This is what real punk rock literature looks like

Thoughts on Upside Down by Danielle Steel

Ian MacKaye, frontman of seminal punk bands Minor Threat and Fugazi, and the founder of Dischord Records, was once asked to write a poem about punk rock.

His poem was a single line:

Because we said so.

From the moment you decide you want to write creatively, you get told the same thing over and over: show, don’t tell.

Don’t tell me the moon is shining, said Chehkov. Show me the glint of light on broken glass.

Technically, that could mean it wasn’t a moonlit night but instead a nuclear bomb had detonated in the far distance, just outside of Doncaster, perhaps.

But let’s not quibble over details: you take my point.

Publishers. Editors. Agents. All those other people who stand between you and those previous groups like an impossible wall…

They’ll all reiterate the same golden rule: show, don’t tell.

If you want to write good, successful literature, you must at all costs avoid telling and do a shit tonne of showing instead.

Fuck that, says Danielle Steel. Fuck that to high heaven.

There she is… the best-selling living author… one of the best-selling authors of all time, up there with Shakespeare and Agatha Christie…

But does she listen to the rules of the literary establishment?

Does she shit.

She guffaws in the face of Max Porter’s earnest experimentation. She sneers at Maggie Nelson’s emotive invention. She will not even break the spine of a Sally Rooney book, no way.

To Steel, all of that junk is identikit; all of it wasting precious time showing the reader things in the hope of building a deeper emotional connection.

Ugh, says Steel. Emotion-schmotion.

That stuff is for wimps.

Her golden rule:

Spell. It. Out.

And then spell it out again, for good measure.

But the real genius? If you’ve spelled it out twice, why not spell it out it a third time? It can’t hurt.

Tell the reader what is happening. Tell the reader how the characters feel. Tell the reader there is a moon in the sky and everyone is having a shag under it (for the majority of the middle third of the book), and then tell them again.

Damn. The audacity of it. She’s a literary punk rock hero.

But you can’t write good literature like this, whisper the Booker judges, meekly. Why do you think you can get away with it… you, and Collins, and Cooper? What gives you the right?

Because we said so, the women scream back. Steel’s hair is bedraggled, and she’s sweating Campari. Behind her, Collins and Cooper are lighting cigars with fifty-pound notes.

Of course, when it comes to subverting literary norms—and Steel subverts like no other—there is a cost. Taking such creative risk means she slips so far under the radar of popularity you won’t ever find her books in the Guardian, the London Review of Books, nor even in the last bastions of true experimentation like The Stinging Fly or Wasafiri.

No, true punk rock must exist outside of the norms.

But thankfully, it exists despite them.

Let me ask you, dear reader, does it get any more punk rock than ignoring the golden rule of good writing and finger-farting 75,000 words of pure and utter tell, as if you were Steve Jones thrashing at your guitar without any real clue as to what you’re doing?

I think not.

This is the real deal. This is punk rock.

I mean, I’m not misreading this, am I?

Everyone knows this, right?

I admit, I’m late to the party. If it wasn’t for the fact I ran out of books to read on the flight back from a holiday in the Basque Country, and if this wasn’t the only English language book they had in Santander Airport, I’d have never known.

Can you imagine?

Living your entire life and not realising that Danielle Steel is the true queen of rule-breaking and utterly subversive experimental literature.

Incredible. If she doesn’t get nominated for the Goldsmiths this year, I want an inquest. And for Christ’s sake, get her on the International Booker panel NOW.

My recommendation: Try everything once. Unless the person who’s telling you to try it has a look on their face like they just drank battery acid.