Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It’s...
As a genius writer I 100% consider myself capable of surgery. What, you’ve never heard of Ferdinand Demara?Honestly, I think the whole “don’t pay the writers” thing boils down to the notion that everybody thinks they can write. It’s the old saw about the novelist at a cocktail party having to hear someone say, for the millionth time, “I’d love to write a book someday.”
Someone–Stephen King? Pretty sure I saw this in a Stephen King foreword–once said they’d like to say to a brain surgeon, “Boy, I’d love to do brain surgery someday.”
We treat “the ability to put words into a sentence” like it’s just the same as “the ability to form a coherent narrative that engenders a variety of emotions within the reader and puts them in a scene and shows them what they didn’t see before”.
And that’s like me drawing a stick figure and saying I’m an artist.
Writers are constantly devalued because everyone thinks they have a book in them and don’t realize the level of skill and commitment it takes to finish even a short story, much less a whole book.
This goes well beyond fandom, but man, I would’ve hoped fandom would know better.
***REBLOGS AGGRESSIVELY***
Also like this notion that writing is not a form of art? Stop that. Writing fiction is a form of art. A good book is like any other form of artwork. It stirs your emotions, it makes you connect to something, it fills some deep need inside you. It makes you feel things or opens your mind, or something.
It’s not art in the same way a painting or pottery or a marble sculpture is, but it is art none-the-less and deserves to be respected as such. Writers are artists, and it takes a lot of practice and effort to be able to write well.