I’ll begin at the conclusion: the masses are starting to lose respect for storytelling. And the reason is that those in control of traditional media haven’t cared about it for some time.

Now, I’m going to rewind for a sec. Before I was writing novels, I wrote marketing copy. I’ve been a marketing consultant or executive in some capacity for almost 20 years now. In that time, I noticed that there was a common phenomenon among entrepreneurs and small business owners.

Many, many of them have no respect for marketing.

The think it’s something anyone can do — if they even think about it at all. They don’t realize (or accept) that marketing professionals spend years studying very specific skills and concepts. That we have to learn certain tools and platforms inside out. That we must understand consumer behavior, brand development, and other things that you can’t just pull out of your ass. Many of us — myself included — are multi-disciplinaries that have also trained in graphic design, video editing, and writing.

For whatever reason, a vast number of people don’t care about any of that. They think that marketing is just something you decide to do one day (or don’t) and then you snap your fingers and it’s done. Almost as if quality doesn’t matter in any way…you just have to “put yourself out there”.

Now the epiphany I had today is that this is exactly what we’re seeing when it comes to storytelling. One of my recent clues that got me thinking about it was the jobs board on indiedb.com, a site for independent game developers. All up and down the list I found dozens of requests for coders, modelers, and artists. But the section for writers? Completely empty.

Because everyone thinks they can write.

That’s not surprising, because writing, in a purely practical sense, just means putting words down. You can think you can write far more easily than you think you can code C++ or make pixel art. Things like programming games and rendering 3D models produce very rapid feedback about your skill, but writing…

Writing is subject to the Dunning-Kruger effect like nobody’s business. A vast majority of people think they can write a good story because they know so little about how to write a good story. They see words on the page and think “well, that did it!” and have no internal mechanism for determining whether they’ve written something worth reading (or watching or playing).

For the record, this is the exact phenomenon I witnessed in the world of marketing. Because it’s easy to send emails, post to social, or throw together a website, everyone thinks they can “do marketing”. They don’t know what they don’t know.

That’s just how it is. I’m not bagging on anyone in particular for being part of a such a widespread cognitive sinkhole. Hell, I’m sure that despite researching the science in my sci-fi novels, I have blind spots that would make an actual physicist tear their hair out.

But see, I’m not writing up blueprints for FTL space travel. I’m writing stories. And my concern is making sure that my stories are good. I’ve spent the thousands of hours improving so that I can make sure I’m putting out something of quality.

Because I’m a writer. It’s a specific job. Not something that you pass off to your nephew or “get around to” when you’re finished with the important parts of the project.

But mass entertainment seems to have forgotten this. Hollywood and streaming especially, but also game studios and tradpub houses. They’re no longer looking for writers. They’re looking for activists who think they’re writers. They’ve turned their back on the fact that writing is a skill and some people are better at it than others. They’ve somehow trapped themselves in a kind of “storytelling equality” lie that’s ruining entertainment.

Maybe everyone has a story to tell. Maybe. But even so, that doesn’t mean they know how to tell it. It’s far more complex than just sitting down and putting words on paper. It requires both talent and training. Ignoring that fact results in the never ending stream of hot garbage coming from mass entertainment.

Every character acts the same (regardless if they’re in the past, future, or on a fictional planet) because these “writers” have never cultivated the skills to abstract another perspective. They have no imaginations because they’ve been misled into thinking that you can just write about yourself and people will find it entertaining.

Long-standing IPs like Star Wars and Star Trek are being demolished, humiliated, by bad writing because the people they’re handing the pen to aren’t writers. They might have something to say, but certainly no idea how to say it. They have some sort of internal personal agenda — a “message” — and stumble their way through storytelling trying to sledgehammer that message into the production.

I’ve said this before, but I don’t believe the erosion of entertainment is necessarily some kind of evil agenda. I think it’s just years of hiring bad writers. It’s gone on for so long that the people in charge don’t even know how to tell the difference. (A lot of the bad writers are in charge, so that figures.)

Things will never improve unless we as a people collectively remember that writing is a skill. It’s an important skill. And we have to refuse to continue consuming garbage stories just because “they have something to say”. Good writers have important things to say, too — and they can also make their message entertaining!