I've been noticing this lack of quality story telling myself, and that its not solely endemic to the WOKE crowd, either, unfortunately. I have often of late downloaded the sample chapters of books on Amazon, both indie published or press published, wanting a good story written by something without an agenda, or to support an indie author that I knew was not WOKE. But I rarely can make it through the first chapter. The stories are stilted, boring, the dialogue unbelievable, the plot filled with holes right in the first chapter, and either way too much description or way too little of it.
One particular book I can think of I truly, truly wanted to like because the author is a conservative "based" writer and colleague of my husband on Discord. I forced myself through the book, hoping it would get better, but that hope was in vain. It was filled with way too much description - every character was introduced with at least a paragraph of description, every new building, room, and scene with over a page of it. And worse yet, the story was terribly weak under all that description and dialogue. Characters going to places that had no bearing on the story, reader expectations never realized, getting to the end and seeing that the whole journey that the hero was put through was really pointless with no explanation.
And as I look at other books on Amazon, both of authors in the indie communities I attend or even just searching for new books to read, book after book after book has the same problems.
I actually hardly read much at all anymore because of it, and that's a shame! I've gone back and re-read Tolkien, Louis L'Amour and other writers of the past to see if perhaps I was just being nostalgic and overly critical, but the truth is, modern writers are not even close to being in league with even the pulp dime novel writers of the past.
I do wonder why new authors can't seem to write engaging, well crafted stories anymore. So much fiction today reads like fan fiction, but perhaps that is the key to the problem. The great authors of the past did not have TV to go by; they read. todays authors are heavily influenced by TV and movies and short fiction. Many do start out writing fan fiction, trying to match their favorite TV shows or movies, and this carries over to their handling of longer fiction too.
Maybe, anyway. I still try, however, to find a story written well enough that I can get through it even if its written on a fan fiction level. I can enjoy fan fiction well enough; its just that when I pay good money for a book, I want something more than just fan fiction, you know?
This is so true. And unfortunately, many conservatives are quick to embrace low-quality fiction just because they are so desperate for something that isn't woke (understandable, of course). I do think there's something to the theory of film convention being over-applied to all forms of story, and perhaps I'll talk more about that in the future. It's definitely something I've observed and even felt seeping insidiously into my own writing, especially during high school. And of course, eroding attention spans are certainly responsible for some of this degradation as well.
I know what you mean! I picked up "Treasure Island" a couple months ago, and breezed through it in a day. It was so well-written!
Yet funnily enough, if a modern editor got a hold of that manuscript, they'd probably say, "Jim needs more characterization and backstory, the story moves too quickly, lengthen it to 90k words because that's the 'sweet-spot,' add a romantic sub-story because that will sell . . ."
The problem I see in film is people not caring about story, first. What story are you telling? "A Star Wars story" isn't what I mean. I mean, what thing aspect of life drove you to tell this story? And can you broadly make a good story around it? Then you need to refine, refine, refine.
The single biggest aspect that the best films is that people work on the script for a long time. Nolan worked on Inception for nearly a decade, Edgar Wright worked on Baby Driver for 20 years. Pixar will start working on idea, and then park it and pick it up again. They don't just knock this out and they don't pick up a camera until they're ready.
Most films have bad writing because for various reasons, they go into production without a great script, often without even any reason for the film to exist beyond *franchise*. Then someone thinks it can all be fixed with reshoots, and that works as well as trying to fix a cake that isn't made properly once its out of the oven.
We also have a lot of people who know little but other TV and movies. They haven't gone to war, or had another career first, they don't read history, philosophy, science, classic literature. We used to have a lot more writers whose life experiences of war, law enforcement, or whatever else was fused in with their writing. Ian Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence, Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton operative, Tolkein was steeped in English literature but also served in WW1.
Some advice I heard early was, "If you want to be a writer, get a degree in something besides writing so you have something you're an expert on that you can write about!"
(I got my degree in ancient Near Eastern studies and now weave what I learned into my epic fantasy. The advice worked!)
So many writers think they can be great writers without being great readers. Plot twist: you can't. This is one of the reasons I think that even historically there have been very few great novels written by people under the age of 30. It takes time to read enough to really have absorbed good stories to your core, cultivate good taste, and have enough interesting life experiences to have something to say.
This is even worse these days because people don't read anymore, and the plots of the TV sludge that is consumed instead just isn't a good substitute. Even Game of Thrones which is supposedly "super-complex TV" has been dumbed down and simplified so much compared to the books. Having good taste is also "elitist" so people don't do that either any more, and smartphones+careerism in novel writing have made it pretty hard for authors to have as many genuine experiences as before.
So what can we do as writers/readers? Well reading more is a good start, but also being unabashedly critical of our reading choices and those of our friends. 1 and 2 star reviews on Amazon. I don't care if it kills your sales: if your book is shit you need to write something better. Calling our friends out for reading softcore porn like Fourth Wing, or worse, watching The Office (for the fourth time!). Writing in-depth reviews helps with this, in both developing our own taste, and helping others understand what is wrong with the trash that they enjoy.
I also think that it might be better for us as writers to publish less. I wrote a book in college for my creative writing major, but I'm not planning on writing another one until I feel like I have something more valuable to say. This doesn't mean don't write, but don't add to the slush pile unless you have something to say. It's not enough for it to be not-woke, or have good world building, or whatever. The plot and characters have to be good. And frankly that's hard and takes loads of reading and living, which I'm not seeing that many wanna-be writers doing.
Heh. I spent a half decade, maybe closer to a decade all told, on TV tropes reading through different examples and seeing how stories break down after I read them or watched them.
I grew up seeing the best of modern movies at the time, movies like alien and aliens, Terminator 2, and those other great movies of the 80s and 90s.
I was given access to my parents library from the moment I could pick up the books and read them.
Now I just need to translate that familiarity with writing into actual writing. ;)
Wanted to echo your comment about Pirates of the Caribbean. I loved that film when it came out; I’ve recently shown it to my children and they love it too. It has a timeless quality similar to The Princess Bride or The Wizard of Oz.
The heart of storytelling is the ability to sustain tension. The best way to sustain tension for the length of a novel is to create a moral quandary. Physical obstacles have clear solutions. If they are solved, the tension falls. If they are ignored, the tension falls. Moral quandaries can be sustained because of the inherent unwillingness the resolve them, which must come at some moral cost.
The most potent moral quandary on which to build a story is a universal value vs. a personal value. But to do this, one must propose to the audience a universal value. And we live in a post-modernist age in which it is difficult to propose a universal value to any audience, let alone a broad one.
And this post-modernism infects the storytelling of left and right alike. Both, for instance, ascribe to the post-modern tropes of the invisible narrator and close POV storytelling. These are expressions of post-modernism because they deny the possibility of an objective view and allow only individual experience to be expressed. And if only individual experience exists, then there is no space for universal value, and thus no contest between personal and universal value with which to sustain tension in a story.
Thus, even in a good-vs-evil hero story, only the technical problem of how to fight the bad guy's super weapon can drive the story. We cannot ask why good is good or evil is evil and why we should lay down our personal goods of heath and safety for some higher-order good that requires us to suffer, fight, and die. And if we cannot ask that question, we cannot have a good story.
Well said and to the heart, I think! And this plays into another trend that I have come to loathe - the antihero and now the glorification of the villain. We can no longer tell the difference between hero or villain - heroes act terribly and for selfish motivations and all villains are given a sob story that is meant to make us sympathize with them. I find very few characters that I truly care about anymore, and ones that I did in the past are subverted and destroyed or mocked and turned into jokes.
If there is no absolute value, how do you tell the hero from the villain? The Villain becomes the epitomy of heroic selfishness, and the hero is a chump.
I think you may very well have nailed it with this comment. I've been scratching around the edges of this for some time and I don't think I've ever heard it explained quite as well as you do here.
I love this thought! I'm curious . . . regarding your comment about the move to close POV storytelling instead of an objective narrator, how does this carry over into the film medium, where there is no "narrator" or "POV" (in the sense that a book has one)?
It doesn't. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by "The medium is the message." The movie format, which appeals to the senses, is inherently objectivist. The written story, which appeals to memory, is inherently more subjective since everybody's memories are different, which already means there is more variation in how we receive a novel than in how we receive a movie. The use of an objective narrator in a sense corrects for that in a novel. It is superfluous in a movie, which is why it seldom works in that medium. Take the objective narrator away from the novel and stick to close POV and you are affirming in the medium the basic message of postmodernism that there is no objective truth, only personal experience. The movie medium is inherently affirming the opposite, that there is an objective world of sound and light and we are all receiving it in the same way at the same time as we sit shoulder to shoulder in the theatre.
This is just one example, though perhaps the most important one, of how the differences in the message of the medium change a story between page and screen. It may also account for why the adaptation is almost always inferior to the original because the totality of the message between the original and the adaptation is inherently different in the new medium and so apt to be less well-integrated in the adaptation.
This is a fascinating line of thought, and one I had never fully considered. I have always tended to write in limited third-person POV, and had never thought about the moral/literary reasons an omniscient narrator is better.
I do tend to write stories that swap POV between characters in different chapters. Do you think that those different perspectives, if done right, can help "triangulate" objectivity in a similar way to an omniscient narrator?
To an extent, yes. There are two ways to look at subjectivity. One is to say there is no objective reality, only individual perception. The other is to say there is an objective reality, but each of us sees it differently because of our limited perspective. A single POV story tacitly suggests the former. A multi-POV story suggests the latter. Neither gives the reader the assurance of objectivity of the narrative voice, but, as you say, it provides some opportunity for them to triangulate towards the objective.
Of course, many writers are choosing alternating POV because they feel bound by the current fashion (and writing school dictates) about close POV, not because they don't want to suggest an objective reality, and because single POV is just too confining.
In fantasy in particular, it seems to me, the author who has put all that effort into worldbuilding would prefer to describe it objectively, as Tolkien did. But they feel bound to the modern fashion, and I often feel like there is a real struggle going on behind the text as the author twists and turns to contrive ways to get their lovingly created world onto the page without violating rules whose source and intent they don't understand.
It is their philosophy of 'kill the past' taken to its logical conclusion as art relies on the past more than anything else, especially historic and fantasy epics.
Post-modernist thought taken to its utter end, absolutely. Three generations now have sought to eradicate what came before in order to build something "new", and we know stand on the rubble field of nothing because they destroyed the building blocks and foundations of art in the process. The Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground and much that has been lost will not be recovered. It remains to be seen what can be salvaged and when the next renaissance will occur. Hopefully, it won't another 1,200 years.
It's already begun. I am very very very encouraged by young people especially here is the south of the USA who are striving for meaning. They have to turn somewhere and postmodernism gives them nothing because it is all about nothing. There is faith and there is tradition. Both of these are profound wells of inspiration and it is up to older people like me, in large numbers, to put those ideas out into the world again as best we can.
I mean, all the shows you mentioned have been accused of being AI-written or AI-assisted. They just had that big Hollywood strike about it and all that did was make the studios double down on it. AI in particular cannot keep multiple ideas going. Like a dream, it's all of one thing or all another and never both.
It's really hard to find a good modern book to read, too. Amazon is such a steaming slush pile that it's impossible to find anything written with anything approaching competence. I was reading a book from an author I usually enjoy, only to find that in this book, she had phoned it in. Ugh, it was a flat, predictable plot with flat, predictable characters. But I KNOW this author can do better because I've read it.
Which is how I came to be here, preferring to read authors here or older writers from yesteryear, very good point here! Phoning it in has indeed become a major problem in a great deal of literature to-day.
Cause for the incompetent story telling? Easy: DEI hires in place of real writers. They brought people to replace storytellers, people who were chosen not for skill with story but for the political-reliability credentials. When their skill set is virtue signalling, that's what you get from them. When their skill set is storytelling, story is what you get. This is not a rocket-sciencey nut to crack.
They have an agenda. Entertaining you is not on it.
Also, executives who think they are writers demanding things like a second third act, insisting on there being a hotshot pilot in a political drama, and so many others were executive meddling ruins an otherwise great story.
A lack of integrity on the writer's part if it is an adaptation.
And yes, the inability to accept that there are other views than theirs which are valid.
I have my own theory about the failures of hollywood and similar systems. What's occurred has been due to an abundance of nepotism. You can see that the elder directors and actors are still up there despite some being in their eighties and nineties. It's because there's no one to replace them. Once a particular tribe of individuals composes a significant fraction of producers and hiring managers, nepotism takes over. By hiring their own on the basis of ethnicity... or hiring individuals on the basis of diversity, they completely lose the ability to construct new IP. Hyper-creative people don't do well when boxed in by highly orthodox producers. The result is a collective creative bankruptcy in the next generation. Being unable to produce their own IP, they instead try to make sequels to existing great works.
The culture is collapsing as the purveyors of it were hired for reasons of ethnicity and not talent. Hollywood is broken and something alternative is going to replace it whether they want it to or not. We're in a position to build the next culture and kill the old one. Let's make the next culture a good one. Good luck!
It is because competent people have not bothered to excoriate hacks. Instead, they should be pilloried. Figuratively, of course. But publicly, their works must be taken apart, as this author has just done.
My biggest pet peeve is how corporate demands everything to be a universe and refuse to let a story have a beginning and a finish. Everything have to have prequels, sequels, spin off and multi universes now. Of course, is going to turn into a mess when the inevitable contradictions arise.
One example I can name off the top of my head that's suffered from both the PC quotas and banality of major studios is "The Witcher" on Netflix. I was somewhat optimistic going into the first three episodes of the first season, but everything quickly went downhill once Yennefer turned into John Wick with daggers in the episode with Three Jackdaws and the dragon. I soldiered through the second season and decided I wouldn't be coming back for the third (and Henry Cavill's last).
I expected there to be at least a few alterations from the short stories and novels, but the changes were so numerous that it seemed as though the writers were trying their damnedest to separate their script from the source material. While extreme changes are the nature of the game when it comes to adaptations, I found that the changes in Netflix's Witcher committed the worst sin any piece of fiction could: be boring. I can probably count the changes that did have potential on a few fingers, but every other departure from the books was just plain bland and uninspired. I couldn't distinguish any of the factions and felt no sympathy or shock towards any of the characters (except Geralt and Roach); the primary cast became cuss-spewing, emotionally unstable parodies of the refined, calculating originals.
I remember one interview with the lead showrunner, Lauren Hissrich, where she claimed the story was about "ordinary people in a fantasy world." That phrase, "ordinary people in a [blank] world/setting" seems to be all too common nowadays. It's fine if a story wants to focus on grounding itself in a realistic character, or at least a character the audience can understand, but if "ordinary" just means being crass, cynical, or just plain boring then I'd rather shoot for the fantastic.
Ah yes, good example! I’m not actually familiar with the source material for The Witcher, but I do remember the Netflix show being watchable until Yennefer got girl-bossed. 🙄 Respect to Henry Cavill for leaving over the departure from the source material, also. You don’t see much of that integrity in Hollywood.
This is something that ties into what I have said elsewhere. The issue with the current crop of writers attempting to write “Ordinary people in a Blah blah blah” is that they are anything but Ordinary people.
These are privileged children born into the Entertainment industry who have lived inside the TMZ for their entire lives.
Interesting thesis. I am feeling the same about the reboot of Day of The Jackal, whereas the original film was a masterclass in character & suspense the new series feels like a low rent James Bond. Filled with bangs and whistles and tired tropes, but lacking any substance. I haven’t watched it all, so maybe it will improve, but I’m not hopeful.
Hear! Hear! I see it as pandering to the lowest common denominator for generations raised on television. No one seems to know how to have an active and fertile imagination anymore
Ironically, I think there are a multitude of spinning plates at play that have resulted in a sudden crash and decline in storytelling across all mediums. I think you touched on most, if not all, of the reasons why. Great piece, E.
Personally I like the decline in storytelling.
There is already an endless amount of incredible films, shows, books and video games to consume. So it's hardly as though we're really missing out on anything.
As a writer and artist, the more garbage that's produced, with most of the trash being front and centre, the more people will yearn for good storytelling, whether it's a novel or album.
I do try to keep a positive lens, even when everything can seem so pointless. I think an important change is championing talented and skilled indie artists. The bigger fish suck up too much attention and money, which is usually underserved.
Unfortunately our world is dictated by money, so the most important thing we can do is to not give our money to those who don't deserve it and to those that do.
Hit the nail on the head. The last book my Book Club read was a "best seller" and it was one of the worst books I've ever read. At one point I truly felt like it must have been written by AI. It lacked so many basic storytelling/writing rules. Rules that you don't break, like having an interesting character.
I was shocked!
It made me want to focus on reading more classics.
I call it "The Sesame Street Syndrome" - the first time she saw it, my mom feared Sesame Street would be the death of education as teachers would be expected to entertain as well as (or instead of) teaching - in fact, it seems the opposite is true and the Powers that Be decided that pure entertainment is a waste of time - all entertainment MUST now be "educational" - and most of the publishing houses and studios have decided that such education must include an agenda of sorts, far too often having that agenda overshadow all other concerns, sadly
I've been noticing this lack of quality story telling myself, and that its not solely endemic to the WOKE crowd, either, unfortunately. I have often of late downloaded the sample chapters of books on Amazon, both indie published or press published, wanting a good story written by something without an agenda, or to support an indie author that I knew was not WOKE. But I rarely can make it through the first chapter. The stories are stilted, boring, the dialogue unbelievable, the plot filled with holes right in the first chapter, and either way too much description or way too little of it.
One particular book I can think of I truly, truly wanted to like because the author is a conservative "based" writer and colleague of my husband on Discord. I forced myself through the book, hoping it would get better, but that hope was in vain. It was filled with way too much description - every character was introduced with at least a paragraph of description, every new building, room, and scene with over a page of it. And worse yet, the story was terribly weak under all that description and dialogue. Characters going to places that had no bearing on the story, reader expectations never realized, getting to the end and seeing that the whole journey that the hero was put through was really pointless with no explanation.
And as I look at other books on Amazon, both of authors in the indie communities I attend or even just searching for new books to read, book after book after book has the same problems.
I actually hardly read much at all anymore because of it, and that's a shame! I've gone back and re-read Tolkien, Louis L'Amour and other writers of the past to see if perhaps I was just being nostalgic and overly critical, but the truth is, modern writers are not even close to being in league with even the pulp dime novel writers of the past.
I do wonder why new authors can't seem to write engaging, well crafted stories anymore. So much fiction today reads like fan fiction, but perhaps that is the key to the problem. The great authors of the past did not have TV to go by; they read. todays authors are heavily influenced by TV and movies and short fiction. Many do start out writing fan fiction, trying to match their favorite TV shows or movies, and this carries over to their handling of longer fiction too.
Maybe, anyway. I still try, however, to find a story written well enough that I can get through it even if its written on a fan fiction level. I can enjoy fan fiction well enough; its just that when I pay good money for a book, I want something more than just fan fiction, you know?
This is so true. And unfortunately, many conservatives are quick to embrace low-quality fiction just because they are so desperate for something that isn't woke (understandable, of course). I do think there's something to the theory of film convention being over-applied to all forms of story, and perhaps I'll talk more about that in the future. It's definitely something I've observed and even felt seeping insidiously into my own writing, especially during high school. And of course, eroding attention spans are certainly responsible for some of this degradation as well.
I know what you mean! I picked up "Treasure Island" a couple months ago, and breezed through it in a day. It was so well-written!
Yet funnily enough, if a modern editor got a hold of that manuscript, they'd probably say, "Jim needs more characterization and backstory, the story moves too quickly, lengthen it to 90k words because that's the 'sweet-spot,' add a romantic sub-story because that will sell . . ."
P.S. I'm trying very hard to publish a deep, well-written, but CLEAN book (with not too much description :). You can explore the first 11 chapters (more coming soon) for free on my Substack: https://jeremypmadsen.substack.com/s/the-pyromancers-scroll/archive?sort=new
The problem I see in film is people not caring about story, first. What story are you telling? "A Star Wars story" isn't what I mean. I mean, what thing aspect of life drove you to tell this story? And can you broadly make a good story around it? Then you need to refine, refine, refine.
The single biggest aspect that the best films is that people work on the script for a long time. Nolan worked on Inception for nearly a decade, Edgar Wright worked on Baby Driver for 20 years. Pixar will start working on idea, and then park it and pick it up again. They don't just knock this out and they don't pick up a camera until they're ready.
Most films have bad writing because for various reasons, they go into production without a great script, often without even any reason for the film to exist beyond *franchise*. Then someone thinks it can all be fixed with reshoots, and that works as well as trying to fix a cake that isn't made properly once its out of the oven.
We also have a lot of people who know little but other TV and movies. They haven't gone to war, or had another career first, they don't read history, philosophy, science, classic literature. We used to have a lot more writers whose life experiences of war, law enforcement, or whatever else was fused in with their writing. Ian Fleming worked for Naval Intelligence, Dashiell Hammett was a Pinkerton operative, Tolkein was steeped in English literature but also served in WW1.
Some advice I heard early was, "If you want to be a writer, get a degree in something besides writing so you have something you're an expert on that you can write about!"
(I got my degree in ancient Near Eastern studies and now weave what I learned into my epic fantasy. The advice worked!)
Nail, meet hammer.
So many writers think they can be great writers without being great readers. Plot twist: you can't. This is one of the reasons I think that even historically there have been very few great novels written by people under the age of 30. It takes time to read enough to really have absorbed good stories to your core, cultivate good taste, and have enough interesting life experiences to have something to say.
This is even worse these days because people don't read anymore, and the plots of the TV sludge that is consumed instead just isn't a good substitute. Even Game of Thrones which is supposedly "super-complex TV" has been dumbed down and simplified so much compared to the books. Having good taste is also "elitist" so people don't do that either any more, and smartphones+careerism in novel writing have made it pretty hard for authors to have as many genuine experiences as before.
So what can we do as writers/readers? Well reading more is a good start, but also being unabashedly critical of our reading choices and those of our friends. 1 and 2 star reviews on Amazon. I don't care if it kills your sales: if your book is shit you need to write something better. Calling our friends out for reading softcore porn like Fourth Wing, or worse, watching The Office (for the fourth time!). Writing in-depth reviews helps with this, in both developing our own taste, and helping others understand what is wrong with the trash that they enjoy.
I also think that it might be better for us as writers to publish less. I wrote a book in college for my creative writing major, but I'm not planning on writing another one until I feel like I have something more valuable to say. This doesn't mean don't write, but don't add to the slush pile unless you have something to say. It's not enough for it to be not-woke, or have good world building, or whatever. The plot and characters have to be good. And frankly that's hard and takes loads of reading and living, which I'm not seeing that many wanna-be writers doing.
I love dissecting TV shows and movies with my wife, analyzing why its well-written or poorly written.
Also, TOTALLY agree on the "publish less" part!
Heh. I spent a half decade, maybe closer to a decade all told, on TV tropes reading through different examples and seeing how stories break down after I read them or watched them.
I grew up seeing the best of modern movies at the time, movies like alien and aliens, Terminator 2, and those other great movies of the 80s and 90s.
I was given access to my parents library from the moment I could pick up the books and read them.
Now I just need to translate that familiarity with writing into actual writing. ;)
Wanted to echo your comment about Pirates of the Caribbean. I loved that film when it came out; I’ve recently shown it to my children and they love it too. It has a timeless quality similar to The Princess Bride or The Wizard of Oz.
Such a shame that they never made any sequels 😉
We just watched it again last night. Such a great film!
The heart of storytelling is the ability to sustain tension. The best way to sustain tension for the length of a novel is to create a moral quandary. Physical obstacles have clear solutions. If they are solved, the tension falls. If they are ignored, the tension falls. Moral quandaries can be sustained because of the inherent unwillingness the resolve them, which must come at some moral cost.
The most potent moral quandary on which to build a story is a universal value vs. a personal value. But to do this, one must propose to the audience a universal value. And we live in a post-modernist age in which it is difficult to propose a universal value to any audience, let alone a broad one.
And this post-modernism infects the storytelling of left and right alike. Both, for instance, ascribe to the post-modern tropes of the invisible narrator and close POV storytelling. These are expressions of post-modernism because they deny the possibility of an objective view and allow only individual experience to be expressed. And if only individual experience exists, then there is no space for universal value, and thus no contest between personal and universal value with which to sustain tension in a story.
Thus, even in a good-vs-evil hero story, only the technical problem of how to fight the bad guy's super weapon can drive the story. We cannot ask why good is good or evil is evil and why we should lay down our personal goods of heath and safety for some higher-order good that requires us to suffer, fight, and die. And if we cannot ask that question, we cannot have a good story.
Well said and to the heart, I think! And this plays into another trend that I have come to loathe - the antihero and now the glorification of the villain. We can no longer tell the difference between hero or villain - heroes act terribly and for selfish motivations and all villains are given a sob story that is meant to make us sympathize with them. I find very few characters that I truly care about anymore, and ones that I did in the past are subverted and destroyed or mocked and turned into jokes.
If there is no absolute value, how do you tell the hero from the villain? The Villain becomes the epitomy of heroic selfishness, and the hero is a chump.
Great comment. I'd never heard about what makes a story good that makes sense like this. Do you have any books or resources that explain this further?
I'm actually working on an essay on this for my Substack.
Awesome!
I think you may very well have nailed it with this comment. I've been scratching around the edges of this for some time and I don't think I've ever heard it explained quite as well as you do here.
I love this thought! I'm curious . . . regarding your comment about the move to close POV storytelling instead of an objective narrator, how does this carry over into the film medium, where there is no "narrator" or "POV" (in the sense that a book has one)?
It doesn't. This is what Marshall McLuhan meant by "The medium is the message." The movie format, which appeals to the senses, is inherently objectivist. The written story, which appeals to memory, is inherently more subjective since everybody's memories are different, which already means there is more variation in how we receive a novel than in how we receive a movie. The use of an objective narrator in a sense corrects for that in a novel. It is superfluous in a movie, which is why it seldom works in that medium. Take the objective narrator away from the novel and stick to close POV and you are affirming in the medium the basic message of postmodernism that there is no objective truth, only personal experience. The movie medium is inherently affirming the opposite, that there is an objective world of sound and light and we are all receiving it in the same way at the same time as we sit shoulder to shoulder in the theatre.
This is just one example, though perhaps the most important one, of how the differences in the message of the medium change a story between page and screen. It may also account for why the adaptation is almost always inferior to the original because the totality of the message between the original and the adaptation is inherently different in the new medium and so apt to be less well-integrated in the adaptation.
This is a fascinating line of thought, and one I had never fully considered. I have always tended to write in limited third-person POV, and had never thought about the moral/literary reasons an omniscient narrator is better.
I do tend to write stories that swap POV between characters in different chapters. Do you think that those different perspectives, if done right, can help "triangulate" objectivity in a similar way to an omniscient narrator?
To an extent, yes. There are two ways to look at subjectivity. One is to say there is no objective reality, only individual perception. The other is to say there is an objective reality, but each of us sees it differently because of our limited perspective. A single POV story tacitly suggests the former. A multi-POV story suggests the latter. Neither gives the reader the assurance of objectivity of the narrative voice, but, as you say, it provides some opportunity for them to triangulate towards the objective.
Of course, many writers are choosing alternating POV because they feel bound by the current fashion (and writing school dictates) about close POV, not because they don't want to suggest an objective reality, and because single POV is just too confining.
In fantasy in particular, it seems to me, the author who has put all that effort into worldbuilding would prefer to describe it objectively, as Tolkien did. But they feel bound to the modern fashion, and I often feel like there is a real struggle going on behind the text as the author twists and turns to contrive ways to get their lovingly created world onto the page without violating rules whose source and intent they don't understand.
Wow so interesting! Great comment
It is their philosophy of 'kill the past' taken to its logical conclusion as art relies on the past more than anything else, especially historic and fantasy epics.
Post-modernist thought taken to its utter end, absolutely. Three generations now have sought to eradicate what came before in order to build something "new", and we know stand on the rubble field of nothing because they destroyed the building blocks and foundations of art in the process. The Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground and much that has been lost will not be recovered. It remains to be seen what can be salvaged and when the next renaissance will occur. Hopefully, it won't another 1,200 years.
It's already begun. I am very very very encouraged by young people especially here is the south of the USA who are striving for meaning. They have to turn somewhere and postmodernism gives them nothing because it is all about nothing. There is faith and there is tradition. Both of these are profound wells of inspiration and it is up to older people like me, in large numbers, to put those ideas out into the world again as best we can.
Agreed
I mean, all the shows you mentioned have been accused of being AI-written or AI-assisted. They just had that big Hollywood strike about it and all that did was make the studios double down on it. AI in particular cannot keep multiple ideas going. Like a dream, it's all of one thing or all another and never both.
It's really hard to find a good modern book to read, too. Amazon is such a steaming slush pile that it's impossible to find anything written with anything approaching competence. I was reading a book from an author I usually enjoy, only to find that in this book, she had phoned it in. Ugh, it was a flat, predictable plot with flat, predictable characters. But I KNOW this author can do better because I've read it.
Which is how I came to be here, preferring to read authors here or older writers from yesteryear, very good point here! Phoning it in has indeed become a major problem in a great deal of literature to-day.
When writers had no internet and they drew their inspiration from real surroundings and people, the results were obviously to a higher standard
Cause for the incompetent story telling? Easy: DEI hires in place of real writers. They brought people to replace storytellers, people who were chosen not for skill with story but for the political-reliability credentials. When their skill set is virtue signalling, that's what you get from them. When their skill set is storytelling, story is what you get. This is not a rocket-sciencey nut to crack.
They have an agenda. Entertaining you is not on it.
Also, executives who think they are writers demanding things like a second third act, insisting on there being a hotshot pilot in a political drama, and so many others were executive meddling ruins an otherwise great story.
A lack of integrity on the writer's part if it is an adaptation.
And yes, the inability to accept that there are other views than theirs which are valid.
I have my own theory about the failures of hollywood and similar systems. What's occurred has been due to an abundance of nepotism. You can see that the elder directors and actors are still up there despite some being in their eighties and nineties. It's because there's no one to replace them. Once a particular tribe of individuals composes a significant fraction of producers and hiring managers, nepotism takes over. By hiring their own on the basis of ethnicity... or hiring individuals on the basis of diversity, they completely lose the ability to construct new IP. Hyper-creative people don't do well when boxed in by highly orthodox producers. The result is a collective creative bankruptcy in the next generation. Being unable to produce their own IP, they instead try to make sequels to existing great works.
The culture is collapsing as the purveyors of it were hired for reasons of ethnicity and not talent. Hollywood is broken and something alternative is going to replace it whether they want it to or not. We're in a position to build the next culture and kill the old one. Let's make the next culture a good one. Good luck!
It is because competent people have not bothered to excoriate hacks. Instead, they should be pilloried. Figuratively, of course. But publicly, their works must be taken apart, as this author has just done.
My biggest pet peeve is how corporate demands everything to be a universe and refuse to let a story have a beginning and a finish. Everything have to have prequels, sequels, spin off and multi universes now. Of course, is going to turn into a mess when the inevitable contradictions arise.
Good point. Everything is intended to be a cash cow milked for as long as possible.
One example I can name off the top of my head that's suffered from both the PC quotas and banality of major studios is "The Witcher" on Netflix. I was somewhat optimistic going into the first three episodes of the first season, but everything quickly went downhill once Yennefer turned into John Wick with daggers in the episode with Three Jackdaws and the dragon. I soldiered through the second season and decided I wouldn't be coming back for the third (and Henry Cavill's last).
I expected there to be at least a few alterations from the short stories and novels, but the changes were so numerous that it seemed as though the writers were trying their damnedest to separate their script from the source material. While extreme changes are the nature of the game when it comes to adaptations, I found that the changes in Netflix's Witcher committed the worst sin any piece of fiction could: be boring. I can probably count the changes that did have potential on a few fingers, but every other departure from the books was just plain bland and uninspired. I couldn't distinguish any of the factions and felt no sympathy or shock towards any of the characters (except Geralt and Roach); the primary cast became cuss-spewing, emotionally unstable parodies of the refined, calculating originals.
I remember one interview with the lead showrunner, Lauren Hissrich, where she claimed the story was about "ordinary people in a fantasy world." That phrase, "ordinary people in a [blank] world/setting" seems to be all too common nowadays. It's fine if a story wants to focus on grounding itself in a realistic character, or at least a character the audience can understand, but if "ordinary" just means being crass, cynical, or just plain boring then I'd rather shoot for the fantastic.
Ah yes, good example! I’m not actually familiar with the source material for The Witcher, but I do remember the Netflix show being watchable until Yennefer got girl-bossed. 🙄 Respect to Henry Cavill for leaving over the departure from the source material, also. You don’t see much of that integrity in Hollywood.
This is something that ties into what I have said elsewhere. The issue with the current crop of writers attempting to write “Ordinary people in a Blah blah blah” is that they are anything but Ordinary people.
These are privileged children born into the Entertainment industry who have lived inside the TMZ for their entire lives.
Interesting thesis. I am feeling the same about the reboot of Day of The Jackal, whereas the original film was a masterclass in character & suspense the new series feels like a low rent James Bond. Filled with bangs and whistles and tired tropes, but lacking any substance. I haven’t watched it all, so maybe it will improve, but I’m not hopeful.
Hear! Hear! I see it as pandering to the lowest common denominator for generations raised on television. No one seems to know how to have an active and fertile imagination anymore
Ironically, I think there are a multitude of spinning plates at play that have resulted in a sudden crash and decline in storytelling across all mediums. I think you touched on most, if not all, of the reasons why. Great piece, E.
Personally I like the decline in storytelling.
There is already an endless amount of incredible films, shows, books and video games to consume. So it's hardly as though we're really missing out on anything.
As a writer and artist, the more garbage that's produced, with most of the trash being front and centre, the more people will yearn for good storytelling, whether it's a novel or album.
Which is a very good thing for me.
I like the glass half full perspective! That’s how we need to be thinking if we want to change things in the future.
I do try to keep a positive lens, even when everything can seem so pointless. I think an important change is championing talented and skilled indie artists. The bigger fish suck up too much attention and money, which is usually underserved.
Unfortunately our world is dictated by money, so the most important thing we can do is to not give our money to those who don't deserve it and to those that do.
Hit the nail on the head. The last book my Book Club read was a "best seller" and it was one of the worst books I've ever read. At one point I truly felt like it must have been written by AI. It lacked so many basic storytelling/writing rules. Rules that you don't break, like having an interesting character.
I was shocked!
It made me want to focus on reading more classics.
I call it "The Sesame Street Syndrome" - the first time she saw it, my mom feared Sesame Street would be the death of education as teachers would be expected to entertain as well as (or instead of) teaching - in fact, it seems the opposite is true and the Powers that Be decided that pure entertainment is a waste of time - all entertainment MUST now be "educational" - and most of the publishing houses and studios have decided that such education must include an agenda of sorts, far too often having that agenda overshadow all other concerns, sadly