Denver Writer Explores Publishing, Social Media in Satirical New Novel

Writing about writing is traditionally thought to be a risky thing, despite some of modern literature’s favorite reads being exactly that: Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News, Richard Russo’s criminally underrated Straight Man and even Stephen King’s Misery. They’re all books about writers, and to some degree about the life found within the profession’s various aspects — and award-winning Denver writer R. L. Maizes has just added her name to that list.

Maizes’ new novel, A Complete Fiction, hits shelves on November 4, and Maizes herself will hit the ground running with a number of local appearances. She’ll be launching the book at the Boulder Bookstore on Wednesday, November 5, and following that event up with readings at Fort Collins’ Old Firehouse Books on November 6, at Denver’s West Side Books on November 17 and Niwot’s Inkberry Books (with the equally awesome Erika Krouse) on December 12.

A Complete Fiction focuses on a dual narrative: a struggling writer searching for the spotlight and a literary editor who’s accused of stealing it. Their dueling narratives carry the weight of the through-story, while author Maizes has a delightful time skewering some of the realities and ridiculousnesses of the publishing world and the thin atmosphere of social media upon which it has come to depend. The result is an acerbic and thoughtful treatment of some fundamental questions regarding the creative process, its ownership, its commerce and how the marketplace will often interrupt anything of actual value.

While A Complete Fiction is an admitted departure for Maizes, who cut her teeth on award-winning books like the novel Other People’s Pets and the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper, she says that’s exactly what she wanted to do with this book. “If it’s more fun for me, it’s going to be more fun for the reader,” she says.

The perceived risk for a writer writing about writing and the writer’s life is, of course, that it’s too inside-baseball for the average reader. It’s something that Maizes admits she considered in crafting the novel. “Publishers think that readers don’t like reading about writers,” she says, “but I don’t think that’s true. Similarly, I was also concerned about writing something that might hit too close to home [for publishers] that they might pick it apart a little bit. It might touch a nerve.”

Maizes’ novel deftly mitigates some of that risk by adopting a satirical bent: What had in early drafts just been the social media platform Twitter (now X) became something utterly original: the invented app Crave, which invites users to “nibble” on one post, or “munch” on another, both mirroring and making fun of the views-driven ravenous juggernaut of modern social media. That satire is fully intentional, says Maizes, who says she had to withdraw from such apps because they drained her mental energy. “I’ve been as guilty as anyone of being sucked in by those social media train-wrecks,” she admits, but also asserts that “those apps make us stupider.” A Complete Fiction is, in some ways, her evidence for that claim.

“I wrote this book in part because as I was working on some of my other writing, I saw some other writers being canceled on Twitter for what they were doing, sometimes by people who’d clearly only read a blurb or maybe a review of the work in question,” she says. “I didn’t think that was fair. You can’t know what a book is really about from reading a blurb, or by reading what someone else says it’s about. I think you really have to read the book. My heart hurt for those writers. I knew they’d spent years writing those books, and that it had taken a lot of courage to put those books out there.”

That courage is important to Maizes. “Writers are warriors,” she says. “This is a tough business in a lot of ways. Anyone who fights for their work to appear in the world is a warrior. The writing itself is hard. It’s hard to find expression that’s pleasant — or less pleasant, but still material that readers want to engage with. You have to be a warrior in order to create the damn thing and to see it through. But you also have to fight through the business end of it. It’s a very crowded field at every step of the way. And then there’s fighting through the fear, through impostor syndrome, through all of those things that are self-limiting but very real in our creative experience.”

And then there’s the way a book might be received. “People don’t hesitate to call your baby ugly,” laughs Maizes. “So you have to be brave.”

R.L. Maizes will appear with her new novel A Complete Fiction at the Boulder Bookstore on Wednesday, November 5, Fort Collins’ Old Firehouse Books on Thursday, November 6, Denver’s West Side Books on Monday, November 17, and Niwot’s Inkberry Books (with the equally awesome Erika Krouse) on Friday, December 12.