"A trainwreck to write about"
On elections, teenage muses, articles about teenage muses, and other pretexts for lazy writing and tired ideas
A line jumped out at me toward the end of the Vanity Fair profile of Augusta Britt, Cormac McCarthy’s “secret muse” (who was a teenager when she and McCarthy, who was in his 40s, began a sexual relationship). Here’s the line, from Britt’s mouth: “I wondered, Is that all I was to him, a trainwreck to write about?”
The line got me to wonder what difference, if any, there might be between a muse and a trainwreck to write about. Or what lines divide a muse, a trainwreck to write about, and “the news cycle.” Aren’t these all just often-fleeting excuses for a writer to write? I began to worry that writers don’t actually need to have something to say; they may just have to have an excuse to say anything at all.
If my worries are true, that would explain about 90% of the current writing landscape.
Immediately after it was published, the Vanity Fair article itself became a trainwreck to write about. Writers seized on the author’s overripe style. There were Twitter pileons and reaction pieces and reactions to reactions. It was the best thing to happen to writers all week, since it gave them something to write about for a couple days.
A few years ago, a big trainwreck to write about was a conflict between two little-known instructors in a community writing program in Boston. The substance of the conflict could not have been less significant. But countless people read about it, and God knows, other writers, rubbernecking the wreck, found ways to write about it, too.
Occasionally, a writer will cause a trainwreck — they’ll dynamite the tracks or sweet-talk their way onto the engine, then derail it all — in order to have something to write about. This used to be called “New Journalism,” but much memoir and (I’d wager) all polyamory writing follows this pattern.
Sometimes, a single tweet, a pebble on the tracks, can be a trainwreck to write about. Or at least a trainwreck to record a podcast about.
If enough people are writing about a thing — a debate performance, a breakdancing routine — then it almost by definition must have been a trainwreck. The headlines will confirm it. Rarely, an actual trainwreck will be a trainwreck to write about.
The U.S. Presidential election earlier this month was a trainwreck to write about. (Most eleections are.) It was a consequential thing that happened, a thing readers supposedly care about, but for writers, it was a sturdy, generous peg onto which they could hang their same old opinions. And as we’ve seen, this peg can always take more takes.
Certainly Donald Trump, the universal news peg, is a trainwreck to write about.
But then, to flip Augusta Britt’s question around, does this make Trump also a muse, in fact, the most important literary muse of the 21st century? There’s a strong affirmative case to be made here.
Just so we’re all clear what my take is, I think this approach to writing — find the nearest trainwreck, and write something, anything about it — is shallow. That’s not to say I’ve never done it myself. Arguably, this very post is writing about a trainwreck. That doesn’t mean I have to like it.
But maybe writing about trainwrecks is what people want. They fall in love with a writer’s voice and sensibility, not their message. All the writer needs is an excuse to put fingers to board. And a trainwreck — well, who could deny that a trainwreck is something to write about?