What's With All the Writing Cults in Fiction? An Exploration

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Kristian Wilson Colyard grew up bizarre in a one-caution-light city in the Appalachian foothills. She now lives in an outdated textile metropolis along with her husband and their clowder of cats. She’s on Twitter @kristianwriting, and you’ll find extra of her work on-line at kristianwriting.com.

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I’ve at all times romanticized training and academia. But I don’t assume I fairly realized how a lot till I lastly acquired round to studying The Secret History final yr. I swear to you, that e book modified my mind chemistry. Something in Donna Tartt’s debut struck a chord. As I learn Richard Papen’s perhaps-not-so-wide-eyed, Nick Carraway-esque narration of his associates’ downfall, I used to be reminded of all the occasions I’d been made to really feel lower than — unintentionally or in any other case — in tutorial environments.

This shouldn’t be an essay about isolation in academia, removed from it. But this bears mentioning: It wasn’t till I acknowledged how giant a task my financial background performed in my college experiences on each side of the desk that I used to be capable of course of the loneliness I felt strolling these hallowed halls — locations that, for higher or worse, I nonetheless handle to lionize.

In greater than a dozen years as a pupil and teacher, I discovered just one place that by no means made me really feel alone, and that was the writing workshop. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with different creatives, making an attempt to make sense of this complete “craft” factor, I at all times felt a way of kinship. Even if nobody loved what I shared, even when I disliked most of what I learn that week, we have been nonetheless in it collectively, and that meant one thing.

So you’ll be able to think about my shock when, after studying The Secret History, I began to note one thing bizarre and sinister about the method authors have been portraying teams of writers and readers. Certainly, Richard and the remainder of Julian Morrow’s college students have been in a cult; that was the level. But then I observed Bunny — not the doomed Tartt character, however the novel. Then, Sleepwalking. And We Wish You Luck. And The Stranger Diaries. Doki Doki Literature Club! — which isn’t even a e book! — and Plain Bad Heroines.

So what’s with all these literature-related cults in fiction, cabals of writers and readers? Why can we preserve coming again to them, again and again?

I’d argue it has hardly something to do with books in any respect. They’re simply the medium. What that is actually about is how we take into consideration our relationship to the written phrase.

Spoiler Warning: This essay accommodates spoilers for The Secret History and Bunny.

Writing Cults in Fiction: The Argument I’m Not Here to Make

I at all times appear to start out essays off with a caveat, however there actually is an elephant in the room right here: Most of the writing cults I’ve discovered in fiction heart fully round younger girls.

Plain Bad Heroines takes place at a faculty for ladies. The named members of Doki Doki Literature Club! are all feminine college students attending the identical highschool. Bunny and Sleepwalking each cope with cliques of feminine school college students, and the professor at the heart of The Stranger Diaries is a lady as effectively.

All this to say, there’s completely an argument to be made about the method these tales current girls and women’ relationships with fiction. I’d love for another person to make it. I’m not concerning it right here.

And now, on to the actual meat of the difficulty.

Writing Cults in Fiction: The Writing Workshop

Nothing arouses a stronger mixture of concern and anticipation in a author than the thought of a writing workshop. Those two phrases are all it takes to bring to mind visions of prestigious gatherings — assume Iowa or Clarion. That alone is sufficient to induce nervous apprehension.

When you add in the abject vulnerability the workshop setting imposes upon the sharing author, nevertheless, the result’s a veritable powderkeg of emotion. People cry, each in the circle and in non-public. They bear in mind who critiqued them harshly and lash out at these writers when their work is on the desk. Some disappear and by no means return. Others preserve writing however cease sharing.

The workshop can nurture some writers to enhance; I’m one in every of them. But it’s not for everybody. It’s uncommon to see a pupil stroll away from a writing workshop with out being modified in any method. And generally — I received’t say most of the time, however someoccasions — these adjustments aren’t for the higher.

What a Writing Workshop Looks Like

For these readers who’ve by no means been a part of a writing workshop, right here is the typical mannequin: The sharing author distributes copies of their work for classmates to learn and write about. At the subsequent session, these classmates will focus on the author’s work — generally after one in every of them, and even the author themself, reads the work aloud — in a roundtable style earlier than handing their critiques and marked-up copies of the story again to the writer.

At no level throughout the dialogue is the author allowed to talk. When the dialogue interval is over, they might pose clarifying inquiries to the group, however they’re forbidden from explaining something about their work. This rule exams the textual content’s means to face by itself and additional develops the thick pores and skin essential to write down professionally — to resist rejection and critiques from individuals who “just don’t get it.”

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There are a great deal of issues with this mannequin, as many proficient writers have identified. Writing for Tordotcom final yr, S.L. Huang famous that “When a student’s contexts and cultural touchstones are different from the vast majority of the class, it’s far easier for such a narrow slice of audience — the instructor and fellow critiques — to miss what that student is trying to do entirely.”

Without the means to talk, BIPOC college students and people from different marginalized teams could get little or no out of the workshop, in the event that they get something in any respect.

A Ritual of the Writing Workshop

It’s these parts, the emotions of helplessness and un-helped-ness, that these fictional writing cults play upon. Oddly sufficient, although, the authors engaged on these tales don’t should stretch the fact very far, if in any respect, to remodel the writing workshop right into a writing cult.

In 2015, Odyssey Writing Workshop founder Jeanne Cavelos informed Wired a few ritual her members had devised to melt the blow of the critique session:

[The students] created a ceremony for themselves. The individuals who have been about to be critiqued that day could be given this ceremony to assist create a way of calm, and the means to just accept no matter they have been going to listen to, and to not really feel afraid or indignant or something. It concerned a crown that you’d placed on that was made out of bathroom paper and paper clips — like little rest room paper flowers — and they’d do a studying out of the Shakespearian insult generator, learn an excerpt from The Odyssey, then the individual would have the ability to select a tune and they’d all dance to the tune round an opulent goat standing on a can of condensed milk….[T]hey wished to assist one another to deal with the scenario, and to have or not it’s this constructive expertise.

It’s arduous to learn that assertion and never consider the bacchanal in The Secret History or the aptly named Workshop in Bunny, every of which turned tutorial superstition and hubris right into a lethal ritual.

Fictional Writing Cult #1: The Secret History

Even although the classics college students in The Secret History aren’t a part of a writing workshop in the strictest sense of the phrase, each hallmark signal from the different writing-cult novels is current. Here, we’ve got a small clique of gifted college students who clearly delineate between the in-group and the out-group. They fixate on the connotations of particular person phrases and continuously critique each other’s work. No one else on campus “gets” what they do — in this case, as a result of nobody else can learn the supplies they’re working with.

In Tartt’s novel, Morrow’s clique of classics majors, sans Richard and Bunny, efficiently induce the “Dionysiac madness” of the maenads — You know, the girls who tore the mourning Orpheus limb from limb when he wouldn’t play for them? — throughout a countryside retreat. Their success outcomes in three deaths: a farmer, murdered throughout the bacchanal; clique member Bunny, whom the group murders after they concern he’ll report them to the authorities; and Henry, who kills himself in entrance of his associates throughout the novel’s climax.

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Keeping with the major solid’s subject of examine, it’s hubris that kills all three of those characters. In the case of the farmer, it’s the group’s confidence that they’ll wind themselves up right into a actually mythic state of ecstasy. When Bunny dies, it’s due in half to his personal hubris — he believes he can maintain the homicide over his associates’ heads in perpetuity with out retaliation. But the clique’s personal confidence comes again into play right here; they’ve killed as soon as, and they’ll kill once more.

As for Henry’s demise, there are myriad readings into his motives: Was it cowardice? An try at heroics? Did he develop into overwhelmed by remorse? Regardless of the way you interpret the suicide that brings The Secret History to its surprising conclusion, there’s no uncoupling that demise from the two hubristic ones previous it.

More vital to notice, nevertheless, is that it’s the clique’s affinity for the books they’ve elected to review that results in the creation of the cult-like atmosphere, which in flip shatters their lives endlessly.

Fictional Writing Cult #2: Bunny

“Bunny” means a variety of issues in Mona Awad’s literary horror novel. It’s what the different members of narrator Samantha’s MFA cohort name one another. (Yes, they’re all Bunny.) It could also be the creature that gave the school its title; is the rabbit-infested Warren campus named after an individual or a habitat? Bunnies are what the Bunnies have chosen to sacrifice to create their Darlings, a.okay.a. “Bunny-boys”: witched-up males normal in the picture of their favourite literary heroes. And it won’t be, but it surely definitely looks like a callback to the major sufferer of Tartt’s whydunnit.

Similarly, “workshop” has two meanings in Bunny. Samantha and the Bunnies attend a standard MFA workshop every week, however the Bunnies additionally use the time period to consult with their boy-spawning witchcraft periods.

Awad’s transformation of the writing workshop right into a fictional cult is way more on the nostril than Tartt’s however no much less riveting to learn. After a protracted yr of freezing Samantha out, the Bunnies lastly invite her to their Smut Salon — a self-organized workshop in which the 4 of them flip their work into efficiency artwork — which she ditches her finest buddy, Ava, to attend.

After she lets the Bunnies ply her with alcohol and — it’s implied — a cocktail of different medicine, Samantha earns herself an invitation to their different Workshop…and that’s the place issues get bizarre.

See, the Bunnies are witches. Kind of. I imply, there are many interpretations of what occurs in this novel, starting from 100% literal to fully metaphoric. I’m sticking with the literal camp right here, for simplicity’s sake.

The Bunnies catch rabbits on the Warren campus and explode them with their minds, utilizing their life essence to spawn the Darlings: engaging younger “men” with literary namesakes that replicate the traits they’ve been given. These aren’t excellent mates, not by Bunny requirements. Their fingers are gloved as a result of the Bunnies can by no means get their fingers to look human, and the Darlings are at all times impotent. What’s extra, they scream and cry when confronted with issues they don’t perceive, reminiscent of the nature of their very own existence. Once they begin screaming, they should be put down — a.okay.a. axe murdered.

Not lengthy after Samantha is inducted into the Workshop, she herself turns into a Bunny. Again, the novel closely implies that the Bunnies are drugging her to maintain her compliant. It’s solely her love for Ava that breaks her out of the fog of Bunnihood.

Samantha spends the remainder of the novel bouncing forwards and backwards between the Bunnies and Ava. She creates her solely profitable Bunny-boy, Max, who’s clever, emotionally secure, and sexually potent, in contrast to the different Darlings. He begins sleeping with the 4 Bunnies and Ava, which Samantha finds perverse in a method she will’t fairly put her finger on…till it’s all too late.

Turns out, the Bunnies have spent the complete novel looking for out what her secret is. They know Samantha created Ava with out realizing it when she first got here to Warren, and so they homicide Ava to show it, forcing Samantha right into a showdown in which she should — actually — kill her Darling, Max, to cease them and tear the clique aside for good.

Writers can learn absolutely anything they need into this. Are the Bunnies holding Samantha again, stopping her from with the ability to write as a result of they count on a lot of her? Or is she so intimidated by what she perceives to be their superior expertise that she retreats from the craft? Does Max characterize a facet of Samantha’s work that must be pruned, despite the fact that doing so will devastate her adoring public — à la Misery? Is the novel nearly how we will’t probably see our personal abilities? Is it a commentary on the helpfulness of writing workshops, or lack thereof?

In fact, there are not any “correct” solutions to those questions. What’s clear in this heady fever dream of a e book, nevertheless, is that the Bunnies’ downfall comes as the results of their very own hubris and obsession with the written phrase.

Damn close to each Bunny-boy is a pastiche of the girls’s favourite literary heroes — their e book boyfriends, if you’ll. The Bunnies may need remained associates if solely they’d paid extra consideration to their very own craft. Instead, they endured in manipulating and tormenting Samantha as a result of they wished what she had: a generative energy that’s each inextricable from, and a stand-in for, her writing. They’re silly sufficient to assume they’ll wield it. But, in the finish, they’re solely capable of create watered-down copies of her unique work.

Why Writing Cults Exist in Fiction

Does such a factor as “the fatal flaw,” that showy darkish crack working down the center of a life, exist exterior literature? I used to assume it didn’t. Now I feel it does. And I feel that mine is that this: a morbid eager for the picturesque in any respect prices.

Donna Tartt, The Secret History

There’s a purpose Most Writers Are Writers is such a well-liked trope. Tartt, Awad, and others are writing what they know. They’re intimately conversant in the energy that tutorial areas, in basic, and the writing workshop in explicit, maintain over college students.

I might speak endlessly about The Secret History. I might provide you with a three-hour presentation on how the Workshop Bunny is each transformative and transshaped. But these aren’t the most intriguing issues about this pattern of writing cults in fiction.

See, opposite to in style perception, most readers aren’t college students of literature. They won’t ever attend a writing workshop. They would possibly recall the high-school cliques that impressed Heathers, Mean Girls, and Doki Doki Literature Club, however that doesn’t imply they’ll perceive the magnitude of being excluded in the method Richard and Samantha typically are. Academia is, in some ways, not a part of the actual world.

What’s extra fascinating, then, is what the recognition of those tales — and maybe of the darkish academia subgenre extra broadly — says about us as readers.

Why We Love Reading About Writing Cults in Fiction

In the identical method that almost all writers are writers, most readers are additionally readers. We flip to books for a wide range of causes. But whether or not we’re escaping actuality or making an attempt to develop into higher individuals, every of us is aware of that books have a sure affect over us.

It’s that energy that retains us coming again. Because we see how simple it’s for these atypical characters, individuals with whom we could intently establish, to get sucked into lethal circumstances — all as a result of they love what we love.

Books.

Looking for extra writing about cults in fiction? Check out this checklist of thrillers about cults! Need your nonfiction repair? These must-read books about cults are an important place to begin.

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