I’ve published nine books and all nine experiences have been unique. Yet there are two questions you get asked every single time, over and over again (by journalists, but also by normal people).



The first question is always: “How did you come up with this idea?” My most honest answer would be to admit that I don’t know, or that I can’t remember, or that I do remember but I don’t want to say. But because this (totally reasonable) question is asked so persistently, I inevitably manufacture a semi-cogent response that feels halfway plausible, and I repeat that response until it feels like the true answer. I suppose it’s possible that this rote reply is the true answer, and that I simply needed to work through the inquiry 25 times before realising this was the case. For example: whenever people ask me how I came up with the idea behind But What If We’re Wrong? I almost always mention watching a specific TV series (Cosmos) while simultaneously reading about the life of a specific author (Herman Melville).

Now, those two synchronised events did occur, and they seem like a plausible genesis for a workable idea. But part of me suspects I’d actually been thinking about the concept of collective wrongness unconsciously for 30 years, and that this serendipitous moment was just the first time I decided to write a book about it. Maybe what I classify as the inception of the idea is actually the conclusion to that idea. Either way, it doesn’t matter. I don’t think most people who pose this question are particularly interested in the answer. It just seems like the proper thing to ask someone who’s written a book.

The second question is (to me) more fascinating, even though it seems far simpler: “How long did it take you to write this?” It’s a query that raises a lot of ancillary questions about the entire process. Am I writing if I’m just thinking about writing, or is writing only the mechanical typing? Does stoically staring at a blank computer screen for two hours while drinking Mountain Dew count as creativity? If I come up with the vague idea for a novel in 1996 but don’t write a word until autumn 2016, did the novel take 20 years or six months?

I never know when the writing starts.

This is further complicated by the fact that it often feels like my books are still being written even after they’ve been released into the public and can no longer be altered. I recognise this makes no sense. When a book is physically assembled and made available in bookstores, it should be finished. The text is trapped under ice. Everything should be over. But in my experience, that is never the case. Once I’ve published a book, I’m asked an avalanche of questions about what certain passages suggest, or what my motives were, or if my work is autobiographical or metaphorical or was composed while on drugs. This is amplified by other people who write about my books and assert what they believe to be true about what I’ve published, and then I’m asked to respond to those arbitrary assertions. Obviously, these post-publication thoughts don’t change what is typeset on the page. But to people who read these auxiliary sentiments before they read the book itself – and even to those readers who don’t encounter these sentiments until after they’ve finished – the book is contextually changed. Not a lot, but a little. Even if they disagree with what’s being alleged, they can’t un-know that this intellectual position exists. So it always feel like I’m writing all my books in perpetuity, every time someone asks me a question about anything I’ve written in the past. If I were smarter, I’d live as a recluse. But I can’t do it.

I once saw a Black Sabbath promotional poster from the 1970s that declared: “More good reviews than most. More bad reviews than all.” I relate to this. I’m shocked by how often my books are reviewed, which (I know) I’m supposed to be happy about, regardless of what the reviewers claim. But it will never stop seeming weird, despite the fact that I’ve spent most of my life reviewing the works of others. It’s a zero-sum game. Unless you’re totally unknown, the content of a review has almost no influence on book sales; a great high-profile review will cause sales to negligibly spike upward for a week or two, but a really bad high-profile review paradoxically generates an almost identical commercial impact. My best-reviewed books have sold the fewest copies.

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Still, there’s always an intangible sense that the response to a book somehow shapes what it actually is, and the more attention a book gets, the more it seems to drift away from whatever you originally imagined. This is disappointing. Of course, the goal of any good publisher is to get as much attention for a book as possible, which means a book only becomes successful when the author completely loses control over what that book means and what it signifies. The central contradiction between writing and publishing is that the former is a way to construct a reality, and the latter is a process of losing control over reality. But you can’t complain about this, because this is how it goes: the disappointment is what they pay you for.

Extract

Melville publishes Moby-Dick in 1851, basing his narrative on the real-life 1839 account of a murderous sperm whale nicknamed “Mocha Dick”. The initial British edition is around 900 pages. Melville, a moderately successful author at the time of the novel’s release, assumes this book will immediately be seen as his masterwork. But the reviews are mixed, and some are contemptuous (“It repels the reader” is the key takeaway from one of the very first reviews in the London Spectator). It sells poorly – at the time of Melville’s death, total sales hover below 5,000 copies. The failure ruins Melville’s life: he becomes an alcoholic and a poet and eventually a customs inspector. When he dies destitute in 1891, one has to assume his perspective on Moby-Dick is something along the lines of: ‘Well I guess that didn’t work. Maybe I should have spent fewer pages explaining how to tie complicated knots.’ For the next 30 years, nothing about the reception of this book changes. But then [the first world war] happens and – somehow and for reasons that can’t be totally explained – modernists living in postwar America start to view literature through a different lens. There is a Melville revival. The concept of what a novel is suppose to accomplish shifts in his direction and amplifies with each passing generation, eventually prompting people (like the 2005 director of Columbia University’s American studies programme) to classify Moby-Dick as ‘the most ambitious book ever conceived by an American writer’. Pundits and cranks can disagree with that assertion, but no one cares if they do. Now, there’s certainly a difference between collective, objective wrongness (eg: misunderstanding gravity for centuries) and collective, subjective wrongness (eg: not caring about Moby-Dick for 75 years). The machinations of the transitions are completely different. Yet both scenarios hint at a practical reality and a modern problem. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true – both objectively and subjectively – is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that re-evaluating what we consider ‘true’ is becoming increasingly difficult.

Buy the book

But What If We’re Wrong? by Chuck Klosterman is published by Amberley Books at £14.99. It is available from the Guardian bookshop for £12.29.