It’s actually been kind of difficult. Sometimes I have no idea what to write about. Other times I miss whole days completely because I’m just too busy doing things. And it makes you realize how much actual writers must have to write. You must have to just sit yourself down and tap those keys, put pen to paper, something. Some sort of words need to be going down on paper. It doesn’t matter if it’s good. It doesn’t matter if it makes sense. You just gotta get words on paper, shelf it, come back to it later, it’s something.
I assume the idea is that as the words are flowing out, if you are a person who has some sort of experience with life and you have a decent internal monologue, your voice as a writer can come forward. Which makes me wonder, “Does that explain why a lot of shows and movies today suck?”
It seems like this theory makes sense generally. Because who are the writers who get hired to work on shows and movies today? Generally speaking, they’re mostly young people who live in these extreme left wing localities, like Los Angeles or New York City. These people all go to the same schools. They have the same opinions. They have never been challenged by anything that they didn’t choose to engage in. They have no friends who don’t share the same opinions they already have and they dislike conflicting ideology in any way, shape or form.
This is very general, it’s not specific to anyone in particular, but I would bet dollars to doughnuts that if you went across the board on all the writers in the entertainment world, better than half the time you’re going to get some hits in this general framework. And it shows.
If someone in this general framework has no idea what to write about (like myself earlier today), have no idea how to deal with a certain intellectual property, or just can’t find themselves getting interested in a story, there is fun thing that an educated writer can fall back on that usually solves their problem, Logos. Not logos as in a logo for a brand, logos as in the Greek word representing the mode of persuasion for logic.
Diversity, for instance, is a fun theme for writers to trot out when they know they have nothing interesting to say. And when their ideas get challenged or critiqued they have a built in shield to deflect criticism because they are attempting to use rhetoric to protect themselves from the fact that they aren’t very creative.
And it makes sense in a way. What is the worst thing in the world for someone to be in the general writer framework presented above? Challenging the world view. So it makes sense that when these writers have their world view challenged, they have no idea how to accept that what they’ve made is not that good.
Take Amazon’s The Rings of Power for example, you have a well established intellectual property, you know that this property will make money if you adapt it properly because people will want to see it based purely on the fact that it’s Tolkien. The writers then went out and wrote their own story with Tolkien characters.
They deserve to be challenged. They deserve to be critiqued. They made a boring show and now they’re hiding behind their shield.
Anyway, not bad for not having any idea what to write about. It went in an odd direction, but hey it is what it is. Day 26 done.
Ah, it seems I wasn't the only one who has noticed this crap. They even determined a word to define this phenomenon, "fan-baiting". “Fan-baiting” is a form of marketing used by producers, film studios, and actors, with the intent of exciting artificial controversy, garnering publicity, and explaining away the negative reviews of a new and often highly anticipated production.