Train Lord: The Astonishing True Story of One Man's Journey to Getting His Life Back On Track

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So get writing - and hopefully we can all sit down round the fire and share a little anthology of all our spooky stories in December. A book that speaks to anyone who’s gone to the darker side of life and still come out alive’ Paul Dalla Rosa We can't guarantee any of this will help with your word count, but we all need to take breaks, right? Despite this minor distraction, Train Lord excels in its frank and moving journey of self-rediscovery as he recounts the most challenging, yet transformative, period of his life. It's that time of year again when words-per-day becomes the currency. So we thought we'd bring you even more words... Words of novel-writing wisdom! No, no... not from us... obviously. From novelist and longtime book editor Howard Mittelmark. Co-writer of How NOT to Write A Novel. A fantastic book full of the pitfalls most writers fall into when they're setting off along the long and arduous road to Novelton, Nebraska.

Alt-lit often employs self-conscious repetition as a literary technique in ways that call to mind the mechanics of internet virality. Mol repeats how he feverishly wrote his novel on scraps of paper in between stops while driving the train, or repeats how he created puns to announce the arrival of each station like ‘attention, customers… next stop is Ashfield. But for all the singles out there, we call it PASHFIELD.’ In the early days of viral content (as in Charlie bit my finger),home video wouldcirculateonline in a kind of organicprocessof attentional mimesis. Today, viral content possesses a synthetic quality because we, as both consumers and creators, have market-researched how best to imitate our own authenticity. Mol repeatedly asserts that ‘the stories we tell ourselves are the ones that become true;’ that ‘from my writer days, I knew if you repeated something then it would come true’ and that ‘I knew if you could believe in lies, you could believe in anything. I knew if you did it enough then those lies would become true.’ Granted, it reads as though Mol is inducing his own virality by spamming your feed with an origin story of his own making. For two years, Oliver will watch others live their lives, observing the minutia and intimacy of strangers brought together briefly and connected by the steady march of time. But that’s not even the half of it, because I’m not telling you about the elderly couples we saw helping one another along platforms and the kids we saw playing peek-a-boo with their reflections and the fathers who spent entire Sundays with their disabled sons: he knows the timetable and all the trains, one father told me. He loves riding the network, which means it’s my favourite thing too. the literature of the over-educated and under-employed (usually white) young person,attempting to reject their privilege. The Gchats and hamsters and vegan muffins, in other words, are ancillary. More specifically, Alt Lit writers tend to position themselves at the very centre of their universe, but employ a flattening of affect and deliberately naive outlook designed todeflect inevitable charges of narcissismby situating their work as akin to Outsider Art.For the first generation of writers to have grown-up online, alt-lit was characterised by the employment of chat-forums and tweet formats as formal constraints and by references to chronic internet use. At their most successful — as in the work of Scott McClanahan or Blake Butler — alt-lit writers can paint a portrait of millennial alienation by toggling unexpectedly between compulsive earnestness and absurdistdetachment.

That invitation extends to you too, listeners! We want your submissions for our Traditional Ghost Story Christmas Special later in the year. Meanwhile, its members were criticised for their unabashed solipsism, for revelling in the concerns of the privileged, for asking how many angels can dance on the head of a ketamine spoon. But such accusations actually undersell the intelligence of the alt-lit writers who strive to incorporate every possible critique into their book’s designs. The issue, if any, is that the alt-lit writer is too aware of his own privilege such that he feels the need to create an entire body of work publicly excusing it. Connor Thomas O’Brien correctly diagnosesthe alt-lit phenomena as: The memoir is as much about the art, craft and alchemy of storytelling as it is about healing. Or perhaps, his book suggests, they’re one and the same thing. “I truly believe,” he tells me, earnestly, “that the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that become true.” Beautifully captures the complexities of illness and of coming to terms with life as an adult’ The Saturday PaperSo join us for some entertaining and enlightening chitchat, and learn things about yourself you've long suspected, but have been deliberately ignoring for years. What happens when the one thing that has practically defined your life is now gone? All of a sudden, the reset button has been pressed: new job, new workplace… a new identity. Oliver Mol is a writer who found himself unable to write due to a debilitating migraine that lasted ten months. During the time, his entire life changed; not only could he not write, but he also couldn’t use screens and thus couldn’t communicate in the modern world. And so, he created a new kind of normal for himself and started working as a train conductor. Then there’s the things that aren’t explained; such as what he’s doing in Sydney, why he’s on the Central Coast, what job did his father lose in Texas that saw the family end up in Canberra and where does Brisbane fit into all of this? Oliver doesn’t have a compass that suggests that maybe people would like the dots joined.

Train Lord is not so much a book about trains as an account of an unfinished process of healing. At its weakest it’s a self-help book, with too many passages quoted from “cod philosophers”, such as the discredited British journalist Johann Hari, that are left unexplored and unexplained. But as it flits between the genres of memoir and short-story collection, it beautifully captures the complexities of illness and of coming to terms with life as an adult. Mol recalls childhood memories and present-day intimate conversations with a tenderness that rivals Karl Ove Knausgård, though his prose is more cluttered and less succinct. That’s not to say that writers no longer exist, or that writers are no longer creating stylistically inventive work, but that every emerging writer experiences the following double-bind: that given how ubiquitous it has become to access information about anything writing-adjacent, we find ourselves more concerned with the attendant anxieties of wanting to be a writer than the anxieties of actually writing. All the while we subject ourselves to the self-flagellatory belief that this purer, more authentic commitment to the craft is no longer accessible to those of us who compulsively over-analyse it. We all know, and resent knowing, that as Mol recalls, ‘the first rule about writing was that you never called yourself a writer’.Mol has every opportunity here to construct a pointed critique of the ways in which institutions prey on aspiring writers by not only promising them the possibility of subcultural fame but by requiring that the majority fail so as to persist as consumers of additionally manufactured solutions; or even of the ways in which emerging writers can come to enjoy the terms of their own exploitation. Instead, Mol averts to these insights only when they function as a conduit for his own redemptive character arc. The first day of train school our teacher asked us what we would do if we were on the train, and we had to go to the toilet, and we’d already had our break. For a while, no one spoke. Then Susie said, Shit in a bag, sir. Yeah. Probably shit in a bag. Good on ya, Suze, our teacher said. The shit in a bag approach. A classic. Then we went around the room and said our names and where we’d come from and a fun fact about us too. Ed said he’d worked in logistics and sailed around the world with the Navy in his youth, and Zayd had been a transit cop with a baby on the way. But now it was my turn and I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t want to talk about the migraine or how I’d failed as a writer. I didn’t want to talk about pain. So I said my name was Oliver and flipped my wrist frypan-style. I winked and said that I loved to cook. I didn’t have many friends at work, and this suited me fine. I wasn’t there to make friends – I was there to go around and around for as long as I needed to figure out my problems, and to work out if it might be possible to love myself again. The impact of the more sensitive anecdotes and descriptions is sometimes weakened by adding music which can sometimes drown out the speech and only detracts from the emotional weight of the story.

Sometimes you manage to find a book that truly speaks to your soul. The kind of book that you can’t imagine having lived without reading. This was that book for me. After such a prolonged period of agony, he realises this painful experience has radically altered not only his lifestyle but also his perception of life. Our heart wrenches as he relives his emotional turmoil with Mol giving us a passionate and undiluted performance. The empathy and investment stretch so far that when he recounts his stories about the strange happenings at the train station, you’re delighted to see the fond expressions on his face. Following an eruption of sexual assault allegations in the alt-lit community, Mol writes, recalling the tumult, that: And so he and I swap stories in the dark. We talk about Mol’s literary heroes and mentors – Roberto Bolaño, Alejandro Zambra, Scott McClanahan, Amanda Lohrey – and the wild necessity of hope (“My book wouldn’t have worked if it wasn’t a book of hope”). We talk about the fine line that exists between romanticising, patronising and honouring working-class Australia, and the democratising linearity of train travel. We talk about the cringing shame Mol feels about his first book (“I was extremely young and terribly ambitious”), and the humility he feels about his second. And we talk about love. So why do you do it? Sam asks, after another year goes by and i’m still working on the book. You’ll think it’s sappy, I say. Or worse — stupid. Try me, he says. Because I made prayers to myself all those years ago, and I’m trying to answer them with this book.