No One Will Ever Be Famous for Writing Ever Again
And I’ll bet my two testicles on it.
Who was the last author to truly make it ‘big’ for their literature, and literature alone? JK Rowling? Suzanne Collins? Tucker Max?
Nobody gives two fucks about reading anymore. That’s obvious. It’s been stated to death. Even though we’re a culture that depends on reading—whether it be Facebook statuses, blog posts, Wikipedia, Amanda Bynes’s Twitter account, or this very article—few seem to gravitate towards books. Nobody has time for it. If you aren’t an established name, then your efforts mean nothing in the eye of the general public. Gambling $10 to $18 on a talent you’re not familiar with is not a top priority.
So how do you get noticed?
Take up a hobby. Become a circus performer. Sell drawings you made with crayon.
Or look no further than proverbial douche and Laurice Elehwany-plagiarist, John Green, for example. His vlogs have cultivated a mass following over the past five years that’ve resulted in an extraordinary amount of book sales and him becoming an internet celebrity. You can’t go on Tumblr for more than an hour without coming across at least one teenage girl quoting a book of his. And why is this?
It’s not because he’s talented. His YA books, while deserving credit for exploring existential themes, paint very 2D pictures of the characters he creates and borrow heavily from plots and storylines that’ve been detailed at length in a number of other works. And yet Time referred to his most recent book The Fault in Our Stars, as
“genius.” On top of that, Time Entertainment named it the Best Fiction book of 2012.
Let me spell something out to you, that I guarantee most will post in the comment section, “hurrrrrrdurrrrrrrrrrNO SHIT!!!” The quality of art is subjective. Imagine if a dog painted a picture of a man using nothing but his paws and a quilt. Most people would be impressed with such a feat, but there would be those out there that scoff and criticize the dog and its talents, despite the fact that a dog possessing the ability to paint is an abnormality and said-criticizer probably couldn’t paint worth a damn.
That dog has the potential to become the greatest painter of all time but it will never, ever be famous because we are a culture that discriminates against canine artists. What does a human actor do? He or she pretends. They lie on camera for an undetermined amount of time and then we give them lots of money and shiny metal things. Dog actors have to learn to react to snaps and whistles and shouts—just so we can make them tilt their head the right way and jump through rings of fire. Why aren’t we paying these dogs with millions of dollars worth of dog food, doghouses, and unlimited publicity? The fucking Muppets get more publicity than dog actors and they’re not even real!
Would a dog that knows how to use iMovie get fans, recognition, and press? No.
Would a dog that knows how to operate Windows 95 get sponsored? No.
The world needs to change and before you can become famous for your writing, you need to think of bigger issues that are plaguing our society. Stop discrimination and end canine-shaming.