Why I Hate Writers
Note: if you hadn't already at some point in the past done so, kindly look up "hyperbole" before you read this. You may be glad you did. >.>
I hate writers. I don't get along with them at all, and frankly I don't want to. Well, rather, I like lots of writers as the perfectly lovely people they are -- until they go into writer mode and start talking about their writing. Then I usually want to throttle them until they die from it.
I'm a writer. I love discussing writing in general -- techniques, styles, conventions, usage, grammar, you know, the nuts and bolts. But, like, talking about what kinds of things I write and why and what does it all MEAN, omg? Yeah, not so much.
I write because I have stories to tell; why the fuck do I have to be all existential about it? I don't. And neither do you. You know why?
Because nobody cares! :D
Other writers may act like they care, but they really are only waiting for their turn to be pretentious about ~*their writing*~. Observe:
"I wrote this little piece while sitting on the toilet and contemplating how the colour of babies' poop is so varied compared to the adults' -- isn't that just another way in which we lose a part of our individuality? Our excrement expresses our conformity! O, tempora! O, mores!"
TMI, MOTHERFUCKER, CAN YOU DIG IT? [I totally made this up, by the way, but I'm sure some pretentious twatmuffin has discussed this seriously before. I've seen worse in my travels.]
Writers refer to their degenerate spewings as "pieces". It's not a fucking piece of art; it's a story. Calling them "pieces" just makes you sound even more pretentious than I already think you are. Bonus asshole points if you refer to your fan fiction as "piece". It's masturbatory fantasy using characters we stole from a commercially successful writer. Of course there are plenty of yes-girls (most of them also writers) in fandom who'll assure you it's ~*~art~*~ nonetheless. Well guess what? In 99.9999% cases, they're wrong! And they're only saying it because they hope you'll return the favour when they post their next 700 words of Harry doing Draco up the proverbial in first-person present-tense stream-of-consciousness using only adverbs of foreign origin.
Writers talk about imaginary little people telling them what/how/when to write. Somehow they manage to stay out of loony bins at the same time. I feel like if I hear another person talk about their "muses" I might choke her. What you write comes from your brain. Muses are fictional deities invented by the ancient Greeks who ALSO thought that the heart was the seat of intelligence. Come on, seriously; it's 2009. That otherwise intelligent human beings persist in invoking "muses" when they're actually talking about chemical processes in their own brain is ridiculous. Especially when they give their muses names (like Bob. Or Bertha.) and then blog about their imaginary conversations, expecting people to give a shit. I'd rather voluntarily dump a thimbleful of lint into my bellybutton and spend an hour picking it out.
(Admittedly, the muse people are not as bad as the writers who claim to get their inspiration from God. But those usually stay away from me; I think it might be the Scowl of Warning (+3). Or possibly the middle finger I'm sticking up; I should really watch where I put that thing…)
Writers act like they're fucking visionaries just because they can string two words together. No. You know who else is a writer? The dude responsible for the ad copy on that unsolicited junk mail you got the other day. Cheap CializViagra, BuyViagra 0nline for less! Save time and money with our 0nline Pharmacy, Noprescription needed, save up to 80%;
Writers assign far too much importance to their own writing. All too often this is also paired with the assumption that people around them actually give a shit about the magnum opus they happen to be working on. Guess what, lady? No one gives a shit! Even your cat is only extra attentive right now because you forgot to feed him in the midst of your writing frenzy last night, you selfish jerk-off.
Writers equate being published with being above criticism. Newsflash, asshole: for the past decade or so, they've published pretty much anything that had a slim chance of selling. That something has a chance of selling does not make it good, interesting, relevant, or worth anyone's time. If you didn't believe that before Twilight was published, that's okay, I guess. But if you still don't believe it now, you're a delusional asshole. Being published means precisely nothing, and publishing a "best seller" means even less.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "OMG UR JUST JELUS BECOZ UR NOT PUBLISHED". Go masturbate to Twilight and take another blue pill, bitch.
Writers are competitive. It's not a fucking competition! You have a story to tell; I have a story to tell. Oh, did more people read your story than mine? I must not have told the story people wanted to read, then, what's the big fucking deal? More readers means more comments and more comments means more chance that someone will misunderstand what you wrote, or accuse you of shit you didn't even know was possible to do with a piece of writing. Like hurt "the children". It's almost always the fucking children.
Imagine you're a supermarket cashier -- are you going to sob when someone passes your aisle and chooses the cashier next to you? No, you're going to be fucking ecstatic because it means you don't have to deal with another goddamned whiny customer. You're not going to assume that the customer thinks the other cashier is prettier or friendlier than you are, or better at cashier…ing. So why the fuck would you do that with writing? IT MAKES NO SENSE. If you really think you deserve to have more readers, find a trope people fall for (LUSTFUL BUT CHASTE VAMPIRES!)… or I guess you could learn to write better (what can I say?).
Writers are even more annoying in the company of other writers. I refuse to go to writers' conferences. Being surrounded by feverish writers practicing their pitches is pretty much my idea of hell. Yeah, I know, you won't sell it unless you go out there and try, but do you really have to be so annoyingly desperate? Don't even get me started on attending workshops or panels where writers talk about writing. All they do is sit around discussing their own writing and congratulating themselves and each other on being prolific, talented, visionary, whatever. I'd rather watch the fun kind of circle jerk, thanks. The sad thing is that the hopeful writers in the audience eat it all up like treacle and then go on to emulate this behaviour when they break out, perpetuating the cycle of suck for all eternity.
Writers exist in a state of painfully embarrassing self-importance, crippling insecurity, or a weird and volatile mixture of both. This makes them at the same time unreceptive to criticism and painfully sensitive to it. They view criticism of their work as an attack on their person, and if you piss off one with a negative remark, you've pissed off her entire writing group -- not because the other members of her group care about her; no. They just want to bully the critic into silence because they're afraid they might be next to get roasted. They tiptoe around each other's feelings and specialise in being vague and noncommittal:
"This is so great and visionary; I'm envious of your talent at underlining the unbearable lightness of being while expressing hard allegorical truths about the nature of man! The protagonist's motivation is a little bit unclear on page 564, but really, if a reader doesn't understand your intention from the rest of this (wonderfully epic!) story, it's really her fault for being so blinkered and conformist, so you don't even need to change anything; it's perfect!~ :-) :-) :-)"
This "peer review" can be used for pretty much any story in existence -- it has a steaming dollop of obnoxious flattery, an appearance of criticism (so the author can furiously masturbate that night to thoughts of how incredibly gracious she is in the face of what's obviously pure spite), and an insult to the potential (always blind, always undiscerning) audience.
All writers are equally obnoxious, but the published ones sometimes take their fail that extra special step further. Like that one bint who was all "I can be totally racist in my fiction because it's fiction and a means for my self-expression ALSO I R A PUBLISHED AUTHOR AND THEREFORE I DESERVE RESPECT FROM YOU PEONS WORSHIP MEEEEEE". And the other one after her who was all "I can totally write a historical novel set in America's past, only without any Natives 'cause I'm a Writer and I get to write them out if it's inconvenient for me to write about them, tee hee!". Or the douchenozzle who posted a bunch of racist shit in her LJ that upset a lot of folks, and then claimed it was all "for her writing research". The world is not your fucking research stomping ground, snowflake. Being a writer doesn't give you carte blanche to be a dickwad. Being a writer doesn't absolve you of social responsibility, either -- if you want to be edgy and write *ist crap, fucking wear it. Don't get all offended when you get called a *ist for it. Hey, you're changing the world with your ~*~art~*~, so what's a little *ism between you and some friends, amirite?
To sum up: STFU, GTFO, and don't forget that blue pill; I hear they taste like baby poop.
I hate writers. I don't get along with them at all, and frankly I don't want to. Well, rather, I like lots of writers as the perfectly lovely people they are -- until they go into writer mode and start talking about their writing. Then I usually want to throttle them until they die from it.
I'm a writer. I love discussing writing in general -- techniques, styles, conventions, usage, grammar, you know, the nuts and bolts. But, like, talking about what kinds of things I write and why and what does it all MEAN, omg? Yeah, not so much.
I write because I have stories to tell; why the fuck do I have to be all existential about it? I don't. And neither do you. You know why?
Because nobody cares! :D
Other writers may act like they care, but they really are only waiting for their turn to be pretentious about ~*their writing*~. Observe:
"I wrote this little piece while sitting on the toilet and contemplating how the colour of babies' poop is so varied compared to the adults' -- isn't that just another way in which we lose a part of our individuality? Our excrement expresses our conformity! O, tempora! O, mores!"
TMI, MOTHERFUCKER, CAN YOU DIG IT? [I totally made this up, by the way, but I'm sure some pretentious twatmuffin has discussed this seriously before. I've seen worse in my travels.]
Writers refer to their degenerate spewings as "pieces". It's not a fucking piece of art; it's a story. Calling them "pieces" just makes you sound even more pretentious than I already think you are. Bonus asshole points if you refer to your fan fiction as "piece". It's masturbatory fantasy using characters we stole from a commercially successful writer. Of course there are plenty of yes-girls (most of them also writers) in fandom who'll assure you it's ~*~art~*~ nonetheless. Well guess what? In 99.9999% cases, they're wrong! And they're only saying it because they hope you'll return the favour when they post their next 700 words of Harry doing Draco up the proverbial in first-person present-tense stream-of-consciousness using only adverbs of foreign origin.
Writers talk about imaginary little people telling them what/how/when to write. Somehow they manage to stay out of loony bins at the same time. I feel like if I hear another person talk about their "muses" I might choke her. What you write comes from your brain. Muses are fictional deities invented by the ancient Greeks who ALSO thought that the heart was the seat of intelligence. Come on, seriously; it's 2009. That otherwise intelligent human beings persist in invoking "muses" when they're actually talking about chemical processes in their own brain is ridiculous. Especially when they give their muses names (like Bob. Or Bertha.) and then blog about their imaginary conversations, expecting people to give a shit. I'd rather voluntarily dump a thimbleful of lint into my bellybutton and spend an hour picking it out.
(Admittedly, the muse people are not as bad as the writers who claim to get their inspiration from God. But those usually stay away from me; I think it might be the Scowl of Warning (+3). Or possibly the middle finger I'm sticking up; I should really watch where I put that thing…)
Writers act like they're fucking visionaries just because they can string two words together. No. You know who else is a writer? The dude responsible for the ad copy on that unsolicited junk mail you got the other day. Cheap CializViagra, BuyViagra 0nline for less! Save time and money with our 0nline Pharmacy, Noprescription needed, save up to 80%;
Writers assign far too much importance to their own writing. All too often this is also paired with the assumption that people around them actually give a shit about the magnum opus they happen to be working on. Guess what, lady? No one gives a shit! Even your cat is only extra attentive right now because you forgot to feed him in the midst of your writing frenzy last night, you selfish jerk-off.
Writers equate being published with being above criticism. Newsflash, asshole: for the past decade or so, they've published pretty much anything that had a slim chance of selling. That something has a chance of selling does not make it good, interesting, relevant, or worth anyone's time. If you didn't believe that before Twilight was published, that's okay, I guess. But if you still don't believe it now, you're a delusional asshole. Being published means precisely nothing, and publishing a "best seller" means even less.
Yeah, yeah, I know, "OMG UR JUST JELUS BECOZ UR NOT PUBLISHED". Go masturbate to Twilight and take another blue pill, bitch.
Writers are competitive. It's not a fucking competition! You have a story to tell; I have a story to tell. Oh, did more people read your story than mine? I must not have told the story people wanted to read, then, what's the big fucking deal? More readers means more comments and more comments means more chance that someone will misunderstand what you wrote, or accuse you of shit you didn't even know was possible to do with a piece of writing. Like hurt "the children". It's almost always the fucking children.
Imagine you're a supermarket cashier -- are you going to sob when someone passes your aisle and chooses the cashier next to you? No, you're going to be fucking ecstatic because it means you don't have to deal with another goddamned whiny customer. You're not going to assume that the customer thinks the other cashier is prettier or friendlier than you are, or better at cashier…ing. So why the fuck would you do that with writing? IT MAKES NO SENSE. If you really think you deserve to have more readers, find a trope people fall for (LUSTFUL BUT CHASTE VAMPIRES!)… or I guess you could learn to write better (what can I say?).
Writers are even more annoying in the company of other writers. I refuse to go to writers' conferences. Being surrounded by feverish writers practicing their pitches is pretty much my idea of hell. Yeah, I know, you won't sell it unless you go out there and try, but do you really have to be so annoyingly desperate? Don't even get me started on attending workshops or panels where writers talk about writing. All they do is sit around discussing their own writing and congratulating themselves and each other on being prolific, talented, visionary, whatever. I'd rather watch the fun kind of circle jerk, thanks. The sad thing is that the hopeful writers in the audience eat it all up like treacle and then go on to emulate this behaviour when they break out, perpetuating the cycle of suck for all eternity.
Writers exist in a state of painfully embarrassing self-importance, crippling insecurity, or a weird and volatile mixture of both. This makes them at the same time unreceptive to criticism and painfully sensitive to it. They view criticism of their work as an attack on their person, and if you piss off one with a negative remark, you've pissed off her entire writing group -- not because the other members of her group care about her; no. They just want to bully the critic into silence because they're afraid they might be next to get roasted. They tiptoe around each other's feelings and specialise in being vague and noncommittal:
"This is so great and visionary; I'm envious of your talent at underlining the unbearable lightness of being while expressing hard allegorical truths about the nature of man! The protagonist's motivation is a little bit unclear on page 564, but really, if a reader doesn't understand your intention from the rest of this (wonderfully epic!) story, it's really her fault for being so blinkered and conformist, so you don't even need to change anything; it's perfect!~ :-) :-) :-)"
This "peer review" can be used for pretty much any story in existence -- it has a steaming dollop of obnoxious flattery, an appearance of criticism (so the author can furiously masturbate that night to thoughts of how incredibly gracious she is in the face of what's obviously pure spite), and an insult to the potential (always blind, always undiscerning) audience.
All writers are equally obnoxious, but the published ones sometimes take their fail that extra special step further. Like that one bint who was all "I can be totally racist in my fiction because it's fiction and a means for my self-expression ALSO I R A PUBLISHED AUTHOR AND THEREFORE I DESERVE RESPECT FROM YOU PEONS WORSHIP MEEEEEE". And the other one after her who was all "I can totally write a historical novel set in America's past, only without any Natives 'cause I'm a Writer and I get to write them out if it's inconvenient for me to write about them, tee hee!". Or the douchenozzle who posted a bunch of racist shit in her LJ that upset a lot of folks, and then claimed it was all "for her writing research". The world is not your fucking research stomping ground, snowflake. Being a writer doesn't give you carte blanche to be a dickwad. Being a writer doesn't absolve you of social responsibility, either -- if you want to be edgy and write *ist crap, fucking wear it. Don't get all offended when you get called a *ist for it. Hey, you're changing the world with your ~*~art~*~, so what's a little *ism between you and some friends, amirite?
To sum up: STFU, GTFO, and don't forget that blue pill; I hear they taste like baby poop.