When Modern Entertainment Becomes a College Creative Writing Assignment

Source: https://www.colum.edu/academics/programs/creative-writing

To hone their craft, aspiring writers in undergraduate and graduate courses will use writing prompts. They must work from a basic concept, usually one phrase or sentence, and develop a story. They are intended as exercises and not to be submitted for publication. They are a challenge, not a good idea for a story.

Write a story about Dracula but make it a comedy. Or maybe, what about a story of a gangster who wants to be a dancer? It can be even more basic, such as a wedding cake splattered on a road. How did it get there? What happened? What is the story behind the smattering of frosting and batter on the pavement?

What if Star Wars was rewritten as feminist fiction? What if Halo was a deep-dive into a journey of self-discovery and sexual awakening? What if the orcs in Lord of the Rings were misunderstood victims of oppression by elves and men? What if Sauron was a sexy antihero?

Creative writing assignments seem to be making their away into mainstream entertainment, with a whole generation of writers eager to write their take on a classic. Somehow, they’ve conflated grad school writing assignments with real world entertainment.

Universities are also places that promote activism, ideological uniformity, and bringing about change in the world through art. The result being, writing projects largely come out the other end with similar themes and messaging.

The creatives behind such projects fondly remember their time in grad school, where new ideas were cultivated in a safe bubble, where groupthink could take hold without apology. Many creatives then moved to southern California, another bubble, where you could separate yourself from the more common experiences of American life with the right amount of money and social connections.

The space for re-imagining or subversion is in grad school. The vast media entertainment complex serving the American public is not. The last few years has taught creatives that the audience is usually more interested in being entertained by entertainment, not lectured to or educated.

It is a little ironic, that trends in literary fiction, indie films, and “artsie” projects tend to follow fads and trends. They aren’t original or groundbreaking at all, if you put them up next to their peers. Probably the most popular and provocative trend in undergraduate and graduate programs are works focused on identity, particularly gender identity, gender fluidity, and sexuality.

The discourse around these subjects has been going on for decades, although it may feel it has only recently taken hold in the past 6 to 8 years. All that has changed is its entry into the mainstream. It’s performance to date has gradually declined from slightly disappointing to coining the term “flopbuster.”

The underlying cause: a lack of awareness. They either fail to understand the audience (the customer) or don’t care to understand them.

Here is another way to look at it: There are different types of worldviews: realists take the world as it is and develop rules, practices, and doctrines around it. To expect human nature to change or transition through the course of history is naive. With such a perspective, things tend to change slowly, if at all. At the same time, realists seldom lack in awareness.

On the other side are utopians, who seek to turn the world into paradise. Their fixation is on paradise itself, its structure, doctrines, etc., not the world as it is. Once settled on what paradise should be like, they seek to transform the world in their utopian image. The weakness in this approach is they often fail to learn how to build paradise or behave as if they’ve already built it.

This is a simplified explanation for how Hollywood has produced such horrible sequels, prequels, reboots, and repositioning of popular IPs from the prior century. They are acting as if the world has already changed and they must produce entertainment for paradise. Sure, there is a vocal minority holding on to the old ways but they who will soon die out.

Instead, these large commercial endeavors have failed to find the elusive “modern audience.” They find the real audience largely unchanged from previous decades.

Sadly, the utopians failed to notice the outcomes of elections, ignored countless negative signals from the market, and insisted that the old-world was on the verge of extinction. No one could convince them otherwise. It was as if paradise could be willed or spoken into existence.

They thought it would come to be, using tactics like declaring the need for a national discussion then declaring said discussion over with their position the clear victor. Realists—and most mature adults—know this is not how discussions work. The utopian frustration with their failure is now visible every day in interviews and news articles.

Human nature hasn’t changed. The beliefs and worldview of some have changed perhaps, but this contingent is not the new modern audience. Utopians will inevitably fail unless they learn how to sell their paradise, rather than assuming it sells itself.

Spending a little more time in the world as it is, might go a long way.