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Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma
In Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma, author Michael J. Seidlinger centers a magnifying glass on the creative journey, with an honest and unabashed search into how and why someone would want to be accepted as a writer in a world that might not care.
The book’s breezy narrative contrasts with the despair that is often triggered by the wasteland of social media and the Internet. This is a story that reminds the reader that they aren’t alone in a culture that pressures us to measure our work on a purely capitalistic level, driven by likes, hearts, and money. Like a darker and more skewed literary version of the metaphysical classic, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Seidlinger’s Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma shows us how our art, often made in solitary, can be the more important and inspiring part of living.
"This smart story ought to prompt readers to second-guess the impulse to write—or to tweet."—Publishers Weekly
“A portrait of the writer as a procrastinator, professional self-doubter, caffeine connoisseur, and social media addict, Runaways wallows in the manifold frustrations of this extravagantly frustrating process—yet it ultimately left this fellow sufferer feeling optimistic and ready to confront the blank page once more.”
—Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
"Part tale and part literary Twitter discourse, Seidlinger delivers a humorous and incisive look into the life and neuroses of the modern writer. Runaways wormed under my skin in the best of ways, invoking bad habits, sage advice, and all of the stories writers tell themselves when faced with a blank page. Required reading for any writer looking to feel less alone in the trenches."
— Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark and Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone
"Whether it’s craft or memoir, I constantly buy books on writing. This one will be on my desk as a touchstone to be read every day for my mental health. It’s essential. It’s a writer's heart’s song, capturing the true agony and ecstasy of being an artist today. Runaways is the book for every writer and everyone who wants to understand a writer."
—Jimin Han, author of A Small Revolution
“Seidlinger holds a mirror to the contemporary writer, a narcissist and addict with often little to say. Deft, gracefully slender, and deeply upsetting: Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma is a plea to every artist to throw their phone into a river.”
—Christopher Zeischegg, author of The Magician
"Michael J. Seidlinger has written a weird and beautiful and slightly deranged meditation on the horror show that is the writer’s life in the age of social media. Think Samuel Beckett’s Stories & Texts for Nothing only here it’s tweets, retweets, quote tweets, DM’s, and the special hell of ‘going viral.’ I can’t tell you how many times I burst out laughing in horror and recognition at the darkly funny and depraved state of our protagonist ‘a writer.’ Finally, a book that takes the craft of not writing as seriously as the craft of writing. Seidlinger is a literary iconoclast who fills the page with riotous and heartbreaking truths about how we live now: cerebral, punk rock, stylish, and sensitive.”
—Gabe Hudson, author of Gork, the Teenage Dragon
The book’s breezy narrative contrasts with the despair that is often triggered by the wasteland of social media and the Internet. This is a story that reminds the reader that they aren’t alone in a culture that pressures us to measure our work on a purely capitalistic level, driven by likes, hearts, and money. Like a darker and more skewed literary version of the metaphysical classic, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Seidlinger’s Runaways: A Writer’s Dilemma shows us how our art, often made in solitary, can be the more important and inspiring part of living.
"This smart story ought to prompt readers to second-guess the impulse to write—or to tweet."—Publishers Weekly
“A portrait of the writer as a procrastinator, professional self-doubter, caffeine connoisseur, and social media addict, Runaways wallows in the manifold frustrations of this extravagantly frustrating process—yet it ultimately left this fellow sufferer feeling optimistic and ready to confront the blank page once more.”
—Mason Currey, author of Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
"Part tale and part literary Twitter discourse, Seidlinger delivers a humorous and incisive look into the life and neuroses of the modern writer. Runaways wormed under my skin in the best of ways, invoking bad habits, sage advice, and all of the stories writers tell themselves when faced with a blank page. Required reading for any writer looking to feel less alone in the trenches."
— Sequoia Nagamatsu, author of How High We Go in the Dark and Where We Go When All We Were Is Gone
"Whether it’s craft or memoir, I constantly buy books on writing. This one will be on my desk as a touchstone to be read every day for my mental health. It’s essential. It’s a writer's heart’s song, capturing the true agony and ecstasy of being an artist today. Runaways is the book for every writer and everyone who wants to understand a writer."
—Jimin Han, author of A Small Revolution
“Seidlinger holds a mirror to the contemporary writer, a narcissist and addict with often little to say. Deft, gracefully slender, and deeply upsetting: Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma is a plea to every artist to throw their phone into a river.”
—Christopher Zeischegg, author of The Magician
"Michael J. Seidlinger has written a weird and beautiful and slightly deranged meditation on the horror show that is the writer’s life in the age of social media. Think Samuel Beckett’s Stories & Texts for Nothing only here it’s tweets, retweets, quote tweets, DM’s, and the special hell of ‘going viral.’ I can’t tell you how many times I burst out laughing in horror and recognition at the darkly funny and depraved state of our protagonist ‘a writer.’ Finally, a book that takes the craft of not writing as seriously as the craft of writing. Seidlinger is a literary iconoclast who fills the page with riotous and heartbreaking truths about how we live now: cerebral, punk rock, stylish, and sensitive.”
—Gabe Hudson, author of Gork, the Teenage Dragon
86 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2021
1 person is currently reading
99 people want to read
About the author
Michael J. Seidlinger
32 books460 followersMICHAEL J. SEIDLINGER is the Filipino American author of The Body Harvest, Anybody Home?, and other books. He has written for, among others, Wired, Buzzfeed, Thrillist, Goodreads, The Observer, Polygon, The Believer, and Publishers Weekly. He teaches at Portland State University and has led workshops at Catapult, Kettle Pond Writer's Conference, and Sarah Lawrence. You can find him at michaeljseidlinger.com.
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
September 29, 2021
This was a total joy to work on and (full disclosure) publish with Michael Seidlinger, someone I've always thought of as the hardest-working person in the small press publishing world.
Sparked by his consistently brilliant (and funny and sad and surprising) tweets, Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma gives Seidlinger a bare, well-lit stage to dive deep into the conflicted mind of a struggling writer. And not just any writer—this is "a writer" who is constantly tripped up by distractions like other writers' inexplicable successes, flakey friends, and (worst of all) social media. In a strange way, I feel like Runaways is more instructional than an actual craft book (more realistic than Stephen King's On Writing and–despite the constant struggles and abandoned pages–more inspiring than a book of affirmations. Shelve it between your David Sedaris books and your Strunk & White.
Sparked by his consistently brilliant (and funny and sad and surprising) tweets, Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma gives Seidlinger a bare, well-lit stage to dive deep into the conflicted mind of a struggling writer. And not just any writer—this is "a writer" who is constantly tripped up by distractions like other writers' inexplicable successes, flakey friends, and (worst of all) social media. In a strange way, I feel like Runaways is more instructional than an actual craft book (more realistic than Stephen King's On Writing and–despite the constant struggles and abandoned pages–more inspiring than a book of affirmations. Shelve it between your David Sedaris books and your Strunk & White.
July 29, 2021
The most difficult part of writing is, I cannot emphasize this enough, the writing.
October 16, 2021
we are all so seen.
November 19, 2023
Been on a real “writers who write about not being able to write” kick. Totally accurate and of the times. Made me laugh and never want to open twitter again.
October 23, 2021
It could happen to anyone, but probably it happens to a writer. The runaways are the ideas that get away. Possibly a runaway is a writer himself, and through use of the masculine pronoun I do not intend to make a universal statement about humanity but rather I vaguely refer to myself, a writer who has, during certain periods of his life, spent valuable time Not Writing a Book. One of the insights implicit here in Seidlinger's Runaways is that the runaway ideas do not have to return in their originally imagined form. The phenomenon of the runaway, instead, might make the book. You grieved your runaway (cf. "whiskey"), but the runaway could return on your doorstep, sticking its thumbs in its ears and wiggling its tongue, and instead of treating it like a pod-person clone, you could let it in. Think of all the Runaways you could have. If this does not blow your literary mind, dear writer, I do not have a social media post that will. (I do, though, have a blog post about this book.)
August 24, 2021
A quick read, and a pleasure for anyone who has written (or tried to write) a book.
December 10, 2021
Loooooool this book is awesome.
At the end of a long, strange, and often frustrating year full of false starts, blind switchbacks and red herrings - a year in which Covid did not end, but simply adapted around our collective dumbassery to keep on keepin' on - a year in which the United States capitol was overrun by a violent mob and half the people inside responded with "meh, shit happens" - a year in which I signed a new publishing contract, joined the Twitterverse, met a shit ton of cool people online who I'll likely never know in real life, got a solid toehold into my second novel, and got back into the book and movie review game with a vengeance (to the serious detriment of said second novel) - Michael Seidlinger's delightful new book Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma, felt like an early Christmas gift just for me (and I'm so glad I'm able to review it a few weeks before Christmas, because if you need a stocking stuffer for that lovably neurotic writer in your life, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better pick).
Seemingly born out of one of those movie-style "a-ha moments," where the blocked creative looks around at his messy apartment full of pizza boxes and beer cans and dirty clothes and unpaid bills, and his phone full of unanswered calls from his mother and ignored texts from friends, and out his window onto the cold, unforgiving city where he's found none of the success he came looking for, only to smile mischievously and say aloud to himself with great enthusiasm "this is it... THIS is the book!" Runaways is a love letter to every writer who's ever felt that way about their craft (and a reassuringly kind acknowledgement that that's pretty much all of us). Interspersing his snappy prose with what I can only assume are actual Tweets he posted throughout the writing process, Seidlinger approaches with easy wit and self-effacing good humor the constant, infuriating push-pull dynamic between the work of writing, and the work of "being a writer" in the age of social media.
His observations feel simple enough at first - writing is hard, the internet is distracting, Twitter trains us to crave easy validation - but if Runaways feels simple it's only because it traffics in the kind of simple truths that take real chutzpah to say out loud, and as each personal confession and authorial shortcoming careens into the next, one after the other, like an interstate pileup that just can't catch a brake pedal, something deeper begins to take shape. As a fellow writer, I'll freely admit that I'm an easy target audience member for this savagely funny little book, but even so, Runaways succeeds in broader terms for how easily "writing" could be replaced by any neglected pursuit, be it music, or learning to bake, or even something as vague as "self-care." Its through a writer's lens because it's written by a writer (duh), but in the end it's more about the incredible, overwhelming cloud of noise that we all live in today, and the near impossibility of escaping it, or even turning it off for more than a few hours at a time. It's about the difficulty of making anything a priority in a world where virtually everything is always screaming to be our highest priority.
I don't want to get into the habit of using this space to toot my own horn, but I was definitely reminded of a line from my own forthcoming novel: "writer’s block doesn’t actually block you from writing so much as it bores into you the certainty that all writing is completely useless." Runaways is this sentiment writ large, cataloging the multifarious ways in which the internet has immeasurably expanded our individual worlds, while also shrinking the actual world, such that even our biggest dreams can feel insignificantly small. It confronts "the discourse" as a living, teeming beast of envious, jealous, jockeying intellects - a who's who of potential nemeses never more than a click away from one another, and likewise, from self-loathing despair. We're more connected and informed than ever before - which is good - but having all that knowledge at our fingertips is also a daily reminder that we're not, and have never been, as interesting or unique as we thought we were; that there's nothing new under our shared, and ever-warming sun. In the end, even Seidlinger concedes, the #1 motivator for any writer is the specter of death; the relentless grind to leave something meaningful behind, before it's too late.
So why bother? Why do anything save eat, drink, and be merry (for tomorrow we die)? These questions, of course, come down to the individual - and merriment is naturally in the eye of the beholder - but Seidlinger clearly finds joy in the process - even the really dumb parts that are, unfortunately, part and parcel of the life of nearly any successful writer here at the tail-end of 2021. In this way, the book acts as its own cheeky spoiler alert - that you're reading it at all lets you know it has a happy ending. And after a year (or two? Three? Maybe five? I've kind of lost count) navigating my own pileup of submissions and rejections, revisions and setbacks, connections made and lost, Tweets liked and forgotten, sitting for a couple of hours and reading about a fellow writer's (and a pretty darn successful one at that) arduous and remarkably familiar journey to publication put a big, goofy grin on my face (and don't sleep on the Author Bio at the end either - it's maybe the best laugh in the whole book).
So yeah, we may have lost some of our precious, snowflakey uniqueness to "the discourse" this past decade, but we've also gained the comfort of knowing that we're all going through a lot of the same shit together. It feels like a decent tradeoff. Even a merry one. And as this year comes to a close, whatever your neglected priority may be, Runaways is the gift that keeps on saying "keep at it!" (and remember your lovably neurotic writers this Christmas :)
At the end of a long, strange, and often frustrating year full of false starts, blind switchbacks and red herrings - a year in which Covid did not end, but simply adapted around our collective dumbassery to keep on keepin' on - a year in which the United States capitol was overrun by a violent mob and half the people inside responded with "meh, shit happens" - a year in which I signed a new publishing contract, joined the Twitterverse, met a shit ton of cool people online who I'll likely never know in real life, got a solid toehold into my second novel, and got back into the book and movie review game with a vengeance (to the serious detriment of said second novel) - Michael Seidlinger's delightful new book Runaways: A Writer's Dilemma, felt like an early Christmas gift just for me (and I'm so glad I'm able to review it a few weeks before Christmas, because if you need a stocking stuffer for that lovably neurotic writer in your life, you'd be hard-pressed to find a better pick).
Seemingly born out of one of those movie-style "a-ha moments," where the blocked creative looks around at his messy apartment full of pizza boxes and beer cans and dirty clothes and unpaid bills, and his phone full of unanswered calls from his mother and ignored texts from friends, and out his window onto the cold, unforgiving city where he's found none of the success he came looking for, only to smile mischievously and say aloud to himself with great enthusiasm "this is it... THIS is the book!" Runaways is a love letter to every writer who's ever felt that way about their craft (and a reassuringly kind acknowledgement that that's pretty much all of us). Interspersing his snappy prose with what I can only assume are actual Tweets he posted throughout the writing process, Seidlinger approaches with easy wit and self-effacing good humor the constant, infuriating push-pull dynamic between the work of writing, and the work of "being a writer" in the age of social media.
His observations feel simple enough at first - writing is hard, the internet is distracting, Twitter trains us to crave easy validation - but if Runaways feels simple it's only because it traffics in the kind of simple truths that take real chutzpah to say out loud, and as each personal confession and authorial shortcoming careens into the next, one after the other, like an interstate pileup that just can't catch a brake pedal, something deeper begins to take shape. As a fellow writer, I'll freely admit that I'm an easy target audience member for this savagely funny little book, but even so, Runaways succeeds in broader terms for how easily "writing" could be replaced by any neglected pursuit, be it music, or learning to bake, or even something as vague as "self-care." Its through a writer's lens because it's written by a writer (duh), but in the end it's more about the incredible, overwhelming cloud of noise that we all live in today, and the near impossibility of escaping it, or even turning it off for more than a few hours at a time. It's about the difficulty of making anything a priority in a world where virtually everything is always screaming to be our highest priority.
I don't want to get into the habit of using this space to toot my own horn, but I was definitely reminded of a line from my own forthcoming novel: "writer’s block doesn’t actually block you from writing so much as it bores into you the certainty that all writing is completely useless." Runaways is this sentiment writ large, cataloging the multifarious ways in which the internet has immeasurably expanded our individual worlds, while also shrinking the actual world, such that even our biggest dreams can feel insignificantly small. It confronts "the discourse" as a living, teeming beast of envious, jealous, jockeying intellects - a who's who of potential nemeses never more than a click away from one another, and likewise, from self-loathing despair. We're more connected and informed than ever before - which is good - but having all that knowledge at our fingertips is also a daily reminder that we're not, and have never been, as interesting or unique as we thought we were; that there's nothing new under our shared, and ever-warming sun. In the end, even Seidlinger concedes, the #1 motivator for any writer is the specter of death; the relentless grind to leave something meaningful behind, before it's too late.
So why bother? Why do anything save eat, drink, and be merry (for tomorrow we die)? These questions, of course, come down to the individual - and merriment is naturally in the eye of the beholder - but Seidlinger clearly finds joy in the process - even the really dumb parts that are, unfortunately, part and parcel of the life of nearly any successful writer here at the tail-end of 2021. In this way, the book acts as its own cheeky spoiler alert - that you're reading it at all lets you know it has a happy ending. And after a year (or two? Three? Maybe five? I've kind of lost count) navigating my own pileup of submissions and rejections, revisions and setbacks, connections made and lost, Tweets liked and forgotten, sitting for a couple of hours and reading about a fellow writer's (and a pretty darn successful one at that) arduous and remarkably familiar journey to publication put a big, goofy grin on my face (and don't sleep on the Author Bio at the end either - it's maybe the best laugh in the whole book).
So yeah, we may have lost some of our precious, snowflakey uniqueness to "the discourse" this past decade, but we've also gained the comfort of knowing that we're all going through a lot of the same shit together. It feels like a decent tradeoff. Even a merry one. And as this year comes to a close, whatever your neglected priority may be, Runaways is the gift that keeps on saying "keep at it!" (and remember your lovably neurotic writers this Christmas :)
January 10, 2022
It hurts because it's real. It hurts because there's no real fix for it, no way out.
This is my first Seidlinger book, and I'm an instant fan. And if he's lucky, my saying that won't affect his craft one way or the other. That's the note the book ends on - learning to write authentically despite our need to be *read*. The social media platforms that we rely on to be noticed at all, they kill what makes us writers in the first place. The way they're designed makes it so the parts of our brains that get hooked on affirmation totally override the ones that create the thing we want affirmation about. It's toxic and it's shitty and there's absolutely no way out.
And Seidlinger manages to put it into language, how it feels to chase these things that are just out of reach, these things we see others have - recognition, inspiration. Being noticed at all. This swirl of poisonous forces is what it means to be a writer in the early 21st century.
The whole time I was reading this, I got as angry and resentful as the writer in the book. In centuries past, being talented was enough to get you noticed and get you read. The information age brought this devil's promise of getting noticed more easily, and now it's never been so difficult - not only to be noticed, but to get anyone to read your work in the first fucking place. Every new passage in Seidlinger's novella ached more and more - internal grudges against writers that have no idea who I am, hidden shit lists in my head against everyone who's ever wronged me (in my own personal life and online), the desperate, driving need for vindication.
Vindication, the lack thereof. Little tidbits of affirmation - in the form of likes and retweets - instead of vindication, like artificial sweetener instead of cane sugar.
And the whole time, we're suffocating inside.
And for what it's worth, the poor frustrated writer in the book has one thing I don't - they have a social media following. People notice their posts. Realizing that I don't even have that made me laugh and want to cry at the same time.
An author of less talent than Michael Seidlinger couldn't have explained this twisted paradox writers struggle with in our age. I definitely don't think I could have. That's what makes authors like Seidlinger necessary - because otherwise, all this interconnectedness makes us feel more alone than ever, especially when we're suffering from afflictions that don't seem to bother anyone else.
This is my first Seidlinger book, and I'm an instant fan. And if he's lucky, my saying that won't affect his craft one way or the other. That's the note the book ends on - learning to write authentically despite our need to be *read*. The social media platforms that we rely on to be noticed at all, they kill what makes us writers in the first place. The way they're designed makes it so the parts of our brains that get hooked on affirmation totally override the ones that create the thing we want affirmation about. It's toxic and it's shitty and there's absolutely no way out.
And Seidlinger manages to put it into language, how it feels to chase these things that are just out of reach, these things we see others have - recognition, inspiration. Being noticed at all. This swirl of poisonous forces is what it means to be a writer in the early 21st century.
The whole time I was reading this, I got as angry and resentful as the writer in the book. In centuries past, being talented was enough to get you noticed and get you read. The information age brought this devil's promise of getting noticed more easily, and now it's never been so difficult - not only to be noticed, but to get anyone to read your work in the first fucking place. Every new passage in Seidlinger's novella ached more and more - internal grudges against writers that have no idea who I am, hidden shit lists in my head against everyone who's ever wronged me (in my own personal life and online), the desperate, driving need for vindication.
Vindication, the lack thereof. Little tidbits of affirmation - in the form of likes and retweets - instead of vindication, like artificial sweetener instead of cane sugar.
And the whole time, we're suffocating inside.
And for what it's worth, the poor frustrated writer in the book has one thing I don't - they have a social media following. People notice their posts. Realizing that I don't even have that made me laugh and want to cry at the same time.
An author of less talent than Michael Seidlinger couldn't have explained this twisted paradox writers struggle with in our age. I definitely don't think I could have. That's what makes authors like Seidlinger necessary - because otherwise, all this interconnectedness makes us feel more alone than ever, especially when we're suffering from afflictions that don't seem to bother anyone else.
Read
November 16, 2021Really glad I picked this one up! I'm on a perpetual search of writers done well as characters in fiction, and this one hits--but not really in the way that you'd expect.
Instead of strong characterization of a writer, it is more of an honest discussion between a writer and their distractions. It takes a look at social media primarily, but it also covers things I suffer from: reading when I should be writing; watching another Youtube video; more; more; more.
I particularly liked how it talked about jealousy on the internet, how everyone else is getting published, getting to enjoy it, finishing multiple books, juggling their time on Twitter with actual writing.
This is a sweet, light read for writers looking to breeze their way through a plot that sees them as who they are (probably).
Instead of strong characterization of a writer, it is more of an honest discussion between a writer and their distractions. It takes a look at social media primarily, but it also covers things I suffer from: reading when I should be writing; watching another Youtube video; more; more; more.
I particularly liked how it talked about jealousy on the internet, how everyone else is getting published, getting to enjoy it, finishing multiple books, juggling their time on Twitter with actual writing.
This is a sweet, light read for writers looking to breeze their way through a plot that sees them as who they are (probably).
October 6, 2022
Any writer that enters this one will feel extremely seen, but it confirms that we all battle against the same things no matter the level we're writing to. It's just scary because this is the exact phase I am in without worrying as much about social media as a writer does.
I recommend this for the writers in my life because it's confirmation of how we're feeling especially when trying to build something for ourselves.
I recommend this for the writers in my life because it's confirmation of how we're feeling especially when trying to build something for ourselves.
November 21, 2021
The truest depiction of the modern writer's struggle. It's all perfectly captured in this book: the self-doubt, envy, despair, bouts of euphoria, etc. More importantly, though, Seidlinger treats his unnamed Writer with tender humanity. Every writer would be wise to pick up a copy of Runaways. It's reassuring to know you're not alone in this fight.
October 31, 2021
There's a lot that this writer identified with in Seidlinger's smart new novella. I'm wondering how many other writers-who-spend-too-much-time-on-Twitter will react similarly. (It's good not to feel so alone!)
October 14, 2021
A runaway hit. A must read!
December 17, 2021
I read Seidlinger's smart send-up of the Extremely Online author in one sitting without checking social media. If that isn't a glowing endorsement, I don't know what is.
Snarky yet full of hope and insight into the creative (and often procrastinative) process.
Snarky yet full of hope and insight into the creative (and often procrastinative) process.
June 29, 2022
Entertaining and highly relatable. It gets you really close to the emotional rollercoaster of the subject writer, pulls you right in. Good stuff.
April 23, 2022
Felt judged and seen while also having fun laughing at another’s foibles! Fine family fun. Only downside: giving other authors the last word!
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews