Writers, Acknowledge the Monster Within

There's something perverse in all of us that demands honest exploration

Photo by Vlad Hilitanu on Unsplash

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Keeping this newsletter focused on writing in 2025 is like cooking dinner in a war zone; the effort requires an element of grace.
With that in mind, I offer the following wish: May human decency and integrity prevail, despite all evidence to the contrary. And may you find the moral courage and personal strength to continue standing for the values that, until the current oligarchy smashed them, were supposed to unify Americans: freedom and justice for all.

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Paid subscribers have access to MFA Lore’s newest feature, the weekly writing prompt that will cap each Saturday’s post. Today’s prompt is a generative exercise that relates to the topic of Monstrosity.

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We’re living in an era of monstrosity. America is now ruled by the collective embodiment of monstrosity. We’re all flailing against a rising mountain of evidence that monstrosity surrounds us. And so, we naturally want to believe that We have nothing in common with the monsters who are out to get us. But that very thinking is what gives the monsters their power, not just by dividing Us against Them but by turning us against ourselves.

As writers, we know the fallacy of such purity claims. We know that, with the exception of the 4% of the population who are bona fide psychopaths (including several of our global rulers), no one is entirely Evil. But no one is entirely Good, either.

We all have a dark side. We all have committed deeds and harbor tendencies that fill us with shame. We all are capable of committing unspeakable acts, especially under pressure. And the more we pretend otherwise, the more twisted and unreliable we become.

Psychology has helpfully labeled several variations of this twistedness. Projection, for instance, is the insistence that your enemies exemplify your own most shameful crimes and qualities (Trump’s entire identity is built on projection). Reaction formation is the professed rejection of your own core beliefs and tendencies (think J. Edgar Hoover’s public screeds against homosexuality even as he secretly coupled with Clyde Tolson). The point is that the pretense of purity often leads to pathology.

And on the page, if not interrogated, it leads to inauthentic memoirs and flat fictional characters. I’ve been reading Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, and when I reached her deconstruction of Nabokov’s modus operandi in Lolita, I let out a cheer. Because Dederer unpacks the difficult truth that too few writers, especially new writers, will admit:

Every good artist knows this is true of the best work: It takes some plundering of the self. You go in there and you have a look around and you bring back something that might make people uncomfortable, and you write it down. Even if it’s awful. Even if people don’t want to hear it. Even if it makes you, the artist, seem like a freak. Because the great writer trusts that the most terrible feeling is hardly unique. The great writer knows that even the blackest thoughts are ordinary.

I was also flattened by a parallel statement from the late Michael Herr, author of the Vietnam War classic Dispatches, in the devastating documentary First Kill. Herr, who went to war to document the “human side” and was forced, on occasion, to take up arms, had this to say:

"Judeo Christian system is flawed, built on hypocrisy. Our collective unconscious is where the real shit is going on. If you're not conscious of it, it will express itself in really awful ways… violent action, primitive."

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I grew up with a mother who could not tolerate criticism. She had impeccable style and an exacting fashion sense, and she was forever berating her own poor body for being too fat or flabby, but God help anyone else who judged her. She tried to forbid me from publishing three books — two memoirs and a novel — which she took to be critical of her. After each publication, we’d go months without speaking.

Those books were actually about my eating disorder, my inarticulate compulsions, my desperate adolescent need to purge any emerging signs of sexuality in myself — in other words, they were about my own monstrosity. And what I learned from the overwhelmingly positive reactions from readers was that, as Dederer remarked, my most terrible feelings were hardly unique. The more honestly I wrote about those feelings, the more readers responded. “The real shit” was my material, as it was Nabokov’s and Herr’s.

Many years later, I was in a workshop with fiction master Jim Shepard, who drilled into us the concept of the complicit narrator. Whether the narrator is the author of a memoir or the protagonist of a novel, Jim insisted, that character is never just a passive observer or victim. Even a bystander who refuses to get involved is making a moral choice that affects the outcome. Even a child who’s too frightened to fight off an abusive parent is playing an active role in the abuse. Extenuating circumstances can help explain behavior, but they don’t let the narrator off the hook. We are all complicit in the events that shape our lives, for better and for worse. And our job as writers is to acknowledge and fully examine that complicity.

Let’s face it, life is a duel between the light and dark forces that reside within each of us, and that duel is by far the most interesting and important thing most of us have to write about. I’ve posted about this before at some length, here:

Stop Protecting Your Protagonist!