Jordan Castro: On Being a 'Real Writer,' Self-doubt, How the Internet Impacts Writing, and His Debut Novel, “The Novelist”
Is there anything more relatable to an aspiring novelist than a story in which a writer wakes up with the intention of writing only to find themselves on an app clicking loop in which they go from one social media platform to the next and then back again? In 2022, I don’t think so, which is what makes Jordan Castro’s debut novel, The Novelist, so instantly easy to connect with. He nails what it’s like to be a writer in the age of the internet. More importantly, he captures the absurd experience of trying to be a human irl while the internet looms heavy with its seductive promises of quick dopamine hits that distract from the discomfort of deep introspection.
The premise of The Novelist is simple enough —an unnamed protagonist attempts to work on his novel over the span of a single morning— but almost immediately upon waking he is distracted from the chattering of the internet, “I had specifically not wanted to click Twitter before working on my novel. Every morning, I woke with the general intention of not clicking Twitter, and, with varying degrees of effort and success, I resisted until I half-convinced myself of a legitimate reason to click Twitter, or, in a weak moment, clicked it unthinkingly.” The novel continues in a frenzied first person account of the protagonist’s morning trying to break from his unhinged internet clicking. We follow him through writerly insecurity and comparison, bowel movements, social media rabbit holes, and contemplation of tea rituals (all of which stand between him and his novel). It isn’t until more than a third of the way through the novel that we actually witness the protagonist open his novel-in-progress. What follows is a laugh-out-loud examination of literature and art from the perspective of a writer desperate to be taken seriously and produce something of value. While many of the protagonist’s assertions about the literary world come across as vitriolic, the novel itself never reads as bitter, and there is something compelling about Castro’s ability to let a protagonist exist with all his flaws and blind spots. Above all, Castro doesn’t offer up any easy answers for how a person should be or what makes art meaningful, and in the end, readers will have to decide for themselves. In this way, The Novelist probes more than it proselytizes, which is something I think the world could use more of.
I spoke with Jordan via email about his debut novel, measuring artistic merit in literature, self-doubt, and self-deception in art and life (amongst other things).
Shelby Hinte: I love that The Novelist is a novel about writing a novel. I am always drawn to books that have this metafictional quality to them, but I was especially drawn to how you wrote such a painstaking portrait of a character attempting to write. It feels as though not a single thought or action in the character's morning are left out. Can you talk a little bit about how you came to write The Novelist and why it was important for you to be so thorough in depicting his writing process?
Jordan Castro: Before I started working on The Novelist, I had been writing another novel that sucked. I kept getting distracted by the internet, and feeling conflicted about why I was even writing in the first place, so I started writing about that instead. Once I conceived of the constraint—that the book would take place over a few hours—I still wanted to make it “a page turner,” and I thought that in order do that I’d need to have many active, concrete sentences. The stuff like the narrator writing and deleting, changing the tense, clicking around online, and so on, was where the action was.
SH: I'm happy that you bring up this question of why even write. While reading The Novelist I spent a lot of time wondering why the protagonist wanted to write a novel in the first place. For many pages he is thinking about writing, but he struggles to actually write. I had some ideas around what might compel him to write even though the task appears arduous, but I hoped you would share what you imagined it was that compelled him to write.
JC: To be honest, I hadn’t really imagined what compelled him to write. The novel might actually be pessimistic about this, since he doesn’t really start writing until he starts ranting about an old friend, and the novel doesn’t really ‘turn’ until he leaves his laptop…
What thoughts did you have about it?
SH: One of the ways I interpreted the protagonist's desire to write as one of his many compulsive behaviors (i.e. checking twitter/ig/email, making/drinking tea, etc.). I have heard you share in other interviews that you don't really consider or want this novel to be read as an addiction novel and the protagonist feels similarly. At one point he even says “If there was any place in literature I did not want to stake my claim, it was among the explicitly drug-addicted — or worse, the recovered.” I was actually really moved by the way your book depicted an obsessive mind. I find that in literature addicts are often depicted as one-dimensional characters, but The Novelist felt like a truer depiction of that particular affliction (whether you want to call it addiction/obsession/whatever). I am probably pretty biased because I am an addict in recovery and I write a lot about recovery, but the protagonist's compulsive/obsessive/addictive behavior was my favorite thing about him. I feel like, and this is totally through my own lens, it really captured the way addictive personality types operate. That said, I can also understand the sort of “cringe” association that comes with “quit lit.” I guess, now that I've probably said more than necessary about my interpretation, I wonder if you could share a little bit about why you felt resistance towards this book being affiliated with the “addiction canon”?
JC: I’m probably not the best interpreter of my own relationship with drug literature, or my novel in general. There is some irony in the narrator’s—as well as my own—disdain toward drug literature: he is writing a drug novel, and The Novelist itself is, in part, about addiction. But I do feel an unarticulated aversion toward the genre in general. For one thing, there is this need to aestheticize… and the aesthetics of drug use, and drug culture, are revolting. It’s also just so easy to be cringe, or dishonest. There is the part in the novel, where the narrator says, “Of course, I loved drug addicts and recovering addicts. It was the impulse to write that one could not trust.” People like to say that you should “write what you know,” but we are often uniquely blind to ourselves, especially when we’re mired in vice. In rehab, I’d frequently hear people say to the counselors, “No one knows me better than I know myself”—but literally anyone else, even just a cashier at a store or something, could have one interaction with an addict and have a better perspective on them than they do. Addicts are notoriously full of shit. Writers too. So you put those two together…
SH: I think it's so funny what you said about writers and addicts (true!), and I think it relates to your thoughts on rationality as well. I feel as though writing, at least in its most basic, utilitarian form, is intended to articulate something (truth maybe?), but under the logic of we are all full of shit/not fundamentally rational, it seems impossible to be honest/rational. I keep using the word authentic to describe your book to people and I guess that is just a synonym for honest, so how do you think you pull this type of honesty off? Or maybe a better question is, what do you think makes a book feel authentic/honest?
JC: I do think we have access to truth, but I don’t think truth is purely rational. If anything, it’s suprarational—it transcends rationality, even though it includes and is harmonious with it. I like this line in the Gospel of John, where Jesus says “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” It’s a very weird thing to say—“I am the truth.” We tend to think of the truth as a static idea or a concept, something you can just think or say, but I think the truth is something more like a living personality. It emerges from a kind of process, and can never be separated from this process, which itself is also the truth.
In terms of making my novel feel “authentic,” I’m not really sure. Simone de Beavoir thought that novels achieve a kind of realism when the characters seem “free,” and that this “freedom” is the result of the novel revealing itself to the author as s/he writes. When one approaches a novel ideologically, with explicit “points” and “ends” in mind and so on, the work can feel dead because it isn’t the result of something vital and dynamic. I believe in getting lost and then finding your way. I’m sure books can come from methodical planning and so on, but unless you are a great genius—which I am not—the result might be more cramped than the open possibility of creative freedom. In novels, we can participate in truth, and illuminate it in new ways, though most often I think my own writing falls short.
SH: So much of The Novelist is about the desire to write versus the struggle to actually write and I found myself curious about where you exist on the anguish/enjoyment spectrum of writing. Can you share about what your writing routine/process looks like?
JC: My friend Hunter Hunt-Hendrix told me she thought heaven would feel like how it feels to be making art, but all the time. I can’t think of much that’s more rewarding than being meaningfully involved in creative production, even or especially when it’s difficult. When something is meaningful, I can’t really separate anguish from enjoyment—they blend and work together toward something more important.
In terms of a routine, when I’m working on a book I usually have a schedule that I stick to. I write every day, and try to stop while I still know what I want to say next, so that I still have some momentum the next day. Then I edit everything a lot.
SH: On a similar note, the protagonist is concerned with establishing the difference between “writers” and “writer types.” Part of it, as he notes, is that writer types “produce nothing substantial, nothing that doesn't point back to themselves and their precious quirks.” This section has really stuck with me and I keep thinking about how so many writers/critics/readers/etc. argue online about the distinction between “real writers” and phonies. What are your thoughts on what makes someone a writer versus a writer type?
JC: There’s a lot here I could say, but I think, fundamentally, a lot of it just comes down to the question of cope. The writer has to see not just through other people’s bullshit, or society's bullshit, but his own bullshit. It’s good to move through the discomfort of one’s own stupidity and emerge changed, with a specific life-view. And even if the writer is ultimately wrong, one has to at least risk being wrong. “Writer types,” who are in reality self-centered petty vandals, and don’t risk anything, are always scapegoating someone or something, and their whole orientation toward writing has to do with self-justification. Lesser work can be fun, or interesting, or formally good, or whatever. But I think a writer becomes a “real writer” when he stops trying to hide from himself.
SH: Besides writer intent, how do you measure the value of a piece of writing?
JC: I’m not sure that one can “measure,” exactly, the value of a piece of writing. There are things good literature can give us—insight, humor, knowledge, beauty, and so on—but there is often an element of surprise involved too: great works teach the reader how to read them; they reveal themselves. When I first read Bernhard, for example, I was disconcerted at first, not knowing what to make of the insane, winding, repetitive sentences, the unbroken paragraph, the descent into this internal hell. But by the end everything was musical, I was laughing, having thoughts that I couldn’t have even imagined beforehand. And so you can’t just approach books with a checklist of measurable qualities. This is what drives philistines and bureaucrats insane, and, I think, why ideological readings of great works are so popular: one can abandon the task of reading for the much easier task of checking boxes, cramming everything into the coffin of one specific lens or whatever. For me, literary value is something more like an experience.
SH: I am fascinated by your phrase “good writing.” This is something the protagonist is quite concerned with and he creates a lot of binaries regarding both writing and people. Do you think writing can be objectively good or bad?
JC: I’m thinking about how if I wrote a novel, and the novel was just one page with the word “zoo,” it would be a bad novel, and anyone who said it was a good novel, or a better novel than Crime and Punishment, would be wrong. Everything is just degrees of this.
I don’t think one can remove subjectivity, but I do think there have to be things that one can point to that go beyond mere subjective sentiment, that can be shared, argued about etc. There are both subject and objective values involved. In Michael Clune’s book, A Defense of Judgment, he makes a point that there are humanities professors who, due to their sometimes dogmatic commitment to equality, would feel uncomfortable saying something like “Madame Bovary is better than The Apprentice.” The problem with this kind of thing is that it doesn’t actually result in equality: it only outsources judgment to the market, where what is most popular becomes “what’s best.” It’s uncomfortable, but judgment is integral to literature.
Another thing Clune points out is that this attempt to eschew judgment basically only exists in the aesthetic realm. At the end of A Defense of Judgment, he says, “There are many literature professors who object to saying one book is better than another as a work of art, yet they have no trouble declaring one work morally superior to another.” I’ve encountered this a lot. It’s the sleight of hand of our whole literary culture: at a time when relativism in aesthetic judgment is nearly ubiquitous, a kind of rigid pseudo-morality has replaced it, so that we judge just as harshly as before, only we use the wrong criteria.
SH: Throughout the book the protagonist experiences some serious I-suck-spirals and at one particularly long one he says, “I had no idea what I was doing; i had nothing to offer; everything I'd done so far sucked; I didn't have what it took to actually write a good novel; I was a fraud; I would never write anything good; I had never written anything good.” I found these moments to be relatable and I wondered what your own experience with self-doubt is like as a writer.
JC: I experience a lot of doubt, but also confidence. In both cases the feeling is almost never a good indicator of what’s actually on the page. The most trustworthy emotion I have while writing is mirth. If I’m laughing or grinning, I usually know something’s working. Sometimes though, especially as the work progresses, I think self-doubt can just be an accurate perception that there is more work to do. In our culture, we want to just banish self-doubt, or shame. We want to say that these things are simply “disorders” disconnected from reality, when often they are accurate responses to something we need to do differently. I used to experience a lot more “self hate” style spirals, but now most of my doubt is specific, about certain passages or sentences and so on.
SH: To me, so much of The Novelist is about a person wanting/thinking one thing and then doing something in opposition to what they want/say they want. What drew you to exploring this particular behavior in the book?
JC: I just detest the idea that humans are fundamentally rational. We live in a head-heavy society, inundated with text and image, and we have a kind of faith in our thinking that isn’t warranted at all. We are more “rational” than ever—and everyone is totally insane. G.K. Chesterton has this great bit in Orthodoxy about how insanity is not a lack of rationality, but rather an abundance of rationality within too small of a frame. He uses the example of a guy who is paranoid that his friend is a CIA agent: “You’re a CIA agent” – “I’m not a CIA agent” – “That’s exactly what a CIA agent would say!” One can be right, in the cramped circle of one’s reason, but wrong in a more fundamental sense.
I think what initially drew me to write about this kind of thing was that it reflected my own situation at the time. Once I started to see that the self was actually divided against the self, it was like a revelation, but strangely, this knowledge didn’t lead directly to any behavioral change. There is something else that steps in between thought and action. I wanted to explore that more.
SH: I guess my final question has got to touch on the way you describe the internet in The Novelist. It was by far one of the truest depictions of the internet I've seen in a book so far and in it the protagonist intends to work on his novel, but keeps compulsively checking various apps/internet pages instead. How does your relationship to the internet impact your own writing?
JC: Before I was really active online, like ages 12-14, I wrote “political essays” and poems, which I converted into song lyrics for a punk band I was in, but when I was 16, I discovered blogs and online literary journals, and from then on my writing and the internet have always been connected. I lived in Ohio, and didn’t go to school for writing, so the internet was how I met other writers and so on. With The Novelist I incorporated the distraction of social media into the writing itself, but now that I’m not writing a novel that takes place in front of a screen, it feels increasingly harder to justify.
Jordan Castro is the author of The Novelist (Soft Skull, 2022). He is from Cleveland, OH.
About the interviewer
Shelby Hinte is a bay area writer and educator. She has led writing workshops at San Francisco State University, The Writing Salon, and in the community, including teaching creative writing to incarcerated adults and youth on juvenile probation. She is a contributing writer and interviewer with Write or Die Tribe and a prose reader for No Contact. Her writing has been featured in ZYZYVA, BOMB Magazine, Hobart, SmokeLong Quarterly, and elsewhere. Follow her @shelbyhinte
