An artist's resolution for 2026: To be moved by beauty

A return to sincerity as the new literary meta

There’s a particular thing that I’ve always done which I’ve heard that other novelists do too—if I find a song that I think is very beautiful, a song that evokes a particular feeling or mood, usually a kind of melancholic beauty—then I’ll listen to that song on repeat for hours at a time while I’m working on a piece of prose.

This gives me less the sensation of writing than it gives the sensation of sculpting.

A novel, to me, is like a sculpture, the substrate of which is symbolic rather than atomic. People mistake text for being “flat,” I think. It’s not really a two-dimensional thing, it’s not even three or four-dimensional. Insofar as it’s a stream of consciousness frozen in the amber of written thought, it’s as expansive as any mood or feeling or experience that can pass through your soul.

The writer, then, is the entity that shapes that form, and gifts it to others.

The classic failure mode of the literary novelist who is just starting out is the act of straining—of trying to force an emotion in a block of prose rather than letting it emerge, organically, out of the deeper conduit of a flow state connected to a truth that lives outside of yourself.

So common is this cul-de-sac that much of the formal teaching in creative writing focuses on stripping things down, on subtracting, on removing adverbs, and so on. The convergence of this trend is just the modern realist style, which of course has been critiqued endlessly on this website as being simultaneously barren and overwrought (Ocean Vuong haters rise up, etc. etc.).

But I would argue that this characteristic over-reliance on the form of austere minimalism is the symptom, rather than the source, of our literary malaise.

Our problems as writers are identical to our problems as human beings: and that problem, if I were to locate it, is that I think for many of us, we have lost our connection to beauty.

By “beauty,” I mean a kind of transcendent feeling, not necessarily spiritual—and definitely not material—maybe it’s God, maybe it’s the Dao, maybe it’s the teleological thrum of Philip Goff’s cosmopsychism.

The problem with a lot of contemporary autofiction is not merely the lingering on various forms of spiritual or psychological ugliness. It’s the despair at the root of this lingering. The despair forms a kind of carapace that takes the form of irony, detachment, dissociation, and so on. Certainly there is such a thing as “dark” beauty, but more often than not, this needs to be leavened with humor for it to work (this is what makes a Houellebecq novel bearable, for instance).

I think, what I’m trying to say, is that negative affect in the literary sense has the risk of being overly repetitive. To the extent that my first book is guilty of this, that is indeed a reasonable critique, but I sense that the meta has shifted.

I think, in this new wave of accelerationism, holding onto beauty will become the current meta.

2025 was a quiet year for Decentralized Fiction. It felt solid—solid to accrue some serious, credible reviews that helped to establish me further, and it felt remarkably solid to do my first reading. I am grateful for all of these things. It’s a privilege to be read in any capacity when you’re competing against algorithmically optimized dopamine slop. Perhaps this is just the natural bifurcation in the market for eyeballs.¹

I hope to start and finish a new manuscript this year. Hopefully, this one won’t take another 11 years of writing. In an ideal world, maybe I’ll have something to show you in early 2027.

Much love to all my readers here, and thank you for being here.

-Han

1. Anyone who can tolerate longform text might as well be their own cognitive caste at this point (lol, lmao).