Allele - Greatest Weaknesses of Modern Authors

Allele - Greatest Weaknesses of Modern Authors





I'm gonna list what I consider to be the Greatest Weaknesses of Modern Authors, their writings, worldviews, methods of working, work produced, etc.

Discuss if you like.



1. Little or No Real World Experience: Too many modern authors, writers, screenwriters (not to mention artists of all kinds) have little or no real world experience. They go to school to learn how to write, they spend their lives obsessing over writing, they spend most all of their free time writing or learning to write. Yet they never lived and have nothing to write about except what is spawned within their own imaginations. They spend all of their time creating fictional worlds because they have nothing to say about and have made no observations on the real world. How could they? They've never spent any time living in it. Writing about what they see in their own heads is the only accomplishment they've ever had or tried to have.

2. Overspecialization: They write only Fiction, or only Non-Fiction. They cannot and do not cross over convincingly, because they are either afraid to do so or let other people tell them they cannot.

3. Overgenrelization: They become a genre writer. Which means that for the most part they become a standardized and serialized hack writer or a closet book entertainer.

4. No Word Hoard: The modern writer has no word hoard. No vocabulary other than that of his genre. He has no poetry and no word-soul. He's like reading a White Paper on computer graphics. So he is not truly literate. Not that that ever bothers him. Lack of poetry is considered gritty, urban, hip, modern, sophisticated. He's as vital as a disco ball at a cotillion. And half as fancy.

5. All Idea, No Story: The modern writer is filled with the most incredibly clever ideas and schemes, about nothing of any importance at all.

6. Worldview: The modern author has a worldview derived entirely from his own very limited real world experience, or derived entirely from his own imagination. Which all too often is little more than an academically recycled imagination. Full of sound and fury, signifying bluffing.

7. Methodologies: The modern author believes the best way to write is to sit in a room all day and stare at a computer screen or at a mirror and navel gaze. It would never once occur to him to get out in the world and watch how it operates and how people actually live. He thinks his job is to sit in a little room and stink it up. And God knows that's also about the size and smell of what he produces.

8. Art is as Art Does: The modern author thinks of himself as a modern Artist. Why anyone would want to do this is beyond me but it tells a lot about why they write what they do. And what they write about. And why they write so badly.

9. Manhood is Dead: Being a writer used to mean you first were a man who had some experience with being a man and so you had something to say about being a man. You can pretty much forget about that now. It's gonna be awhile before manhood becomes a common attribute among writers again.

10. Ignorance is Bliss: Just ask most modern authors. Compare what little they know of the world to how much they're willing to write about how little they know. You'll get the idea pretty quick.

11. The Psychopop Imperative: If there's a deep pop psychology imperative then some modern writer is gonna find a way to carefully explore the idea. Of course if there were such a thing as a deep pop psychological imperative it might be worth the effort.

12. The Deconstructive Myth: With the right technique the modern author can explain everything. Even the unexplainable. Just ask him. He'll tell ya, and then he'll write 15 books in a series explaining how he figured it all out. "In his head." This is also called the "Fictional Conceit" or the "Theory as Fact" motif. A dedicated Fanbase will eat this one up. Just ask em sometime.

The Exchange - Artists should try "Manhood" for a Change

The Exchange - Why the modern Artist needs to give up on being such a prissified pansy, a limp wrist-ed imitator of actors and other ne'er do wells, stop painting his face like a mime, pick up a chisel and a hammer, and start acting again like a Real Man.



Before I present my thesis proper on this issue let me briefly interject a bit of history into the discussion. Art, architecture, sculpture used to be dominated by real men. Men who could bend iron bars in their bare hands and invent incredible devices, like Leonardo, men who could labor torturous hours suspended in backbreaking rafters to paint a huge cathedral ceiling, like Michelangelo, men who could invent and design and build, like Phidias. Men who were centuries ahead of their time, true beacons of their age, often as much scientist and philosopher and poet and warrior and strategist and even priest as just a run of the mill artist and dabbler in crayons and water color.

Art was the domain of the brilliant and the ingenious, yes, that is certainly true, kingdom of the creative and the futurist and the Renaissance man and polymath, but it was also the realm of the thinker and the wizard and the tough man and the strong guy and the fearless and the dauntless and the expeditionary and the adventurer, not just the realm of the limp-wristed, emotive, cry-baby faggot and Andy Warhol type stick-man, scarecrow bodied modern artist.

When people used to say Artist the term both denoted and connoted respect, a certain authority, a man one could consult and declare because he was possessed of a fearless vision of the future and because everyone knew that if push came to shove this was a man you could turn towards to solve problems, - not moan, bitch and cry about them like a spoiled little prep school grammar doll. Women admired, respected, desired and loved them instead of inviting them to luncheon chats to get the artist's latest recommendations on hairstyles and make-up foundation.

In addition when an artist said he was an artist he didn't mean he was a mere sketch master or a painter, or a caricature carnival man, or a thememaker who spent twenty years churning our different colored versions of the same soup can in his mother's kitchen apron, he meant he could do damned near anything; design buildings, build buildings, compose music, read and write in foreign languages, do math and geometry, act, run his workshop as a thriving business venture, create machines and invent, paint, draw, observe, deduce, create, problem solve, he could do it all, as needed and necessary. He was painter, sketcher, designer, architect, scientist, inventor, researcher, genius, traveler, musician and poet, mathematician, tactician, consultant, engineer, even soldier if need be. He mixed his own paints, created his own tools, devised new techniques and approaches previously unimagined, was one of the great entrepreneurs of the engine of human progress.

In short an artist was a Man, all man, in contrast to so much that passes for manhood in our modern society. And when someone called a man an artist, a true artist, the word most often used in passing was "Maestro." That man was a Master. And that said it all.


We move forward to the so called "modern artist" and everything that denotes and connotes. I needn't go into detail, we all understand what this means and what the differences obviously are, and what that implies. And so I present the body of my thesis as to why Artists should once again strive to be Men instead of merely "Modern."


Thesis: Because it's the right thing to do, because it's about freakin time, and wouldn't you much rather be known as a Man and a Maestro than a Metrosexual?

Just think about it for about 3 seconds or so. Then you decide.


P.S.: Can we get an "Amen" from the Writer's Chorus? They could use a good dose of manhood while we're at it.