You don’t have to be a writer these days to have experienced the pitfalls of an impulsive social media post. In a world where posting our truth is supposed to be enough, what happens when the fallout effects the lives of others?

R.L. Maizes turns her lens on the world of publishing in A Complete Fiction, as she explores these questions and more.  Would-be author P.J. Larkin serves a “nibble” on the trendy new social-media app Crave, accusing Editor George Dunn of stealing the novel she submitted to him for publication. When the item goes viral, George is fired, and his million-dollar debut book deal is put on hold. The repercussions echo through Larkin’s professional and personal life.

Told with humor and sharp wit, Maizes explores whose stories we are at liberty to tell, where truth lies when we’re dealing with complex human experience, and what little power we have when stories spin out of control.

AUTHORLINK: Tell me about your apprenticeship as a creative writer. Did you have a mentor who offered advice that you can share with us?

MAIZES: I’ve had several mentors. One is Will Allison, contributing editor for One Story magazine, best-selling novelist, and developmental editor extraordinaire. He helped me sharpen my dialog by recommending that I rewrite what he called “exposition masquerading as dialog,” which are bits of dialog that are there to inform the reader of backstory, but that the character wouldn’t actually say. A simple example would be a woman coming home from work and calling out to her partner, “I’m home from my job on Wall Street!” unless it’s being said ironically. Otherwise, her partner already knows she works on Wall Street, and she wouldn’t tell them.

AUTHORLINK: James Dickey said the idea for Deliverance came to him as a vision of a man standing alone on top of a mountain. His job was to get the man off the mountain. Where did the idea for A Complete Fiction come from?

MAIZES: I watched one writer after another being cancelled on social media by people who condemned their books after reading only a blurb or skimming a review. It made me angry because I knew how hard those writers had worked and how much of their lives they’d given to writing their books. Each time it happened, I obsessed about it, and when I’m obsessing about something, I know it’s a good subject for me to write about.

AUTHORLINK: This story really captures our current day struggles with cancel culture and pinning down the truth. Talk about how this works in writing circles and why you wanted to explore it fictively.

MAIZES: Exploring subjects in fiction helps me understand them better and when those subjects are close to my own life, it helps me understand my life better. Applying humor to some of our current struggles is a way for me to cope with them. If I can get the reader to laugh, I believe it helps them cope, too.

AUTHORLINK: You also get at some essential truths about the writing world. The sting of rejection, the competitive nature of it and the scant rewards that sometimes result. If writing is this hard, why do you think so many of us still do it?

MAIZES: Many of us fall in love with stories when we’re very young and decide we want to tell stories and write stories ourselves. I was six or seven when I wrote my first book, a crayon and staples affair. I didn’t have an inner critic yet. I didn’t pine for audiences wider than my mother or father. For many of us, from early on, books hold a significant place in our lives, whether it’s because our parents read to us before bed, or because we read under the covers with a flashlight after the bedroom light is out. We don’t have any idea of the torture inherent in creating some of those books or getting them out into the world. In the best books, the seams don’t show. And maybe it’s better that would-be writers don’t know. Otherwise, there would be fewer writers. Of course, there’s a lot of joy in creation, too. In making something beautiful or funny. For me there’s considerably more joy than pain. And a lot of us would tell you we don’t have a choice, that we’re compelled to write, which is true for me.

AUTHORLINK: Talk a bit about how social media in the book is both a tool for writers to get noticed and an enormous distraction and potential harm. How has social media functioned for
you?

MAIZES: It’s definitely distracting, a terrible time suck, and at the same time I’ve read great pieces of writing that were recommended on social media and met people I wouldn’t have met, writers and other humans. So there’s a lovely benefit to it, too. That’s the problem. If it were just harmful, more of us would be able to leave it behind.

AUTHORLINK: What kind of research did you do for the novel?

MAIZES: I researched the Senate Page program because George, one of my protagonists, was a Senate Page when he was in high school. I researched social media apps and rideshare companies, and then invented one of each in the book. I researched Capitol pensions and hook rugs. Hooking monochromatic rugs is a neurotic hobby of one of the minor characters. I hooked rugs when I was a teen, but I’d forgotten certain aspects of the craft so I needed to refresh my memory. I researched sexual assault, its impacts on survivors, as well as sex therapy.

AUTHORLINK: What was your greatest challenge in developing A Complete Fiction?

MAIZES: One of the protagonists, P.J., is a somewhat unlikable character. She’s complex, so there are likable aspects to her, but she does something harsh at the start of the book. The challenge was to write her in a way that readers might disagree with that action while still wanting to read about her and even root for her. In the first few drafts, I had the balance wrong. She was too unlikable. The solution was to find ways to strengthen her likeable traits, which I did in later drafts.

AUTHORLINK: This is your third book. Has your approach to writing changed?

MAIZES: I hope I’m becoming more patient. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m not a naturally patient person, but taking time on a piece of fiction and putting it aside before revising it, then putting it aside again and revising it again, is a guaranteed way to improve it. I can’t see a piece objectively, see it as anyone other than a doting mother would, until I come back to it after setting it aside for a time.

AUTHORLINK: What advice do you offer apprentice writers about craft, staying encouraged in the face of rejection, or both?

MAIZES: I’m shopping a whole essay right now on how to stay encouraged in the face of rejection. My advice includes eating chocolate cake and having other interests that allow one to take a break from writing. I knit, hike, and swim, and of course read. Writing is important, very important, but it needn’t be everything. It shouldn’t be everything.

AUTHORLINK: Discuss what you are working on now.

MAIZES: Right now I’m trying desperately to publicize this new novel because it’s terribly hard to get the public’s attention when so many good books are being released all the time. I’ve also been working on a novel about antisemitism and vigilantism. That one is difficult because it deals with trauma that’s encoded in my DNA, and incidents of antisemitism are in the news nearly every day that retraumatize Jewish people. Sometimes, I’d rather look away, but it’s too important a subject.

R.L. Maizes is the author of A COMPLETE FICTION. Her debut novel, Other People’s Pets, won the 2021 Colorado Book Award in Fiction and was a Library Journal Best Debut of Summer/Fall 2020. She is also the author of the short story collection We Love Anderson Cooper. Her short stories have aired on National Public Radio and can be found in Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading and in The Best Small Fictions 2020. Maizes’s essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, O Magazine, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, and have aired on NPR. She is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellow and the recipient of a Fellowship Grant from the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture for 2024-2025 for her novel-in-progress, Beanie.