By Serdar Yegulalp on 2026-08-13 17:00:00-04:00
There were more than a few kinds of writers I could have ended up as.
When I was in high school, I thought I was going to become something in the vein of the High Modernists like Pynchon or Barth (or, later, David Foster Wallace), and I wrote a lot of stuff in that vein without really understanding what motivated the choices within them. I was just copying a surface, and in time I abandoned that approach. That and as I started to read more work actually in that vein (in an attempt to do more than copy), I found I just didn't like most of it. It was too-clever-by-half, jejune, more interested in being snarky than in being insightful.
Option #2 was experimentalism and "transgressive" writing — William S. Burroughs, Kathy Acker, Dennis Cooper, Hubert Selby, Jr., etc. All this required, as I found, someone who had actually lived on the edge as opposed to just reading about it. I could, again, whomp up a fair forgery of the style from the outside, but there was no inner life, no burning necessity that made those people do what they did. I didn't want to be someone who could mouth the words but never whistle the music, so I left that off too.
Option #3 was the one I'd sort of sat on the whole time: works of the fantastic, but also out at the edges (or what at the time was considered the edge): Philip K. Dick, Stanisław Lem, LeGuin, "James Tiptree, Jr." (Alice Sheldon), Joanna Russ, Theodore Sturgeon, etc. I felt let down when I found out most SF wasn't like this at all, but I clung to those mavericks as examples of the direction I could head in. By this point I knew I couldn't get anywhere by just writing mock-PKD or pseudo-Lem. I had to do my own thing, and that meant making my own mistakes. And I didn't really get the wheel turning on that until 2006 or so (20 years! my god!).
I think often of how the main reason to choose, or not choose, any of these paths was sincerity with myself. What did I really want and why? The high-modernist and experimentalist paths weren't really about what those things involved, but more about me seeing myself in that mold. That was an artifact of how I used to think about myself and my work, one where I was far more self-consciously aware of how I'd be seen by some hypothetical audience. I didn't really start to write anything I was truly proud of and that felt like it had any lasting value until I shucked off that attitude and left it by the roadside.
Nobody really knows what their own thing is until they try to grope towards it. I don't know of any writer who sat down at the start of their career with some perfectly formed image of what they were going to do and why, and then proceeded to execute on it. Doing the thing was the only way to find out what road they were really on.
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