Once upon a time, the majority of books were well-written, at least in the basics, before they made it into the bookstores and the majority of movies at least kind of made sense, unless they were intended to be avantgarde.
Movies, my wife and I point them out to each other and have a saying, "Hollywood" as a shorthand for, "They did something that doesn't make sense. They either broke the laws of physics, have a plot hole, ignore history, or have a stupid deus ex machina."
It's not that we enjoy these. It's merely that we understand that sinful people are stupid, and Hollywood is filled with sinful, incompetent people. The movies that do this are never watched again. The ones that don't get added to the watch list, and might be rewatched at a later date (usually my wife has hand projects and likes background noise while working on them. I usually go to podcasts because I like more thought and information in such circumstances).
So, it is what it is. We plebs can only change things by what we watch, and the majority of Americans use media to entertain, not recreate. As such, our habits are a drop in the bucket, and even then are gatekept in part by algos and what we can afford - which is what is free on Amazon streaming and a free Catholic streaming service of saint movies at this time, unfortunately.
I didn't emphasize it in the article, but it's the sheer number of books that are written as if they don't remember what the rules are for their genre that have me the most baffled.
I think part of that too is the whole post modernist trend that has been going on in recent years - the desire to tear apart everything that came before. So everything is getting subverted to make it "new" or "refreshing" for "modern audiences."
I have been pleased to see that some people seem to be getting tired of this. It's strange how the tearing apart is often over some little thing--often more about something the tearer wants to show off their knowledge on and less about what makes a good story experience for the audience/reader.
That's what happens with the democratization of the industry. The publishers treated writers like slaves. Amazon gave them a way out, but also pays poorly except to those the algo pushes. Vox has broken down and shown how it cannibalizes the market well enough to convince me it's not viable long term.
But editors, good ones, do their jobs well. Picking good authors, filling plot holes, helping them grow their craft, etc.
But not giving good advances, not paying well for sales beyond the original contract, and betting only on a couple big names is a losing game by the publishers. They cannibalized their own market, just like Marvel and DC did for movies.
Anyways, right now the publishers seem to be simply a catering to our base desires for the most part in terms of what sells the best. Especially Amazon. As I'm sure that you, being a writer, understand - you just wrote on this on the last one I commented on.
The flooded market makes it harder to find those diamonds worth spending money on. It's really all about getting things recommended, and knowing the person recommending it has the same taste as you.
*edit*
It's why the based book sale is so nice. Because even on those, there's a lot of disagreement about different things. Sexual morality and decency is the biggest one. Go girlism. What Vox Day would call gamma literature. It's not that these have no place - its that I simply don't find them appealing.
Power creep in some fantasy and sci-fi is a huge one - Chris Nuttal's book series on the girl in another universe I put down when she caused a nuclear explosion for that reason. It's nothing wrong on his part - the series might be captivating, he just created a character that can't be beaten now. An editor would hopefully tell him to back off.
Anyways, these things are creeping in all over the place in the genre. It makes finding books to enjoy difficult. But maybe I'm just a picky reader.
But yes. I think things like Based Book Sales is a great step...and I hope it grows in years to come.
It can't do everything...as you say, not everyone agrees on what fits or would enjoy each book...but it's a start.
(Chris's heroine still has many problems, over and above the fact that there are many kinds of problems that blowing up the whole town won't solve. ;-)
Agreed - see 'you go girlism' - but I'm not going to tear down a man's hard work in public beyond the glaringly obvious, and stating what made me put the series down.
And I think the based book sale will continue to grow. I know it's helped me find good books to spend my meager funds on. I thus assume it has for others.
I've had more and more trouble finding anything decent to read among newer books. I was trying out a popular Christian author's latest book, and like ... The characters were cliches, and the writing was that breathless semi-poetic voice that only shows how much poetry the author has never read. I barely made it through the sample. I'm always trying to read fairytale romances, but the trend now is to gender swap everything. Fairytales are heavily male and female encoded. When you have a princess swinging a sword to chop through a hedge of thorns to rescue the sleeping prince, that little voice starts up in the back of my head. "Hope he doesn't mind sleeping an extra decade, because it'll take her that long to get through." Especially when she's been described as 5 even and her only strength is her tongue. Ugh.
She has a sword AND she's running from an arranged marriage to a rich cat who would dramatically lift her and her family out of poverty! I've been studying feudalism with my kids and I think most of these fairytale writers would tell a lot better stories if they had any idea of the politics of the time and place.
Also, ever since I saw the Elf Story video by Cox and Crendor on youtube, I've been completely ruined on all YA fantasy. "I don't want to be a cookie maker! I want to fight wars with the high elves!"
Tut, tut, tut. The heroines who run away from arranged marriages are already princesses, or at least well off. And usually because it's to her own father. (See All Kinds of Fur, Donkeyskin, and The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter -- and she ends up working as a scullery maid until the ball.)
I've been in discussions where I announced that Alissandra, in *The Princess Seeks Her Fortune* IS your typical fairy-tale princess, which makes her just about unique nowadays. I've gotten some odd looks but no one ever disputes the point.
(On sale now in many fine online venues! But it does not go into the Pop Top 20 tales.)
I think I tend to be emotionally charged when reading or partaking in movies and don't notice such things until later. I love a certain series that is great until the end, but I have read it multiple times. I don't want to write that way though.
I can't talk about something until I can think about it, and even then, I try not to dissect it. I want to write and publish, though, which might be something to get over.
I do complain about these problems. Issues with consistency, characters acting out of character, etc. It's something I can't turn off, so sometimes I have to keep it to myself. Makes me a decent editor (if I do say so myself), but with the normies I tend to get a lot of "It's just a movie, bro" or "It was written for kids" style pushback. When we continuously settle for spectacle over good writing, we wind up with what passes for entertainment today.
At least we can hold ourselves to a higher standard and release works we're proud of, even if the extra effort is not always appreciated.
Yes. At every level books were better edited and had better control of plot. The Tor / YA novel sag in the middle of the story when the emotional B (or even C) plot takes over for a while before the other plot threads pick up again.
I picked up a few romance novels to read for my current project...recommended by other readers...and two of them, it was as if the art of how to write a romance and keep track of the heroine's emotions had been entirely forgotten. I had to go back to 2000 and before to find good ones.
I notice. Let it get bad enough, and I pull out my pick axe, chop out the interesting part of the idea, and run off with it under my cloak so I can write my own story. (Though there does have to be something interesting.)
Interesting. I recall that there was a period where John found bad novels really inspiring, because he would be filled with ideas on how to do whatever it was better.
Many year ago, I knew both PHN and TNH before they were a pair Later, I realized that they were likely throwing Hugos to their favored authors before Y2k. I ha suspicions but kept silent. I was not 12 wen I met them an years later, who was I? I had, by that time stopped attending conventions because fandom had left me, More years passed, and along came Sad Puppies... and by that time I consigned fandom to the ash bin of history.Fate is fickle and I found that I had some degree of talent in writing. I wrote. My fans are partisan comparing me to this that or the other writers. The only one I cared about was H Beam Piper who died the year of my birth, I write in his style to this day, as much as I can.
At first I simply stopped buying books, particularly by anything recommended by Locus. Then I bought just from authors I like, but looked at many. Now, most of what I see is dreck.
I have lost heart even if I have a dozen books on kindle. To put it bluntly, the fandom I knew and adored is dead to me. I write these days for my own pleasure and if the tropes I favor suck to others, tough!
John and I have had experiences that are similar in some ways.
David Hartwell, may he rest in peace (dead nine years yesterday, I believe), told us at the beginning of Sad Puppies that Tor was gaming the Hugos...but that there was nothing that he and those who disagreed could do. He was quite a fine man, so I believe him. (If you did not know him, he was a Tor editor, a very fine one.)
One of the sad things about not having a gathered fandom such as once was is that it is much harder to guess what people might like to read.
I first heard of Sad Puppies from Sarah Hoyt (she of sainted name), but all I could do was talk and that was, sadly, not enough. The Hugo is gone, now there is the Dragon Awards, but they have no history. Most people are content to hold to the known and not the new. At not quite 12, I threw myself into fandom wholeheartedly. Few seemed to care, and for the first time I was a peer.
These days I look back and wish I'd seen the future. But, like most real fans, I had no conception of just what that future would be. IMHO the most pernicious belief since is the left. That class of theories have never worked, and have destroyed much. I am pleased abuut yesterday.
Heard someone describe it once as "blank-canvas storytelling."
I don't think anybody has done a deep dive on it yet, but it seems to be almost like a writing prompt, where you give like the equivalent of an outline, and then let your audiences' minds fill in the rest. Which is great for the author because then everyone literally creates the story they like best while you get all the credit for it.
I've seen this sometimes with "second screen" watching people. We're doing a movie or tv show, the person's eyes drift down to their phone...
Then later when talking with them, you start to realize they either missed something completely, or they have invented whole assumptions that weren't in the film.
with movies, there is a teensy bit of room here because there are time limits and budgets and demands by producers, so often a plot hole exists because the producer left the footage that explains that plot hole on the cutting room floor.
Still, that's only a teensy bit of room because you are very much right in that most story mediums these days, whether they be book, tv, or movie are all falling into this same trap. And I think it may well be that the newer producers and writers coming up had not been taught critical thinking or really studied what makes a good story. Schooling at both the secondary and collegiate levels has really gotten bad in this country. Have you see the articles lately talking about how incoming college students have never been required to finish a book in their life and are appalled that they are expected to actually read 3 or 4 books from cover to cover for their English class?
Though I will also admit freely that not all my favorite books and movies from the past always made sense either :) Still, there is a big reason why there are fewer and fewer movies that stand the test of time. How many movies from before 2000 are considered classics and worth rewatching time and time again? Now think of movies made after 2000?
Its both the writers and the readers, I think. Readers have had the same education as the writers. And one penchant of younger readers today is to think the world started in 2000; they don't know that there is anything out there to compare to. Now this is changing some - Zoomers and generation alpha have some fascination with the 70's and 80's and are learning about the movies and shows from those two decades so maybe things will change in the future?
But meanwhile, I'm like you - I don't read nearly as much as I used to and I read even fewer books written in the last 20 years. I've got several that I have samples for on my e-reader but I'd say I usually pitch 98% of them. Very, very few actually lead to a book sale and that's usually because the characterization is terrible or the hook is terrible or there are already plot holes in the first chapter that stretch my generous thread of credulity to its breaking point.
Regarding movies...people now just put things in the background, so they're not absorbing it as fast. I do this sometimes (fold laundry, cook, pay bills etc. with a movie or show on) but if something is actually good, my chores unexpectedly go on hold. When it's bad and we're just kind of vegging out, heh, out comes the phone or book.
Frozen was a kid's movie, the music is fun, and a whole section of very vocal sorts glommed onto it. This combo meant it didn't get the criticism it deserves.
With books...readers are an odd lot. First, things get pushed "artificially" by companies or people who know how to work the system and get eyes on books that are good enough. Bad execution of favorite tropes hits it off with people who just really like those plot points, too.
That's very good point about a lot of people not paying that much attention to movies. If you're not paying much attention, you're enjoying color, drama, dialogue, then whether they really make sense or not is really not that big an issue.
About books, I hold them to higher standards.
Movies, my wife and I point them out to each other and have a saying, "Hollywood" as a shorthand for, "They did something that doesn't make sense. They either broke the laws of physics, have a plot hole, ignore history, or have a stupid deus ex machina."
It's not that we enjoy these. It's merely that we understand that sinful people are stupid, and Hollywood is filled with sinful, incompetent people. The movies that do this are never watched again. The ones that don't get added to the watch list, and might be rewatched at a later date (usually my wife has hand projects and likes background noise while working on them. I usually go to podcasts because I like more thought and information in such circumstances).
So, it is what it is. We plebs can only change things by what we watch, and the majority of Americans use media to entertain, not recreate. As such, our habits are a drop in the bucket, and even then are gatekept in part by algos and what we can afford - which is what is free on Amazon streaming and a free Catholic streaming service of saint movies at this time, unfortunately.
I didn't emphasize it in the article, but it's the sheer number of books that are written as if they don't remember what the rules are for their genre that have me the most baffled.
You make a good point about movies.
I think part of that too is the whole post modernist trend that has been going on in recent years - the desire to tear apart everything that came before. So everything is getting subverted to make it "new" or "refreshing" for "modern audiences."
I have been pleased to see that some people seem to be getting tired of this. It's strange how the tearing apart is often over some little thing--often more about something the tearer wants to show off their knowledge on and less about what makes a good story experience for the audience/reader.
That's what happens with the democratization of the industry. The publishers treated writers like slaves. Amazon gave them a way out, but also pays poorly except to those the algo pushes. Vox has broken down and shown how it cannibalizes the market well enough to convince me it's not viable long term.
But editors, good ones, do their jobs well. Picking good authors, filling plot holes, helping them grow their craft, etc.
But not giving good advances, not paying well for sales beyond the original contract, and betting only on a couple big names is a losing game by the publishers. They cannibalized their own market, just like Marvel and DC did for movies.
Anyways, right now the publishers seem to be simply a catering to our base desires for the most part in terms of what sells the best. Especially Amazon. As I'm sure that you, being a writer, understand - you just wrote on this on the last one I commented on.
The flooded market makes it harder to find those diamonds worth spending money on. It's really all about getting things recommended, and knowing the person recommending it has the same taste as you.
*edit*
It's why the based book sale is so nice. Because even on those, there's a lot of disagreement about different things. Sexual morality and decency is the biggest one. Go girlism. What Vox Day would call gamma literature. It's not that these have no place - its that I simply don't find them appealing.
Power creep in some fantasy and sci-fi is a huge one - Chris Nuttal's book series on the girl in another universe I put down when she caused a nuclear explosion for that reason. It's nothing wrong on his part - the series might be captivating, he just created a character that can't be beaten now. An editor would hopefully tell him to back off.
Anyways, these things are creeping in all over the place in the genre. It makes finding books to enjoy difficult. But maybe I'm just a picky reader.
But yes. I think things like Based Book Sales is a great step...and I hope it grows in years to come.
It can't do everything...as you say, not everyone agrees on what fits or would enjoy each book...but it's a start.
(Chris's heroine still has many problems, over and above the fact that there are many kinds of problems that blowing up the whole town won't solve. ;-)
Agreed - see 'you go girlism' - but I'm not going to tear down a man's hard work in public beyond the glaringly obvious, and stating what made me put the series down.
And I think the based book sale will continue to grow. I know it's helped me find good books to spend my meager funds on. I thus assume it has for others.
Even a sale that had only the genre we like would have books that were more and less to our taste.
This way, we can skip the less to the taste authors in later sales and get more of the more to the taste.
I've had more and more trouble finding anything decent to read among newer books. I was trying out a popular Christian author's latest book, and like ... The characters were cliches, and the writing was that breathless semi-poetic voice that only shows how much poetry the author has never read. I barely made it through the sample. I'm always trying to read fairytale romances, but the trend now is to gender swap everything. Fairytales are heavily male and female encoded. When you have a princess swinging a sword to chop through a hedge of thorns to rescue the sleeping prince, that little voice starts up in the back of my head. "Hope he doesn't mind sleeping an extra decade, because it'll take her that long to get through." Especially when she's been described as 5 even and her only strength is her tongue. Ugh.
I have had the same trouble with fairytale retellings.
Once upon a time, I loved stories with girls with swords...now my eyes glaze over. I don't want to read them.
She has a sword AND she's running from an arranged marriage to a rich cat who would dramatically lift her and her family out of poverty! I've been studying feudalism with my kids and I think most of these fairytale writers would tell a lot better stories if they had any idea of the politics of the time and place.
Also, ever since I saw the Elf Story video by Cox and Crendor on youtube, I've been completely ruined on all YA fantasy. "I don't want to be a cookie maker! I want to fight wars with the high elves!"
lol
Yeah...as a history buff it bugs me that they have no context for why things are the way they were.
Tut, tut, tut. The heroines who run away from arranged marriages are already princesses, or at least well off. And usually because it's to her own father. (See All Kinds of Fur, Donkeyskin, and The King Who Wished to Marry His Daughter -- and she ends up working as a scullery maid until the ball.)
:-)
Though I just had the funny thought that I know of two older women who were actually taught to box by their fathers.
Neither of them could actually, successfully, box, though. Even if they might have been able to surprise someone with one solid punch.
How very true.
I've been in discussions where I announced that Alissandra, in *The Princess Seeks Her Fortune* IS your typical fairy-tale princess, which makes her just about unique nowadays. I've gotten some odd looks but no one ever disputes the point.
(On sale now in many fine online venues! But it does not go into the Pop Top 20 tales.)
I think I tend to be emotionally charged when reading or partaking in movies and don't notice such things until later. I love a certain series that is great until the end, but I have read it multiple times. I don't want to write that way though.
I can't talk about something until I can think about it, and even then, I try not to dissect it. I want to write and publish, though, which might be something to get over.
I do think not really knowing what you think until some time has gone by after reading/watching it is a common occurrence.
I do complain about these problems. Issues with consistency, characters acting out of character, etc. It's something I can't turn off, so sometimes I have to keep it to myself. Makes me a decent editor (if I do say so myself), but with the normies I tend to get a lot of "It's just a movie, bro" or "It was written for kids" style pushback. When we continuously settle for spectacle over good writing, we wind up with what passes for entertainment today.
At least we can hold ourselves to a higher standard and release works we're proud of, even if the extra effort is not always appreciated.
I keep thinking that quality tells. It doesn't look that way at the moment...but it might look that way again in the future.
Yes. At every level books were better edited and had better control of plot. The Tor / YA novel sag in the middle of the story when the emotional B (or even C) plot takes over for a while before the other plot threads pick up again.
I picked up a few romance novels to read for my current project...recommended by other readers...and two of them, it was as if the art of how to write a romance and keep track of the heroine's emotions had been entirely forgotten. I had to go back to 2000 and before to find good ones.
I notice. Let it get bad enough, and I pull out my pick axe, chop out the interesting part of the idea, and run off with it under my cloak so I can write my own story. (Though there does have to be something interesting.)
Interesting. I recall that there was a period where John found bad novels really inspiring, because he would be filled with ideas on how to do whatever it was better.
Many year ago, I knew both PHN and TNH before they were a pair Later, I realized that they were likely throwing Hugos to their favored authors before Y2k. I ha suspicions but kept silent. I was not 12 wen I met them an years later, who was I? I had, by that time stopped attending conventions because fandom had left me, More years passed, and along came Sad Puppies... and by that time I consigned fandom to the ash bin of history.Fate is fickle and I found that I had some degree of talent in writing. I wrote. My fans are partisan comparing me to this that or the other writers. The only one I cared about was H Beam Piper who died the year of my birth, I write in his style to this day, as much as I can.
At first I simply stopped buying books, particularly by anything recommended by Locus. Then I bought just from authors I like, but looked at many. Now, most of what I see is dreck.
I have lost heart even if I have a dozen books on kindle. To put it bluntly, the fandom I knew and adored is dead to me. I write these days for my own pleasure and if the tropes I favor suck to others, tough!
John and I have had experiences that are similar in some ways.
David Hartwell, may he rest in peace (dead nine years yesterday, I believe), told us at the beginning of Sad Puppies that Tor was gaming the Hugos...but that there was nothing that he and those who disagreed could do. He was quite a fine man, so I believe him. (If you did not know him, he was a Tor editor, a very fine one.)
One of the sad things about not having a gathered fandom such as once was is that it is much harder to guess what people might like to read.
I first heard of Sad Puppies from Sarah Hoyt (she of sainted name), but all I could do was talk and that was, sadly, not enough. The Hugo is gone, now there is the Dragon Awards, but they have no history. Most people are content to hold to the known and not the new. At not quite 12, I threw myself into fandom wholeheartedly. Few seemed to care, and for the first time I was a peer.
These days I look back and wish I'd seen the future. But, like most real fans, I had no conception of just what that future would be. IMHO the most pernicious belief since is the left. That class of theories have never worked, and have destroyed much. I am pleased abuut yesterday.
Completely agree.
I am cautiously hopeful that something better may be ahead.
Heard someone describe it once as "blank-canvas storytelling."
I don't think anybody has done a deep dive on it yet, but it seems to be almost like a writing prompt, where you give like the equivalent of an outline, and then let your audiences' minds fill in the rest. Which is great for the author because then everyone literally creates the story they like best while you get all the credit for it.
I've seen this sometimes with "second screen" watching people. We're doing a movie or tv show, the person's eyes drift down to their phone...
Then later when talking with them, you start to realize they either missed something completely, or they have invented whole assumptions that weren't in the film.
Interesting about the second screen watchers.
> “What the streamers want most right now is ‘second-screen content,’ where you can be on your phone while it’s on.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/notes-on-hollywood/why-are-tv-writers-so-miserable
with movies, there is a teensy bit of room here because there are time limits and budgets and demands by producers, so often a plot hole exists because the producer left the footage that explains that plot hole on the cutting room floor.
Still, that's only a teensy bit of room because you are very much right in that most story mediums these days, whether they be book, tv, or movie are all falling into this same trap. And I think it may well be that the newer producers and writers coming up had not been taught critical thinking or really studied what makes a good story. Schooling at both the secondary and collegiate levels has really gotten bad in this country. Have you see the articles lately talking about how incoming college students have never been required to finish a book in their life and are appalled that they are expected to actually read 3 or 4 books from cover to cover for their English class?
Though I will also admit freely that not all my favorite books and movies from the past always made sense either :) Still, there is a big reason why there are fewer and fewer movies that stand the test of time. How many movies from before 2000 are considered classics and worth rewatching time and time again? Now think of movies made after 2000?
Its both the writers and the readers, I think. Readers have had the same education as the writers. And one penchant of younger readers today is to think the world started in 2000; they don't know that there is anything out there to compare to. Now this is changing some - Zoomers and generation alpha have some fascination with the 70's and 80's and are learning about the movies and shows from those two decades so maybe things will change in the future?
But meanwhile, I'm like you - I don't read nearly as much as I used to and I read even fewer books written in the last 20 years. I've got several that I have samples for on my e-reader but I'd say I usually pitch 98% of them. Very, very few actually lead to a book sale and that's usually because the characterization is terrible or the hook is terrible or there are already plot holes in the first chapter that stretch my generous thread of credulity to its breaking point.
I do think having small plot holes in movies is understandable. Often, that plot hole is covered in something that is on the cutting room floor.
You may be right about the decline in teaching reasoning leading to a decline in noticing things being out of place.
Regarding movies...people now just put things in the background, so they're not absorbing it as fast. I do this sometimes (fold laundry, cook, pay bills etc. with a movie or show on) but if something is actually good, my chores unexpectedly go on hold. When it's bad and we're just kind of vegging out, heh, out comes the phone or book.
Frozen was a kid's movie, the music is fun, and a whole section of very vocal sorts glommed onto it. This combo meant it didn't get the criticism it deserves.
With books...readers are an odd lot. First, things get pushed "artificially" by companies or people who know how to work the system and get eyes on books that are good enough. Bad execution of favorite tropes hits it off with people who just really like those plot points, too.
That's very good point about a lot of people not paying that much attention to movies. If you're not paying much attention, you're enjoying color, drama, dialogue, then whether they really make sense or not is really not that big an issue.