Arthur Graham’s Reviews > The Failure Cascade > Status Update

(cont.) And when I write any of the stories like the ones in this book, whatever you call them — microfiction or flash or gonzo fiction or whatever — the more of these I do, the more I realize I’m writing the same five or six stories over and over again. I think ten years ago, when I started thinking about the possibility of stealing Hunter Thompson’s gonzo journalism shtick and using it for fiction, it made total sense. Instead of writing autobiographical fiction or creative nonfiction and lamenting that I couldn’t write “weird” stuff, I’d use a first-person participatory story, and wrap it around a core piece of some observational opinion piece. Instead of writing about how Richard Nixon was a weirdo or publishing excruciating reviews of old Dokken records, I’d write a story about how I used to hang out with Richard Nixon and listen to Dokken records with him. And that worked, until it didn’t.