Jenna Ortega Has Killer Taste. Why Can't Novelists?

Writers don't have a Criterion Closet, and liking old, more abstract books can make readers angry. What gives?

Interviews promoting movies tend to be sorta dry and lifeless. Especially when it comes to movies I have zero interest in, like Beetlejuice Beetlejuice. But, it was hard to ignore this promotional video that got passed around the other day from the film equivalent of Goodreads, Letterboxd, interviewing Jenna Ortega, Winona Ryder, Catherine O’Hara, and Justin Theroux.

The prompt was asking each one for their four favorite films, which is a Letterboxd feature for user profiles. You get to feature your four favorite films and I don’t know, it’s sort of like MySpace favorites and I fear I just aged myself greatly. Anyway, here’s the clip.

Catherine O’Hara’s shock at Jenna Ortega’s taste is such a wholesome, interesting moment, and forces O’Hara to dig deeper. I’ll just say it, Jenna Ortega has some killer taste in films, and it basically lines up with whenever Criterion posts a video from the Criterion Closet where they take an actor/director/artist into their closet of discs, ask them to pick a few and explain why. Everyone in the Criterion Closet is always so excited and gets to show off their favorite movies. For our purposes, they get to show off their broad range of tastes that helped forge them as an artist.

Again, in the buildup to Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, here’s Winona Ryder in the Criterion Closet.

These Criterion Closet videos are almost always the same. It’s people from film and film adjacent industries discussing the films that inspired them. They aren’t always high artists who make small indie films, either. Here’s videogame developer Hideo Kojima’s, Paul Giamatti’s, Chelsea Peretti’s, and Charlie Day’s. I want to note something here, I’m not picking auteur filmmakers or anything here, just actors, filmmakers and comedians who all have really cool taste.

I’m bringing this up because in publishing, especially in fiction, it feels like there’s been such a mighty push to avoid rocking the boat. If you look up “favorite books” from current bestselling authors it’s a crapshoot of listicles of books that whomever curated said list feels that person’s fans would like, or lists from authors who’ve recommended books over the years, but it doesn’t have that same feeling to it. Not even a little. They feel more like promoting peers or things their readers would like than some deep look into the soul of an artist. Where someone more established, like Stephen King, or Margaret Atwood can sorta opine about all sorts of cool, interesting things.

There’s a phenomenon going on over these last few years where social media platform TikTok has become popular with a subset of readers, labeled thusly as BookTok, which has become incredibly influential among those readers. Hell, it’s made some authors into overnight success stories. But it requires a certain amount of participation from some authors, who will continue the feedback loop of talking about recent books similar to their own that they know these fans and readers will enjoy.

Look, I have no expectation that someone excited about Beetlejuice Beetlejuice is going to be inspired that Jenna Ortega recommended the phenomenal La Haine and look that movie up (some might, though!), or that It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia viewers are going to rush out to view Agnes Varda’s filmography (note: you should). That’s not their target audience, but as an indie author who’s been involved in this industry for many years, I’ve noticed this doesn’t track with authors. The ones that do best seem to be the ones whose taste overlaps perfectly (or is at least projected as such) with their readers, which doesn’t come as a surprise. To be a successful indie author, you need to be prolific. That means you’ve really gotta live in this moment of creating similar books without burning out. I’d argue being an indie author can, at times, feel closer to being a “content creator” than an artist, where your job is to churn out a constant stream of similar novels, all within the same stylistic, trope-filled wheelhouse. That’s fine, people like what they like, but what I’m getting at here is that it feels like, among readers, there are expectations that we, as authors, are creating in service to specific needs of the readers and that veering from that chosen path is one of ruin and destruction, or worse yet, being ignored.

If you’re a reader and you’re reading this right now, you and I should not have the same taste in everything. Our tastes and wants should diverge at a certain point, because my taste informs what I write and makes my work my own. Your taste is your own. Because of that taste, I can add layers and texture to my work, that even if it’s in a genre that doesn’t lend itself to “high art,” it can still have artistic flourishes and sample from things I love. My bestselling series is named Trystero. You know where that comes from? Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49. It’s a shadowy organization at the center of the book’s conspiracy of a rogue postal service, and serves as a metaphor of sorts that the protagonist can never know the truth about that organization, and her interpretation of it will always be subjective, or influenced by her own beliefs. So, yes, I released a space opera series named after this, and I did so with intent. Maybe just an in-joke. Who knows, right? All I know is that book helped change my life in college.

What are my Letterboxd top 4? Vagabond by Agnes Varda, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me by David Lynch, IZO by Takashi Miike, and Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior by George Miller. The fact that it’s a top four means I need to leave Stalker off of the list. Imagine having to do that. What about my favorite books (listed on BookBub, because Goodreads is a trashfire for this stuff)? Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami, and 2666 by Roberto Bolano.

Sure, I grew up loving science fiction. I loved Isaac Asimov and veered off into reading a lot of the authors who co-authored novels with him (like Robert Silverberg), or who riffed off of his work. In addition, I read a lot of the “grand masters” and then got more into Philip K. Dick, which led to Kurt Vonnegut, and my reading from there just got more esoteric. I still read some science fiction, but it’s usually for research, not enjoyment (although I do enjoy lots of it).

Don’t even get me started on music, because my taste in music is a weird mix of industrial, metal, and hard rock from the 90s, drone, ambient and shoegaze, modern pop-rock acts like Halsey, Lucy Dacus, Phoebe Bridgers and Wolf Alice, or just… whatever I find musically interesting. Never forget Prince or David Bowie, either. Lately I’ve been back into an old favorite in Japanese noise rock/drone band Boris, as well as psychedelic rockers from Japan in the 90s and 00s in Ghost, with a lot of Iceland’s Ragnar Zolberg mixed in.

Hell, pro wrestling is wired into my DNA, as well. No, I don’t watch WWE and I haven’t in a long time. My favorite pro wrestling tends to be the old worked shoot style stuff (for example, Vader vs. Nobuhiko Takada was the inspiration for the very long, brutal fight in Shattered Lineage), Japanese indie sleaze and/or deathmatch wrestling. Takashi Sasaki is one of my all-time favorite wrestlers (heads up, this is a deathmatch, not for the squeamish), and in fact he was an inspiration for TAKASHI in Intergalactic Bastard. I can’t even begin to explain my love for mid-00s AAA in Mexico, or how cool Chessman was back then. Or Poison Sawada JULIE, an evil cross-dresser imbued with snake powers from the heads on Easter Island. Or what about Magnum TOKYO? Number one in my heart will always be Toshiaki Kawada, though.

A part of me sees those folks in the film industry, one that was able to unionize prior to current labor laws that prevent writers from doing the same, and see how universal it is that even the goofiest of people in that industry are overflowing with passion for their art form, and gets jealous. Because in publishing, you don’t see a lot of that. Like, yeah, Stephen King reviewed Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch when it came out for the NYT, where he gushed about her prose (the first few chapters of that book are immaculate, let me tell you), over ten years later writers discussing work outside of their own feels hollow and transactional. The idea of blurbing books has come into focus recently, and for good reason. It’s a transactional practice in a shaky industry where publishing contracts can be pulled out like theoretical rugs at the drop of a hat. In the age of BookTok, it feels like authors need to continue propping each other, or other, similar books up instead of talking about things that make us passionate.

Last month I was so excited when I saw a YouTube channel, Leaf by Leaf, talked about one of my favorite books from college, Against Nature by Joris-Karl Huysmans. It’s hard to explain why it’s a favorite. It’s not a comfort read, or even that enjoyable, but for that time and place it really helped conceptualize some ideas kicking around in my head and it always bummed me out that I didn’t have anyone to talk to about this weird book. Why do conversations about books need to be confined to academic or quasi-academic spaces, unless it’s about fucking Harry Potter or whatever bestseller is lighting up BookTok or the NYT bestseller list? It shouldn’t be seen as pretentious to have taste in books when fucking Charlie from It’s Always Sunny, the guy whose character is best known for putting jellybeans on steak, can profess his love for arthouse movies.

All of this is percolating inside of my head right now because today I finally, after years of pausing, gave the go ahead to my editor to start work on my next release. I started writing this book in 2016, right before my boys were born, and worked on it in spurts between then and now. Up until now, most of my work has been space opera science fiction, which I’ll always love, but it’s not what I read all the time. It’s not what I watch or consume all the time. This book is different. It’s about a future where the ultra-wealthy have taken over space for their own, and instituted systems on Earth where everyone is indebted to them, with major religious organizations backing them up for their own profit.

As my audience is one that will most likely adhere to the books I’ve already written, that’s a scary thing. This book was essentially ready two years ago, but I decided to take a stab at traditional publishing it, and the answers I got were along the lines of it being good (there were actually some downright gushing replies from agents), but sci-fi that’s even a little outside of the lines is an incredibly tough sell right now to publishers. Two years of being told it’s not me, it’s the market, and frankly, I’m done waiting. I believe in this book more than anything I’ve released before, and I’m scared that my cultivated audience who’ve enjoyed all my fun space romps will see this and guffaw, just like many did when I released a novel about an intergalactic prizefighter with an addiction problem trying to realize there’s more to life than his job.

In addition, I saw the giddy rush indie authors were having playing with generative AI (LLMs/large language models), and that marketplaces like Amazon were starting to get filled up with borderline nonsensical books churned out at a breakneck pace, with some very shiny looking cover art (read: AI) with some awful-looking fonts slapped on top of it. Since then, there has been plenty of pushback, and already gurus and “thought leaders” are pushing these generative AI tools as a shortcut to making more money. That isn’t to say that traditional publishing isn’t giddy over eliminating human jobs thanks to this trash, either. Because they are. But all of this made me leery of indie publishing and not want to be a part of a mad rush to the bottom. Indie publishing, especially when it comes to “to market,” series-based work, is an arms race, and the people willing to do anything to get ahead were just given access to largely free tools to do exactly that.

That’s not why I’m a writer or an artist. I’m doing this to create real, human connections. To tell stories that resonate, weasel down into your subconscious and won’t let go. Not churn out constant content. I didn’t want to be a part of that world. The problem is, that world isn’t just indie authors. Everything is having its own “moment” and the walls are closing in around us and publishing isn’t doing much to protect authors from potential implosion. So, I vowed that the age of me writing a full novel in six weeks was over. I wanted to put care and attention to detail in my work, not pump out content, or even worse, pawn it off onto a chatbot.

It’s hard not to feel like there’s no room for me in publishing, even with a proven track record.

But, like I said in this recent piece published by Typebar Magazine, for there to be real, substantial change in publishing, someone has to do it. Someone has to publish different books. Someone has to stop waiting around for the publishing industry’s ROI calculators to align with our taste. Someone has to toss down a gauntlet to readers and say, “hey, my book isn’t from a major imprint, it’s not like everything else you read, but I think you’ll love it.” I’m looking to say that you don’t have to only enter the indie publishing world if you’re writing in a hot market, hitting all your tropes and “writing to market.” I’m not delusional enough to believe I’m going to be a catalyst of any sort, but I’m idealistic enough to put myself out there in a way I haven’t before and take what I consider a pretty big risk.

Support artists. Support artists supporting each other. Remember that we’re human beings and that for us to create amazing things, we need to feed the artist inside of us just as much as we need to produce things you enjoy reading.

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