#so obviously bram stoker had something
working on deconstructing all the lessons put into my head by those…I don’t know what they’re called but you know the people that sell self-help books convincing you that you can win capitalism? the writing version of those
Theres a whole genus of bloggers that seem to make their way in the world writing articles that are like “The Harsh Truth About Publishing a Novel” and it’s all stuff like “No one likes your book as much as you do” and “Everyone will hate your book if it has worldbuilding” and “you MUST start the plot in the VERY FIRST SENTENCE NO EXCEPTIONS” and “if you use a single adverb, your editor will break your wrists with a crowbar”
There are a thousand books and articles about writing that are entirely based on the following premises:
- you, as a writer, are competing with tv, movies, and social media for the increasingly short attention spans of your readers, therefore, you have to make your book as fast-paced and immediately attention-grabbing as possible
- Not only are the guidelines of writing a good screenplay applicable to writing a novel, the ideal way to write a novel is “exactly the way you would a screenplay.”
Also,so many books and blog posts about writing and publishing fiction outright say “what worked in storytelling 300 or 200 or even 100 years ago doesn’t work anymore.”
Neat. I guess that’s why “classic” books are never read anymore, and no one has any interest in the stories of the past.
It would explain why no one ever reads or watches Shakespeare anymore. And why Greek mythology and fairy tales have disappeared from the average person’s consciousness. Yup, makes sense, seeing how no one today cares about Sherlock Holmes or Frankenstein.
It’s not like the tropes and conventions of the stories we tell today are directly based on those of stories hundreds of years ago. Imagine if half of our movies, books and shows were adaptations of stories first told hundreds of years ago! That’s clearly impossible.
Also, no one understood anything about storytelling up until a few decades ago, when some editors at the big five publishing houses got together and realized we’ve been doing it all wrong for all of human history.
