Writing by the Playbook

By Robert Cavaliere

“The playbook changes every decade. The writers stay the same—half-crazed, half-hopeful, half-drunk, scratching their way toward the page.”

Groupthink Seeps In

“All you need is your mind, something to write with, and something to write on.”

You only need your mind, something to write with and something to write on. Writing is the cheapest art form. We’re all familiar with the notion of the starving artist —a painter comes to mind. Why are they starving? Well, because the tools of the trade are so damn expensive. Or… listen to this sales pitch.

I saw this ad once—

“Do you want to be a writer? You can write in fifteen-minute increments! With the Magic-Write app, you can write on your own time. No time for revisions, ideas, or editing? No problem! Make Magic-Write unleash the real writer in you!”

It’s insidious, it’s everywhere. You know the pitch, get this software and then you’ll be a writer. Or let’s One-Up that, we’ll just upgrade your now outdated version of Pages. Um… tastes alright… hold on, needs more AI… Yum—

The commercialization of writing doesn’t improve you significantly. Though, there is a lot to organizing yourself, developing your process. If you’re thinking of diving into a writing program, think again. There is no strong corollary between master-level writing and intensive and expensive graduate programs. There is a lot you can get your brain to go through in a Master of Literature program, though— that’ll put you through the wringer. You can get a teaching job, too. You could maybe get a teaching job too with an MFA in Creative Writing, but it’s getting tough. Don’t just take my opinion on it, read this article by The Atlantic.

MFA and the Demise of the Contemporary Novel

“We wrote a program to analyze hundreds of works by authors with and without creative-writing degrees. The results were disappointing.” —Richard Jean So & Andrew Piper, The Atlantic, 2016

In 2016, literary scholars Richard Jean So and Andrew Piper decided to test the MFA question scientifically. They analyzed 200 contemporary novels—half written by MFA graduates from top programs (Iowa, Columbia, Texas) and half by writers without such degrees, all of them reviewed in The New York Times.

Using computational text analysis, they combed through diction, style, theme, setting, and character use. Their question: Does MFA training leave a measurable imprint on the modern novel?

The answer? Not really.

The results showed no clear, systematic difference between MFA and non-MFA novels. Despite all the fierce arguments—critics warning of homogenization, defenders praising “time to hone craft”—the data didn’t back either side. The MFA’s cultural dominance, they suggested, might tell us more about our faith in institutions than about any actual impact on literary art.

Still, the study reignited an old anxiety: that MFA programs produce a kind of institutional prose, a house style built on polite transgression and workshop consensus.

Workshops, after all, train you to please the room—to make your sentences smoother, your characters tidier, your conflicts teachable. It’s a system that can reward coherence over courage. Peer feedback, “market awareness,” faculty mentorship—all the things that sound good in a brochure—often end up channeling writers toward what Jennifer Ellis of the Los Angeles Review of Books called “gatekeeper-friendly prose.”

Homogenization in the name of craft. Creativity by consensus.

Meanwhile, fine literary work flourishes outside the system—apprenticeships, small magazines, and self-taught obsessives. In other countries, writers are supported by public grants, residencies, and fiercely independent presses rather than degree pipelines.

The roll call of American greats who skipped the MFA is practically canonical: Steinbeck, Kerouac, Bradbury, Hemingway. No degrees. No credentials. Just nerve and need.

If MFA programs narrow incentives toward safe, “literary” styles, the remedy isn’t to burn them down—it’s to widen the gatekeepers, diversify publishing, and restore the gritty editors and proofreaders who once told us the truth. Bring back the hard-nosed curmudgeons who could spot a lazy metaphor from a mile away.

Is this bad news? Add to that the steepest decline in university enrollments we’ve seen in generations— does it all spell to a decline in American fiction?

I don’t think so. It could usher in a new era.

Writers coming from all sides, the way it should be. No more elitist gatekeepers. No more workshop writers writing for workshop writers. Writing to the tastes of an elite, which ever elite is in vogue. Instead, there’ll be that writer coming from the gutter, that writer dropping out of dead-end office jobs or worse places, like so called “good jobs” that drain your creative force.

There’ll be somebody who says “No!” Maybe flips a bird too. Go Birds!

The Reset

“It’ll all be reset. We need it. Straight-up fiction.”

Would-be writers follow the playbook—the YouTubers, the gurus, the guys with tacky thumbnails and too many teeth. They promise the secrets of success in a ten-minute clip. “Build your author brand!” “Hack your first draft!” “Market like a pro!”

The thing is, there’s value in the trade side of writing—learning the business, developing your discipline. No shame in that. But it’s worth asking: are these folks teaching, or selling snake oil?

In any business—including writing—you’ve got to know how people are incentivized. How do they make their money? Nothing wrong with making money; you just want to understand the game you’re in.

Some of these creators offer good, practical advice. Take what you need and move on. But most of them? They’re just middlemen, hawking the next “hack” to help you go viral. They’re not talking about art—they’re talking about sales funnels.

Hacking It

“Can you hack it?”

I host a podcast called Hacking It!— Not because it’s going to offer up hacks —it’s about the work, about doing it, hacking it. As in, you’ve heard it before: This guy can’t hack it. Can you or can’t you?

You can hack it.

The thing is, that literature needs your voice. That’s right, you— the guy listening to this. Developing yourself, getting good, coming up with stories from your city, from the things around you, from those tight spaces that don’t get much light these days.

One place looking for your voice is Cityscape Press. At the moment a chiefly digital press, but it can do more.

According to the hype, the ad copy, it’s the place where It’s where sleek urban fiction meets the street. We amplify the voice of dynamic, edgy writers blending contemporary grit with cool defiance. Okay. If you need a place to crash, come on over, cityscapepress.com

Otherwise…it’s all amusement-park writing—big genre or political angle or whatever the failing publishing houses think you should read. It’s all slush-pile writing, too. All these guys saturating the market with their fan-level fiction. Nobody tells them it’s no good. Everybody gets a pat on the back..

When Helping Backfires

“Every passing second is your second chance.”

Helping friends come out of slump can sometimes backfire A friend of mine who’d all but quit writing for something like a decade had the dragon start wake. It happened over time and it happened because he saw me working. He wanted back in.

So, one day—must be a couple summers ago by now, he got it into his head that he wanted to “experiment” —which I took to mean, he was getting his sea legs. So, in the quiet of my mind, I said okay, what you got?

He wants to write this book on writing, is what he says. I think to myself, you haven’t written a goddamn thing in ten years, haven’t shaped an original idea in about as long or longer and you want to write a writing book? What’s next, you want to write the “Memoirs of a Statesman?”

He’s been a teacher for a couple of decades. Started right out of college. He went that route. “The road most taken.” I’ll have him on sometime so he can give us his point of view— it’s only fair.

Anyway, so, here’s the best or worst part: He wants to write it with me. Against my better instincts, I say, okay. Thinking, well, if this will get the juices going why not?

And, if anything, it’d be a good way to have him write out his thoughts on writing, on the process, maybe he gives up on it or shelves it —he said he’d self-publish it to see what that’s like, then shelve it. Not true. Little liar.

Don’t get me wrong, this was all sort of done in earnest, on his part—well, mostly. I had a problem with the concept right off the bat because having read only a few books on writing by guys who were champs in the ring, I’m talking Steinbeck’s Writing Days and Travels with Charlie, John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction and On Becoming a Novelist, I thought what the hell else needs to be written?

And if there is —and sure there is, it better be kick-ass, it better be Next-Level. No, he tells me, it doesn’t need all that, It’s not serious. Yet, it is —it’s’ about getting budding writers stuck in a rut needing a jump-start. I could have read this all wrong—after all, not only do I dish out aggressively bad advice, I sometimes give myself crap counsel, too. “Besides,” he keeps persuading me, there’s all these clueless guys and gals writing these manuals. We can do better.” I go along. I do it my way, subversively. He tasks me to write the topics.

I had written some guidelines for myself while writing big novels —one called Chron, and by the end of 2019, another called Sage. And a few others. Each taught me something. Taught me so much.

So, I write the most cryptic stuff I can write.

I write it in cursive on a yellow legal pad. I draw. I make graphs. All of it makes sense to me. Like koans, if read enough, repeated enough in a low voice, they should break your mind. I wanted to crack his psyche. To rebel. You want to see’em, by the way? I’ll put an excerpt on Cityscape.com Not too much, don’t wanna crack your psyche.

He’s getting serious, I’m on the hook. In the end, he takes my guidelines and some topics I grudgingly wrote about process meant for those starting out. It’s a part of writing that I can speak to and don’t feel I’m out of turn.

He overwrites me, makes it about “Second-Chance” writers—guys who need a pep talk, need to hear it’s not too late. Nurse the writer’s dream now, you’re ready, now that you got your two-car garage and six figures, now you’re ready for this bitch, the siren call of the writing muse beckons.

You want a second chance?

Every passing second is your second chance.

Got a novel, a short story waiting to find expression? Make it happen.

I've been giving bad advice all my life and this time is no different: If something is getting in your way, get rid of it, go around it, evade it. Is it a job? Quit. Find one that doesn't burn you out and gives you time to write.

You live in a boring city with no energy, move the hell out. Go where it matters-- the big city. Out in the East Coast, out in the West Coast--you know the ones. Get out of lunch-meat "Shmalaska," Padouka-no-where-ville.

Grow some legs --fast.

Got invites to socialize? Turn them all down, unless they're outside your writing hours.

Bad advice.

You can't have it all. Something's gotta give. Express yourself, before you break yourself.

What astounds me is the gall. I ask myself: Is this what it feels to fall under a delusion? What guys like that want is success. Not writing. Not the writing life. That’s for losers.

Back in the day, pulp fiction writers used to get paid by the word. They’d sit at a typewriter all night long, drinking whisky and dying. They died at the typewriter, many of them, never to be heard of again.

They wrote pulp, but they put in the work. In the end, the book is serviceable, I’m not even going to plug it in —it’s out there, anyway, among all those little books for beginners, some to pep them up, some to get them organized. He’s a teacher, he wrote it in earnest. Best intentions, the road well-paved to hell and all that.

We talked, not long ago, that he thinks what my problem with it is that it’s for beginners. Maybe. Or maybe my beef is that he plastered his M.F.A on it. So concerned about the credentials. Following the youtubers’ playbook. He did learn a lot, as it turns out, about formatting, about getting a book ready for the self-publishing platforms, about editing (editing my stuff almost all the way out).

A book has to sit for a while— to breath, even when you think it’s completely done. The writer has to process just what the hell he put out. Doubts set in. Doubts should set in. Looking back on it now, I wonder all the time if my beef with the writing book is that touches on something so profound— the act of inspired creation. It’s as close as mere mortals can get to the gods.

“No,” I think to myself, “he’s not all wrong, this friend of mine—not all the way. Somewhere between my rash defensiveness and his tempered will to help writers ready, willing, but failing to launch has got to be some kind of answer. I imagine iterations to this writing book— a book he tells me could not have been written without me. He’s given me plenty of chances to edit and morph it.

I think too much on a grand scale—I’m over thinking it. And then it hits me: When I get to writing something big— the real hard novel, I tend to check myself. I track what is within my wheelhouse —what aspect of the human experience I can dwell on over the page. This should be no different, this writing book. It hits me again. I envision a future edition in which two authors engage in the dialectic inherent to creative work, to design, to unearthing the philosophical bedrock —the approach.

What I do know is how to get unstuck. How to get out of a slump. It’s about an immersive process to writing that I’ve developed, that I’ve lived through all these years of writing.

Since I built it up so much —the writing book’s shadow now looming large over us, I’ll mention it, after all. 21 Days to Manifest Your Story is my brainchild and Dan Allen, my friend, gave it form and expression. It’s just waiting for my vantage point, low as it might be down here in the trenches.

What he doesn’t know is that I do have my own little book about writing. I call it Harmony with Words. It’s about living like a novelist. About Living with Your Manuscript —which is another guidebook I wrote for myself.

When I wrote them, I had, of course imbibed the teaching of those much greater than me… much of it from my English teacher who was a hell of a guy, a subversive as hell, foul-mouthed Detroiter and he had a mind as sharp as a knife. That’s the thing, that’s the open secret: Write your own damn book.

If you can throw a punch, you can write the book inside you.

What It Is and What It Ain’t

“No lies. No self-deception. No exit.”

Writing should be a mirror that doesn’t let you look away. No escape, no flattering angles.

The other way—the lazy way—is to sift through the bargain bin, hold up a paperback, and mutter, “I can write better than this.” Maybe you can. But beware the Dunning–Kruger effect—the bias that makes amateurs overestimate their ability simply because they don’t know how much they don’t know.

Writing isn’t about proving you’re smarter than the hacks. It’s about proving you can face yourself on the page.

We Want Our Chance

“No one’s roping you back from the ledge.”

We Want Our Chance We want our chance. Our names in marquee letters. You want that, you’re at the ledge. No one is roping you back.

Editors are gone. The good ones who read the work and turned us down or when all the stars lined up, told us come on over, you’re ready, we’re ready for you.

Agents, i.e, publishing sales guys are the conduit to publishing— they’re the go-to man. Let’s turn that back on its head. You don’t have money or energy to waste. But you want to level-up.

News flash, the only one who can do that is you— it’s within you. It’s the way it’s always been.

I’m not dogging creative writing courses, though. But you probably only need a few —not a whole degree. You think about. You decide. If you do, there’s some great stuff from the best. Like John Gardner —gifted writer, gifted teacher. You got $11 bucks? Get his book. There’s a whole generation of that kind of teacher. He was like my teacher. But they’re all in retirement or dying off. Pull them out of retirement, seek them out.

These grouchy, curmudgeons, cheap with compliments, inscrutable, lording it over the words, your work. “You don’t understand my vision, man!” Oh, they do. And when they do, you’ll know it. There’s these other guys who’ll sell you on the idea that you can “squeeze in” writing. Yeah, everything else can take a backseat to this. You put in the long hours for that job. That job that’ll keep the lights on.

Except it didn’t turn out that way. No you’re in the rat race. You want more. A house, more house. A car, more car. A trip, more trips. A novel? That can wait. Oh, hey, now you can have it ghost-written for free by hackey software program. You can slap your name on it, keep telling yourself you did it all by your lonesome, hon.

If you are putting in the work, putting in the hours. Now’s the time to get real with the trade. And it’s a good time, too. Don’t let me or anyone tell you differently. Whenever there’s turmoil, whenever there’s wide-scale fuckery about, that’s when we thrive. We writers.

We, anyone who say’s “No, I got another idea.” It’s a topic for another episode, but we need to move laws up to protect the craft, to mitigate the saturation of crap-writing, slop-writing.

Meantime, yes, there is an opportunity here to use the tools we got, to get your work out there, just gotta watch that in doing so we don’t fall into someone else’s design. The writing programs, the ghost-writing by proxy, the publishing hacks, the commercialization of your earnest desire for expression, the know-it-alls, the gatekeepers, the sleaze-bag self-publishers (you know who you are, publishing trash en masse, mostly hoaky genre, but nothing’s safe) —all these things are the big stacks at the poker table, we’re the short stacks.

Every move we make’s gotta mean something, gotta count or we’ll get killed by the blinds. If you got a bankroll, say $16-19K is that an M.F.A.? $1, 2, 3K, is that workshop cash? Imagine what you could do with that. When you’re ready, you’re writing is ready— now, you can put that back into the trade. Yes, maybe you go the indy route to publish —and why not?

The game is rigged and the riggers are falling down, now’s the time to pounce. So, yeah, now you got money to level-up your trade game. In the meantime, it’s about your craft, and beyond that, your voice, your vision —what you’ve really got to tell us, your story. If that’s come together for you.

You’ve matured, and you’re not worse for wear… a little jaded is okay, normal, even. Then, you can pivot to the trade part of the equation. You can go by the playbook, sure— or you can write the playbook, your own game plan.

As for me, I think I’ll play it by ear.

“Whenever there’s turmoil, whenever there’s wide-scale fuckery about, that’s when we thrive. We writers.”

About the author:

Robert Cavaliere is a novelist and essayist who writes about the strange intersection of art, commerce, and endurance.