by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
Long ago, my dream was to work at either Media General or The Richmond Times-Dispatch. Sadly, it took me about a decade to realize I was being extremely delusional to think that was a possibility for me. I’m just too creative and don’t have the intense, introverted personality that most successful journalists have.
The great irony of it all is that being a successful journalist — or someone in the media — isn’t really that hard. You often have to take something akin to a vow of poverty to pursue the career starting off, but many people go straight from college into a job at a daily like The Richmond Times-Dispatch. That makes me sad that I wasted so much time being oblivious that if I ever become a success, it will be through telling the “truth” through a novel or screenplay rather than the “facts” of journalism.
Over the years, I have seen plenty of cases where people went straight into a daily newspaper environment out of college, grew disillusioned and moved on to something else. This smarts because they so casually were able to drop my dream because they saw what it really took to be a journalist and even though they could do it, just didn’t want to.
I monitor the chatter within the publishing industry through chatter and it’s shocking how bitter people who are far more advanced in their novelist career than I am. Many of these bitter people are “mid-list” authors who have had some success and now are being screwed over in various ways. I totally get that, but I’ve been an aspiring novelist for so long that I would be grateful at this point to be a mid-lister.
All of this happens in the context of me being concerned that not only am I too much of a drunk crank to ever get a literary agent to begin with but that cold, hard fact that I simply can not, will not abide by the strict orthodoxy of the “woke cancel culture mob” that seems to be mainstream among many successful novelist these days.
I know my truth north and if you don’t like it — fuck you. I try to be as empathetic and understanding as possible but when people tell me they will ding my storytelling ability because I don’t have two women having a conversation among something other than a man — Jesus Christ.
While I don’t support or defend JK Rowling’s anti-trans stance, the mentality of the people who would “cancel” her for having concerns me because, as I keep saying — it’s shit like that that drives Traditionalists in the arms of fascism.
Anyway, I just hate how hysterical both the far Right and the far Left are these days. They have a symbiotic relationship at the moment because they force “radical moderates” like myself to defend the most extreme policy aims of whichever side I am forced to align with.
Since I fucking hate MAGA fascism, I have to defend some pretty kooky woke ideas to my Traditionalist relatives whenever we discuss politics. But, as I keep saying, we all have to pick a side, or a side will be chosen for us. To be a “centrist” is to be complicit in the rise of fascism. Post-truth is pre-fascist and all that.
There are no easy answers and all I want to do is give my audience the best possible story with most fleshed out an interesting characters possible. It will be interesting to see if me being a “delusional jerk with a good heart” will get in the way of that dream.
