I’m being kind with my title tho. What I truly meant to say is that the authors who make these kind of characters with professions related to writing and publishing are lazy af. Make them bookworms, sure. Music lovers, yeah, I mean who isn’t. But everything is literally on the internet right now. Professional people blog and vlog every hour of their work day. There are literally chefs, pilots, and oil-field workers out there putting out POVs of what they do at work. Research is easier than ever. Occupation, the mundane details of it, doesn’t even play a large part in most of the stories anyway. Still, many authors (I’m looking at you romance authors) make the most boring choice of making their characters writers.
I don’t care if everyone says your story is amazing and it deserves to be the Book of the Year or even the Noble Prize. If your main character is a writer, I’m dropping that shit.
by hyrulepirate
21 Comments
Seems petty. But you are free to do as you please I suppose.
Curiously, what’s a Noble Prize?
Yeah, writers who write characters that are the same sex, race and age bracket as them are lazy as fuck lol
Misery, Salems Lot, and the Shining?
This is a weird thing to be so passionate about, but you do you I guess.
🤷♀️ to me, laziness in a writer will out in all kinds of ways. I don’t see any need to appoint this particular thing as especially indicative.
Your system, your rules. If that’s how you feel and you feel that strongly about it, you do you.
A couple of thoughts, for the sake of conversation? I don’t read romances, but I am familiar with a lot of them being formulaic based on character traits and plot points that were invented a long while back. I wouldn’t hold it against a genre that it is abiding by its own accepted norms.
I’ll also put it to you that lots of first-person narratives have the narrator be a literary sort, because that’s a pretty easy way to explain why they are telling their story the way you are reading it.
As a final thought, it would be pretty tough to ding Little Women for being a story about a writer. To me, that’s a huge part of the appeal where you are left wondering where the author is drawing the divide between herself and one of the characters.
Again, those are my ‘I’m not sure this holds up’ first thoughts, but you are 100% entitled to your position, however arbitrary it might seem to me.
*Edit:* And downvoted inside of six minutes. I’m going to assume OP did not want to have a conversation about this? Fair enough. Twitter/X might be the better place for screaming angry thoughts into the void, though…
As the saying goes, write what you know (but not what you know well, because that’s lazy).
I get where you’re coming from, but I don’t think the books are inherently bad. I think if the author can avoid being too self-indulgent, however, it’s still possible to write a good book with a writer protagonist. These setups are a bit in vogue in a certain class of literature, I would agree. But again, I don’t think that makes them categorically bad.
If anything, I think I find myself more bothered by the outsized attention these types of books receive. Any creative industry or community works that reflect on or romanticize that form itself. Hollywood/film is much the same way (think about stuff like The Fabelmans, La La Land, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Artist – all majorly celebrated works). But they really do tend to get relatively large amount of attention.
Such a strange take
Cool 😎 take but snoody. Where can we see your curated list of top rated books 📚?
Well, that’s pretty silly, but thanks for sharing.
Perhaps you should read *All the Wrong Questions* by Lemony Snicket. Yes, there are numerous characters who are librarians, but the books serve almost an ode to librarians. The characters rely on libraries for research (as was the case in his *A Series of Unfortunate Events* books) because there’s no internet in that world. By denying the possibility of internet, I’ve got to doubt that the author took the easy, lazy route. You might see it as doing the opposite.
Also wondering how this works in the case of biographies/autobiographies of writers/librarians/publishers? Is it impossible for this to be perfect? Because if the book is there to tell readers about these people, it would be impossible for them to actually achieve their goals.
I know what you mean, as there is something about it that warrants a healthy amount of suspicion. However, in the end it’s all about execution. Your embargo could prevent you from reading some pretty good books, such as
– *The Hundred Brothers* by Donald Antrim (manic surreality, takes place in a library),
– *The Novelist* by Jordan Castro (well-written farce about an aspiring author),
– *The Plot* by Jean Hanff Korelitz (a very tense thriller, main character’s a writer),
and more. I agree, it can be self-indulgent, but there are authors who earn it by actually doing a good job.
What a lazy take. Pass.
I think it has to do with a fundamental element of story. Which is, what the heck is the protagonist doing there, and why should we care? What makes this story and passage of events special?
You can’t ask a fish if it enjoys swimming in water. To make outside observations you need an outsider looking in. So protagonists are usually in some way intersectional with the world. Story’s with something to say are usually critical of the world or characters in it.
But there is an element of laziness to it. To write a protagonist as a lawyer or a cop or a chef you must have some understanding of these things. Or it comes off phony. Most successful writers know writing. And they have to research something else.
The Librarian from the discworld books would have things to say about your opinion, and all those things are “Ooook”.
I don’t agree with or understand your opinion, but it’s fine. You do you.
Stephen king takes this as a personal attack
Not sure why you felt a need to post this particular dislike, in this forum. As if we here might have any sort of influence over what writers choose to do with their careers.
Don’t read what you dislike. There. Done.
I hate reading about writers in books – I don’t like when it’s obvious that an author has jammed their own experiences in (I know that all authors do it but when it’s not disguised at all it grates).
I think sometimes as well, the obligatory passages about the wonder of books, how great it is to read, the joy of being in a bookshop etc etc… feels a bit like a lecture, and I don’t need it, I’m already here, reading! No need to convince me further!
There’s also the fact that so many writers are just insufferable when they talk about their work. Obviously I live their work, but why do they become such a smug bastard when being interviewed?
r/deardiary