Welcome back readers! It’s another Monday, and that means as always another Being a Better Writer post for you to dig into!
Me? I’m currently out of the office, up in Alaska if all went according to plan. Completely off-grid most of the time and hopefully not soaking wet just as often (fingers crossed, but it’s Southeast Alaska, so I’m not holding my breath, save to come up for air when the rain gets really bad).
Today’s post is a one that’s been on my mind for some time now, owing to a wind band of articles, comments, and general sentiment I’ve run into around the internet over the last few years that has, in recent times, only increased in frequency. Unfortunately, I think this increase is to the detriment of writing everywhere, as the increase means this phenomenon is only becoming more accepted over time.
Why? Well … let’s take a quick look at what this phenomenon is. The first time I truly realized how widespread it had become was when I encountered a whole article dedicated to the practice on a book site. And I don’t mean in “raise the flag of warning” kind of way. This post was the problem.
What was it? An editorial piece from one of the site’s members about how much they “loved” The Lord of the Rings … save for one “tiny” problem. I won’t go into detail on what the “problem” was, because it ultimately doesn’t matter. It was all in their head. The real problem was that their post straight out demanded that the Tolkien Estate rewrite and “update” the books to bring them in line with what this reader demanded. To “fix” them, as this reader explained it, so that it would fill their content desires better.
Again, I’m not going to specify what the demanded change was. You can make your own guesses, but I found the entire thing ridiculous. This article demanded that those in charge of The Lord of the Rings change and rewrite the classic to suit their demands, as they were a ‘paying customer’ and therefore was, it would see, ‘owed’ the product they demanded.
Unfortunately, as the years have gone by, I’ve seen this attitude appearing more and more across the web, from posts to reviews to even comments on forums and places like Discord. More and more often I see people posting comments like “Well, I want to read this story about this so this creator needs to stop creating what they like and create what I like. Art is for the public, and I’m the public!”
Some go further. The OP-ED I had recently about “banning things just because you don’t like them?” That sort of “let’s force censorship on anything we don’t like” mentality often overlaps with this sense of entitled demand that a creator owes these individuals what they want simply by existing, and if they don’t deliver it? Well … then they need to be punished. Whether that’s attacking them with a twitter mob, smearing their work with negative reviews or ratings, or some other form of attack.
And this kind of behavior is wrong. Full stop.
Which brings us to today’s Being a Better Writer post, which is in a way a rebuttal to all these very self-aggrandizing, entitled folks. Which starts, and basically ends, with this:
You want content? You write it.
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