How to Write for “How to Write Stories About Writers”
“How To Write Stories About Writers” Submission Guidelines
Christopher Lasch, the author of “The Agony of the American Left,” and “The Culture of Narcissism” condemned modern and postmodern narrative techniques, especially metafictional approaches to literature. He wrote:
“Novelists and playwrights call attention to the artificiality of their own creations and discourage the reader from identifying with their characters. By means of irony and eclecticism, the writer withdraws from his subject but at the same time becomes so conscious of these distancing techniques that he finds it more and more difficult to write about anything except the difficulty of writing.” He went on to note that in a Narcissistic Culture “even the rich lose the sense of place and historical continuity, the subjective feeling of ‘entitlement’, which takes inherited advantages for granted. This gives way to what clinicians call ‘narcissistic entitlement’ — grandoise illusions, inner emptiness.”
At “How to Write Stories About Writers” we aim to take this moralist’s objections seriously even as we continue to employ ironic, subjective, and metafictional techniques in order to expose not only the literary devices that are employed in our own short stories but also those employed at work, in the family, in the shopping mall, in schools, and finally in society at large that reinforce our passivity and perpetuate what is ultimately a corrupt social order.
We are seeking stories about stories, literature about literature, and writers writing about writers. This is this the publication for your narcissism, this is the publication for your alienation, this is the publication for your skepticism, for your fiction that is self-reflexive, ironic, dissociative, and wild.
“How to Write Stories about Writers” is an online publication at dietsoap.org. We seek stories ranging between 500-4000 words. We pay a flat $5 honorarium.