No. 4: A Study in Taylor

What the Taylor Moment Can Teach About Writing

I’m worried about Taylor Swift.

‘About’ is the key preposition there — I’m not worried for her but existentially about her. In the same way I worry about phone-addled kids losing interest in books or about AI making us less human or about Florida sliding into the sea.

Caveat here: I’m a Swiftie and have been for a long time. She and Madonna have been the two artists I’ve tracked intensively and that’s no coincidence. Because when it comes to their art, each has historically refused to give us what we expect.

And here I am, writing a book that certainly you and my past readers aren’t expecting — but even more, a book which I didn’t expect.

Truth is, I never understood why I had such a longstanding, visceral interest in Madonna and Swift, why I studied them so relentlessly… until I started this book. Suddenly I had the a-ha moment: I was studying them, yes. But more than that, I was also straining to build up a specific kind of courage that each seems to carry so effortlessly.

The courage to evolve.

Let’s start with a theory —

Every successful novelist, musician, filmmaker, or any kind of artist has their breakthrough moment and then has to chase the ghost of that moment by mimicking and replicating that success, which satisfies a core fan base, but comes with built-in limitations — the biggest being that you have to do the same thing over and over again, until both you and your audience are sick of it.

Madonna and Taylor reject this. They use their success to periodically vanish and reemerge with new personas, new sounds, new energies that feel authentic and inhabited. The reinventions are so thorough that there is a wonder you’re listening to the same artist at all. (Ray of Light vs. Erotica… Reputation vs. Folklore…)

For this reinvention to work, though, an artist has to be somewhat of a cipher personally. So that old skins can be sloughed and a new one believably worn.        Ironic to say that Madonna and Taylor are both ciphers, given the amount they’ve been photographed, but for a long time, both perfected the art of giving you the semblance of access, and yet, never letting you get too close. (Taylor doesn’t even let you comment on her social media posts.) But it’s this distance that is the secret sauce for a career where you’re allowed to change. The art is the thing and the rest is persona. And persona, which is such a shallow construct, holds no candle to the impact of true, lived-in work. Fandom falls away once you read the first sentence of a deeply felt book or hear the first note of a new album, releasing chemicals in your brain, shivering the nerves in your skin, invoking feelings and secrets that no one else knows. It’s no longer about the artist. It’s about you.

And the same holds true in any medium, I’d argue. Know too much about the artist and it becomes harder to surrender to magic and mystery.

Which is why I’m worried about Taylor.

For the first time ever, and I say this delicately… we’re too close.

The onslaught of press, of appearances, of hubbub, or all-consuming every day Taylor, Taylor, Taylor, for so many months, in so many different contexts, means for the first time, when I hear the music, I’m thinking about her instead of thinking about me. A temporary condition, surely — the result of an absolutely mammoth year of success in every realm.

But we can learn from this as writers.

For ten years, I’ve written romantic fairy tales. They have a tone that is very, very specific — lavish and exuberant and dramatic and rooted in the female gaze.  It is an authorial voice that my readers can spot from a mile away. Here’s Sophie from The School for Good and Evil in one of her arias:

“Look at these glasses. Aren’t they chic? Saves your eyes from the sun. You know, these Evergirls sneak me all sorts of things like this now, pearls, jewels, makeup to add to my ensembles. At first I thought they were Good deeds, and then I realized, no, they just like seeing their things on someone more glamorous and charismatic. Only it’s all so cheap. Gives me a rash.”

Or:

“Even if I could spare a thought for Tedros — or any boy, for that matter — it would be a wasted one. I’m completely happy on my own, unattached and untroubled by the vagaries of love. Flah-sé-dah, that’s my new mantra: a blissful mélange of ‘laissez-faire’ and ‘la-di-da.’ Who needs the stress of love when there’s important work to do? I prefer a modest life now, dedicated to my students.”

It’s the Sophie-ness of SGE which makes the tone so identifiable, and it’s an authorial voice I played up in my own online persona for the last ten years — to the point you could pick out my writing like a face in a crowd. I even tested this experiment, writing a secret fan fiction (called “The Prince’s Club”), and it wasn’t up on fanfic websites for more than an hour before fingers started pointing in my direction. Which is the ultimate compliment — especially since I thought that tone was my tone. My only tone. The one I would write in forever because it was me and I was it.

In fact, the book I was planning to write after SGE (See Entry No. 1), was a farm-based, luxurious romance, with a fairy-tale twist, and I could hear the same kind of words in my head, sprawling and sensual and sumptuous.

But when I started writing and this book came out instead… the tone was very different. For instance:

“I get up at 6:15. Dry-mouthed. Fogged in the head. Like a busted Chevy juicing energy out of an empty tank. Kept the window open all night to ride the freakish fall heat wave, but now my bed is coated with soot. Perks of wildfire smoke.”

Or:

“Oh man. I’m whipped. So whipped I can’t think about any other girls, even when a pesky frosh keeps chatting me in the halls or low-hanging fruit like Ashley Banks tells Jax I have nice legs and asks if I have a date to the Back-to-School Ball.”

Even after I reckoned with the fact that no, there would be no farm book, and yes, I was going to write this unexpected book instead… there was still the fear that this tone shift was so stark that it wouldn’t be sustainable. That somehow it wasn’t as me as the SGE tone. I spent the better part of 2023 churning out chapters just to get used to the new voice, chapters which I’d end up heavily compressing or throwing out, but little by little, it had the effect of exorcising old ghosts. In a way, it’s not so different from when I make technical changes in tennis. I’ve been playing at a high level for 30+ years now, and when I mess with my serve or backhand, it takes months and months before even the slightest tweak feels organic and normal, as if it was there in my swing all along. And indeed — twelve months after starting this novel and inhabiting a new tone, I find myself completely alienated from my SGE voice. If I had to write another fairy tale book right now, I wouldn’t even know how. This new novel has become (in the words of Taylor) “my entire personality.”

That’s not to say that the old voice doesn’t creep in here and again. Like little unconscious sojourns back to the Endless Woods. Luckily, my editor flags it vigorously. For instance:

“Our colors will dim. Our spirits will sag. We’ll leave it to the next group and they’ll leave it to the next and the next and the next, while we bury our heads in sand, bunkered inside our own walls, our useless dramas, our secret little love stories that distract us from our dread…”

She put many question marks by this passage, essentially saying: “HELLO, SOMAN.” Cue me moving it to the trash bin.

I’m on high-alert, then, for ghosts of my past voice, seeping in to derail my progress. Often, these ghosts are a result of fear of the new voice — fear that readers won’t like this new incarnation which makes me slip back into old skins to give them what they want. The end result being a Frankenstein which is no good to anyone.

Time to be braver, then. The only way forward is courage and commitment and a belief that there never was an SGE “voice” at all — but rather just a particular story to be told, and now I’m onto the next, which is just as much a part of me as Sophie, Agatha and Tedros. 

Which brings me back to those Taylor worries.

I fret that at the moment, she’s so ever-present in our lives as Taylor the Star vs. Taylor the Artist, that finding that mystery again come new-album time will be elusive — especially since that new album is coming soon (April 19th to be exact).

Almost every artist who has found an audience has faced a version of this fear, albeit on a much tinier scale. Indeed, I had my own creative, existential crisis for the first year of writing this book — that readers would be looking for the fairy tale fantasy in it instead of seeing it for what it was. But perhaps the cure for all of us is the same cure that it was for Taylor, mid 2010s, when she was in a moment just like this, on top of the world, overexposed… and then suddenly disappeared. And in that disappearance, for her, for all of us who want to grow — we wrestle with ourselves, with our work, in secret, far away from the public commons, and in the slow time it takes to cook a new turn, people forget about us, people give us space, and by the time we finally have something to show for our struggles… they’re Ready for It.

(Go Chiefs!)

Tell me in the comments — do you fear that you only have one voice? One story to tell? How do you give yourself permission to change?