The Fine Art of Bad Writing

Dan Sinykin interviews Tom Comitta about their latest project, “People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels.”

By Dan SinykinJune 5, 2025

• Literary Criticism

• Fiction

ONE OF OUR great theorists of the novel is a conceptual practitioner. Tom Comitta began as a poet who distrusted the novel, dismissed it as a commercial form. Among other experiments, they wrote intentionally bad poetry, shiterature. But then, in 2012, Comitta encountered their friend Kota Ezawa’s recent film City of Nature, which “consists entirely of rotoscoped nature shots from feature-length movies.” Comitta was fascinated. They went to the library and began collating nature descriptions from novels—and, in the process, fell in love with fiction.

Comitta wrote a story entirely from sentences from New Yorker stories, and a novella—Airport Novella—gathered from four common gestures in airport novels: nods, shrugs, odd looks, gasps. In 2023, they published The Nature Book, a novel built entirely from nature descriptions drawn from other novels. They call this genre the “literary supercut,” locating it within a long tradition of “citational fiction.” Our conventional understanding of fiction assumes a text’s origins in the creativity of a solitary author, a regime produced by the intertwined histories of capitalism, copyright, and print. Comitta explodes our assumptions about this regime. They write with rigorous concern for the systematicity of creativity. The result, with The Nature Book, is a pastoral as emotionally moving as it is intellectually stimulating.

People’s Choice Literature: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Novels (2025), Comitta’s latest, is a little different. Rather than beginning with what writers have written, it starts with what readers want. With the help of a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, Comitta developed an extensive poll asking what respondents find most and least desirable in fiction. For example:

• “What length of novel do you prefer?” (36 percent say 200–300 pages.)
• “How many characters do you like to get to know in a novel?” (60 percent say between three and five.)
• “If you had unlimited resources and could commission your favorite author to write a novel just for you, what would it be about?” (“It would be about Jane Austen”; “stories from the Age of Sail”; “Jay-Z writes my biography”; “a mafia romance that is hot and heavy.”)

Comitta then wrote The Most Wanted Novel and The Most Unwanted Novel to match. Together, they make up People’s Choice Literature. It’s a riot. It’s tremendous fun to read. It’s full of gags and winks. The Most Unwanted Novel even includes an inset book of horror stories, Lesser of Two Devils, written by a demon in a literal bureaucratic hell who only comes to writing after years of applying for and failing to win hell’s Creative Decapitation Award. One of his stories is about teenagers saved from cannibal clowns in Fun Town by Antifa.

Comitta and I exchanged questions and answers on Google Docs over a week or so in May.

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DAN SINYKIN: Tom, what is this? Is People’s Choice Literature performance art? Is it social science? Is it a pair of conjoined novels, one a corporate espionage thriller, the other a queer science-fiction quest romance set on Mars? Is it a single encyclopedic novel? A single Oulipo novel?

Don’t say it’s all of these. That is, of course, true, but I want clarification about your quixotic quest. What is the tradition you most identify yourself as participating in? Who do you see as your primary interlocutors?

TOM COMITTA: I really just see it as a novel. And not as an experimental novel, as my work is sometimes described, but simply one that belongs to this centuries-long tradition. Novels have always done weird, crazy things. I’m not sure if it’s just conglomeration, or memory and attention spans shrinking, or something else, but it seems we’ve forgotten this. Though, to directly answer your question, I’m sorry to say, Dan: it truly is all of the above.

As for interlocutors, for some reason, almost all of my books are in conversation with an artist or artists who have also inspired it. For SENT, it was Tacita Dean and her documentation of a Merce Cunningham dance rehearsal. For The Nature Book, it was Kota Ezawa, who had made a rotoscoped supercut of nature shots from blockbuster movies. Here, it’s Komar and Melamid’s People’s Choice paintings and Dave Soldier’s People’s Choice Music (with Komar and Melamid), two poll-driven art projects from the 1990s. But People’s Choice Literature seems most in dialogue with Soldier’s album. This is in part because it’s one of my favorite albums of all time. And also because the two songs that make up the album, “The Most Wanted Song” and “The Most Unwanted Song,” are essentially ballads—they tell two very different stories.

It’s true, “the novel” is capacious. It welcomes into its fold Tristram Shandy and Blood and Guts in High School, Pamela and Oreo, Frankenstein and Mumbo Jumbo and Moby-Dick and Wittgenstein’s Mistress—each of which is, arguably, here in People’s Choice Literature. Your novel is an exhibition of the form’s capaciousness. I am having a difficult time concentrating because I am listening, for the first time, to the blasting bagpipes, which just transitioned into a children’s choir singing a Christmas song accompanied by a tuba, on Dave Soldier’s “The Most Unwanted Song”—which is considerably more wanted than his “The Most Wanted Song,” judged by numbers of streams on Spotify. Both songs are, I think, good, and the quality that makes them good is irony.

I would say the same for People’s Choice Literature, especially The Most Wanted Novel. There, your ostensible pursuit is to present a novel that synthesizes the qualities most desired by the respondents to your survey. Reading, I was charmed by how often you winked at me by turning the results of the survey into a joke, with a demonic trickster energy. I laughed harder every time, for example, that you further belabored the comparison of the Silicon Valley villain’s appearance to that of John Lennon. So many of the names are witticisms. The real names of best-selling writers are dropped with comic regularity. Your play with the back matter and, maybe, the introduction, recall Dave Egger’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The Most Wanted Novel itself shares a considerable amount, as you point out in the introduction, with Eggers’s The Circle. But in that novel, he’s wholly earnest. Are you a demonic trickster god?

A true demonic trickster would never reveal themselves … but Ezawa has called me a prankster on several occasions. Zach Fabri, an artist and friend, referring to People’s Choice and my supercut novels, once asked, “Is anything sacred [to you]?” It’s true that I feel a literary duty to knock anything people take too seriously off its pedestal. (For the record, my answer to Zach was, “People are sacred.” I’d also add animals and plants to that list.) But in a way, I feel like these books enact a different kind of trickster energy than might first be apparent: because of the introduction and the “Tom” voice moments interspersed into The Most Unwanted Novel (the Heartbreaking Work moments you mention), I’m cueing the reader in on all the jokes. I don’t really hide anything—we’re all in on the game and, hopefully in a Rancierian way, on the same playing field laughing (and cry-laughing?) together.

Your listening to “The Most Unwanted Song” reminded me of an experience I had with that song two years ago. In conjunction with a Komar and Melamid museum retrospective, Soldier and a band of “unwanted” instrumentalists restaged it live for the first time in 26 years, and Soldier was kind enough to let me sit in on the rehearsal. That six-hour day was always lighthearted; they played through “The Most Wanted Song” and then a few other works from his oeuvre, and it was great fun. But when they started practicing “The Most Unwanted Song,” the mood in the room completely changed. Everyone relaxed. People laughed more. It seems Soldier’s demonic trickster energy had freed us all—and these were people who had dedicated their lives to what poll respondents said they didn’t want!—from any tension or concern of the moment. I saw this as revealing the essential power of these unwanted or “bad” works. Once the pretension is removed, something new and exciting is possible.

I love the generosity of spirit you describe in that rehearsal—and in your relationship to the reader in People’s Choice Literature. I’d like to draw you out a little bit more on your relationship with the form of the novel. In an interview you did with BOMB, you mention that you used to be skeptical of fiction but that, in reading hundreds of novels to assemble The Nature Book, you fell in love with the form. Can you say a little about your longue durée relationship with the novel—how it has evolved, and how it led to People’s Choice Literature? And how People’s Choice Literature fits into your larger artistic project, including your forthcoming novella, Patchwork?

For most of my life, I was allergic to fiction. This was largely due to a dispiriting 10th grade English teacher and a general skepticism towards a form that so often masks its artifice. My first forays into the novel were a bit punk: in 2012, I staged National Novel Writing Night Month (NaNoWriNiMo), one-upping the now-defunct write-a-novel-in-a-month contest, challenging myself and others to write 180-page narratives in one night (think Oulipo on speed and a lot of copying and pasting). The Nature Book took everything I assume people skim over in their fiction—nature descriptions—and made a full novel out of them. But yes, that book changed me. And my newfound love for the form inspired a finished Nature Book that was a lot more nuanced, and much more readable. Both Patchwork (my second supercut novel, in which each chapter collages a different pattern in how authors write fiction) and People’s Choice Literature were created with this new, albeit complicated, love. Halfway through writing these latter novels, I realized I was playing with both sides of the same coin: People’s Choice Literature was making fiction out of statistical data about how we read; my supercut novels were examining patterns in how we write.

Each of these new books—particularly The Most Unwanted Novel—is also the culmination of a tandem literary journey I’ve been on for almost two decades: the fine art of bad writing. It all began in 2009, a month before I started my MFA writing program. Sitting on a hill in Dolores Park gazing out over Downtown San Francisco, I found myself in a literary identity crisis. In a poetic history (I was a poet at the time) full of Emily Dickinsons and Walt Whitmans, who the heck was Tom Comitta, then a 23-year-old small-town Pennsylvania kid who’d written one self-published chapbook? I wallowed in the grass for who knows how long, and then it hit me: a month earlier, I’d seen a retrospective exhibition of Martin Kippenberger at MoMA. Back in the 1970s, when painting was declared “dead,” Kippenberger and his friends responded to this zombie state by creating the worst paintings imaginable. They used color combinations, styles, and subject matters that no one in their right mind would ever consider. And from this process they made brilliant, beautifully bad—and even just beautiful—work. There on that grassy hill, I gave myself a similar task: to write bad. But not just bad—the worst poetry imaginable. Every step of the way, I would pick rhythms, diction, and other poetic devices that contradicted whatever I’d learned was the right way to do it. I soon found that this writing process was not only more fun; it also yielded texts that were more honest and more dynamic than anything I’d done before. I called it “shiterature” and even edited two issues of a journal of the same name. In many ways, I’ve never left that project. And because of it, I’ve never had writer’s block.

The Nature Book engaged shiterature superficially, being a “bad idea” that, in execution, became surprisingly quite agreeable and even beautiful, in the words of many readers. Patchwork contains a chapter made entirely out of typos from first editions of major novels; it also incorporates a lot of rhythms and narrative twists that a “good” writer would never allow. But it’s The Most Unwanted Novel that I believe is my shiterary masterpiece, a culmination of nearly two decades of honing my craft. There’s too much alliteration, too many big words (yes, I did go back and just throw in the most obscure words I could find), too much sex, too much violence, and too many genres. To top it off, it’s almost entirely in the second person; I’m asking the reader to identify for hundreds of pages with a dweeby 160-year-old tennis-playing Martian billionaire with the most idiotic name: Lord Jimothy Tickletext. And yet, it’s this unwanted, bad novel that is seen as the better of the two by all early readers.

In the novel, writing is described as if it were strenuous physical exercise: “Any observer might have called this activity ‘writing,’ but these motions were more akin to a track-and-field event than anything else. The body controlling those fingers was tense, beads of sweat cascading down its hunched form.” This is not dissimilar to how Danielle Steel, someone we both admire, describes her experience of writing. She talks about her bloody fingers and ruined back after 20 consecutive hours at her typewriter. Did you sweat a lot while writing the book?

The first draft was truly a marathon. We conducted the poll in December 2021, and our child was due to be born in May 2022. Not knowing how or if I could create new work with a newborn, I realized I had six months to finish the book, or I might never. Fortunately, I’d learned half a year before starting People’s Choice Literature that, given 100 constraints and the task to make it bad, I can write quite fast. That year, I wrote what I thought was my first “original” novel (as in, not made entirely out of found language). I took the Turkey City Lexicon, a list of everything you shouldn’t do when writing a sci-fi novel, and did it all: telling, not showing; using too many “Tom Swifty” adverbs; adding too many soap opera moments; and so on. The novel title itself, Star Tears, also contradicts the lexicon, combining two “pushbutton words,” or language “used to evoke a cheap emotional response without engaging the intellect or the critical faculties.” With all these guidelines, or constraints, I realized I could collage disparate narrative parameters (lexicon entries) into a new novel outline, settings, and characters. I literally printed them out, cut them up, and searched for how they fit together into a single story. With this laundry list of narrative tasks, I was able to write 38,000 words in five days. It was also incredibly fun—swerving, sometimes dancing through all these narrative variables like a fun-house obstacle course. This is essentially how People’s Choice Literature was written. The main difference, though, was that while writing People’s Choice Literature, I also had a day job; that previous five-day sprint was possible because I’d been granted a writing residency. Quite the luxury!

You also took advantage of technological advances to write People’s Choice Literature—that is, you played with large language models (LLMs), casually referred to as “AI.” Specifically, you used OpenAI’s Playground, a pre-ChatGPT interface that lacked many of the guardrails since imposed, making it much less constricted in its output. You’re thus part of an early cohort of writers, from the most avant-garde to the most commercial, co-writing with AI, a group that includes Ross Goodwin, Sheila Heti, and Vauhini Vara. Meanwhile, other writers are suing AI companies for copyright infringement and calling for a refusal to use these models. All of this has been a bit dizzying for the politics of copyright. Leftists and liberals have tended to argue for more permissive copyright regimes, but with AI we’re seeing a lot of these people becoming more conservative on behalf of intellectual property.

For your part, using OpenAI is, on the one hand, a natural fit for People’s Choice Literature; as you point out in your introduction, a project that is trying to serve as a literary expression of public opinion dovetails beautifully with a model trained on millions of texts and designed to produce statistically relevant text on that basis. On the other hand, your career-long project has, it seems to me, a deep, underlying resistance to the fantasy of creative originality, a sense that writing is always collective. AI captures that rejection of originality but also, in its current formation, does so to enrich oligarchs and accelerate capitalism. I’d love to know what you’re thinking—because I know you’re thinking deeply—about all this.

Like most readers, I’m not interested in reading an entire book written by a computer program, and I don’t think all books would benefit from using one. In the case of People’s Choice Literature, I used the LLM sparingly (only about five percent of the time in The Most Wanted and 15 percent in The Most Unwanted), and when I did use it, I had to rewrite almost all of the LLM’s often flat language. The main reason I collaborated with the Playground was because it provided a kind of polyvocality to the writing—having read and learned to replicate almost the entire history of literature. It also helped challenge my subjectivity in this novel that is purportedly engaging with the taste of an entire nation. The idea shaped the form, which guided the content.

As for the oligarchs, more than their companies’ AI products, I’m most concerned about them not paying taxes, and plundering the country’s resources while helping elect candidates that will never support things like universal basic income or increased funding for the arts. Of course, the opposite is happening under the new anti-intellectual, anti-“woke” NEA austerity measures. And while I understand and sympathize with the desire to stop these vampiric AI corporations from using your work to train a machine, I can’t help but think a lot of that energy could be used in more productive ways. All of this to get an “opt out” option from corporate LLM training or get paid the $15 the companies should’ve initially shelled out to study your epub? Even copyright infringement fees won’t get you much by way of compensation. Sure, let’s sue these companies, but could we also put energy into lobbying national and state governments to tax them to fund the arts? And to work with publishers and literary arts organizations to become W.A.G.E certified, which would mean they would more fairly compensate their authors for their labor? Of course, this would require financial restructuring from the for-profits and a lot of petitioning of the wealthy to fund arts nonprofits more adequately, but in the current climate we desperately need this. Those with money, this is the time to step up!

I understand the fear for those who make a living as writers about maintaining their jobs in this new AI ecosystem. But the reality is that this technology is not going away, nor is the pressure of companies to save a buck. So it seems there’s a challenge to make work no AI could think up—which means we have to really get creative. And if you use an LLM in your writing, you’re only going to make anything of worth if you yourself are a good (or aspiring virtuosically bad) writer. Like a remix artist or collagist, it’s what you do with the materials that makes it of interest, not the materials or, in this case, the outputs themselves.

And you do incredible things with the outputs! LLMs are quickly becoming known for producing writing sanded so smooth by statistical norms and corporate pre-prompts that it reads as oppressively normal. What’s striking about People’s Choice Literature is its weirdness. Not just The Most Unwanted Novel—where talking Meaowist cat pirates have taken over earth and where It’s a Wonderful Life starring Jimmy Stewart becomes It’s a Wonderful Wife starring Jim Henson—but also The Most Wanted Novel. Rather than approaching some bland normie middle, it is full of genuine, great weirdness. Did you inject that weirdness because you believe that at the heart of normie America lies an irrepressible weirdness—or could you just not help yourself?

I do think that at the core of us all is a deep weirdness. It’s just day jobs, most parents, some grade-school teachers, and the like who try to teach us to suppress it. Jung calls this weirdness the shadow—those things that, particularly as young people, we learn to hide in order to survive in the world. Like queerness, artistic impulses, emotional expressiveness in the case of folks assigned male at birth, etc. Blocking the shadow is the persona: the part we project, or the front we put up that may or may not reflect who we truly are. This metaphor has been helpful for me to understand how these novels work together. Sure, there are bizarre moments in The Most Wanted where techno-thriller genre tropes, data-driven constraints, and my authorial sensibilities collide into silly moments or phrases—my favorites being the many Dan Brown–inspired chapter introductions featuring Lonely Planetesque descriptions of tourist sites. But this “desirable” book mostly contains everything we’ve come to expect from our most successful novels: tidy plots, complete character arcs, and traditional gender roles and sexualities.

I think the lightness that I described in that rehearsal room for “The Most Unwanted Song,” and what draws people to The Most Unwanted Novel, comes from each work’s celebration of a kind of anarchy. Granted, plenty of scientifically honed data points kept it all together, but the writing process produced narratives, characters, and situations that you might never expect to find in literature. An Old West saloon standoff of baby cowboys slinging shots of chocolate milk? A zombie philosophizing about the aesthetics of eating brains? A 160-year-old sports radio DJ and a humanoid cat-person having pulpy, graphic sex? These are not things that we usually think of as literary or respectable fiction. And yet they found a home here—in a book published by a respectable university press, no less.

I would like to add that, while I keep stanning The Most Unwanted, I also deeply love The Most Wanted. When I finished editing these novels a few months ago, I found myself sad to be “leaving” the worlds and the protagonists from both books. Will Alix Finn and Detective Stone make it? What actually happened to Lord Tickletext? I now dream of writing a follow-up: The Most Wanted and Unwanted Sequels. But that might really reach the limits of desirability …

The question of sequels invites me to ask: what is next for you? This is a big year, with you putting out two books—a huge accomplishment. Have you begun further projects? Do you have ideas? Anything cooking?

I’m in a funny place. Every 10 years, I seem to quit a discipline and start over in another. In grade school and college, I was a musician. Then a poet in my twenties. Then a fiction writer in my thirties. And here I am turning 40, a decade into novel writing and now releasing everything I’ve written so far. For a while, I’ve thought of leaping into nonfiction, but the first project I tried went off the rails when I transformed from a journalist into a protester. The whole experience was so traumatic that, after writing the obligatory essay to cover my expenses, I never wanted to think about it again. Which probably means yes, I should pursue this.

It just so happens that, as I was writing you here, a book came in the mail: Brian Hill’s Such Stuff as Dreams, a millennia-spanning anthology of nightly sojourns that I fully intend to collage into a lengthy dream supercut … as a precursor to a horror novel … or a collection of horror fiction? I got bit by the horror bug while writing Lesser of Two Devils, and almost all I read now is horror, specifically “weird fiction.” So maybe this is the first decade I hold steady in a form but go full genre. Which is to say, I may find myself in a not-too-distant place after all, collaging and telling stories that no one in their right mind would read. Right back on my bullshit … erature.

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Featured image: Photo of Tom Comitta by Beowulf Sheehan.