Just One Thing with Brett

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?