George Orwell, who write 1984 and Animal Farm, among others, once said:
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon… And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.”
Therefore, the question was asked, are all good stories inherently political? I don’t think that’s remotely true.
I was having a talk with a moderator of one of the writing forums I’m on and part of this was a laugh but mostly, it was just sad. This is just more evidence that these people are really, really pathetic. Not the mod, we’re friends, but the rank amateurs who care more about their feelings than they do about reality.
So, someone posted this on a writing forum and while I did respond there about some of the aspects brought up, some of it I thought would be best served responding here because a lot of these places get mad when you start to talk about reality unfiltered.
I have complained on numerous occasions about the ridiculous things that I see constantly on writing forums. It’s just not that often that I see a perfect example of why I have a problem with it.
Earlier today, I found myself in a discussion with a professional author friend of mine, someone who is part of my writing critique group. It isn’t like we get to talk a lot, in fact, I don’t think I’ve seen him face-to-face in a couple of years. However, we got to talking and the conversation rolled around to dealing with amateur writers and I was rather surprised at the response, because he seems to think pretty much like I do.
Now that I’m sort of kicking around Facebook again, and trust me, I’m doubting that decision every single day, I’m starting to see different perspectives and different ideas and, at least some of the time, it’s starting to look very similar to what I’ve faced before.
So I finally gave up and created another personal Facebook account, thinking that it had to be better than Reddit, at least if I stuck to the more “professional” sounding groups and yeah, it really isn’t.
This has come up in discussions a couple of times of late and I thought that I would put my thoughts down in one place, once and for all, because I’d rather have somewhere to point people to if they’re curious, rather than having to go over the same ground time and time again.
This is one that just bugs me, mostly because amateur writers tend to be so absurdly touchy about just about everything. They will ask for advice and when you offer it, no matter how delicately you do so, they will freak out because they don’t want to do what you’ve suggested. They want to continue doing all of the “bad” things they’ve been doing, they just want a “good” outcome.