Giant Chips, Giant Shoulders

I’ve been reading more short fiction to try and understand where the market is today. When people hear this, many tell me this is a Bad Thing for writers to do. From seasoned pros to random relatives to people in my writing group, there seems to be no dearth of people who believe creative work should appear ex nihilo from the genius artist’s brow. I don’t think I can agree with this.

To me, writing feels like a conversation with past works. Everything I write is the meeting minutes of my own imagined salon starring Pratchett, Roy, Erikson, and so on. Newer writers (Jemisin, Ha, Chiang) also chip in, usually with more interesting and current suggestions. I don’t think I can write if I don’t read.

Maybe it’s a Me Problem. I’m an engineer who grew up in the STEM-lord hegemony of post-90s India. I always feel behind on reading compared to my peers. I’m hesitant to even call them my peers. In one sense, I’m ahead of them in that my intuitions on physics and causal inference are stronger than many active writers. In a much more important sense, I’m far behind them; my impoverished intracranial salon is significantly more parochial than someone who grew up reading The Canon or someone who works in Real Science (TM)(C)(R) and can summon cutting edge speculation at the drop of a pipette.

It’s also possible that those complaining about my reading approach are pointing to a different problem: they’re worried I’ll get stuck trend-chasing. People who believe this are unaware of how much work it would be for me to actually accomplish this. I don’t have the skills or fortitude needed to (a) identify a market trend (b) translate that into a story outline and, (c)rucially, actually write a story that I’m not interested in on its own merits.

“Understanding the market” is just me trying to understand what I’m stepping into, so I know what I’m in conversation with. Imagine I sat down to write a story set in the impact of LLMs on creativity without knowing that Thomas Ha already wrote a great story about that (The Mub.) Whatever I could come up with might be an interesting story, but it would also be a shallower one.

There’s a perverse similarity between the people telling me to avoid marketomancy, and the people who (incorrectly) defend LLMs as extensions of this behavior. Though the former would vehemently deny this connection, both approaches treat writing as a coin-operated machine: insert ideas here, just add terajoules. This is also, ironically, STEM-lord logic. The mental model of writing as a conversation is much more interesting to me, and has the added benefit of being more human.

The final irony of this formulation is that treating writing as a conversation is already common wisdom in a particular set of fields: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. The nerds who built those LLMs didn’t also invent calculus from scratch. And I shouldn’t have to invent multi-POV short stories to know that they’re an option. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Now that I have used the STEM-lord in me to defeat the STEM-lordism in my well-wishers, I will now return to my stories. Because, and this may be the most important part, I LIKE TO READ.