Tuesday, 11 December 2012

Letter to Lydia Millet

Hey Lydia!

Come on, what do you say to a bit of modern-day metafiction? Do you really believe it breathed its last breath thirty years ago? Or can metafictive novels set in Scotland really find readers in an indifferent marketplace? All right, I know you’re rolling your eyes! But let me pitch some ideas to you. Check out these pearls of originality:

1) A writer struggling to write his novel falls in love then writes his novel
2) A writer struggling to write his novel has an affair with a teenage girl then writes his novel
3) A writer struggling to write his novel visits a foreign country, sleeps with a prostitute, takes LSD and writes his novel
4) A writer struggling to write his novel writes his novel after four years of torturous re-writing
5) A writer struggling to write his novel abandons writing his novel and takes a job in a call centre and spends his life forever fielding questions about the novel he one day planned to write
6) A writer struggling to write his novel writes a haiku instead
7) A writer struggling to write his novel escapes the novel and writes the novel the author-scriptor is writing
8) A writer struggling to write his novel eats his own his head then publishes the resultant turds
9) A writer struggling to write his novel moves into Mulligan Stew, steals Antony Lamont’s Sur-fictional opus, moves back into the original novel and publishes Lamont’s novel to complete critical ignorance

Let’s team up. Light some firecrackers of invention.

MJ

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