camfusedly

idk, I write sometimes

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tracyeobrien
@tracyeobrien

Is it just me or do books about book people have a tendency to be almost… insulting? Like, you know your reader is a pretty serious book person if they’re reading a mid-list cozy mystery about sisters who own a bookstore, “reads a lot” isn’t going to cut it as an interesting personality trait!

I just finished one where the protagonist is constantly “guiltily” going on about fireplaces and slippers (which, okay, it is cold where she is but grow a spine about it and also you’re not special, you can watch Netflix in wool cardigans) but we don’t actually get anything from her in terms of book taste or reading motivations or… anything, really. Like, at one point she picks up a book in Greek in her bookshop that she doesn’t recognize and instead of looking it up or asking her sister or reading the dang bar code to shelve it she just sort of sets it various places around the shop to test the vibes? Truly nonsensical bookseller behavior tbqh.


camfusedly
@camfusedly

This is so so true. I’m always skeptical of fiction about writers especially unless they do something interesting with it (my gf just read Yellowface by R.F. Kuang which sounded fucking amazing) but I feel like these books can end up… being the laziest version of “write what you know,” or self-inserts, or wanting to talk shop about their pet ideas. Not always bad, but these things make me skeptical when they show up.

(I’m also skeptical about fiction about painters, which I feel like is often “wanting to talk about writing feelings but in disguise,” lol. Not necessarily bad as long as the writer actually learns something about painting, lol.)

I swore to never do this but then one of my first stories ever published was one of these… lol. (It was 100% me setting some weird SFF queer shit in a “write what you know” setting and me wanting to talk about my pet writing annoyances. 😅) Anyways, here it is. 😅 I still like it somehow lol. https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/super-luminous-spiral/


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in reply to @tracyeobrien's post:

It isn't! But having spent some time in online writing circles, there's a certain type of person that just wants to be An Author. They're not really interested in books or even what anyone else is writing and writing groups are just as excuse for them to make everyone see how they're Writing A Book. Sometimes these people can even be good writers (at least when it comes to a specific field of writing), but at the same time they are also incredibly incurious and detached when it comes to literature. Their idea of a "book person" is something we'd see in a cliche old movie, because books are essentially just props for them to promote themselves and they assume everyone else is pretty much the same.

Now obviously this sort of person is a minority and not everyone who writes (even badly) about Book People is like this, but these people definitely exist. I've met a few, and read about even more. You'd be surprised how much work some people are willing to put into something that they think will make them an Important Person.

There's of course always the more benign explanation that what we're dealing with here is a person too little self esteem, too much enthusiasm. They love books, but at the same time they're thinking "Surely the way I love books is too boring, people won't want to hear about that. I need to make my character more interesting, to write them so that people really understand that they are a Book Person without boring them with too much actual book talk".

We will probably never know, could be this, or that, or any of a hundred different things.

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