Dear Mr. Klosterman

April 12, 2007
Dear Mr. Klosterman:
I have an admission and a request to make. I realize the admission may ruin any chance at the fulfillment of my request, but, oh, so it goes.
I’ve been reading you since high school, when I thought that your larger-than-life self-congratulatory way of looking at the world through writing was over-written. I was not a huge fan, but I kept my SPIN subscriptions coming… I guess I was oddly intrigued. I came from very rural Nebraska. Perhaps you can understand that my narrow mind had only really been exposed to Willa Cather and Mari Sandoz.
In college , in Sioux Falls (I know that Olive Garden well!), and under the guidance of a more worldly and eccentric writing professor, I found my own voice. Which seemed to be along the lines of the same self-congratulatory one I had once disliked in you. I think it has to do with escaping the emptiness of wide open spaces and the monotone lives of everyone you ever knew. I feel pretty proud of myself for not working at Wal-mart or the nursing home, as most of my old friends do.
I live in Chicago these days, after a stint in D.C. at NBC (yeah, television reporting sucked), the Argus Leader and the PR world. I’m working on a book, considering grad school (The good ol’ MFA, Creative non-fiction). My writing style, to a degree, seems to reflect this level of… what I’d call excitement, that my life has been. Telling you all about it would take forever, so, for example, let me just mention that I recently returned from Thailand where I spent time with the Thai mafia and was detained by immigration before returning to the US. The crazy stories—I find them, they find me. My life is my muse. My family, friends—they want that excitement in my stories (perhaps to ease the boredom of their lives?), but then they tell me that my writing is too boastful.
So my request is the answer to a question I’ve been struggling with since I got back from Thailand. How do I reconcile my “boastful” writing with what my audience wants? How do I know what my audience wants? If my writing and my voice isn’t just empty words, but a way of understanding myself and the world, then how do I squelch that voice and “refine it” as one friend suggested? Or do I just tell them to fuck off and find a whole new audience? Do writers—do you—deal with this a lot? (Ok, so it was a bunch of questions, sorry.) I want to hold on to me, in my writing, but I don’t want to sound like some pompous, over-written and under-edited braggart that I’m beginning to feel.
These are very juvenile questions, I know, I know. The whole issue here is that my self-confidence is apparently not getting me anywhere, so I’m being forced to reconsider all I thought I once knew about myself as a writer. Maybe that’s silly. I think it is, but I’m asking your advice as a fellow writer, since these people discouraging me are mere commoners (haha). I’m not sure if you’ve had thoughts on this, or are willing to share, but I’d appreciate anything you can offer. Thanks for your time… and your perspective.
Sincerely,
Mars


So if you don't know, Chuck Klosterman is a senior editor at SPIN magazine and the author of a dozen non-fiction essay collections. His forthcoming novel, "Downtown Owl,"will be released in September by Simon And Schuster.
I used to hate his writing, thinking he was nothing more than a pompous braggart from North Dakota. And for whatever degrees of truth there is in that statement, his IS from North Dakota. The above is a letter I wrote to him today, in an effort to draw some literary criticism from someone who's actually a person of letters.
One of the things I realized in Thailand is that I'm often doing things to wow those at home. That's not the MAIN reason I eat small round balls of an illegal substance in a dimly lit alley way or makeout with a ping-pong princess in one of the red light district's seamier establishments. Those things just sort of happened. In fact, I can't think of a single example of something that I've done to impress someone, except for maybe buy a new dress to wear to some dumb political event. The point is, I've found a need for more honesty and truth with myself. This came about during several uninterrupted hours of writing on the beach, the train, the coffee shop, where ever. So now I'm at home and trying to continue with this tradition of writing established abroad, and I'm also trying to examine myself through my words. That is after all, why I write. To make sense of my world. To analyze people and place and things and my relation to them.
I've had a couple of discussions now with people telling me to tone down my writing. Which is basically like telling me to tone down my life and be quiet.
After the first one, I wrote a great essay in about 20 minutes. No, I'm not posting it because I'm submitting it to the scrutiny of the literary community (my peers), and the journal in mind doesn't accept previously published works.
After the second discussion, I didn't write, but I thought about what this meant on a more personal level. What it meant to me and who I am as a person, removed from who I am as a writer. Being made to feel like the snobby prom queen when high school has been over for years is a pretty lame way to feel as a twenty-five year old. What would I have done in high school, had I been feeling like that? Probably gone off and got wasted, smoked a joint, in an effort to make myself feel better? No, even that is lamer than feeling like a snotty princess. I thought about the fact that my writing is my voice, and had someone not wanted to listen to my voice in high school, I would have taken the hint and simply found a new audience.
Thus the letter. I wrote it, pinned down his correspondence address.. we'll see if I get a response.
In the meantime, a former colleague called me (someone who's also trained as a writer) and we dished on life and location for a while. I told her about my current crisis of faith within my craft, and she said, nonchalantly,
"eh, it's your voice. I've always liked it. You do take the reader into it with you. That's good storytelling."