire and picked me out from the bread crumbs I had left for them to pick up.

Most of my teachers reproduced not by sex — eww, gross to quote one of them — but by thought.

Did it matter if I carried their blood or their teachings out into the world?

They were instructed to pass things on and they included me in their wills, written, spoken, imagined. And I had very good teachers.

It’s become fashionable to say you studied at this institution or that one but I learned from my teachers.

…

It’s important to make clear what you do and don’t know.

Now I don’t know much about a lot of things but I do know the best way to kill a man. Give him exactly what he wants.

Man isn’t supposed to have a paradise here on earth so there’s only one way this sort of thing goes down. Badly.

Other men will see him getting his dream’s fulfilled and summon that darkness that lies in every man’s heart when he sees another, definitely lesser man get something he ought not have. You could call it envy if you want or even a type of lust, I guess.

How many people lust for things that they ought not have? What’s a heaven for if it’s within reach? What purpose can you have when it is fulfilled? Most of us live our whole lives striving for things we ought not have and only when we’re at the end do we get that we had all we needed all along. Isn’t it funny the way ambition takes from us our youth in a hustle we never can quite finish?

No, I don’t know who actually did the hit against him — I have my theories just as much as the next guy and we’ll go into each and everyone of them— but I do know that someone took his life from him but not before he surrendered it fully to his imperial dream of citizen journalists scouring the scene, cataloguing every fuck up of their supposed betters with the gleeful anarchism that comes when you don’t have to make the call. You can’t do all that without paying a price.

Orwell called this surveillance Big Brother as if there was some bureaucracy sitting there, quietly tabulating all that we had done or would do. That wasn’t it, not exactly. We’d all tell on ourselves and each other through our iPhones.

Prime Minister Baldwin said the yellow press wanted the prerogative of the harlot — power without responsibility — and I suppose that’s true. (He got the line from his cousin, Rudyard Kipling, who knew a thing or two about being powerless. His poem “If” was for his son, killed like so many in the Great War.)

I know now that there isn’t any power without responsibility but I was young once—and a blogger. Now I am a writer and older and I know far less than I ever did.