On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Devon Eriksen describes the real skill a fiction author needs to have to produce fully satisfying stories:
Woke message fiction may be slowly dying, but stories won’t magically get better when it’s dead.
Because there’s a deeper problem.
I found it in a book I’ll call MillenialQuest. That wasn’t its real name, of course. I’m not trying to dunk on some poor soul just for writing a bad book. If I did that, I’d never be stopping.
It was some medieval fantasy thing with a rather likely premise involving a fallen paladin and an army of steampunk centaurs.
But when I opened it up, I quickly realized that every single character, despite living in a world where “horse” was the peak of transportation technology, was a Joss Whedon character wearing a Tolkien skinsuit.
Complete with sarcasm, cutesy little quips, and no emotional self-control whatsoever. Didn’t matter if the character was a professional assassin or a cloistered scholar, he talked, acted, and thought as if he were auditioning for a episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
My first impulse was to be annoyed with the author for disappointing me. But I quickly realized that the problem ran deeper, and the author, annoying as her habits were, was both symptom and victim of a deeper malaise.
The primary skill of an author is empathy.
Now, I don’t mean the “empathy” that socialist twats are constantly talking up, in lectures about how we must all immediately dismantle Western civilization to create infinity third world biomass.
I mean the actual skill of figuring out what other people are thinking and feeling.
To excel at his craft, an author must empathize in two directions at once. Not alternately, but simultaneously. He must empathize with the audience to understand how they will experience what he writes, and he must empathize with characters, to understand how they see the world, and what they would do and say.
Empathy must be learned. And it can be learned in two ways, either by having lots of conversations with people who are as different from you as possible, or by reading books with characters who are also totally unlike you.
Well, we’ve now raised several entire generations who cannot withstand the stress of a real conversation with someone from their own nation who happened to vote for the other idiot on a two-option menu.
And what have those people been watching, listening to, and reading?
Well, Whedonized stories wherein every character is a reskinned version of a white, middle class, left-leaning liberal arts student in a small East Coast private college.
The author of MillenialQuest didn’t set out to write The Message™. Nobody was a purple-haired mixed-race fat wheelchair lesbian, and there weren’t any thinly veiled rants about capitalism or diversity.
Sure, the word “misogynist” was used a bunch, without any apparent awareness of the confused look of incomprehension that your standard medieval knight would respond with.
But so was the word “allergies”. And “expense account”. And “psychology”. And “self-medication”.
No, the core pathology here wasn’t the irrepressible urge to preach the author’s values at all.
It was a complete lack of ability to put her head into someone else’s world view.
To the new breed of author, the 21st century liberal zeitgeist isn’t just the only moral viewpoint, it’s the only imaginable viewpoint.
This is why they think you are evil and crazy if you voted for the other guy. Because they literally have no idea what might have motivated you to do that.
The author of MillenialQuest couldn’t imagine a world where differing responsibilities for men and women are a necessity for survival, rather than a cause for complaint.
She couldn’t imagine how the concept of an expense account would be expressed in a world where peak financial technology is pounding your shiny metal into discs with faces on them.
Emily Wilson can’t understand a woman who would be ashamed of cheating on her husband, or men who would start a war over an insult.
Yes, often it’s deliberate. Often it’s preaching, or venting their own desire to debate with someone whose response they cannot hear.
But the point is, even if and when they are forced, by threat of major film studio bankruptcy, to stop deliberately trying to preach and propagandize, they won’t magically gain the ability to write characters different from themselves.
Empathy is a skill. It has to be learned and then practiced. And most people in the writing game today simply haven’t had the opportunity.
We may be exiting the age of DEI slop, but we are entering the age of just plain slop.
