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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   2992 thread views

Wellness Wednesday for March 20, 2024

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

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Overall I'm a mediocre writer, but in rare moods everything flows out beautifully. Perhaps I'll find that star soon. I sure hope so.

Then why not just... write? Where's your blog, your Substack? What are you putting in front of people? All the guys you mentioned did not ruminate and just did stuffs. That's the hardest step one can take, but by far the most important one.

I haven't been writing because I think our current literary forms aren't doing the job, and I've been daydreaming a lot about how to fix that. That probably sounds like a waste of time, but I do think I'm getting close(r) to some answer.

Can I ask what your thoughts are? I'm in the same boat. I feel like:

  • very few people read novels any more, especially men. Maybe there's still a market for YA garbage, smutty romance, or whatever woke stuff wins literary awards. But it's mostly just a very slow, long medium that doesn't fit the modern age of information overdose. I can spend my entire life reading great novels from the past and never run out of content.
  • twitter is the opposite, too short to have any real info at all. Lots of funny jokes there though.
  • Blogs... I don't know. So many blogs just sound the same to me now. Especially with so many of them moving to substack where it's the same format, they all link to each other and borrow from each other. Mostly they seem to be a lot of "Hi, I'm a smart guy but have no real expertise on X. Let me write about X anyway, based on some shower thoughts I had. No peer review or editing. I'll be writing more or less the same blog posts every day, forever, in order to churn out content."
  • writing comments on sites like this just disappears into the ether. Good place to generate ideas, bad place to get any credit or come up with a finished work of art.
  • Comic books/graphic novels/manga. I like this medium a lot, for how it can use pictures to very quickly convey information. But it takes so fucking long to draw anything, and it still has that reputation of being "just for kids." Bryan Caplin has been trying to write non-fiction graphic novels though, and that's very interesting.

To the general public, written entertainment is obsolete. Your average person doesn't enjoy reading -- only a great book like Blood Meridian with no adaptation will convince him to read. Dune is basically a better version of Star Wars yet nobody knew that for 50+ years because people just don't want to read.

Books are competing on the same battleground for attention as films, as podcasts, as music, and they're losing. Basically, the only way to approach book writing in 20XX is to write a book so explosive and interesting that it lures you into reading it. This is stuff like Gravity's Rainbow, or Blood Meridian or Infinite Jest. Alternatively, it's totally batshit stuff like Philip K. Dick's work. These books are still read because they offer you experiences other media can't give you.

Does literature have a future? Well, to the extent it can compete. There is absolutely potential for more books like House of Leaves to attract the attention of normal people, to move literature forward in some way. But obviously, it's going to take a lot of talent. You have to be a master writer now to compete with other media. Unfortunately that's just how it is. But it's possible, yeah.

It sort of sounds like you're saying that, yes, novels have a future, but only if you're a master writer who can produce a work of transcendental genius. Which... sure. But unfortunately most of us aren't that. And most normal people aren't reading novels, either. I want to write something that a regular man-on-the-street can enjoy and talk about with his friends.

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. That regular guy on the street doesn't read, neither do his friends. You can write a good book but the odds anyone reads it are low. But of course, the odds of success in any creative medium are bad, so do what you enjoy.

Sci-fi and fantasy are very much alive, so if you have any interest in those books, you should try writing one. It's a niche, but a very steady one.

Can you give some examples of recent sci-fi and fantasy that you like? I used to love it as a teenager, but I've fallen out of it since then. It seems like it both ran out of ideas (no more Einsteins or Tolkiens to generate new material) and also got woke.

I don't read SF myself but Three-Body Problem is pretty recent and massive, you should check it out.

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