You don’t need to be some kind of prophet to see the stagnation in media. It’s a graveyard of lack of ideas, like a day job for the dead.
One thing about being a professional writer is that you become a realist very quickly. Everyone else thinks they’re writers. They know everything. Pedants usually think they’re God. One step above God are squeaky little critics and incredibly insular publishers.
…So, what’s new? These are the C students from grade school who need to be like that to pretend they’re anyone or anything. I couldn’t care less. If you write, expect to be misread. If you’re trying to make a point, expect that point to be missed.
In commercial writing, they want “safe” stuff. The sort of stuff which everybody’s read a thousand times before. It only exists because something like it was accepted before. They literally don’t need to read it, simply because it’s not new. That’s market standard, aka unmitigated cookie-cutter crap. No points of interest; just obvious blurb. Then publish.
B2B is a case in point. Uninteresting content is suicide for this market. What if somebody ever actually got someone else interested in the client’s product? Where would we be?
The idea is to sell to businesses. These businesses need to see value, not a tide of cliches they’ve seen everywhere else since they went into business. You have to show value, not just prattle on about it. …But the cookie-cutter mindsets make sure the lowest common denominator is what they read.
B2C is the other no-brainer. What’s in it for the buyer? You’ll never know and neither will they. Mainly because nobody will bother to tell them. Just add images and pretend you’re doing your job.
Even the bureaucracy that inflicts this formatting is automated. That doesn’t do much for anyone. I just got a grammar correct for the word “crap”. It “may be offensive, apparently. Presumably to people who’ve never had an actual conversation or heard a word said to them on any subject in their lives. Meh.
I write anything and everything. My default is creative writing. My stock in trade is ideas. You may have heard of them if you’re old enough.
Here is where the farce expands. New ideas sell, so they say. You’d never guess that from the formatted-to-death media you see. “Bland” is flattery. Any new idea would be lucky to encounter anyone who understands it.
The graveyard of formatting infects the subjects. Doesn’t matter how interesting the subject might have been. For example – Even the ridiculous hype about AI is all highly formatted sales pitch. You don’t need to know a damn thing about AI to write that garbage. …And they obviously don’t. Just about all of them write the same thing about the same things in the same way. There’s not a single new idea in the mix.
Must be nice to be a dinky little commercial publisher. You can be totally illiterate and simply categorize accordingly:
- Fiction
- Nonfiction
- History for ignoramuses
- Technical and scientific writing for the incredibly patient
- Pabulum, usually political or celebrity babble
- Sex – Third party, of course, with guidelines.
- Gutless writing “help” for timid little servile sycophants
These categories infallibly miss the point about why anyone reads anything. Reading is a personal perspective. You interpret. You visualize. Readers have self-interest, too, particularly on subjects that matter to them. Do you think these people want to read slop? They don’t, and they won’t read it at gunpoint. Why spend money on variations on Jack and Jill?
People don’t actually have to read anything, and they won’t if the content is too dull or predictable.
Talking about dull – Market ignorance is now an industry in itself. If that load of crud is any sort of market analysis, the word analysis needs rebooting or shooting.
Patronizing interlude – Do you like books about thirty-somethings? Of course, you do, and you desperately need to pay for the privilege of being insulted at soul level.
Marketing, you say? No.
The “idea” is that people are obsessed with whatever suburban trivia someone condescends to publish or stream. Hence the categories. As usual, “the means is the end”. No objectives. No new horizons. No inspirations. A rather shabby draining dish of whatever and about as interesting.
It’s as bad as standup comedy. After you’ve done the imaginary friend routine, meaning one more friend than most people have, you’ve got a yawning void, and probably a yawning audience.
Most of what you see in media are ideas up to 100 years old. The sheer stagnation of the sector produces more of them, slightly repackaged. Hollywood has been living on Stan Lee and George Lucas for 50 years. Storylines are rejigged by thematic panel beaters and intense meetings with the dead.
So much for the background.
In this environment, I don’t expect much from anyone. Very little if anything. My sole claim to any kind of writing skill is that I do at least try. I like to explore ideas. This is not the place to do that.
What really annoys me is the utter lack of understanding of even the basic need for new product and new ideas. This is the creative pre-Cambrian, duly fossilized by the sector. That’s what’s killing this culture – Autotoxicity, aka self-poisoning.
I think the only real cure is to do it all yourself. You could spend decades talking to people who just don’t get it. Learn how to do it all yourself, and you’ll at least have one person you can work with.
