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My working hypothesis on bad writing is at least in part due to the hyper-professionalization of movies and games. In both cases, the people making them don’t come from all walks of life. They come from a rather insular world of people who have gone through specialized training at university, and they then go on to live in the same town and hang out mostly with other people like themselves who went to the same professional schools and so on. They’re rarely if ever outside that bubble. They rarely know anyone who came from outside that bubble. And as this goes on for generations, the lack of contact with the normie world makes it impossible to create movies and tv and games that feel realistic. Nobody in Hollywood shoots guns, and probably very rarely would they even know anyone who collects or uses them. When it comes to writing a story about the kind of person that owns or shoots guns, they aren’t referencing their own lived experience with gun owners. They’re referencing other works about the topic, they’re referencing their political views about guns and the people who own them, and maybe stereotyping they’ve seen about gun owners. That doesn’t allow for much depth. It’s like a copy of a copy of a copy — every step away from the real thing makes it less like a real person and thus less interesting.
You're onto something. The goal of fiction isn't to recreate reality, but I think the further the creative class gets from the working class the worse mass-market entertainment gets. You have to really dig around or look at niche works, or be able to swallow pretentiousness that hasn't been eclipsed by the creator's ego.
Ghostbusters (1984) is a story about schlubby guys getting jobs as supernatural firefighters and pest control. The villain of that story isn't Gozer, it's the EPA inspector who has no clue what they actually do. More and more, the creative class seem to be EPA inspectors.
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See also this article. TL;DR: National Book Award winners (and American novelists in general, by extension) used to come from all walks of life, but in recent years winners and nominees have been dominated almost to the exclusion of all else by college-educated novelists who have completed MFAs. This has the effect of making recent acclaimed literary novels insular and hermetic, with little of the grit, colour or life experience of literary novels from decades past.
The classic story of Chuck Palahniuk being a diesel mechanic while writing Fight Club. Frankly a grittier man than some other authors.
I totally agree. The stuff that grabbed me about Fight Club, and The Martian is just how close Palahniuk and Weir seemed to be able to get the mindset of ordinary working class people stuck in extraordinary circumstances. A lot of sci-fi seems to assume that everyone is PMC and that ships in space or colonies are going to be large and clean and have lots of cool gear. They’re cruise ships built for luxury run by people who cry but rarely experience a real hardship.
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