I am so tired of short-attention-span, trim-the-fat culture. All writing advice these days is for how to write like Chuck Palahniuk. "Cut 'think', cut 'feel', cut 'wonder' - only action, only pushing forward, show and move and move and move." What if I could emulate this style, and still don't want to? What if I want to write like Henry James, with three paragraphs of introspective musings between each dialogue line? The music advice is, "make it shortform, make it Tik-Tok compatible, make it punchy, hit the refrain as soon as possible." What if I want that 10-minute prog rock piece? What if I want that symphony? What if I want it slow and luxurious and lazy? Movies. Series. Poetry. Bodies. Everything is "trimmed trimmed trimmed trimmed, stripped bare, you have three seconds to win me over, make it airport chic." I don't want to win you over, then, I guess. I want the fat left it. I want the pleasure and the indolence and the indulgence. Fuck this art-advice that's always "your art needs Ozempic."
Chuck Palahniuk is one of the worlds best authors of all time there was absolutely no reason for him to be mentioned in this post lol. Have you even read RANT? If you think his writing is anything like how people write on tiktok you clearly haven't read his work.
His name absolutely belongs mentioned in this post, as he's the one who gave the advice that OP is directly talking about:
Which is advice written directly by Chuck Palahniuk about how to write like Chuck Palahniuk, which is a style that OP doesn't want to emulate.
Popularity ("one of the world's best authors") isn't necessarily the same thing as writing well. Eragon was popular. I couldn't make it past the first few pages because it was poorly written. Anne McCaffrey told beautiful stories about Pern, but I always found her writing itself to be dry and difficult to swallow. Steven King is hugely popular, but his writing can also be dry at times. James Patterson has his name on a lot, a LOT, of popular stories that.... Well. Aren't really his, or at least weren't actually written by him. Would I take advice from any of them about how to write? No, probably not, unless it actually suited my style.
It's common right now for TV series to have 8-12 episode seasons, when we used to have 22-24 episode seasons. To tell the story in the shorter period of time, a lot of the "fat" gets trimmed, but if you've ever cooked meat you know that the fat is where the FLAVOR is. I desperately miss 22-24 episode seasons. I miss the trope episodes that don't particularly affect the plot. I miss that style of storytelling, and it's largely been sacrificed for the go go go trim the fat style OP references.
And the thing is, their advice isn't necessarily bad advice. But the message often comes out like OP says: "this is the only good way to write, and if you do x or y or z, it's bad writing."
And that's not necessarily the case. Maybe it's writing you don't like, and that's fine! Not every piece of writing is for every single person. But there are people who enjoy styles that aren't necessarily popular. That don't do what that advice orders them to do.
And those other styles, the slower and more expensive are fun and good and popular with many people still. The advice to cut things out is only good advice if that's the style you're looking to emulate. OP clearly isn't. And clearly there are plenty of people who agree that that style is not for them, either.
