How to Win a Literary Feud
By Bill Ferris | March 21, 2015 |
Warning: Hacks for Hacks tips may have harmful side effects on your writing career, and should not be used by minors, adults, writers, poets, scribes, scriveners, journalists, or anybody.
Every author strives for greatness. You’ll have to invest thousands of hours honing your craft and dealing with rejection, though, if you want to be mentioned among the immortals. Or just find one of the immortals and punch them.
Ernest Hemingway vs. Wallace Stevens. John Updike vs. Salman Rushdie. Mary McCarthy vs. Lillian Hellman. A good literary feud can be as exciting as the authors’ books. You may think you already need to be a famous author to have a noteworthy spat. This is the twenty-first century, bub. Between cons, book tours, and social media, it’s never been easier to harass your idols in public.
Step 1: Choose Your Opponent
[pullquote]Feuds occasionally happen over innocent misunderstandings, but you’ll have a better success rate with willful misunderstandings.[/pullquote]
If you already have author enemies, this will be easy. If you don’t have enemies, make some. With a personality like yours, trust me, you’re waaaaaay ahead of the game on this one, pal.
Many a feud has resulted from personal slights; Paul Theroux fantasized daily about V.S. Naipaul dying in a fire because Naipaul auctioned off a personalized copy of Theroux’s book. Think back to when an author offended you. Did a famous author once flag your blog comment for spam just because it was blatant advertising for your self-published memoir? Sounds to me like Mr. Famous has let fame go to his head. The Internet has expedited personal slights the way the Panama Canal sped up international shipping. Somewhere, my special little snowflake, there’s a writer who irritates you in ways you never thought possible. When you find them, you’ll know your mutual loathing was meant to be.
Step 2: Get Ready to Rumble
You’ve got your target, but it’s not a feud until both parties attack. You need to provoke a response. Start with a snarky review of their book. It is not necessary to have read the book beforehand. In fact, the more incoherent the review, the more likely you’ll goad them into battle. The Faulkner estate was very quick to respond when I said “A Rose for Emily” would’ve been better if the zombies had won.
Feuds occasionally happen over innocent misunderstandings, but you’ll have a better success rate with willful misunderstandings. Go ahead and read sinister intent into your opponent’s behavior; you can safely assume their protagonist’s love of peanut butter crackers alludes to severe flaws in the author’s character. It’s hard to properly antagonize a person of letters over a difference of opinion. It’s much easier when you realize they’re really a crypto-fascist baby-eater.
Step 3: Attack!
[pullquote]No matter how cogent their argument, how scathing their rebuke, it is entirely invalid if they make a single spelling or grammatical error.[/pullquote]
Shots have been fired and the feud is on. Time to make your battle plan:
- Let slip the tweets of war. The Internet is a big wrestling ring where the ref’s been knocked out, and your Twitter followers are your manager sneaking behind your opponent with a steel chair. Let your followers know what an ignoramus your opponent is, then sit back, tent your fingers, and chuckle to yourself as they swarm like angry hornets. Once your opponent is softened up, engage them directly.
- If you have more Twitter followers than them: Inform them that the marketplace of ideas has deemed you more relevant and important. The inferiority of their ideas is a foregone conclusion.
- If you have fewer followers (much more likely; I’ve read your tweets): Your opponent is a sheep who caters to the lowest-common denominator. They probably like Nickelback and prefer McDonald’s over Five Guys burgers, too.
- Subvert Godwin’s Law. If your argument takes place online, at some point, one of you will call the other a Nazi. This is a law of the Internet. Just remember there are a variety of dictatorships, military juntas, and kleptocracies to which you can compare your opponent, so don’t pigeonhole yourself.
- Hit them where it hurts. If they write literary fiction, say their work is pretentious and boring. If they write sci-fi, say that their work is a landfill of genre cliches. If your arch rival is a poet, you need to raise your standards.
Step 4: Finish Him! Or Her! Or Something!
Your opponent is dazed and stumbling around the ring. Time to hit them with the People’s Elbow and claim your prize. Use any or all of these tactics to finish them off.
- A legendary zinger. Words are a writer’s best weapon. Norman Mailer beat Gore Vidal senseless and lost because of Vidal’s quip, “Once again, words fail Norman Mailer.” You need something just as pithy. Something like, “There’s two kinds of people: rubber and glue. And you’re looking pretty sticky, my friend.” Not that one, of course. That’s mine.
- Pour your drink on their head. The most writerly way to dis someone without writing anything. Self-explanatory and easy to execute; you’re a writer, so you’re probably holding a cocktail right now.
- Updog them. If you successfully updog your opponent, you are declared the winner, and are entitled to receive non-stop high-fives for the next ninety minutes. (If you’re not sure what updog is, please visit their website.)
- Technical knockout. No matter how cogent their argument, how scathing their rebuke, it is entirely invalid if they make a single spelling or grammatical error.
- Declare victory. Talk about how viciously you’re owning them. Do this as early in the feud as possible. It will annoy them, which plays right into your hands.
You now know the basics of authorial antagonism. If you want more practice, for a small fee I’ll be happy to feud with you. For a slightly larger fee, I’ll let you win. Go forth and antagonize! Someday soon, you’ll be world renowned as the jerk who keeps picking fights with other writers. We should all be so lucky.
What’s your go-to move in a literary feud? Who would you like to feud with? Let us know in the comments.
After college, Bill Ferris (he/him) left Nebraska for Florida to become a rich and famous rock star. Failing that, he picked up the pen to become a rich and famous novelist. He now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and looks forward to a life of poverty and ridicule.
Bill–
I’m not saying “Dear Bill” because nobody who writes such toxic, vicious posts deserves courtesy, because basic courtesy is too polite for someone like you! I can’t believe how toxic your whole gooey, rancid, slithering word swamp is! Believe me, I’ve met my share, I can live with almost anything really toxic and vicious–but NOT people who consciously, willfully make reference to p–n–t b-t-er. My son is ALLERGIC to p–n-ts! His whole life just flashed before him, flat on his back after walking behind me and reading what you wrote! It’s so sick! I mean he would’ve fainted if I had a son instead of a beagle, but just thinking about it, I want you to know how many millions there are out there, or here, with the p–n-t allergy, people deeply scarred all the way to lunch by any mention of THAT THING. And this message, this warning is going out, mister, you can take it to the bank that this heads-up about a literary monster named BILL FERRIS is going out far and wide, so get your Kevlar on, sport, strap on your open-carry because you’re going to be looking at some very wet-nasty blowback real soon!
(BTW: your post is hilarious, and I thank you. Even though you’re a monster.)
Dear Bill:
Your post made me smile. I think every writer out here should at one point or another become involved in a literary feud. It will either toughen your skin or make you stop writing altogether. I don’t mean to make this post as long as War and Peace, so I apologize in advance. Over a decade ago I started writing fanfiction. I did it just to see if I could, and I discovered that I enjoyed writing and had a flair for it. I’ve since moved on to original fiction. At one point another “writer” (and I use the term loosely) took five plot points out of a fanfic I wrote years before, including the main character’s name. She and her circle of friends heavily promoted the resulting POS online as a fanfic classic. People came to me thinking that her story was a shout-out to mine. It wasn’t.
About a year later, I wrote a sequel to my original story with the same MC. One of my so-called “friends” went running to the thief and told her. I received an email from her in which she informed me that if I posted the story she would destroy me. She claimed that everything was a coincidence, that she used the exact same character name as a tribute to her dead son. Well, folks, the way to honor a deceased relative is to name a character who is raped, mauled by dogs and strung out on drugs after them. Who knew. She ended by saying “You stole from me. You stole from Zat!”
I went ahead and started posting chapters twice a week; it was a multi-chapter fic. Zat and her trolls rolled into action and called for an online boycott of me. They loudly proclaimed that I was the thief. Never mind that my original fic was posted a year earlier than her first one, and there is no way to alter the original post date. They filled my inbox with flame reviews and emails 24/7. They actively harassed whoever dared follow and review my story.
I kept right on posting. Six weeks later, they gave up.
Turns out that other people couldn’t stand her and since she attracted so much attention others began to harass her. Several of her friends emailed me begging me to call off “my people.” I didn’t have any people, and even if I did I wouldn’t have. Her mother asked me, “you have so many stories. Can’t you give her this one?” Nope. Sorry, Momma. Soon Zat was online crying that she just wanted to be left alone. The longer this went on the more apparent it became to everyone concerned that she wasn’t that tightly wrapped in the first place. Bear in mind that this was all about fanfiction. Which is based on someone else’s work. If they pulled out the literary knives over something that is free I hate to think what would have happened if there had been actual money involved.
By the way, Zat is not some teenager; she’s an adult woman. With kids.
Apparently she doesn’t realize that since her stories are on the net they are available for anyone to read and review until she deletes them. As I understood it, every time she received a bad review she would immediately rant and rave: it was me, I hated her, she was the poor widdle victim and I was the hateful witch who tried to destroy her “brilliant talent.” (Insert eye roll here.) Her followers would come over and leave flames and reviews on my stories. I thanked them for upping my review count, blocked them and moved on. Three years ago I heard Zat went on another rant because of another bad review. I braced myself. Nothing happened. According to friends she’d pulled that victim stunt so many times now no one believed her.
It’s easy to win a literary feud if your opponent carries her own rope with her and hangs herself every chance she gets. I wish I made all this up, but I didn’t. Great post, Bill. Once again, I apologize for the length. Peace out.
There is so much comedy gold (and scathing commentary) in this post I don’t know where to begin. Practically every line is quotable. I’m thinking I’ll begin every day next week rereading it. Though, in the spirit of the article, I feel a strong need to eviscerate you in a public forum, I’ll refrain. Mostly because I love all your posts.
Thanks for the guffaws!
Hey Bill,
Thanks for the step-by-step. Should I ever become feud-worthy I’ll know just what to do. Now that’s what I call value content. :)
Great post and thanks for the laugh.
Annie
Mister Bill:
I have nothing meaningful to add to this wonderful post, but anyone who steps up and writes such a fun piece on a weekend deserves a comment thread worthy of the effort.
BTW: feuds can sometimes prove immortal, or at least longer-lived than the adversaries. The feud between Harold Pinter and Lee Child has survived the former’s death. (Pinter kicked it off with something like: “I have no idea why anyone sits around waiting for the next Lee Child novel.”) Lee still bashes literary fiction every occasion he can. If he weren’t so insightfully droll about it, no one would care.
Also, I’m informed Colin Whitehead still schemes for revenge over being spat at by Richard Ford after the former’s snarky review of … I can’t remember. The most recent one. (The review amounted to: Aren’t we done with the work of old white men?)
Keep up the good fight.
Bill, you updogged me on this post. Please pour a cocktail on my head (but don’t be surprised if I tilt my mouth up). Thanks for the laughs.
“No matter how cogent their argument, how scathing their rebuke, it is entirely invalid if they make a single spelling or grammatical error.”
I’ve seen rule this in action once or twice. Thanks for another great post, Bill!
This is hilarious. And you totally updogged me. This means war.
Also, “If your arch rival is a poet, you need to raise your standards.” made me laugh out loud. Thanks for brieghtening up a miserable, rainy day.
I came, I saw, I was updogged.
You are now my mortal enemy. Prepare for a cocktail shampoo!
Sorry for the Updog, Keith. To make amends, I’ll send you a gift certificate for a free Buttfor.
Unbeatable guide. Thank you, Bill. And being Grammar Nazi can be a winning tactic:)