I just got done with a long discussion with a young person on Facebook in a writing group. They were claiming that writing is automatically against any young writer. Why? Because they weren’t instantly successful with their very first book with absolutely no effort on their part. Therefore, it’s all a conspiracy!
It’s really sad that I have to explain this stuff, but I do.
I get that some of them have been lied to their entire life and in that, they’re somewhat the victims, but at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. You, as an adult, are responsible for your life. Nobody has to do things for you, you have to learn to do them for yourself. When their helicopter parents told them they could do anything they wanted to and that they were special, they were lied to. When their teachers told them that the world owed them a living, that was wrong. This is not how reality works. Never has been and never will be. It’s unfortunate that they were mislead this way, but it’s time to grow up, deal with the actual reality in which they live, and get on with being a responsible adult.
This is really, I think, where self-publishing has been a bad thing. With no gatekeepers, there is no quality control. If anyone can scribble down a load of garbage in the morning and publish it on Amazon by afternoon, that harms everyone. It floods the market with crap and it makes potential readers overly-cautious because they have a good chance of buying bullshit if they dare to try a new author. That harms everyone.
That said, try suggesting to any group of young authors that maybe there needs to be quality control and you’ll hear them howl. Why? Because they think they’re special. They think that their shit doesn’t smell.
They are wrong.
I’m not suggesting that every young author is bad at writing because that’s certainly not the case. There is plenty of good, solid storytelling out there, written by people in their 20s. It is just vastly overshadowed by the flood of barely-intelligible garbage that pushes everyone, even the most talented, down in the ratings because there’s just so much of it.
This is where, I think, the upbringing of the past couple of generations comes in. As I said, it might not all be their fault, at least not directly, but it’s still something they need to be able to change. Just about every young person I talk to in the writing sphere has a serious issue with this. They figure that if they bothered to do a thing, and it really doesn’t matter what that thing is, then someone has to pony up money and pay them for it. That’s really why so many of them want to work on YouTube. YouTube used to be a place for people to share their passions. It wasn’t a career path. It was something people did for fun. Today, many people want to make money off of it. No matter how badly done, no matter how vapid the content, they think someone owes them for their efforts.
This is also true in writing. In traditional publishing, where you had to have talent and be able to sell your work to a publisher, the average fiction author wrote between 6-10 full length books before they got anywhere remotely close to having something worth putting on the market. Some went more, some less, but it was never “I gave it a shot, pay me!” Most young people today, not all, I stress, but most, don’t have that kind of patience. They want their very first attempt to be saleable. If you tell them that it isn’t, they call you a fascist or some other name because they aren’t actual adults. They are children who have never matured into an actual mature person. They have entirely unrealistic expectations and it is those expectations that get them into trouble. They can’t just insist that they deserve to be paid, they have to convince people that they’ve earned it.
That’s where most go wrong. I’ve read a lot of things by young authors. Some is good, most is really bad but the people writing the worst are the ones with the strongest Dunning-Kruger syndrome. They think they’re wonderful because their parents and teachers told them they were. They don’t want constructive criticism. They want praise. They want to be compensated because they tried. That is going to get them nowhere useful in life. It is only going to ensure their failure.
It’s really time to say enough is enough. Nobody cares about your feelings, we care about reality. The fact is, your writing is garbage. The only way you get better is through practice and your practice isn’t going to be for sale. We need gatekeepers, not to keep ideas or people out of the market, but to make sure the market meets certain minimum quality standards. There should be no exceptions. If you want to be an author, learn to write. Your feelings are irrelevant. It’s time to grow the hell up.
