Just One Thing with Brett Hymel Jr

Brett Hymel Jr’s story “Gaffney is Born” captures the complexities of grief, friendship, and paper cranes. Here, he shares just one thing about the piece: 

There's a painting associated with this story. On the back, it says, "I went through hell and all I got was this stupid crane", which was the original message on the final crane. That's all I care to say about the painting.

When I was an undergraduate, some maniac decided to give me Italo Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, and John Barth, and for a long time I ruined a lot of growth trying to do what they were doing. Metafiction is a bit of a tired schtick at this point--the reader knows they're reading a story, and the writer knows the reader knows they're reading a story, so what use is pointing it out? It doesn't help that the genre has been made so utterly uncool by people like Sam Altman, who touted a ChatGPT-generated mound of dogshit as the future of writing. Of course it was a metafiction story. This is not the part where I do silver linings: metafiction sucks. The only reason I write it, sometimes, is because I would rather take a potato peeler to my skin than come up with a nonfiction essay.

I was told this was an advice column, so here's the tip: Believe everything everyone tells you on the Internet. Accept all unsolicited writing advice as immutable fact. When somebody tells you a genre is weak, or tired, or old, buy one-hundred-percent into their worldview. A computer would never lie to you. Everyone hammering away on their keyboard is your friend. Likes, reposts, and quote tweets are a form of divine currency, delivered by God to his most special little children. 

Are you among the favored?