A failing I see with most modern stories is not only an attempt to make every story “darker” than the last to try to get some sort of edgy feel where it makes a reader or viewer nauseous, but modern fiction also tends to overcomplicate stories compared to the greats of the past.
Everything that has a concise, simple purpose tends to bend up beautiful, because the mind can see the aim, the goal, the themes very clearly. When something gets muddied, like Game Of Thrones, where there’s 20,000 perspectives, you don’t remember a character from one book to the next, and it just keeps going in an endless, dreary, pointlessness.
This is nihilism in a nutshell. The overcomplicating of works creates chaos, entropy, and it’s another reason we can’t connect to current corporate cultural products.
It’s funny, because in writing classes all the way up, I was told over and over to focus on “the twist.” Not only just to “twist” a story but to “twist the twist” so that it tricks the reader even further. How dreary to view readers as people you’re supposed to trick. I found my best stories when I abandoned that principle and everything else these nihilistic cultural gatekeepers were selling.
Isn’t it nice just to read stories about a hero who defeats a villain? Someone who does something good to overcome wrongs? It’s not that hard.
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