Where are the jokes about ____?
How to use "the Tom Wolfe model" to write: Find the most obvious idea that no one's done yet.
The Tom Wolfe Model by Michael Anton, talks about the famous author’s knack for finding obvious ideas no one else had done yet.
In his manifesto, Wolfe professed himself to have been amazed that the utterly fascinating and riotous spectacle of New York in the second half of the 20th century — arguably the richest source of material for writers in human history — had not produced a single big realistic novel in the vein of Dickens, Thackeray, Twain, Balzac, Lewis, Steinbeck and the like. It was, he said, the most obvious idea imaginable. And no one had done it.
Two decades earlier, Wolfe had similarly asked: where were the novels about the hippies? There weren’t any, so his nonfiction Acid Test filled the gap. About the race riots? Ditto — so Radical Chic took their place. About the various social revolutions collectively known as ‘The Sixties’? Again, his collected nonfiction articles did the job. The novelists had abandoned the field…
Today we may ask questions similar to the ones Wolfe was posing decades ago. Where are the send-ups of wokeness? Of Big Tech? Of the globalist elite? Of deep-state apparatchiks? Where are the sympathetic accounts of the Deplorables? These books simply aren’t being written. They should be.
Consider what the comedy version of this might be. “Where are the jokes about ____?” Now go ahead and fill the gap.