R.L. Maizes on Storytelling, Cancel Culture, and Why Writers Need to Get Off the Internet

We hear a lot about the power of story to do good. Less is said about the power of story to wound or smear or drown, which is what R.L. Maizes’s fun, smart novel about social media and cancel culture takes on. A Complete Fiction (Ig Publishing) follows the repercussions of a single social media post that goes viral, engulfing a novelist accused of plagiarism, then the original poster, and finally their family and friends. Along the way the book addresses #metoo, owning your story, and the different ways a narrative can be exploited.

A Complete Fiction begins when frustrated novelist and rideshare driver P.J. Larkin posts a “nibble” to the hot new social media app Crave, a satire worth the price of the book. She accuses an editor of plagiarizing her #metoo novel in his own debut; the charge threatens his hefty book contract, his job, and even his marriage. Then the tides shift: P.J. is revealed to have possibly poached the plot of her own book, creating a rift among her friends and family. Both characters escalate the stakes as they attempt to steer a discourse that has raged out of control.

While the target of the book’s satire is writers, publishers, and the way social media can amplify and inflame our pettiest impulses, the book itself has a more serious purpose. At its core, A Complete Fiction is about the ways sexual assault can reverberate throughout someone’s life, affecting not only the victim but everyone around them. Maizes (We Love Anderson Cooper, Other People’s Pets) has created a novel that is snappy and frothy but has a nuanced point to make about human behavior.

Maizes and I recently met at a Boulder coffeeshop to discuss social media, cancellation, and what it means to “own” a story.

Emily Wortman-Wunder: One of the utter delights of this novel is the fictional app Crave. It nibbles, it crunches, it serves meals; when someone posts, the app makes a sound like biting into celery. And the app’s logo is a drooling mouth. How did you come up with it?

R.L. Maizes: Originally the social media app used in the book was Twitter. Then, during a break in the submission process, I took the manuscript back from my agent to reread it and realized that I had this incredible opportunity for humor. The novel was already a satire. But there was this opportunity to satirize social media in a larger way. I was already satirizing publishing and writers; this would give me an opportunity to have fun with social media. So I rewrote the book, changing that whole aspect of the book to Crave. 

Humor is a way to not only give the reader a chance to laugh, but to hold things up to the light in a concentrated way. I had a great time doing it, but I also was mindful of what I was doing, which was saying, “Hey. This is not good for us.” 

Social media is not good for us as writers, because it takes us away from writing, and has us spend a lot of time on very shallow, short thoughts. It has us worry about likes. Writers are people who are already starved for attention—that’s why we become writers. We want to be seen. We have stories we want to tell, but more than that, we want to be seen. So social media is especially bad for writers.

EMW: One of the things that really struck me was how social media functions in A Complete Fiction almost as this other-than-human force.

RLM: I feel like social media is very powerful right now. My first impulse for the book was seeing writers get canceled on social media, sometimes without a chance to have their say. I’m not saying that people can’t ever be cancelled. Definitely not. But I do feel like it’s too easy to have rumors start on social media. It’s too easy to cancel somebody without knowing the whole story. More than once I have seen people read less than the whole book jacket before posting something negative to social media. Someone would read two sentences about a book on Publishers Marketplace and then decide the book needed to be canceled. There’s no way you know what a book is about from Publishers Marketplace. The writer probably didn’t even write the copy. Even if they did, how can a few lines capture the nuances of a 300, 400-page book? They can’t. 

It didn’t feel fair to me. I used to be a lawyer, so I really honed in on issues of fairness, and justice, and due process. I would obsess about it. So I needed to write a book about it.

EMW: We did meet on social media. So: not all bad.

RLM: Thank you for saying that! Absolutely not all bad. I really want to say that. Not all bad. But it’s like food, which is why I love the Crave metaphor: food is necessary and good. I’m not sure social media is necessary, but it can be good. It can be nourishing. I have met so many wonderful writers on social media. I’ve discovered so many pieces of writing on social media. But too much is not good for us. Too much is gluttony.

EMW: Not long after we met, I remember you saying on social media something like “I’ve had to break up with my boyfriend, Twitter.” Can you talk a little more about that?

RLM: I really felt like I got addicted to Twitter. And I say that because not only was I on it for too many hours of the day, but also when I wasn’t on it, I was on it. I was thinking about it and what I would Tweet next. How many moments was I not listening to my husband, or a friend, because I was on social media? I didn’t think it was good for my brain. So I had my husband block it on my computer. 

EMW: You wrote most of this book before the implosion of Twitter. How has that implosion affected the landscape of social media and what it can and cannot do? 

RLM: I still feel like social media sites can be largely empty calories. Even if they are commenting on social movements that I’m part of, that I agree with, it will be the same sentiment over and over again in my feed. As a human who’s only alive for so many hours, I don’t really want to spend an hour reading the same thought. 

EMW: So let’s shift a little bit. I’d like to ask you about one of the bedrock themes of the book. Who gets to tell a story? What is our responsibility as writers when it comes to using other people’s stories?

RLM: It’s such a tricky thing. I think we have a responsibility both to the person whose story we are telling—if we are going to tell someone else’s story—but we also have a responsibility to the story. Because that’s what we do as writers. We SHOULD write important stories. And they can’t always be our own–that would be very boring. If all I ever did was tell my own story, I would quickly run out of meaningful things to say.

EMW: As one of the characters in A Complete Fiction says, “Not everybody can be on the Titanic.”

RLM: Right! It’s the job of writers to tell other people’s stories and to imagine other people’s lives, to get into other people’s heads. And sometimes we should do research! That research might include having someone else read our story, someone who is closer to the material. It might include literal research on the computer to find out–What does this town I am writing about really look like? Who really lives here? 

I think that the availability of sensitivity readers in this day and age is a fantastic thing. And this is another way that writers can do research. People didn’t think of doing this thirty years ago. I can think of a whole shelf of older books where people wrote about someone else’s community. Even if the writer lived in those communities, they didn’t know what it was like to be the person they were writing about. So it is FABULOUS to have somebody from those communities read your book and say, “Actually?…not so much.” 

I think it’s a balance between not being a wrecking ball as a writer by telling other people’s stories in an irresponsible way, and what you owe to the story itself. What is your responsibility as a writer to tell the truth that you see in the world?

I have in my stories and my novel, to lesser and more degrees, told other people’s stories. The most serious stories in this book—made-up stories!—revolve around #metoo. I have had my own #metoo stories. I have written about them in the form of nonfiction. They inform this book mostly in the way I felt and in people’s reactions to me telling my own #metoo story: who believed me, who didn’t believe me, what people’s nonbelief did to me. 

I’ve told that story in the form of an essay before. And in this book I’ve told that story in the form of fiction. I’ve also told other people’s stories. Because as I said, I saw a lot of stuff that bothered me in the world, and that partly sparked the book. So then I made sure to take that spark and change it enough that it wasn’t those people’s stories anymore. 

EMW: And is that part of being a responsible storyteller?

RLM: It can be. Or conceivably one can get permission. If you get permission to tell someone else’s story, then you have to disguise it less. I think if you are telling someone else’s story and you are not getting permission, as often fiction writers don’t, then yes, you should disguise the story. There are a lot of other benefits to disguising the story, too: when we get to change the story, we can really focus more on the message we want to tell, rather than on what happened.

EMW: Like changing Twitter into Crave.

RLM: Right! It’s very fun to do that. But I do think it’s tricky. I stopped writing personal essays for a while, because I found the dilemma of telling my own story and telling someone else’s story at the same time very hard to negotiate in nonfiction.

EMW: P.J. Larkin, your character who is accused of taking someone else’s story, should have done more due diligence in drafting her novel. She probably should have reached out to this person and showed them what she wrote. But she did do research. And she was basing it to some extent on her own reaction to the event.

RLM: I think the question of what P.J. should or shouldn’t have done is tricky. And the book explores that question. But, yes, it’s P.J.’s story, too. She loved this person and the assault that affected them affected her as well. It changed her life. To be honest I can’t imagine P.J. not wanting to tell that story. She was bothered by it, and how does P.J. deal with things she is bothered by? She writes about them. But it’s safe to say she could have been more sensitive to the other person’s experience.

EMW: One of the most heartrending threads in the novel is when one character is pushed into going public with a long-concealed trauma. Can you talk to that element of #metoo? 

RLM: That section of the book is about writers being forced to go public with material that they had chosen to write about using fiction. Partly it is about this whole process that I am going through right now with you, where we have to talk about the book and maybe talk about ourselves in the context of the book. There are few fiction writers who are not asked, “What was the context of the book? What was the impetus for the book? Did you have experiences like the ones in the book?”—but the choice to write fiction often means that we didn’t want to tell those stories directly. And that is a legitimate choice. Then this character is given a terrible choice between salvaging their career and going public about something that they don’t want widely known. 

Certainly for #metoo survivors the choice to go public is very hard. And people come after them. That can be devastating. I do not want to downplay that devastation. However, we have all these laws protecting us now in the workplace that we might not have had if women hadn’t been brave. Their efforts were so important and have changed the landscape. 

But there’s terrible backlash now. I didn’t think I would be living at a time when it was okay to do and say the kinds of things that people in the public do and say now. Even in the past, people wore hoods. They don’t even wear a hood anymore. 

EMW: Any hope amid this crazy time?

RLM: I think there is hope, because there is community. 

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