Meditations on Taylor Swift

Written by Kevin Jin

As we continue along the winding road of writing mastery, we must be mindful that the enemy is often far closer than we think. The eager novice (myself included) tends to gorge themselves on the buffet of writing advice and opinions available online, swallowing craft books, party-packs of anecdotes, maxim canapés, and junk food platitudes alike. This, like any exercise in gluttony, accumulates fatigue. The change is slow, but by the end the budding writer is tiptoeing around an abundance of red tape just to produce a single sentence. They measure every word, paragraph, and story against so many different guidelines that their story is barely perceptible beneath the noise, confusing technical proficiency for quality of fiction and mistaking the trees for the forest. I only recently put my pack down and realised how much of this baggage I had accumulated, and it was all thanks to Taylor Swift. Not the singer though—rather Hugh Behm-Steinberg’s contest-winning flash fiction piece of the same name. “Taylor Swift” was Remy’s ratatouille to my Anton Ego. Judge Steve Almond of the 2015 Barthelme award put it best when reflecting upon his selection of the story: 

“Full disclosure: I tried quite hard to resist choosing ‘Taylor Swift’… Why? Because all the stories I received were worthy and many were more technically ambitious when it came to language and form, …because I feared selecting a story entitled ‘Taylor Swift’ might speak to my literary deficiencies, or plain old drooling idiocy. But what the hell. In the end, I just wanted to read this thing again and again.” 

 That last line, obvious though it may be, touches on a simple truth about writing that is too easily forgotten. Good writing is subjective, but good fiction is reliant on one thing: the story experience. Somewhere amidst the ocean of exercises to pare sentences to the bone and compose witty wordplays, our idea of good writing morphed into a qualitative assessment. Good fiction “should” be deep and verbose, experiment with form, and say something about the human condition. It “should” revolutionise your life and leave a mark on the cultural consciousness. Almond’s conundrum is a symptom of this: technically ambitious writing feels like it ought to be “better”, but as “Taylor Swift” shows, your writing just needs to be fun and have spirit.

Almond mentions this when he talks about the story’s heart and love: “It extradites us to a realm of strange wonders and incantatory rhythms in which we are forced to acknowledge that the heart and its deranged pursuit of love cannot be disabled or even diminished by our neurotic defenses.” And boy, is he right about the neurotic defences. Ever the critic, I too had a knee-jerk reaction against the title, ready with all manner of sarcastic comments and weaponised feedback to tear the story apart, but I too was won over by the simple, funny, and above all, pure story that I had read.

“Taylor Swift” is a ridiculous premise, drenched in humor, and packaged neatly at 500 words on the dot, yet it is far more than the sum of its parts. It’s a pure fiction story in the sense that it doesn’t try to do anything but make you laugh and transport you to a fantastical world where Taylor Swift can be bought by the dozen. By nature of being a flash piece, it’s definitely been combed over meticulously and trimmed of unnecessary words like the many adages say to do, but the key thing is that at no point does the voice feel curated.

The story starts sentences with conjunctions, skips them altogether sometimes, and does away with quotation marks entirely, but these transgressions don’t matter at all. The wisdom imparted by the Elements of Style, On Writing, and other books on the craft have their place among the chorus of voices that can refine yours, but when you approach them as gospel your writing loses its earnestness. The output is homogenous in the same way ChatGPT can write a perfect, technically sound story, but it will never be able to move people in the way that a child’s scrawl can. Behm-Steinberg’s desire to take the readers of “Taylor Swift” on a journey is so dominant that even if the words are tinkered with, the story’s voice remains uniquely entertaining and its own. With its laid-back prose, the pocket-sized piece effortlessly surpasses my stuffy, meticulously reworded works, and that forces me to reflect. I look upon my own stories and see a mosaic of my influences, but can I find my own voice within my work?

“Kill your darlings” the old masters say, and the eager apprentice hacks their work apart. “Taylor Swift” has become a north star for me in terms of how to preserve the core of a story, and a wake up call for how stiff my writing has become. It’s so easy to get lost down the rabbit hole of the craft, which warps your perception of what great writing can and should be. “Taylor Swift” is a testament to the fact that, at the same time, writing isn’t that deep. There is a simple pleasure in reading a story that is merely here to entertain, and similarly, causal writing can—and should—be fun to do. If it’s not, then perhaps you’re also in too deep. Put your luggage down and rest for a while. Come gaze at the forest in all its beauty.