are you trying to write a villain

it's me, hi, forced to discuss the "white male lit crisis"

Apologies for the lack of a post lately—I’ve had a longer essay percolating about sex and rich people and Our Dang Society, but I haven’t had time to finish the draft. My husband’s company decided—thanks to the Trump tariffs and the imminent recession—that it would be cool to eliminate his job. So we’ve been scrambling, and I’ve been trying to take on extra freelance work without compromising my novel-writing time. This, unfortunately, has meant sacrificing newsletter time (and sanity time, lol, lmao, it’s fine). Anyway, sorry again that my regular cadence has been interrupted; it may remain interrupted for a while longer.

In lieu of writing about sex, I did want to write something shorter about all the sad literary boys and all their sad literary complaints about how nobody wants to read books by young white men anymore, or maybe just young men, or maybe men in general. I liked this piece by Andrew Boryga, in which he explains that he didn’t sit around and wait for someone to give him permission to write his novel Victim, which is, as he describes it, “about a POC race and identity hustler.” He just wrote what he wanted to write. I was less thrilled by Boryga’s other piece on the subject, in which he suggests that women gatekeepers in publishing might indeed by rejecting works by men that reflect “male vulnerability” through un-PC language, the kinds of novels in which male characters from macho cultures might be trying to work out their issues with women but are still referring to them as bitches, etc. He cites a writer whom he views as a successful, admirable example of this sort of thing, and it’s—oh no—Junot Diaz.

Boryga doesn’t mention the long list of credible sexual harassment and sexual assault allegations against Diaz, which seem pretty relevant in this context. Diaz’s writing—long celebrated for its authenticity, for its supposed searing treatment of a self-insert male character coming to terms with his misogynist culture and rejecting its terms—has also been criticized by many people (including me) as displaying remarkably little irony, whatever its obvious surface claims. In his novels and short stories, Diaz consistently depicts women like objects, with little inner life or agency, which seems to reflect his actual beliefs. It’s always possible for someone to write about a misogynist without being one, of course. But it’s entirely possible that the mean gatekeeper girlies of literary publishing are rejecting manuscripts as misogynist because they quite simply read that way: maybe because they are. Diaz wasn’t read that way when he was published, even though it really seems like he is.

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Whenever there’s a blowup in the publishing world, I like to play a little game: what happens if you flip a literary argument over to the SFF sphere, and vice versa? In this case, it gets interesting quickly. If the problems in publishing writ large were truly “men,” “masculinity,” “women gatekeepers,” and “women readership,” you would expect to see similar if not the same problems in genre fiction. But the issue just isn’t present in SFF. Genre fiction is blessedly more diverse than it used to be, but young white millennial men are still well-represented, and well-awarded. Lots of women/POC win major SFF awards and receive a great deal of attention; so do young white millennial men like Adrian Tchaikovsky, Robert Jackson Bennett, and Max Gladstone, among others. The field is also dominated in part by older white men: Brandon Sanderson, George R. R. Martin, the Witcher guy, the Expanse guys. I can’t say I particularly like any of the older set, but I guess other people do. Plenty of men in SFF are still writing about masculinity and its consequences; as are the women from time to time, like Premee Mohamed in The Siege of Burning Grass. The men in SFF are fine; they’re blooming.

But over in literary fiction, the fellas, they’re withering away! What’s happening? I suspect the culprits are, mainly, three things: lack of remuneration, lack of prestige, and lack of impunity regarding sexual harassment. But although men should worry about the money—nobody gets paid much for writing anymore, especially now that it’s considered a woman’s field, in fact that’s how you know it’s a woman’s field—they needn’t worry that much about the other two. The multiple sexual harassment allegations against Junot Diaz have always been credible and he’s fine. He never lost any of his prestigious positions. He hasn’t written a novel in years and that doesn’t seem to matter much to his reputation either. Guys like Thomas Chatterton Williams are willing to go to bat for him anyway, over something as silly as Diaz being left out of an updated anthology (and have I mentioned that Diaz hasn’t written anything notable in years?)

The narrative about the lack of literary men, per Boryga, is that some men find it impossible to write about men in this world, this real world, or impossible to have that writing taken seriously by women gatekeepers who will only judge it as misogynist. But I think there might be another lesson to take from SFF here, and this one is structural. Are you trying to write villains and have them be mistaken for heroes, and get forgiven like heroes? Are you trying to write a guy who’s an asshole, a real dirtbag, who treats women like shit, but demand that the reader not develop independent opinions about him? It’s possible to do the first part of this—write a villainous protagonist, an antiheroic protagonist—but it has to be a conscious decision, not a sly and dishonest one. The second part is impossible in any context. You can’t control your readers’ reactions, especially if you’re not being real with your readers and yourself.

I’ve been discussing this subject with some cool literary friends lately—one suggested Philip Roth as a model for how this kind of protagonist can be done. I have another suggestion: check out The Forest of a Thousand Lanterns, a YA fantasy novel by Julie C. Dao. I know, a YA fantasy novel! but trust me. This is a surprisingly clever book. The antiheroine, Xifeng, is a classic scheming concubine who is attempting to become an empress. She’s not a good person. She’s an extremely bad person. And yet you’re kind of rooting for her because she has limited options, and because she’s so utterly shameless about it. It’s all about her voice, her naughtiness, how she carries it off. It’s all about Dao’s excellent writing, really. It turns out you can do anything in a novel—if you write it well. And The Forest of a Thousand Lanterns has been controversial, as any non-standard YA novel tends to be: some readers object that it teaches wicked morals, that it presents bad behavior as good behavior. But so what? You can’t control readers.

If your writing is going to be bold, controversial—if you’re going to be a bad boy or bad girl of literary fiction, YA fiction, any fiction—then you’re going to make a couple Puritans clutch their pearls. And if the gatekeepers truly don’t like it, okay, then open a new gate. But the honesty needs to be there, and it needs to be in the writing itself. If you’re writing a character who is bad, who is maybe trying to be good but failing, or not actually trying much at all, then you need to know these things about your characters, and yourself. Be honest, like in a good YA novel.