/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.14516795]

>These editors asking you to rip the yarn never talk about politics beyond a possible desultory nod toward wanting stories from writers of “diverse backgrounds.” They do not talk about voice or literary style. They do not ask for excavations of an inner life or the forces of history or any of the things that once would have made a work of writing lasting. A writer may find clever ways to worm these things in, but in the end they are ancillary goods. The desire is always for work that puts narrative ahead of all other considerations, and this is the kind of writing that now dominates our literature: it describes the world without having a worldview. Which is a workable definition of the kind of writing most easily converted into IP.

why all writing is shit now, or -- cynically -- how to get paid:
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/they-made-a-movie-out-of-it-pogue
tl;dr google, amazon, and facefuck fucked it up

[Anonymous No.14516833]

>This was also the moment [post '08 crash] that Amazon explicitly set out to destroy the system by which books were published and sold in this country, and when Facebook and Google began their colonization of the business of American journalism. In short order, these companies became the windows through which almost all writing gets delivered to readers, leading to a situation where nearly 70 percent of internet advertising dollars go to Google, Facebook, and Amazon, while the portion that accrues to the outlets who produce the work is “barely a rounding error,” as Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery wrote recently in Mother Jones. We live in a time when our writing finds its audience not through the publishers and journalistic outlets that commission writing, but through a handful of unregulated monopolies that siphon off most of the revenue this work produces and that are almost entirely in control of its delivery to its eventual readers.

[Anonymous No.14516846]

> It turned out that people did still want to read books, and they even wanted to read them in print. So why had book advances not recovered? Many new forces of that era, like Vice, were glad to have an excuse not to pay decent wages, as they treated their writers as a cadre of interchangeable hustling losers, lucky to be writing at all. But mostly the answer was even more banal: Facebook, Amazon, and Google took all the money.

[Anonymous No.14516880]

>It turned out that the people who were still publishing American writing did not want literature, at least not in the quaint sense that we might have understood it a few decades ago. They wanted shareable writing in forms that were easy for publishers to reproduce and that were easy to absorb. Books and magazine pieces had, above all, to be simple to describe and package online, otherwise no one would click on them

[Anonymous No.14516899]

>Production companies in L.A. began hiring refugees from publishing faster than they could pack their stuff and leave Brooklyn. Bookish, young English majors who might once have hoped to spend their careers publishing literary fiction became dead-eyed hunters of writing that could be easily turned into a product, obsessively seeking out sneaks of drafts by magazine bros like David Kushner or genre writers like Don Winslow, whose work the new system best rewarded. Young writers, meanwhile, had figured out it was still possible to get paid. You just had to produce IP.

[Anonymous No.14516928]

> It may be that, in the average case, Hollywood options don’t pay wild sums. But often they offer a payday that makes writing worth it, and no one I know is stupid enough not to have taken note of this. Hollywood and big tech have not yet entirely merged, and there are interesting and original producers, screenwriters, and directors who do good work in the film system. But it’s true that in the last ten years, Hollywood has begun to morph into a business designed to develop content that fits easily into delivery systems designed by Amazon, Netflix, Apple, and Google, and that it was their entry into the market for IP that kicked off the book-to-film buying frenzy.

[Anonymous No.14516959]

>editors at prestige outlets increasingly view writing as germinal IP. We have a perfectly good word for the kind of writing and reporting this all encourages: trash. Trash is how we once thought of work designed above all to fit commercial demands and generic narrative forms. The imperative to produce it isn’t going away soon. But I don’t think we have to accept it. For one, we (especially me) should all stop writing for magazines. Everyone (especially me) should have stopped writing for magazines years ago. With few exceptions, these places have become formula-driven content dumpsters willing to outsource the obligation of paying their writers to companies in L.A.

[Anonymous No.14517012]

s-so, how's that novel going, anon?

[Anonymous No.14517246]

what's interesting is that the author is crafting this article according to the tactics that he is deriding

[Anonymous No.14518152]

bumping in case anyone who actually reads and writes still uses this board

[Anonymous No.14519257]

Thanks for posting op

[Anonymous No.14519307]

based and blackpilled