The Work of My Writing Style

How I turned stylistic mimicry into a career. Several careers, actually

As far as my work goes, everything’s a reference to something else. Easter egg after easter egg

I work a day job as a corporate copywriter. I write and edit research content for a consultancy that also sells SaaS. The house style wasn't mine to create, but I execute it well enough to keep the lights on. Before this, I did the same thing for leviathan-sized real estate and facilities management company. And before that, I was a legal historian on the tenure track at the University of Texas at Arlington.¹

The corporate voice, the academic voice, the law review voice, the appellate brief voice — I’ll gladly write in any of them. Whatever pays, whatever’s halfway interesting. But that's only part of the story.

I’m a salesman at heart, and while I’ve worked those day jobs, I've always written along a parallel track. Ghostwriting. Journalism. "Takes," as the "kids" (most of whom are now well into their 40s) started calling op-eds in the late 2000s. Fiction, or what I pretended was fiction during a semester at Montana in 2003. I'm interested in styles, different approaches to whatever lands on my desk.

Long before ChatGPT, there was ChatBAT: "ya boi," serving up whatever suited my fancy. I threw together a Pitt News column that followed a Larry Brown short story structure. Won a Columbia Gold Circle award for it, one of many I picked up for the humor op-eds because (I assume) no one else was writing those.² I wrote something for The Paris Review on Kevin Smith in a David Foster Wallace-lite register. Put together MEL Magazine features with lines lifted from Frederick Exley, Venedikt Erofeev, and many others.

When it comes to the reasons for writing this material, I’m doing it in large part to entertain myself. Nothing beats taking some corporate ghostwriting assignment, grabbing a patriotic John Quincy Adams or Learned Hand speech, and reworking it until I’ve got something brand new. I'll eagerly refashion Jimmy Cannon sports columns as serious-sounding cultural essays. Maybe a forgotten G.K. Chesterton paragraph could serve as the foundation for something about Glenn Greenwald smoking meth or John Fetterman refusing to take his meds. The possibilities are endless!

Do I really care about all these topics? Yeah, definitely…to an extent. And I need to know what I need to know to add to the discourse. But what I really care about is the writing.

Make this one look like something by Tom Wolfe, that one like a William Burroughs original, a third like a pastiche of Donald Barthelme.³ Incorporate Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Hubert Selby Jr., and Oliver Thomas Bateman III — my dad, perhaps a more interesting writer than either. I dig it because I'm a bricolage man. If I were writing about bricolage, I'd probably reference Anthony Burgess's essay on the bricolage of Orson Welles. As you’ll learn from the 1,000 or so pages spread across two volumes of memoirs, Burgess himself was a content man and bricoleur nonpareil.

My favorite writing conversation from 2020 (i.e., "peak pandemic") came when someone told me I was both "lucky" and "privileged" that I never had to write takes about my wife, dating, people I'd dated, sex.⁴ I explained I would have done so if that market wasn't oversaturated. Thousands of people already cover those topics, mostly women⁵ and mostly for free. My own contributions would be vanilla, trivial, and outside the scope of the 2010s writing market's need for more diverse narratives. Never mind that much of that diversity wound up sounding exactly the same: bland, risk-averse, corporate content for Random House or St. Martin's or whichever living fossil of the nearly-extinct "publishing industry" needed such a title for its superficially varied catalog of the same old crap.

I had a good frenemy who spent much of her adulthood chasing writing market "success"⁶ by cooking up a book exactly like all the other literary fiction on the shelves. Always swapping agents and editing inquiries and book proposals, never writing much of anything else, always studying other books to produce some sort of mad lib-type book perfect for the "right now." Then, bless her heart, she finally sold one. Alas, the book didn't go to auction. In fact, it didn't go anywhere. Fifteen thousand buckeroos in an advance that wasn't earned back. I suppose you could say that the books flew off the shelves because whatever copies were there were remaindered faster than post-plagiarism James Frey texts.⁷ Her agent, like mine, doesn't answer her emails anymore. Except in my case it's because I've got no fish in a barrel for him to shoot, mostly because I've sold six figures’ worth of work on my own.⁸

If you know my work, you know that my beat consists of increasingly weirder and more niche topics for which there is minimal competition. Always lots of bonus weirdness in reserve. The paid market is contracting. If you like to write as much as I do — and I really do love to write, love it with all of my heart, whatever is left of my heart — my advice to you is to figure out what's not being covered so you can write about it in a way that no one else is.⁹ Then write about your weird topic in a way that's unique to you. Without that, you might as well switch off the lights, lock the door, and close the shop for good.

I think about how Tom Wolfe, surely the greatest public-facing Ph.D.-credentialed writer of the past century, could take a bus ride with Ken Kesey and his counterculture pals or attend a dinner party with "Egregio Maestro" Leonard Bernstein and then turn it into something so wholly his that the work might as well have been about Wolfe, not the subjects. Writing to end writing, as Hemingway said of Jimmy Cannon.

Someone emailed me once, a lost-soul kind of writer. He said he really admired the long, detailed wrestling obituaries I write on tight turnarounds for The Ringer. Those pieces are deliberately written in the style of my friend and editor David Shoemaker, right down to the way I compose the titles. I've been reading and corresponding with Shoemaker since his first "in memoriam" essay dropped at Deadspin, long before we began working together. ¹⁰

This writer said he wished he could write something like that, but always found himself selling Trump and wrestling or race and wrestling takes of the most insipid kind, the sad hackwork I've critiqued on Substack and elsewhere. I tried to give him some advice but didn't know what to say. There was no way to replicate a trajectory like this: a fifteen-year friendship with an editor plus thirty-five years spent as a nose-to-the-grindstone nerd fan, the kind who wrote twenty thousand words of "e-wrestling" fanfiction the night before the SAT. Nothing to say except start over from square one.

But like every other working writer, I too must heed the dictates of the God almighty dollar. This means my articles are often what the paying parties want and written in their house style, even if it's my beat and my analysis.¹¹ A lot of it is deadline work, for good or ill. In spite of that, I still think most of it is better and less forgettable than typical deadline work, warts and all.

I also try to publish several Substack essays each week. This is because I prefer production to idleness and need to strike while the ideas are red-hot. Is it the best work? No, I've always rushed them, always done a million things at once, always done too much in the course of trying to do evertyhing. To my everlasting regret, I'm not Justin E.H. Smith or Sam Kriss or some other esoteric character who can allocate the time needed to polish long, heterodox pieces to a fine sheen.¹²

So it goes:¹³ I am what I am, a bricolage man chasing the next fin or sawbuck, trying to rustle up those gold doubloons along with a couple more chances to end writing. Occasionally my efforts hit the mark — a lot of you are here because of that nifty little small talk essay that I spent forty-five minutes writing. It’s great fun to use this "spray and pray" approach to content, hoping a few lines land true and pure and clear. Because what else is there for me and mine as ChatGPT threatens to erase what's left of ChatBAT?¹⁴ What else indeed!

Here’s the straight tea, sis: I always try my best, and you’re so very patient.

1. That one ended badly, though I’ve written plenty about the whole deal and thus ensured that I got “got mine.” No need to rehash it here. Read this instead.

2. Nor should they. Why should anyone care, anywhere? Just work that Goon Hand, man. Goonin’.

3. Check this out: “Our reputation for excellence is unexcelled, in every part of the world. And will be maintained until the destruction of our art by some other art which is just as good but which, I am happy to say, has not yet been invented.”

4. I did write one very fun essay on dating that I’ve reworked many times since then. Click the links to check out all three versions!

5. Writing for other women, which makes sense here.

6. More foolish than fool’s gold because there’s no such thing unless you’re willing to pretend there is (many such cases…some, I think, are even good people!).

7. Who is back, bee-tee-dubs, and firing up the boys and girls of “book [insert platform]” yet again. Bless his heart, too.

8. Albeit over the span of a half-decade as a relatively productive side hustle.

9. ChatBAT or no, I never espoused the “median opinion” or wrote shareable (yet unreaable) copypasta for these extremely online frens/enemas conflicts. I did, of course, write about them for money.

10. Thanks to me and my good friend Ian Douglass, these obituaries run so long they wind up unearthing material no one had about these guys before. For example, we confirmed that Paul Orndorff and his brother did indeed hold off a half-dozen cops in a barfight (for which the pair were arrested) and publicized the fact that the man Scott Hall killed before he began his wrestling career had killed another man a month earlier (I can find no prior mention of this fact anywhere, even by Hall, so I’m assuming it’s new). Add to that the proof that Ole Anderson played college football as a 5’10” center at Colorado, New Jack’s press clippings from his surprisingly impressive Clark University football days (his wife wrote to thank us for finding those), an article about the time a teenage Sabu was shot in the mouth, &c. and you’ve really got a stew going.

11. My favorite editors will begin by suggesting a story or accepting a short pitch based what I’m capable of doing. I’ll then write to suit the needs of their publications, and they’ll leave my material intact. That’s why I enjoy working with them, and why I show up so frequently in places like UnHerd, RealClear, and the Washington Examiner’s biweekly magazine. The place where most of my literary experiments are sent (and there are hundreds of them!) is Russ Smith’s Splice Today; you can read those pieces here.

12. Also, regardless of whatever voice I’m writing in, the work is accessible. Even my attempts at parodying highly unreadable styles such as H.P. Lovecraft’s or your workaday cultural-studies academic are meant to be highly readable. That thicc network of hyperlinks I’ve been compiling in a Google Docs commonplace book for the past 20 years provides additional clarity whenever necessary.

13. I’m fond of using Vonnegut’s famous bit here and elsewhere, mainly because he’s still well-known (though declining in importance, they’re all declining!) and some readers will recognize it.

14. Definitely read that Will Storr piece.