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I was going to make a similar comment about how VG writing is just bad, but I don't think it's just because they're nerds. It feels almost like the human race has become worse writers in the past few decades, it's like the torch was never properly passed on and it's become a lost art.
You're just not paying attention, is all.
Writing is a craft. Maybe there's slightly fewer writers now, and sure publishing is broken, but ..are you really reading? ( There are solid younger writers out there. No, they're never g oing to be featured in any magazine or be famous, though.
When it comes to literature I am certainly not paying enough attention, I basically don't read anything contemporary besides excerpts here and there, and so I don't really have the grounds to make such a sweeping statement. But regarding "scripted" media, screenwriting, I feel pretty up to date on how things have degraded from what highs we managed to reach in the past.
On the other hand, when you talk about writers who can't even get in a magazine I feel like I just don't care. It's like when everyone says there music is just as good these days, you just have to find certain bands etc. It's just nothing like the amount of experience and culture of excellence in the music industry in say the 70s that elevated everyone together. Art goes beyond individuals, and plucky youths can only get so far. I don't think there are exceptions to this rule, I think great art always comes through the world as a movement, and dies out with the movement, and the fame is part of that, because it's how the culture spreads, it orients people's motivations, and puts great expectations on the artists to continue to grow and deliver, see Goethe. Even Van Gogh, the talented loser, wanted to be famous, and was part of a great movement, even though no one gave a shit about him till he died, he was still elevated by the works around him and elevated others in turn.
This is a good framing of the issue, because saying things like "everything sucks now" rounds off to old men rambling about the kids these days, when it doesn't matter how talented the kids these days are, when the cultural infrastructure to support that talent is just not there. It's also more in line with the pop-culture-war criticism that's been accumulating over the years.
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I think you're right but it's not just a torch being passed on. Writing in general became about representation both from the author and in the writing. Look at the many amazing reviews of the writing for the new True Detective series because it was run by a woman and was about women. Or basically any of the many threads we've had about book awards even among those that people acquiesce is well written it also almost always is about something that has an ideological purpose/bent to it.
It's probably harder to identify the good when you have to include a bunch of other conditions on the writing for it to be considered worthy of praise/awards these days. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but even before this became a big part of identifying what is "good art" these days there was a glut of basically everything that no one has time or really care to dig through.
I wonder what happened to ghost writers for movies though. Used to be you'd get people like Tom Stoppard rewriting almost all of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Quentin Tarantino punching up Crimson Tide, Aaron Sorkin rewriting the Rock or even Tony Gilroy and Aaron Sorkin improving Enemy of the State, so even in these popcorn action movies we'd get some quality dialogue. Now, I guess they figured out that it didn't matter or don't care or the writer's that would be ghostwriting are just making indies? It's a mystery but I think it's why modern action movies often feel soulless compared to older ones because they don't ever bother to try to improve them. Or more likely people don't care about the difference, say what you want about Joss Whedon but there is a stark difference between his writing and someone aping his writing but I'm sure most people don't care to notice the difference. A large portion of people like Fallout 3 better than New Vegas and can't even understand how the writing is any different. And most people who are into "good" writing don't care about making things that are pulpy better they want Disco Elysium they don't want the next God of War to be written like that or even care if it's rewritten by a better writer just to make the dialogue better. I wonder if anyone who likes an action movie that was rewritten several times to get the script in a better state could ever identify that they liked that movie because of the writing, anyway?
Yeah, I think there needs to be a kind of environmental momentum, and the critics are part of that. From the critic side I think it's a combination of ideological capture plus the poptimism movement which I think is actually the worse offender in terms of lowering standards.
And yeah your thoughts on punch ups makes a lot of sense to me. My imagination just tells me no one wants to say no to the writers room, everyone just wants to flatter each other and avoid confrontation, that kind of thing, that seems to be the attitude in the air these days.
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I think it's because everyone just does less. People used to be travelers, craftsmen, soldiers before they were writers, and the decades of life's experience flowed into their work. Nowadays people sit passively browsing information for hours on end, and base their writing on other books they have read, one more layer removed from reality.
I think there's something to this. Particularly in how so many character dynamics seem to reflect stuff that might be the most stressful part of a modern writer's lives, just transplanted to some fictional setting, such as, e.g. a fantasy princess rebelling against her arranged marriage in favor of her lesbian love interest, as was the case in Willow, I believe. Or in Star Wars, Admiral Holdo talking down to her hotshot male underling Poe for being a hotshot male who is upset that, as the leader, she hasn't communicated to her troops any information that would give them confidence that she has a plan for keeping the Resistance alive. There's just no sense that the writers had any understanding of the way people in these roles and with these responsibilities think and operate.
This extends to action scenes, of course, which break laws of physics in egregious suspension-of-disbelief-breaking ways that, say, Jackie Chan or even wire-fu Jet Li films didn't, which shows how little the choreographers or directors knew about actual combat and making it look believable (not necessarily realistic) within the setting. To say nothing of the even greater crime against good taste with the terrible camera work and uninteresting choreography you see in so many works (e.g. even the terrible The Matrix Revolutions from 2 decades ago had better choreography in its worst action scene than the even worse Resurrection had in its best one).
But I think there has to be more than this, because one very common refrain you see from writers in general and certainly the types of writers who support the promotion of (certain) agendas in writing is the power of fiction and narrative to change and influence people. There is no shortage of fiction from the past that they could learn things like how military structure works and why it works that way and how that would look when transplanted to a similar situation in a galaxy far, far away. It takes non-trivial research to get all this right, but personal experience, direct or indirect, isn't a requirement for writing these things well, or at least much better than what we're seeing these days.
And the fact that we see incredible incompetence in following basic narrative rules like characters going through arcs or setup and payoff also points at a deeper issue. These are things that someone who got a C in an undergrad creative writing course would understand and avoid. Some of it is surely that the garbage of the past got forgotten, so we're comparing the best of the past to the average of today. But there are like-for-like comparisons that can be made. E.g. the recent live-action Pinocchio remake presenting Pinocchio as an innocent bystander who only ever got dragged to doing bad things instead of giving into his temptations and learning from the negative consequences of them, along with his iconic lying-leads-to-nose-lengthening being used to help him get out of the cage instead of being punishment for lying to the fairy, shows that the writers simply didn't have a handle on the underlying themes of the story. They say that rules are made to be broken, but they also say that you should understand a rule before you break it, and the understanding of why these narrative rules were determined to be so good and useful that they were labeled as "rules" in the first place seems to be missing.
I think a lot of the problems stem from the professional inbreeding of writing and filmmaking. You are certainly correct about people having less lived experience. I would argue that in a lot of ways it goes much much further. In order to make it in Hollywood, you have to go to film school, and by the nature of college and student loans, you have to come from a certain stock to have the ability to study film, creative writing, or acting in school, As in at least upper middle class with a mommy and daddy able and willing to not only foot the college bill but support this budding Hollywood star for years while they worked on getting in. So we’re talking about at least 50 years removed from the time when their ancestors did ordinary manual labor in a factory, repair shop, store, or building site. They exist both in their families and among their peers in a world where nobody takes religion seriously. They also are not the kinds of people who watch boxing or MMA on TV and certainly have never been in a fight themselves. They don’t know anyone who’s been in the military. All of this means that not only does our author know nothing, but he’s surrounded by know nothings. And he’s likewise been taught by no nothings.
There’s not much of a chance that a person who’s never seen a real fight and never took so much as a karate lesson is ever going to understand fighting. And someone who doesn’t know anyone who’s ever been a cop or soldier can’t possibly understand the mentality of those professions.
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