B.R. Yeager Interview
[GS-INT-011]
When I was working in a kitchen, the only books I recommended to any of the other chefs were yours. And the kitchen I was in was with hardcore metal dudes who I think were all undercover stoners, I wasn't sure. It feels really good to barely know someone and be like "I know a good book you'd probably like". Similar to what people do with bands. Have you ever considered why your work responds to such a specific group, who -- in my opinion-- haven't had a voice in literature?
I'm not entirely sure, aside from the fact that much of my writing is based around people I knew in my teens and 20s. A common piece of feedback I get from readers is that the characters feel like people they grew up with. So maybe it's as simple as people seeing themselves or their friends or their experiences in the books. Or maybe it's something more. I really don't know.
Years (decades?) ago I used to bartend at a greyhound track, and I spent a lot of time hanging out with the kitchen staff. They were into all kinds of art (not to mention that cooking is, itself, an artform). They were reading Palahniuk, Bukowski, and Pynchon. I discovered Gaspar Noe through one of them. In contrast, I've primarily worked in offices over the past decade, and barely anyone I've encountered in those settings has had any interest in art, let alone literature. It's all sports and home improvement.
I couldn't begin to tell you, definitively, why there is that difference, but it may hold the answer to your question.
We can totally skip this question if you want. But Palahniuk seems to have become that artist who spoke to the underground, gained notoriety, and is now a guilty pleasure you don't talk about, and when mentioning that you like him people say, "Of course you do." Can you explain where you think that might come from?
I chalk this up to Palahniuk being a gateway author. He’s a great introduction to particular styles and themes in literature, but I think readers tend to eventually leave him behind for more sophisticated fare. A big reason for this is that many of the reasons his writing appeals to younger readers— entertaining and clever storytelling, prose that verges on the cinematic, explorations of taboo themes that border on scatological glee—become less interesting the older you get and the wider you read. I truly don’t mean for that to be as negative as it sounds. He writes in an extremely entertaining way, which in itself is a feat—the sheer fact that his writing is so entertaining that it will snag people who aren’t traditional readers—but often that comes at the expense of rich characters and deep narratives.
But Palahniuk is an extremely interesting case, because you’re right, despite his objective impact on writers of my generation, people are hesitant to bring him up, myself included. But I think one of the most interesting things about Palahniuk is that he wasn’t an underground phenomenon—he became intensely mainstream. I’ve had random co-workers who were otherwise not interested in transgressive fiction or extreme horror who were avid Palahniuk readers. Which isn’t to say he was someone who catered to a mainstream audience, but the mainstream embraced him despite his quirks. And for a lot of people around my age, he was maybe the first mainstream writer we encountered who was writing in a very voicey, literary first-person style that was also cinematic and entertaining, while also playing with genre elements and gross-out/extreme situations that would be more at home in underground splatterpunk.
Then, if you really got into his writing, you’d likely trace the aesthetic lineage backwards to people like Amy Hempel, whose prose is some of the most masterful you’ll encounter, or Bret Easton Ellis, who is exploring similar themes of violence and alienation in a more multi-dimensional way. And then you might trace that back to Joan Didion, and then it’s like “holy shit, Ellis is just a weak impersonation of Didion,” and you keep going and going, exploring richer and richer literature. And in doing so, Palahniuk kind of gets lost in the fray, because—as entertaining as they are—his books tend to be fairly one-dimensional. In a lot of ways he’s like Metallica. I love Metallica, those first five records had a massive impact on me, and they were responsible for turning me on to other artists who were maybe doing more interesting things. But do I need to tell everyone about how much Metallica impacted me? Am I spending all my time still listening to Metallica? Not really.
But again, this all sounds way more negative than I mean it to be. He does what he does exceptionally well—it’s just that I’ve largely grown out of what he does. But I do want to note that his craft essays are some of the most useful out there—especially as someone who is skeptical of craft essays. Internalizing those lessons will absolutely make you a better writer at the sentence level. Also worth noting is that he seems to be a genuinely humble guy, and has always been very transparent about his influences, and has long been an advocate for less visible writers. He seems to possess a genuine affection toward his audience. I mean, one thing that was so unique about him in the 90s and early 2000s was how accessible he was—being diligent about responding to fan mail, giving his time to mentor newer authors, etc.—which was not at all commonplace at that time. Major authors still felt like untouchable warlocks, divided from the common realm, whereas Palahniuk seemed to be coming from the same place as his readers, and that can be extremely appealing.
I read something you wrote, I think it was an intro for a photography book, where you said the idea that writing is a lone act is a false one. Which I agree. But knowing that the reader completes the circuit, how much consideration does the reader get when you are writing? Do you ever find yourself thinking about the reader too much?
So the constructive approach to considering the reader’s perspective is to ask yourself “Is this book successfully facilitating the experience I’m trying to induce?” Because all art is a form of communication—it’s a sharing of psyches, etc. Attempting to step into a reader’s shoes can be a good way to check in with how effectively you are communicating your vision. When constrained to this form of inquiry, I think it’s extremely useful to account for the reader’s perspective.
However, this can quickly become poisonous once you begin asking yourself “Will people like this? Is this giving readers what they want?” Because at the end of the day, fuck the readers. What readers want doesn’t matter, and audiences shouldn’t dictate what an artist creates. The notion that the audience gets a say is ruinous to culture—just look at the stagnant, algorithmized state of television and cinema, or mainstream literature, where so many authors are writing around popular tropes and BookTok trends, chasing agents and advances. Once you start tweaking your vision based on whether or not you think an audience will like it, you are no longer creating art—at best it’s entertainment, at worst it’s content.
But to more directly answer your question—yes, absolutely, this is something I wrestle with. I am not at all immune to wanting to be liked, and wanting to create things that others like. These are desires I need to actively fight against, because I know they will only sabotage my work. And the more attention you get, the harder it gets to fight back. It becomes easy to hop online and see people saying all these nice things about your work, and you get that dopamine hit, and it makes you think “How do I craft something else that will get even MORE people to say even NICER things about my book,” and it’s just utterly fucking poisonous. So I’ve had to fight that impulse, and actively put myself into positions where I’m challenging myself, trying to write about things I don’t yet know how to convey, purposefully making myself unsure and off-balance so that I don’t grow stagnant and self-satisfied.
There's an underlying ecosystem in the US that is fueled by the market. And I think many writers believe it is more important to network than to be true to their vision. Even those that are deemed an alternative to the mainstream. This, I believe, unconsciously sways your practice if you let it. There is an extra layer on top of a notion that must be expressed, you must not let your expression be informed by others. But what about feedback you get from people that you ask to read your drafts? I find there are times I immediately respond to someone's comments in agreement like someone guessing a word you were trying to think of, and there are some I have to mull over before I can decide if they're right. Is this relatable?
So this is the other side of the coin, because I do let others inform my expression. Outside input is actually crucial for me. But I have to be very selective about when and who I receive it from, and it takes a weird balance of confidence and humility to determine how to let feedback influence you.
Aside from a couple community college creative writing classes, I haven’t really been in a workshop environment, so I can’t speak to that. But typically, I’ll only let another person read my manuscript once I’ve brought it as far as I am personally capable of taking it. I am very much someone who needs to write the thing in order to figure out what it's about, and if I let other people in too early they might contaminate it with their own notions of what it should be. So it needs to be close to finished before I’m ready for any feedback—positive or negative. But once it gets to that point, it has traditionally gone to a few close friends, who typically give the expected encouragement that I can in no way trust because I know that they love me and want me to feel good about my work. But thankfully, I’ve gotten to work with great publishers who have no stake in my ego, as well as editors—usually other writers—who I can trust to give dispassionate feedback, who also understand the vision and can help me better convey it. I will make massive cuts and changes based on trustworthy feedback, just because I’ve gotten to a point where I can allow myself to recognize when they’re right and I’m wrong.
A different situation, but relevant: a fairly respected literary critic once reviewed an anthology I was in, and he absolutely eviscerated my story. From the jump, he’s shitting on me for being a horror writer (it was not a horror anthology), and is criticizing how I use violence, and so on. Then, he closes by calling my final line “complete amateur hour.”
And fuck—while everything else he said was bullshit, he was 100% correct with that last part. The closing line absolutely was amateur hour. It was telling the reader what to feel rather than just letting them feel it. So I cut the line when I republished the story in Burn You the Fuck Alive. And I was only able to do that because I allowed myself to be open to intensely negative criticism, while also remaining discerning in which aspects of that criticism I let influence me. Some people might say doing this comprises my work, but I don’t see it that way at all—it’s just helping me refine what’s already there. Writers will always tell you not to read reviews of your own work, but solid advice is solid advice. I’ll take it wherever I can.
On the other hand, sometimes you have to reject solid advice. Elle Nash helped me edit Negative Space, and there were a number of parts where she said “people are going to be frustrated by this,” and I just had to say “I know.” 99% of the time I’ll take her suggestions because we have good aesthetic alignment and she will absolutely make my text better, but I had to be stubborn on those particular pieces because I wanted the book to be a little frustrating. I wanted there to be friction. And looking back now, reading back through it again, I’m like “Fuck, those parts are pretty frustrating and tedious, I kind of wish I did something different there.” But then those flaws become part of the book’s character. Negative Space is now kind of notorious for having this section three quarters in that’s a slog to get through, and now that’s part of its mythology, and that’s kind of beautiful in a weird and stupid way, like the way everyone bitches about the whale physiology chapters in Moby Dick (which rip, actually), or the ritual of Chüd in IT, and so on.
Like, sometimes it’s just fun and cool to reject solid advice. There was a story title that everybody—people whose tastes I greatly respect—told me to change, but I just had to be like “Nah. It’s cool. I like that it’s a little stupid.” And that solidified something key for me: the things I like tend be broken, fucked up, and maybe a little stupid, so why shouldn’t my writing be that way too? I want art that burns itself down a little, or a lot, and in order to create that you have to strategically make the wrong decisions sometimes. But it’s always a balance, and I’m never quite sure whether I’m striking it or not. There have definitely been some people who have identified, with laser precision, my greatest weaknesses as a writer—the parts where it’s like “this doesn’t even suck in an interesting way–it just sucks.” And for that stuff, I definitely try to improve and not make the same mistakes again. But committing to bits that may not work is how you keep it interesting.
This feels like the perfect place to end it. You feel good?
B.R. Yeager is the author of Negative Space, Burn You the Fuck Alive, Pearl Death, and Amygdalatropolis. He lives in Western Massachusetts.