Processing: How Justin Taylor Wrote Reboot
The author on reboots, online culture, video games, and “the constantly moving target” of writing about the present.
On a semi-regular basis, I interview authors about their writing processes and new books. You can find previous entries here. Today I’m excited to be talking with Justin Taylor, whose excellent new novel Reboot comes out this week. Reboot is a hilarious and thoughtful romp through our culture of endless rebooting—with detours into toxic online fandom, climate change, conspiracy theories, and more—following a wash-up actor who is trying to simultaneously reboot his life and the teen TV drama he starred in.
I talked with Taylor about writing in different forms, video game inspiration, and “the constantly moving target” of writing about the present.
Reboot tackles a lot of timely material—online discourse, climate collapse, out-of-control fandoms, the lingering effects of the pandemic, etc.—but I know most novels take years to incubate. Can you talk about when the novel first germinated and the processes of writing it from first draft to last?
I wanted it to be as immediate as I could make it. I love the way that emergent tech can become an object of fascination and a kind of inadvertent subplot in novels that are about other things, like Dr. Seward’s phonograph in Dracula. In Reboot, it isn’t so much the tech that is new and ambivalently alluring; rather, it’s the culture that said tech has made possible: these massively populated virtual spaces and the kinds of communication and connection that are (and are not) possible in them. That said, I spent a decade trying (and mostly failing) to write this novel so “the present” was a constantly moving target. Going viral on Twitter for example, seemed to mean one thing back in 2014 when I started the book, by 2016 it meant something very different, and nowadays it’s something else again.
Same goes for the novel’s relationship to cultural nostalgia. I started writing this novel the year that Bojack Horseman premiered, and I had concerns at the time that the show had kind of preempted what I was doing, especially after it became popular. Then it got so big that the new cool thing was to roll your eyes at it, and then it went off the air. I ended up writing it into the novel; David has seen the show and riffs on it a bit when talking about his own substance abuse and recovery.
I wrote the final major draft of the novel in spring 2021, so that became the year the book was set, which in turn set the narrative timeline and the novel’s sense of what was “contemporary”: how old the characters are in the present if they were in their mid-teens when they shot the show, what years the show would have been on in order to have a 20th anniversary in 2023, which is David’s target for the reboot. If I’d finished the book in 2014, Rev Beach would have been on in the early 90s, a contemporary of shows like 90210 and The X-Files, a forerunner of the teen drama wave that brought Buffy and Dawson’s Creek. But instead Rev Beach comes after that wave has crested and broken. It’s kind of belated even when it’s brand-new.
You’re a creative writing professor, and one thing I remember my own professors telling me was that every novel forces you to learn how to write a novel all over again. Basically, every project is different. (I tell my own students this too.) I’m curious how writing Reboot differed from your first novel, The Gospel of Anarchy? What did you learn that you could reuse and what did you have to invent anew?
I think that’s absolutely right. To be honest, Reboot feels like I’m debuting all over again. It’s right there in the title. Gospel came out in 2011 and was basically finished by 2009. It’s a book about gutter punks in a college town in central Florida, and structurally it’s close to a novel-in-stories, though I don’t think anyone would mistake it for one. It’s easy, maybe too easy, to look back and see its flaws: there are places where I would have pushed farther if I hadn’t been under the gun to finish it, and there are aspects of the story that I worked very hard to keep subtle or implicit when I should have been hitting people over the head to make sure things didn’t get misconstrued, or just missed. In early drafts of Reboot I did try to use some of the stuff that had worked in Gospel, particularly using multiple points of view, but it didn’t work. That kind of structure is good for a group portrait, which Gospel is, but Reboot is David’s story before (and after) it’s anything else. The first person POV works because it’s the vehicle of voice and this is a voicey book, but also because the “I” is a form of restriction. It sets the parameters of the novel’s energy and attention. Of course, if you read the book you’ll see that there’s some pushback against that restriction, but that only further proves the point. The resistance is as productive as the rule.
In addition to those novels, you’ve published a memoir (Riding with the Ghost) and multiple story collections (Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever and Flings). How does your writing process differ between those forms?
I think of myself as a short story writer. Stories bring me the most pleasure to work on, and they’re what I am most inclined to write. If I am sitting down at the desk with no plan, just looking to see what’s on my own mind, odds are it’s a story. My last collection came out in 2014 (same year I started writing Reboot) and I’ve got about two dozen uncollected stories that I’ve written since then. Most have been published, a few are coming out this year. I’d love for my next book to be a collection, probably not of all of them. My dream is to do one of those razor-thin collections like Barry Hannah’s Captain Maximus, which has 8 stories in 100 pages; Brad Watson’s Last Days of the Dog-Men, which is also 8 stories in I think 140 pages; any Amy Hempel collection; or Jamaica Kincaid’s At the Bottom of the River, which is 10 stories in 82 pages. 82! The fucking GOAT.
But anyway, to get back to your question, which extends my answer to the previous question, the memoir was a truly unexpected entry in my own catalog. It was written in response to exigent circumstance (my father’s illness and sudden passing in 2017) and even after I wrote it I wasn’t sure that I’d put it out into the world. But once I committed to the project, I found enormous freedom in the restriction (that word again!) of telling a true story. Because I couldn’t make anything up, I was able to focus all my attention on the practical aspects of longform storytelling that I tend to struggle with the most: narrative arcs, pacing, character development, and so on. I don’t think I’d have ever arrived at this version of Reboot if I hadn’t taken that particular detour. It’s fair to say that writing the memoir taught me how to write a novel.
Reboot is a novel about narratives and it includes descriptions of narratives in other mediums. Chiefly, the Buffy-meets-The O.C. TV show Rev Beach—which the protagonist David starred in as a teen—and the roguelike video game Shibboleth Gold that David voice acts for in the present. I’d love to know how you imagined those works outside of the page. (Did you map out season arcs on the TV show? Sketch characters for the game?) And how did you balance providing readers with enough information to understand these fictional works without being overwhelmed with details?
At one point I tried to write an episode guide for Rev Beach, like what you’d see on a fan site on the back of a DVD box set. It was tedious, and the temptation was always to make it sillier so it would be more fun to read, then the sillier it got the less it worked as a plausible artifact of pop culture. I finally realized that if I was going to put that much effort into building out the world and lore of this supernatural drama I ought to write it as its own thing (and, presumably, cash in big) rather than shoehorn it into this other story. All the imaginary IP in Reboot has a trompe l’oeil quality to it, they’re painted backdrops on a theater stage. I included just enough to make it feel real to the characters, which I figured would make it feel real enough to the reader.
Speaking of video games, I believe you enjoy playing them. (“Gamer” seems like a word to use these days.) Have video games influenced your fiction writing in any way?
I’m just old enough to have been online before broadband. In high school I played the original Everquest for a while, via 56k dial up modem. That was my first experience of virtual community. I mean not just of being online, but of meeting and developing relationships with other people in other places. I joined a guild, got to know some of those folks outside the game a little. When I got to college they’d just put broadband in the dorms and I felt immediately how easily it could become my entire life, so I quit. I sold my gnome necromancer on eBay for a couple hundred bucks. I still won’t play massive multiplayer online games. Everquest has been memorialized a few times in my fiction, as a game called Spells of Evermore. There’s a story in Flings called “A Talking Cure” narrated by an academic who plays SoE 3 as part of her doctoral thesis work: she studies the way that folkloric and mythological tropes are recontextualized when they’re used in MMORPGs. SoE is mentioned in Reboot also, and in one other story that I haven’t been able to publish yet.
I still play RPGs, but solo and on my own time. I don’t mind level-grinding and resource farming. I already spend most of my waking hours thinking difficult thoughts about sophisticated narratives—as a fiction writer, teacher, and critic—so brainless game time can be very restorative. I played Skyrim and at one point did this evil quest where you join a cult and do human sacrifice and cannibalism. In another game, that would have altered your affiliations or changed the trajectory of the story, but in Skyrim it was just like, a lost weekend. It didn’t matter. You go back to saving the world and the only person who knows you killed and ate a guy is you.
I love Final Fantasy 3, Chrono Trigger, the Lufia games, Hollow Knight, Super Mario World and Super Metroid. I’ve played newer Marios and Metroids and they’re fine but these are the high points of those franchises. Zelda on the other hand—A Link to the Past is a masterpiece. Breath of the Wild was a revelation and then Tears of the Kingdom was even better. I don’t many roguelikes because they’re too stressful, but Hades was a huge part of my pandemic. Shibboleth Gold, the game in Reboot, is directly in homage to Hades, with touches of Diablo II.(I like playing as the druid who can turn into a werewolf.) I didn’t touch Hades for a long time after lockdown ended but I picked it back up recently. I’d gotten to 19 heat with the bow and the fists but hadn’t hit 20 and I really wanted to. Finally did it the other day with the fists, in the aspect of Talos with a Zeus build. I’m close with the bow but too slow with my shot setups for Hades himself. I feel like I could get to 20 with the satanic laser gun too, but I’m near the ceiling of my skill set. I’m too much of a button masher to become truly elite.
Reboot is really hilarious, which made me wonder how comedy influenced your work. Did you ever want to be a stand-up or write sketch comedy?
Thank you! I would never want to do stand-up. Sketch comedy, I dunno, never thought about it but I guess if someone asked me to I’d give it a shot. I always wanted this to be a comic novel. Especially after the ruminative sadness of a grief memoir, I wanted this to be fast and loud and a little unhinged. A picaresque, a bit speculative, but not quite a cartoon. And it does have some dark parts too, some sad and moving parts (he said, hopefully). My sense was that those might hit harder if they caught the reader off-guard, popping up amidst all this chaos and goofiness, like a splash of cold water in the face.
One thing I’ve come to believe about writing comedy is that the characters should not know they’re in a comedy. Reboot is a deeply self-aware, self-referential novel in a lot of ways, but the characters take their own desires and concerns seriously. They have realist motives and psychologies, and they’re earnest. That earnestness is the engine of the comedy. Though Reboot pays its most explicit homage to DeLillo (underrated as a comedian) it takes a lot from guys like Bellow, Martin Amis, Sam Lipsyte. Barry Hannah, who I mentioned earlier, and my friend Nell Zink, who is one of the best comic writers working today. One thing they all have in common is velocity. Different eras, interests, tones, etc., but they all have this genius for sustaining momentum without sacrificing precision. The logic of jokes helps with both speed and precision: one-liners, set-ups, riffs, and callbacks. They’re all organizational principles, ways of forcing every bit of material to carry its weight or make way for something that will.
Your prose is also quite literary (complimentary), but Reboot includes a lot of what might be normally considered ugly prose. Social media rants, clickbait celebrity news, etc. How did you go about incorporating those types of language into your own?
I tried to think about them in terms of character. There is usually a general tone or language specific to a given genre, whether that’s celebrity news or redpilled internet bullshit or anything else, but then there’s the specific person who is speaking in that idiom, their style and understanding of audience and sense of what’s at stake. Molly Webster, the culture journalist who gets caught up in David’s story, is writing for a website whose house style hearkens to early Gawker: it’s razor-tongued, highly condescending toward a pop culture it is nevertheless obsessed with and fluent in, and it’s chatty, with a lot of “I.” It’s not The Hollywood Reporter. Molly has enough affinity for all this that she can take the assignment, but she’s also playing to her audience. (And she has an ulterior motive for writing the piece.) IRL, she’s still razor-tongued, but she talks a lot more about poetry and politics than celebrity gossip. The anonymous tweeter who goes by @BigDiogenesEnergy, on the other hand, is known to us mostly through certain recurring bits: he guesses the sizes of famous women’s feet, he helps give conspiracy theories traction irrespective of what they’re about. He’s a creature of pure reaction: replies, quote tweets, copypasta.
How did you research the novel? I heard that you read a lot of teen actor memoirs.
I read Corey Feldman’s Coreyography, Jodie Sweetin’s Unsweetined, and Dustin Diamond’s Behind the Bell. Mara Wilson has also written a lot of good essays about her experiences in the industry, the ups and downs and sheer weirdness of it. She tells a story about finding pictures of herself circa Matilda on a foot fetish website. Both David and his ex-wife Grace have had these sorts of experiences. David has read some Rev Beach erotic fanfiction depicting his character or sometimes him having graphic sex with his co-stars. Grace deals with it every time she goes online, which is all the time, because she’s pushing a lifestyle brand. I have a folder on my bookmarks bar for Reboot with three subfolders in it: celebrity, hollow earth, climate. There’s dozens and dozens of entries in each folder. I just kept adding to them. I mean in ten years you can read a lot of stuff! And fandom culture has only became bigger and more deeply entangled with the entertainment industry. We’re all in the biz now whether we mean to be or not. One particularly smart piece on this subject is “For All Fankind” by Kyle Paoletta, which was in the Baffler in 2019.
The climate prognosis also kept (and keeps!) getting worse, and I see a connection there to hollow earth theory, which was 19th century capital’s imperial-industrial fantasy of discovering a new unspoiled land to strip of resources, because they knew that they were causing irreversible damage to the whole of the known world. Ishmael talks about this in Moby-Dick, wondering whether the whales will be hunted to extinction like the American buffalo. He observes that the reason whaling voyages have become so perilous is because the shps have to go farther to sea and stay out longer to find the whales, whose numbers have been decimated by the industry. Eventually he pulls back and gives some reasons why he thinks whales can’t be hunted to extinction, but it rings false. Melville’s point is that Ishmael has seen the truth and backed away from it, retreating into conciliatory fantasy, because otherwise he’d have to reconsider his job working on a whaling ship. Well, that’s the perpetual dream of capital: Surely there must be something out there that will allow me to solve the problems I have caused without forcing me to stop doing the things that caused the problems. We’re still trapped in that dream today.
Lastly, if you could magically, uh, reboot Reboot in a different medium—a video game, TV show, Broadway play, etc.—which would it be?
Even though Reboot is about a TV show I think it would make a good movie. It’s a pretty tight three-act story. There would be some on-location shooting and CGI involved, but there aren’t that many principal characters. I think you could do it on a reasonable budget. Since so much of Broadway these days is adaptations of movies, I have to assume that the musical would follow the film as a matter of course. The best thing to do would be to adapt the IP from within Reboot: make the Rev Beach TV show, design the Shibboleth Gold game. But I’m just happy it exists as a novel; and as an audiobook, which I recorded myself. My first choice was James Van Der Beek, but the publisher was unable to reach his people, or so they told me. Once it became clear we couldn’t get him, I wanted to do it myself and I feel incredibly lucky that they let me. It sounds exactly the way I think it should sound. And they had to pay me again. Movies, games, and shows would all be lovely, but at this point all I can say is Dayenu!
If you like this newsletter, consider subscribing or checking out my recent science fiction novel The Body Scout that The New York Times called “Timeless and original…a wild ride, sad and funny, surreal and intelligent.”
Other works I’ve written or co-edited include Upright Beasts (my story collection), Tiny Nightmares (an anthology of horror fiction), and Tiny Crimes (an anthology of crime fiction).
