Writing About Writing
Naomi Kanakia
on writing “Editors Don’t Want Male Novelists”
Naomi Kanakia is a novelist and critic in San Francisco who writes the Substack publication Woman of Letters. The essay we interviewed her about is one of her weekly “tales”: it's a viral, ~4,000-word short story that follows a male novelist who marries one of his high school students. The whole story is rather provocative; you can read it here.
Why did you decide to write this story?

There’s always male-writer discourse. That summer (2024) there had been multiple waves of it. At this point, I had recently started writing stories in this new style, that I call “the tale”, which allowed for much more authorial intervention than the typical story. And I was devoting a few days a week to just tooling around, exploring the form. As I recall, I wrote this tale in about four hours, and then there was some kind of mishap and I lost half of the draft, so I quickly rewrote that part from memory.

I had committed to posting one story per week (one every Thursday), and this looked good, so up it went!

How hard was it to write this story?

This one was a gift. It’s one of my most successful tales in this form, and one of the longest and most story-like. It is a true viral short story. It still gets shared pretty regularly, and it’s gotten me hundreds of new subscribers. Writing it was really not hard — it just came from the unconscious, the same place dreams come from.

How long did it take you to write this?

Not long. A few hours, over the course of one day.

What was the process you used to write?

It uses story logic. I started with a character, and then I followed the character’s story to its natural conclusion.

Do you have any screenshots or early snippets of the piece you could share?

Yes! I went back to an earlier draft, and I saw this snippet (about the main character’s first girlfriend): “He’d found sex with her underwhelming. After all that hoping and dreaming, he’d thought, is this it? People pay money for this? It’s a substantially less pleasurable experience than masturbating.”

I probably cut this because I felt like it was too incendiary — why stack the deck against my character before people even get to know him.

Where were you, physically, when you wrote the piece? And what was your writing environment like?

I do all my writing at a coworking space for women called The Ruby. At the time, this was at our old location, which was in an old winery in the Mission. It had wooden roof beams and tall ceilings and exposed brick walls. Great place — very grungy and DIY-looking spot. I would sit every day in a corner, beneath a flowering vine. I usually wear ear plugs while I write, because music is distracting.

How did you decide the story was ‘good enough’ to publish?

I have a publication schedule, and I think it’s usually better to err on the side of publishing. When it comes to internet-writing, often things that are less-finished and less-polished perform better online. That being said, my main trepidation here was just worrying that there was going to be some outraged reaction (because the main character ends up ‘grooming’ and marrying his high school student) and that I’d get canceled. I wasn’t too worried about that, because my only book under contract at the time was with Princeton University Press, and I didn’t think they’d care about online controversy. But it was still a risk. This story is what really taught me not to be afraid of being provocative.

What was the reaction when you initially shared it?

As I recall, it was a viral hit, almost immediately, and was shared widely on Substack’s social network feature (Notes). It was more than a year before I had another ‘tale’ that was quite so successful — it was really lightning in a bottle.

Reading the piece now, is there anything you would change or that you now disagree with?

No it’s great! I have actually revisited this piece quite a few times, because it’s included in my forthcoming collection, Money Matters. I think the first paragraph is a bit shaky, and I would’ve described the ‘discourse’ a little more precisely — this was the main revision I did for the collection.

Do you think you have any nonobvious or unpopular opinions about writing?

Many! I think when you’re writing online, it’s best to have a schedule. A lot of people get online, get an initial burst of popularity, and then they seize up. They start thinking everything needs to be produced to a high level, and that causes them to seize up, develop writer’s block. The most important thing is to learn how to let go of your perfectionism, so you can tap into the unconscious. You just need to be able to say ‘Yes’ to whatever your unconscious is giving you. And a schedule helps with that, because it teaches your unconscious that it doesn’t need to produce the best idea of all time — it just needs to produce one decent idea per week.

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Bonus questions
What is your favorite essay on the internet?

I really love Henry Begler’s “Slight Rebellion Off Madison”, a survey of the work of J.D. Salinger. This piece taught me so much about how it’s possible to approach a great author’s work with just the right mix of reverence and critique. It was a huge influence on how I approach my nonfiction writing.

Why write the Afterword? Did you consider leaving it out?

This was one of the first ‘tales’ that I published on the internet, and at this point I was doing ‘afterwords’ just to contextualize the story, because my subscribers weren’t yet used to seeing fiction from me. Almost all these early tales included one. Over time, I started dropping the Afterwords, because I realized a lot of the reaction and discussion would just be about the Afterword and not about the tale itself.

I think for this tale, I was also worried that people would think I somehow endorsed teachers sleeping with their students, so I wanted to be clear that I didn’t. Nowadays I have more trust in my audience. There’s also a phenomenon I’ve noticed, in longtime newsletter writers, where they get very defensive, and they fill their writing with qualifications and caveats (“Of course, I’m not saying that if you think this, then you should do this, but I do believe that there is always the chance of…”). It’s silly. Just say what you want to say. In the case of a short story, ambiguity is good — that’s the point of fiction. It doesn’t explain everything.

That being said, if a tale is inspired by something else, sometimes these days I’ll include a link, just to give credit where it’s due.

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