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Moo Cat's avatar

This is smart, and I love that you're grounding it in the VHS/streaming dichotomy. However, instead of calling the instinct to let artists like Forman always have director's cut the "teacher-god" principle (with the reader/viewer as the student/disciple), how about calling it the "influencer/fan" principle instead? Fan culture and literary theory have so thoroughly dumbed down/smarted up both the role of the artist and the reader/viewer that we can't look at things without obsessive attention to what the artist "really wanted" (see fan culture) or what the art "really means in context" (literary theory). We're just really bad readers/viewers of ambiguity and nuance. I'm a bit of a technological determinist, so I see a lot of this as simply an effect of the dissemination of fan culture and literary theory through the internet/streaming and the corporate domination of culture through through those vectors. Artists make "content," like influencers do, and the role of the corporation is to deliver the maximum amount of it to fans. In the old, slow system of intensive curation (the dreaded "movie studio notes," or "my book editor keeps returning my draft"), the artists at the top of the pyramid answered to a bunch of very conservative curators, but in the new system, there's no curators at all, just a fire hose of content that must be doled out as quickly as possible for an artist to have any hope of making the same amount of money that they did before. So artists become influencers, and readers/viewers become fans, obsessively consuming all of the retread content of a very small number of people at the top of the pyramid (Swift, T., Disney/Marvel/Star Wars content, the Kardashians, etc.) and ignoring the "middle class" of artists making their first or second or third novel/album/movie/tv show, desperately showing more and more of themselves in an attempt to turn readers/viewers into fans.

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Miles MacNaughton's avatar

Important things to keep in mind, especially when you're writing a novel. The major theme of a novel I'm working on is betrayal and lies, and it's demanding to ensure that not a single line in the book uses either of those words. You have to trust the reader to understand what's a lie and when betrayal occurs.

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