The Selfish Gene Theory was first popularized by ethnologist Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene (1976).
This book and the theory it espoused became standard doctrine across the entire scientific community. The book became required reading in universities—which is how I found out about this theory. I had to read the book in college. The Selfish Gene Theory states that individuals of any given species are motivated subconsciously to act in every way to promote, reproduce, and benefit the spread of their own genes. According to the theory, our genes are the ones directing us to act in certain ways, such as providing for our children and contributing to our communities. The theory describes the conflicting reproductive strategies of men and women. The author states that men and women are pursuing different agendas when it comes to passing their genes on as much as possible to future generations. The author describes the male reproductive strategy as scattering one’s wild oats far and wide. Men have much more sperm to go around, so the author believes that each man will try to impregnate as many females as possible before moving on so he can widen the possibility of his genes taking root in multiple bloodlines. Females produce far fewer ova and these ova require a much larger investment of biological resources to create them. Gestating, giving birth to, and raising children also requires a significant investment of time and resources on the mother’s part. The female therefore makes a significant investment in a smaller number of children. The mother concentrates on securing a male counterpart who will share this investment. The mother also seeks to prevent the male from pursuing his own broad-spectrum strategy in order to get him to invest in her children instead of someone else’s. This theory has become one of the cornerstones of modern scientific thought. It’s rare for anyone to carry on any scientific discussion without referring to and questioning the evolutionary and genetic benefit of any given behavior. There’s only one problem with this theory. It’s nonsense. If the Selfish Gene was real, we as human beings in general would feel no motivation at all to help anyone who isn’t directly genetically related to us. The Selfish Gene Theory offers no explanation at all for the major mental health benefits we humans get from helping others. One of the feel-good brain hormones responsible for our wellbeing is oxytocin. Scientists call it The Love Hormone because it’s associated with the feelings of deep connection we get during romantic relationships, parent-child bonds, intimate friendships, and other meaningful interactions that affect us at a core level. We get a massive oxytocin boost when we help other people, including those closest to us. Our love for them makes us want to give to them and improve their lives. We get the biggest oxytocin boost—and the biggest boost in all our other feel-good brain chemicals—when we help total strangers. These are people we have no connection with. We have no genetic link to them that would give us a genetic advantage by helping them. In some cases, these are people we’ve never met and might never even see. The entire philanthropy and charity industry exists because of this drive of ours to give and help people when we have absolutely no hope that we’ll ever receive anything in return. We get the biggest oxytocin boost precisely because we won't get anything in return. We get this sto precisely because we understand at a deep level that we don't have to do it. We do it purely because it's a good thing to do and it makes us feel good about ourselves. We wouldn’t have this drive at all if the Selfish Gene was real. We would have no interest at all in helping others, especially not people unrelated to us. Our genes would make it impossible for us to help people we aren’t absolutely one-hundred-percent certain are related to us by blood. Imagine you’re walking down the street and you see a newborn baby wrapped in dirty newspaper tucked into the corner of a filthy alley. The vast majority of us as normal human beings would stop what we were doing, go over there to find out how we could help, at a bare minimum get the child to safety by handing it over to the Police, and possibly going so far as to taking the child home and maybe even raising it as our own. Men are just as likely to have this reaction to someone else’s defenseless child as women are. When I first told my thirteen-year-old daughter about the subject of this blog post, I told her this story and her very first response was, “It’s mine. That baby is mine.” This would never happen if the Selfish Gene was real. If the Selfish Gene was real, we would avoid the child. We might even possibly try to harm or kill the child to stop it from competing with our own genetic children. Never in a million years would we take the baby home and divert resources away from our own children to raise someone else’s child. My ten-year-old son happened to be listening to this conversation. He very rightly pointed out that, if the Selfish Gene was real, helping others who aren’t related to us would actually be socially frowned upon. We would have socially embedded rules and customs to stop us from giving to other people’s biological progeny. It would never cross our minds to help some stranger on the other side of the world we will never even lay eyes on. These behaviors are hard-wired into us for a reason. Our genes aren’t selfish at all—or if they are, we aren’t ruled by them. We’re ruled by something much bigger and more powerful—something innately unselfish. We all understand at a core level that the person over there who needs help is actually part of us. We’re all connected. By helping them, we’re helping each ourselves. We’re helping Project Human Race because we’re all in this together. No man is an island. Another person’s suffering injures and detracts from me. This is why we get such a massive boost to our mental health when we help others. It’s one of the quickest, easiest, cheapest, most accessible solutions to all our mental health problems. It’s the quickest, easiest, most reliable way to start feeling instantly fantastic. All our own problems seem to disappear when we give our time, resources, and care to those in need. If anyone reading this is suffering from depression, anxiety, or mental health problems, the chances are high that you’re focusing too much on yourself. Think of the vast number of people in the world right now who have it so much worse than you do. Some of them could be right down the block from you right at this moment. In fact, they almost certainly are. Feeling amazing is waiting for you right outside your door. It’s accessible to all of us, at all times, and it’s absolutely free. You just have to ask yourself, honestly, if you really want to start feeling better—because you can start feeling better whenever you want to. The ripple effect of our actions affects everyone on the planet. This is the most effective, most immediate way we can make the world a better place. Whatever you think is wrong with the world, you have the power to change it each and every day with your actions. We’re all born with this desire built into us at a core level. We all want to make the world a better place. We wouldn’t have this drive at all if the Selfish Gene was real. We wouldn’t even be aware of it. This is proof that we’re being guided and governed by something much bigger—something much better—something that makes us happier, brings us together, and gives us a clear path to make the world a better place exactly the way we want to. _______ All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author.
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Human beings are fundamentally selfish.
This isn’t a bad thing. We’re hardwired for survival. If something threatens that survival or even makes it more difficult, we treat it as a threat. As airline flight attendants so often tell us, put on your own oxygen mask before helping others. A relationship is only as good as its ability to serve the needs of the people involved. All of us go into every relationship and every interaction with other people thinking about how this relationship affects us. If the relationship doesn’t benefit us or, in the worst case, if it actually works against us, we withdraw from the relationship. In some cases, we have no choice but to push the person out of our lives completely. There is not a relationship anywhere in human interaction that doesn’t operate by this rule. There is no relationship that is totally unconditional, not even the parent-child relationship. There have been plenty of children who have had to push their parents out of their lives because the relationship posed such a grave threat to the child’s wellbeing and even their life. The reason could be emotional cruelty, manipulation, or outright abuse. The children have to cut their parents off just to survive and rebuild a life from scratch. The opposite is also true. Many parents have had no choice but to push their own children out of their lives for the same reasons. The parents had to save themselves from manipulation, toxic behavior, and even physical violence inflicted by their own children. It doesn’t matter how much you think you love someone. Every relationship has boundary lines that, when crossed, destroy the relationship and drive the two people apart. None of us should have a problem with this. It’s a good thing. Many so-called influencers on the internet would tell us that we can improve the quality of our relationships by making them more relational and less transactional. These influencers are telling us that we shouldn’t focus the relationship on what the other person can do for us—or what we can do for them. We should just enjoy relating to the person for their own sake. This poses two distinct problems—mainly because it completely violates the law of human interaction that I’ve just spelled out here. Human beings don’t interact with each other this way. If you’re telling yourself you aren’t going to treat a relationship as transactional, you’re probably already either getting taken advantage of or you’re the one taking advantage of the other person. This advice is just a sloppy way of ignoring the needs of both parties. If the relationship doesn’t work for one person, it doesn’t work for both people. Someone I care about could come to me at any time and say, “This particular aspect of the relationship isn’t working for me. We need to change it for us to continue.” Then it’s on me to actually find out what the problem is and work to fix it. This doesn’t mean I’m admitting any fault on my part. It’s my obligation as one party to the relationship. It’s my job as half of the relationship to make sure it works for the other person as well as it works for me. If I don’t work to fix it, then I’m failing in my role as an actor in this relationship. If I say, “Screw you. The relationship works fine for me, so just suck it up and accept it,” then the person would have every right to say, “Either fix it or we’re done.” If I persisted in not addressing the issue, then they would be right to end the relationship. It would be a clear sign that I don’t care enough about the relationship to make it meet the other person’s needs. This actually happened to me with my mother. I spent years trying to get her to change the way we related to each other because our relationship didn’t work for me. She continued to use the manipulation tactics she developed when I was a child. She did this for decades into my adulthood. When I raised the issues, she didn’t say she wasn’t doing it. She knew she was doing it. She just said, “Well, this is the way I do it, so just eat it.” Eventually, I had no choice but to cut her out of my life just to keep my own sanity. There is another aspect of this that our influencer friends don’t seem to realize when they tell us not to make our relationships transactional. Many times, the transaction involved and the payoff we receive is not from getting something for ourselves. Many times, the payoff is in what we can give to the other person. This is the case with parenting—good parenting. Good parents don’t work and sacrifice for years to give their children a good life because of what the children can give to the parents. The parents make these sacrifices and do this work because of what they can give to their children. These parents make the investment for the express purpose of benefiting their children. That’s the payoff—the children’s benefit and improved wellbeing both in the present and in the future. This is also the case in friendships, romantic relationships, and other family relationships. None of this negates the law I stated earlier. There is a limit to which anyone will work and sacrifice to benefit another person. There is always a line in the sand that, once crossed, will shatter the relationship and cause the parties to stop giving to each other. We shouldn’t be trying to change this law. First of all, it isn’t possible to change it. Doing so would be counter to our own survival. It isn’t even necessary or desirable to change it. This is the way human relations operate, but it goes beyond that. Transactional relationships are a good thing. We should make our relationships more transactional, not less so. We should all have clearly stated boundaries about what we will tolerate and what kind of behavior we’re willing to accept from those closest to us. All actions have consequences. If you mistreat me, the chances are high that you won’t be in my life for very long. That’s a good thing. Getting people who mistreat me as far out of my life as possible is a great thing. It’s the best thing for me. When my children were small, I used a very simple X-Y formula to communicate with them. If you do X, I’m going to do Y. This isn’t a threat. It isn’t a punishment. It’s a statement of fact about the consequences of the other person’s actions. If you don’t put your shoes on right now, I’m going to put them on for you. If you throw that ball in the house, it could break the window. If you keep hitting your sister, I’m going to have to put you in your room until you calm down. This is an effective formula we can all use in our daily interactions with people. They often don’t know how their actions are affecting us, so they don’t see the potential consequences. Explaining it to them in a clear, concise manner gives them all the information they need to do the right thing. If they really care about us, they’ll modify their behavior so the relationship works better for everyone involved. If they say, “Too bad. I’m going to keep doing it,” then you’ve already outlined for them what will happen as a result. That’s on them. We don’t need to feel guilty about delivering the consequence we already warned them we would deliver. Delivering the consequence will only benefit us. -------- All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. Everything we do in life has consequences, either good or bad.
Everything we do is a choice that will have some consequence. Even the decision to do nothing is a choice that will have consequences, most of them unforeseen. If you see someone getting attacked on the street and you do nothing, you’re making a choice to carry out a certain action as opposed to another action you might take. Your decision will have repercussions for the victim, the perpetrator, for you, for those close to you by extension, and for society at large. Nothing we do happens in a vacuum. The Law of Consequence is one of the immutable laws of the universe. It’s a law because it works even when we don’t want it to—even when we don’t think it is working. We don’t have to do anything to make this law work. It happens by itself no matter what we do. If we think it isn’t working, that’s just another way of saying we didn’t see the consequences. On the flipside, if you choose to help that person in need, that will also have consequences—most of them we will never see. The consequences will affect the victim, the perpetrator, you, those closest to you, and by extension, society at large. If we do a good action, we get a good consequence, both internally and externally. If we do a negative action, we get a negative consequence, both internally and externally. There is nothing we can do to stop this from happening. Thinking we can stop it or escape this law is pure delusion. This is why the rewards of investing in our own development are always guaranteed. If we put in the work to improve, the results will pay off. This result is inevitable. There is a second component to this law that few people understand. Even fewer people understand this than understand the first component of the law—and even more people try to escape it and stop it from happening. The consequences of any particular action are always cumulative. They compound over time the longer we carry out that particular action. Say you ate junk food five times a day for fifteen years and you gained three hundred pounds. If you suddenly ate a salad and then went straight back to your normal way of eating, nothing would happen. Eating that salad would have absolutely no effect on your life, your weight, or your sense of self-worth. Conversely, imagine you ate healthy, exercised, and took meticulous care of yourself in every way for fifteen years. Then the day comes when you go out and eat an ice cream sundae before you go straight back to your normal lifestyle. That ice cream sundae wouldn’t hurt you at all. You wouldn’t gain a single pound from eating it. You would have to completely reverse the process in order to wind up in the same position as the person who ate crappy food every day and weighted four hundred pounds. The effects would accumulate over time. The longer you followed either of these paths, the more profound the results would become. Imagine you never touched drugs until suddenly, in a moment of lunacy, you snorted a line of cocaine. That action would have an immediate consequence, but it wouldn’t be life-changing—not unless you kept doing it. If you never did it again, it probably wouldn’t have any long-term negative consequences at all. It would have long-term negative consequences if you kept doing it. The long-term negative consequences would compound the longer you kept doing it. Eventually, the long-term negative consequences could accumulate to the point where you lost your health, your finances, your job, your family, your freedom, and ultimately, even your life. Think of any area of your life. Whatever result you’re looking for, it will accumulate the longer you keep doing it. If you do it once or in short bursts, you won’t see any result. The result compounds with time. You have to keep doing it for a long time to build the result that you want—or to avoid the result that you don’t want. The same goes for positive consequences. Putting up a website and offering a product for sale won’t make you rich. Making a bunch of YouTube videos won’t make you rich. Everything in business compounds over time. If you work for a company, your presence there compounds over time. If you give it your all-out effort, your results will improve the longer those above you see you putting in the effort. By the same token, if you don’t put in the effort, those above you will see that, too. Their opinion of you will diminish over time. They’ll see that this way of life is entrenched in your character. They won’t expect you to do anything else—and they’ll be right. On the other hand, you might suddenly one day have a lightbulb moment and start putting in the effort. The results would compound over time. No one would trust you at first or think much of your efforts. They wouldn’t trust you to stick it out. It would take a long time of you continually putting in the effort and taking the initiative before your superiors let themselves believe that you were sincere in your desire to change. The same is true for all change. If you suddenly start a new healthy lifestyle—or a business—or a self-improvement program, no one will believe you’re sincere or that you’ll keep doing it. These people aren’t malicious. They’re basing their assessment on the accumulated actions of years of your own behavior—maybe even decades of your behavior. It’s going to take an equivalent accumulated amount of time to convince them that you’re committed to doing things differently. The good news is that the positive consequences will accumulate. This is the other facet to this universally immutable law. The longer you keep doing positive actions, the more the positive consequences compound. The bottom line is that other people’s opinion of you is just another consequence of your actions—either good or bad. It won’t change just because you did something once…..or twice…..or ten times. Their opinion of you won’t change just because you changed. Their opinion—either good or bad—will compound based on your actions. If you continue to improve, their opinion of you will improve. If you continue to deteriorate, their opinion of you will deteriorate—and rightfully so. This process will happen. It’s inevitable. It’s as inevitable as the sun rising tomorrow morning and setting tomorrow night. None of us can escape it. The solution is to harness the power of this compounding effect and ride the wave in our favor. All we have to do is continue to do the right actions and reap the resulting benefits. They, too, will come inevitably, just as the negative consequences will inevitably come as a result of negative actions. The choice is always ours—and this is another area where we always control the outcome. Thinking we can escape this law or stop it from happening is the definition of insanity and will only bring pain and tragedy into our lives. All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. May God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
We’ve all been told our entire lives that there are some things we can control and others that we can’t control. We can control our activity. We can control our nutrition. We can control what information we consume. We can’t control the weather. We can’t control random accidents and disasters. We can’t control things that are happening on the other side of the world that we never even find out about until after they’re already long over. These are the events of our lives, and as we all know, the events are not the story. We also don’t control other people’s responses, thoughts, and emotions despite whether they might try to make us believe that we do. Other people might blame us for their responses, thoughts, and emotions. There is one thing that we always control—the way we respond. We respond to everything that happens to us and everything that we ever find out about. We respond to everything that enters our awareness. We always control the way we response—always. No one makes anyone else respond a certain way. One person’s reactions and emotions never dictate the reactions and emotions of another person. Say someone cuts me off in traffic. That’s an event. I have no control over what the other driver did. I always control the way I respond. I could choose to completely fly off the handle. I could yell at the other driver, shoot him the middle finger from my window, and spend the rest of the day fuming about how inconsiderate he is. I could instead respond by shrugging it off, forgetting about it, and focusing on all the much more important things I have to do today. The other driver never entered the equation to determine my response. He acted the same way in both scenarios. How I responded was entirely under my control at all times. We don’t always control the events. We always control our response—and here’s the most important thing. Our response to the events will determine the outcome. Say that driver cut me off and we got in a wreck that paralyzed me or one of my children. I could choose to give up on life, waste away in a void of self-pity, and spend the rest of my life hating him and letting that hate eat away at me from the inside. Or I could choose to bounce back and make the best of the life I have left. I might not become a marathon runner, but maybe there’s another outcome waiting for me that would be even better and more fulfilling. Australian pastor Nick Vujicic was born without arms or legs. He spent years depressed and resenting God for giving him such a terrible affliction. Now he embraces his situation as the vehicle that has given him the platform to change other people’s lives and communicate his message of hope to the world. Australian exercise physiologist Drew Harrisberg thought he was getting a death sentence when he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Drew later became famous when he wrote a letter to his diabetes thanking it for all the wonderful changes it had brought to his life. It made him healthier, happier, and more fulfilled. It also gave him both the empathy and audience to build a global platform to touch other people’s lives. His diabetes allowed him to help other people in ways he wouldn’t have been able to if he never received that diagnosis. We will always experience events beyond our control. Our response will always determine the outcome and our response is always under our control—therefore, we always control the outcome. Remember that the next time you feel stressed, overwhelmed, depressed, or hopeless. You control everything that happens to you. You always control the outcome of everything that happens to you. You control it through your response. I spent decades living behind the eight-ball and getting knocked around from one life disaster to another. A series of changes occurred in my life that brought me to where I am today. When my publishing contract ended in January 2024, my very first thought was, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” And I was right. I was right because I turned what could have been a disaster into the greatest thing that ever happened to me. Within a few hours of making the decision to pull out of the contract, I created a plan that to skyrocket my publishing to something far beyond what that contract could have given me. This was the third time I had the same response to what could have been life-destroying events. The first was when I separated from my children’s father. The second was the end of another long-term relationship. I was married to my children’s father for eleven years before that marriage came to an end. The breakup was absolutely fantastic for me. It was one of the best things that has ever happened to me. I made a list of everything I wanted in my new living situation and I got everything I asked for. When I took my kids and moved out of the house into a new place, I thought, “This is going to be great. My life is going to get so much better after this.” And it did. My life became exponentially better as soon as the relationship ended. When I initiated the breakup of the other relationship, I also thought, “This is going to be the best thing for both of us.” It wasn’t easy. None of those events was easy to go through. These three experiences taught me something. I wasn’t thinking about this before. It happened three times one right after the other for me to learn this lesson. From now on, no matter what happens, tell yourself, “This is going to be the best thing that ever happened to me.” You might not see how that’s possible right now, but ten or twenty years from now—if you play your cards right—you could get yourself somewhere so much better that you wouldn’t have gotten had you stayed where you are right now. Whatever you’re going through right now will be the best thing that has ever happened to you because you’ll make it that way. If you respond to this event by embracing it as the best thing that ever happened to you. You’ll be in the best possible position to launch yourself into whatever opportunity is coming into your life. It will lead you down the other road—the better road. One thing is guaranteed. If you tell yourself this is the greatest disaster of your life and that it will destroy you, it will. You’ll find a way to let it destroy you. You’ll give yourself permission to fall apart instead of taking a leap into something new—something that might have been the greatest opportunity of your life. A wise man once said that a character can only be as smart as the person writing that character.
The modern fiction market is a vast wasteland of idiotic, morally objectionable characters who make the worst possible decisions at the worst possible times. These characters either don’t communicate when they should or they communicate so badly that they make their situations worse than they need to. Their behavior, decisions, and the situations they end up in as a result are so wildly unrealistic that they could never occur in real life because no one could possibly be that stupid. This is the definition of bad writing. The writers are so bad at their craft that they don’t know how to create realistic conflict, either internal or external. The writer then falls back on the device of having the characters make the stupidest possible decisions. The characters get themselves into situations that are totally avoidable and unnecessary. The writer tries to pass this off as conflict when it isn’t. It’s just the reader watching the character flounder in a cesspool of their own idiocy. We could explain this away by saying that these writers are learning from others who are as moronic as themselves. New writers come along and copy the tropes and conventions of the brainless writers who went before them. The new writers see everyone else doing it and think this is the way it’s supposed to be done. The other possible explanation is that our society is so morally degenerate that the lion’s share of these writers are wallowing in the same intellectual and moral sewer as the rest of the population. If ninety percent of the population is low intelligence, then it follows that ninety percent of the writers will be the same. Their characters will all be low intelligence, too, and they’ll act accordingly. The same goes for the moral aspect of fiction. If ninety percent of the population thinks it’s okay to engage in morally reprehensible behavior, then ninety percent of the writers will think it’s okay, too. They won’t have a problem making their characters act the same way—which will lead to ninety percent of the fiction on the market displaying this kind of behavior as normal—which is exactly the state of affairs we find ourselves in right now. Case in point: the movie Arrival (2016) directed by Denis Villeneuve and screenwritten by Eric Heisserer. ***Spoiler alert*** We won’t address the question of whether this movie was well directed, well shot, and well scripted. This post will focus on one aspect of the story that illustrates the point I’m making about idiotic and morally reprehensible characters. The movie’s main character Louise learns an alien language that allows her to experience time in a non-linear fashion. This allows her to see events in her future that have not yet happened. She sees that she will marry her future husband, Ian, and that they will have a daughter who will die of cancer. Louise decides to keep their daughter’s impending death a secret from Ian. Louise foresees that he will leave both her and their daughter when he finds out that Louise kept the secret from him. The movie raises the question of whether any individual would make the same life choices if they knew in advance what would happen. Note that it doesn’t raise the question of whether she should have kept the secret from him. The movie only raises the question of whether she would choose to give birth to her daughter knowing that the girl would die too soon. We’re also going to put aside the obvious plot hole here that Ian would have known about his daughter’s death in advance, too. The movie suggests that Louise taught the aliens’ language to everyone on Earth so everyone experienced time the way they do. The question here is why the writers and directors made Louise do something so cruel to her husband and daughter. This device serves absolutely no function in the story at all except to make Louise into a villain instead of a hero. This woman is a selfish, sadistic narcissist who deliberately inflicts unforgivable damage on the two people she supposedly loves so much. It would have taken Louise a fraction of a second to sit Ian down and tell him the truth before they conceived. Then the story could have proceeded exactly the same way. This problem could have been solved by removing a single line of dialogue from the entire movie. Ian could have made the same choice to father a child and enjoy his daughter’s company for a few years before both he and Louise lost her. The movie tries to make Louise come off as heroic for raising this girl on her own, but it doesn’t come off that way at all. It just makes her look selfish and the movie makes Ian look like a shallow, selfish bastard, too. The movie tries to make the ending seem all romantic and heart-warming. Exactly the opposite happens. We can actually see the moment in Louise’s eyes when she makes the decision to leave Ian in the dark even when she knows it will drag him through the most torturous ordeal of his life. This scene should be taught in the schools as a textbook example of narcissistic behavior. She knows exactly what keeping this secret will do to him and she does it anyway. I honestly cannot imagine why the writers and directors think this is okay. I can only think of one possible explanation. The entire production staff must be so morally degenerate that they actually think it would be okay to keep a secret like this from your spouse and the future co-parent of your child. These people actually think it would be okay for a father to abandon his child and never see her again just because the mother was a selfish witch who destroyed his life by keeping an important secret from him. Maybe the writers were trying to portray Ian as the bad guy here because he isn’t even present for his daughter’s death. If the writers were trying to do that, they only succeeded in making Louise look even worse for driving him away. She manipulated him into caring about a child he could never have—all to serve her own selfish whims. She tricked him into getting her pregnant under false pretenses so she could play house. The movie even implies that she shouldn’t have told him at all and that she should have kept the secret from him forever. She says the only mistake she made was telling him something she shouldn’t have. Art has the potential to elevate humanity, teach us new things, and bring us closer together. The modern fiction market seems to be deliberately designed to do the opposite. It teaches an entire generation to engage in the worst, most toxic relational strategies, make the stupidest decisions for the stupidest reasons, communicate in a way most likely designed to destroy relationships and drive people apart, and drag all of us through the moral gutter along with it. This is the picture we’re painting for the next generation of what’s normal. We’re painting romance as a series of selfish, degenerate, toxic acts deliberately intended to make all relationships seem as destructive and hurtful as possible. This is what we’re teaching the younger generation to look for in romantic relationships. We can look past the obvious social implications and see how this process actually works against us as fiction writers. Portraying our characters making bone-headed decisions only serves one purpose—it makes the characters less relatable. This is exactly the opposite of what we’re trying to accomplish as writers. We want the reader to love the character and root for them. The reader can only do that if the character is smart and morally strong as well as resilient and forward-thinking. The character has to face overwhelming odds or crippling life conflict and still make the right decision. In many cases, there is no right decision. This is how life works. We’re faced with an endless parade of Kobayashi-Maru scenarios. We just have to make a choice and live with the consequences. This is how a writer creates compelling characters. The question is then left in the reader’s mind whether things would have played out differently if the character made a different choice—or if the reader would make the same choice in the same situation. The reader should never point to a character and say they were stupid, selfish, or just plain badly written. That’s a sign of artistic failure on the writer’s part. The reader should never be able to find fault with the character’s decisions or at least be able to identify with why the character made the decision they did make. Even in the case of the villain or antagonist, it’s still better to make them smart, insightful, and always strong both physically and mentally. Making them anything else weakens the hero and paints them as pathetic, selfish, and unheroic by comparison. The better the villain, the better the hero appears by overcoming them. Every character is a portrait of the writer. What we’re seeing on display in the modern fiction market is an entire population of morons with access to computers. These aren’t artists. They’re monkeys punching the buttons of their keyboards and churning out whatever random bullshit happens to pop into their heads. This gives us a clear window into exactly what is going on inside their heads and it isn’t pretty. Recently, I made the mistake of visiting a writer’s forum. The participants were talking favorably about using AI to improve their work.
Their logic was that AI is a tool that makes our lives easier. It boosts the quality of our work and makes everything more efficient the same way computers, cars, and kitchen appliances do. One of the participants in the discussion compared using AI for writing to using Python to construct complicated computer code or using an Excel spreadsheet to organize mathematical calculations. By this analogy, the writer who uses AI to either generate or edit content isn’t a writer at all. They’re a computer programmer. Before the days of Excel speadsheets, accountants used pen and paper to keep records of exactly the same mathematical equations. Accountants could easily go back to that now if they absolutely had to. The analogous technology that makes writing faster and easier is Microsoft Word. I use Microsoft Word. The only thing Microsoft Word does for me is to make typing, cutting, and pasting quicker and easier than using pen and paper. The content is the same because it all comes out of my head. Plenty of modern authors still use pen and paper. There’s nothing better or nobler about it. They do it because it helps their creative flow. Typing on a computer helps my creative flow because I can type as fast as I can think. I word-vomit the content onto the page. Writing with pen and paper would slow me down and cramp my flow. It’s a matter of personal idiosyncrasy for each writer. The difference here is that the reader knows—and the writer knows—that the finished product came authentically from that individual writer. AI-generated content didn’t come from that writer. It came from a machine. Computer code serves a specific function. Its function is to execute whatever task the code is programmed to execute. Writing also serves a function. The function of writing is to communicate the writer’s ideas to the audience. That is the only function of written language. A writer who uses AI—or any other tool to generate content—isn’t communicating with the audience. It’s the opposite of communicating with them. This would be equivalent to the US President sending his speech writer to negotiate with the Premier of Russia. The Premier of Russia would be justifiably offended that the US President sent someone inferior to communicate in his place. Your reader is far more concerned with receiving your communication than with how perfectly it’s written. If you’re worried that it isn’t written perfectly enough, the solution is to improve your writing skills—not to do something that could interfere with communication. In the worst-case scenario, your reader would correctly assume that you substituted a machine to communicate in your place—which is the opposite of what communication is supposed to be. All people have millions of thoughts going through their heads every single day. Written communication acts as a lens through which your reader looks into your mind and sees the ideas the way you see them. Your writing skill either muddies the lens or makes it sparkling, crystal clear depending on how good your writing is. Written language is synonymous with thought. Your thoughts are only as good as your ability to communicate them in writing. Writing things down is literally the act of organizing your thoughts. We can directly measure the quality of those thoughts by how well you articulate them. Any random thought doesn’t mean anything until you communicate it in a way that the rest of the world can understand. Using AI either to generate this written content or using AI to manipulate it into something other than whatever came out of your mouth or the end of your pencil—both methods short-circuit the communication process and the process of organizing your thoughts. Ask yourself one question. Why do you need to use AI at all? I use spellchecker and grammar checker on my finished documents. Some might argue that these are AI tools. Most of the time, I ignore the tool’s recommendations because it doesn’t understand things like idiom and readability. Whenever the tool gives me a recommended correction, I critique the recommendation compared to what I know about punctuation, grammar, spelling, and word choice rules. I also compare it to the way I want the work to flow and the message I want to communicate to my audience. Nine times out of ten, the recommendation is wrong. I only know this because I know more about how written language works than the tool could ever know. Only a bad writer would need to use AI to write content or improve it. You’re showcasing your lack of skill because you can’t produce something better on your own. You wouldn’t need AI if you really did your job—if you really learned your craft and perfected all the rules and skills you need to call yourself a writer in the first place. You would produce an even better result without it. If you’re bad enough as a writer that you have to use AI, whatever you produce will be bad because you won’t know what good writing is. You won’t recognize where it needs to improve. You won’t think you need to improve because you’ve outsourced improvement to a machine. AI can never be anything more than a crutch. It’s a shortcut on the road to excellence. If you take this shortcut, you will never be excellent and everyone who reads your work will see you as the fraud that you are. Think about the legacy you’re leaving behind with this content. Imagine your children and grandchildren looking back on the work you produced in your life. Imagine how proud they’ll be of the books you wrote, the blogs you authored, the legal briefs you produced, and the research you conducted. Now imagine how they’ll feel when they find out that you used a computer to generate this content. Which would you prefer to be known and remembered for? The betrayal and disappointment they’ll feel will be equivalent to millions of young fans finding out that Lance Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs to win all his cycling titles. Lance Armstrong spent years denying that he doped during his cycling career. Then the whole world turned against him when the truth came out. No one denies that he actually cycled in those races. No one denies that he actually won those titles. He might have been able to win those titles without using drugs. We’ll never know because he used a crutch to do it. He used a tool that made cycling easier, faster, and more efficient. That’s what AI is. It’s a performance-enhancing drug. It boosts your native skills and allows you to accomplish something more. You might have been able to produce something as good or better if you only tried. We’ll never know because you didn’t try. You took the easy way out and wound up with something mediocre and totally devoid of personality and excellence. I could write every single one of my books using pen and paper. The result would be the same. The stories would be the same. The wording would be the same. The process would just take longer. True greatness can’t be AI-generated. You will never be great if you cut corners, take shortcuts, and let technology do the work for you. All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. We hear a lot in the fiction world about how our characters need to have flaws, backstories, and vulnerabilities to make them human. This is what allows our audiences to connect to and identify with the characters.
There has been a huge trend in the fiction world lately toward creating character-driven plots. These plots start off with the character’s flaws and insecurities as the focal point of the story. I actually had a prospective client turn me down for a job because I didn’t use this approach. We see examples of this littered throughout the fiction industry. Harry Potter was an abused child, hated by his aunt and uncle, and kept locked in a cupboard under the stairs. Katniss Everdeen is a poor girl struggling to survive in a harsh world without any advantages. Bruce Wayne survived a violent robbery where he witnessed his parents getting murdered before his eyes. All these characters experienced these traumas before the story starts. The characters’ backstories are supposed to make them more human and relatable. A character’s insecurities, dark secrets, and hidden pain are supposed to inform the audience about the character’s motivations. The dark history is supposed to help us understand why the character does what they do in any given situation. Personally, I see this approach as forced, contrived, and unrealistic. When we meet a new person on the street, we don’t understand their backstory, their hidden insecurities, or their underlying motivations for doing anything. We learn and discover that over the course of time. In most cases, we don’t ever find out any of that information about someone. We deduce it through their actions and behavior. The same goes for fictional characters. The best way to flesh out a character’s personality, motivations, and humanity is by displaying their actions and body language. The audience meets the character for the very first time on the page the same way they would meet someone in real life. The audience knows nothing about this person. Dumping a bunch of backstory on the audience is the worst way to make a character realistic and believable. The Batman franchise is the absolute worst for this. Practically every instalment of the franchise begins with a flashback sequence. We revisit Bruce’s parents’ deaths leading into some shoe-horned segue that explains how the murders made Bruce become Batman. Character development works much better when we play out the scene in real time and show the character’s personality through action, dialogue, and body language. More of the character’s personality and hidden motivations becomes apparent as the story goes. If the writer does his job, the events of the story will throw the character into different situations that cause the character to react in certain ways unique to his or her personality type. We as humans are subconsciously programmed to make judgments about someone’s personality based on their body language and reactions to events that take place around them. This is how we get to know people over time. A person never has to tell us their life story or explain anything to us. We make those judgments automatically and come to those conclusions on our own. Given enough time, we’ll come to know the person even better than if they did explain themselves to us. People can lie to themselves about who they are and why they’re doing something. Whatever a person tells us might be completely wrong—either because they outright cover up their own character flaws or because they don’t understand themselves well enough to give an accurate picture of why they do anything. Getting to know the person and finding these things out for ourselves gives us a much clearer picture of who they are, what they’re capable of, and what motivates them to act the way they do. The same applies to fictional characters. The events of the story will lead us to get to know a character better than if the writer dumps a bunch of information on the audience at the beginning. Quentin Tarantino explains this perfectly in this video describing why he thinks Robert DeNiro is the greatest actor of our time. Tarantino explains that DeNiro goes so deeply into becoming his character that he can only react a certain number of ways to any given situation. These reactions reveal the character more thoroughly than any explanation could. If a dog walks across the set, DeNiro doesn’t say, “Cut! Cut! We have to start over!” He reacts to the dog exactly the way the character would. This is what I do. Once I’ve created a character, I place them in a scene and allow the scene to play out naturally. The character can only respond to the situation in a limited number of ways considering their personality and experience. Let’s do a little thought experiment. How much difference would it make to the story if we never found out that Bruce Wayne witnessed his parents getting murdered in a robbery? What would the Batman story be if Bruce’s parents never got murdered at all? What if they died in a car accident or were still alive and living in another part of the country? What if Bruce just decided to become Batman because he couldn’t stand to watch crime destroy Gotham? Would it really make any difference to the story if we take out that element of his history? I say no, it wouldn’t make any difference. Each of the Batman stories would have played out exactly the same way because how he became Batman isn’t really that important. He already is Batman. He would have battled the Joker and all his other nemeses exactly the same way whether he had that traumatic history or not. We don’t need some sob story about his painful childhood to make us think he’s a poor little rich kid we should all sympathize with. That’s just the writer trying to manipulate us. If an element isn’t critical to the plot, it doesn’t belong in the story. If the story works without it, then it has to go because it’s superfluous to the story itself. It would work just as well or better if we saw Bruce’s inner conflict over his current situation. He’s only one man. He can’t be everywhere at once. We could see him haunted by the horrors he’s seen on the streets and brooding over all the lives he can’t save. What about Harry Potter? How would the story be different if Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon never mistreated Harry? Would it really make any difference to the story if Harry showed up at Hogwarts as a happy, confident, well-adjusted boy? Some might argue that he had to be abused to explain why he didn’t know he was a wizard. I personally wouldn’t have done it that way because I don’t think it’s necessary to the plot. The author could easily have written it into Dumbledore’s letter asking the Dursleys to keep Harry’s magic a secret from him for his own safety. They could have been kind, caring relatives who went along with this for Harry’s benefit. Then the story would have played out exactly the same way. This traumatic backstory is totally unnecessary and irrelevant to everything else that happens. When I create characters, I drop them into a situation in the opening chapter of the book. I don’t tell the reader anything about the character at all. I let the reader to meet the character there as if they were meeting a total stranger on the street. The unfolding events of the plot give the character plenty to cope with, struggle with, and react to. This is how the character develops. The character will develop over the course of the story exactly the same way they would develop in real life. The past takes a back seat as the character attempts to cope with the present. The history can be revealed later when it becomes relevant and necessary for the reader to understand it. It doesn’t belong at the beginning when the audience is just meeting the character for the first time. I created a scene towards the end of the Prideland series where Renfroe and Tom Sharples meet in Renfroe’s garden. These two characters have barely spoken to each other through the entire series and never in any meaningful way. They’ve barely been in each other’s presence for more than a few minutes over the course of five years. They come face to face across the garden and they share a moment of significant eye contact before they start their conversation. All the other events of the story leading up to this moment are what make this moment actually mean something. This moment is a combination of forces that have been acting on both characters over the course of time. The two characters didn’t know each other at all before the story started. Neither of them even knew the other existed. The events of the story cause each character to mean something to the other. Each character exerts his influence on the forces affecting the other. This is how character development works. These forces come together in a moment of significant eye contact. This moment means something even though the characters have hardly met or spoken before. Two characters seeing each other across a garden wouldn’t mean anything without all the events leading up to it. We never find out anything about Renfroe’s or Tom’s history before the story. None of that matters. I did the same thing in Battalion 1. In the opening chapter, the audience knows nothing about Captain Corban Rhodes except his name and the current circumstances in which he finds himself. We don’t know anything about his past or his personality. The unfolding events of the following chapters offer enough challenge and tension to create both an internal and external conflict for him to grapple with. We see his responses, emotions, and struggles through his decisions, body language, and internal dialogue. Battalion 1 never elaborates on Rhodes’s backstory because it isn’t relevant to the plot. None of the characters’ backstories are relevant to the plot. Rhodes doesn’t ask about his subordinates’ histories because the situation doesn’t call for him to know that. The characters have enough to deal with already without digging up the past. This is character development done the right way. Artificially inserting information about the character’s history is unnecessary and contrived. It isn’t necessary or even desirable to deliberately assign flaws, trauma, dark secrets, or insecurities to make a character relatable. We don’t have this information in real life and it doesn’t work in fiction. It works much better to start off with what looks like a normal person on the surface. Remember the old saying: A normal person is someone you don’t know very well. Getting to know the person over time reveals what makes them something out of the ordinary. It works even better if the audience sees the person transform into something completely different over the course of the story. The character doesn’t need to start out as something out of the ordinary. That could actually make them less relatable instead of more so. It’s a sign of amateur writing when an author feels the need to insert these traumatic backstories that serve no useful purpose to the plot or even the character’s development. The events of the story should be interesting enough. The audience wants to see the character’s effort to grapple with these events and the internal conflict that arises from the struggle. These contrivances only weaken the character instead of strengthening them. It’s a sign that the character and the story itself aren’t strong enough to stand on their own. The writer doesn’t have to manipulate the audience’s feelings into caring about a character they would otherwise find boring and one-dimensional. All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. I write a lot of romance.
The romance market calls for a very specific type of character for the male lead who will become the female lead’s love interest. This male character is physically strong and healthy—usually muscular with broad shoulders and washboard abs. He’s determined, commanding, authoritative, dominant, ambitious, decisive, and he has clear boundaries for everything, especially with the woman in his life. He’s a direct communicator and doesn’t beat around the bush when making it clear what he wants and how he plans to get it. The hero in any romantic love story is also protective, caring, and selfless. He has strong connections to family even if he’s been hurt or abandoned in the past. He likes children and wants to have children of his own with the right woman. This is the kind of man that all woman want and all men want to be. He’s the kind of man we all want to rely on because he’s dependable, honorable, and keeps his word. He’s hard-working and understands what’s important in life. He’s a leader that people who aren’t as decisive and certain as he is are happy to follow. He shows the way and usually winds up leading others to a good outcome. It doesn’t even matter if he’s all that good-looking. I’ve created characters like this who were hideously deformed and penniless. They still come off as heroic because they possess all these other qualities. I did this with both Hangman from Rise of the Giants, whose face is covered in scars, and with Carter Holt from Firehouse Blues: Fallen Hero, whose face and body were hideously burned in a fire. When we see a man acting like this, we automatically think of him as a good man. When he sacrifices himself for others, we see him as a hero. We subconsciously equate the opposite of these qualities with evil. An evil man is conniving, manipulative, selfish, has no integrity, and is usually too internally weak to conduct his affairs and relationships with any kind of honor and forthright determination. We see this played out in all the great villains of history such as Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin, Pol Pot, and others. They were insane, paranoid, insecure, and manipulative on a mass scale. None of them was what we would call a warm, caring, cuddly family man. They had perverse ideas about how to conduct their personal relationships and they thought nothing of sacrificing others for their own gain. The truth is that we could say all the same things about what makes a woman either an evil or a heroic figure. All the same qualities apply to women. Heroic women are physically strong, mentally tough, determined, forthright, honest, and confident, but they’re also selfless, caring, and protective. They’re dedicated to family and they’ll do anything to take care of those they love. We as human beings are subconsciously programmed to see someone as cold, toxic, and evil if they are strong, determined, and confident but they’re also selfish, hurtful, distant, and manipulative. We could point to exactly the same behaviors as good or evil regardless of what gender the person is. We hear a lot these days that suppressing emotions stunts men’s mental health and makes them toxic. We hear a lot about how society programs boys and men to believe that expressing emotion is less than masculine. The reality is that men express emotion all the time. Ninety-nine and a half percent of the time, men express emotion appropriately. Pointing at male expressions of emotion and saying they should do it differently is what twists and poisons a man’s mental health. If a man says in a very calm, neutral tone, “It really made me mad when you flirted with that guy at the restaurant right in front of me,” that’s a perfectly appropriate expression of emotion. The fact that he said it in a calm, rational, direct, composed tone doesn’t make it any less valid as an expression of emotion. It’s no less valid because he isn’t crying, yelling, or jumping up and down. We would consider it just as toxic if the woman to whom he made this statement completely ignored, belittled, or dismissed his concerns because he wasn’t crying, yelling, or jumping up and down. We would consider both the statement and the dismissal in exactly the same terms of appropriateness and toxicity if we reversed the genders of the people involved. If a woman said this to a man with whom she was involved in an intimate relationship, we would consider it just as unacceptable if he completely dismissed or belittled her concerns because she didn’t say it emotively enough. My number one rule for writing all kinds of fiction is: fall in love with the male lead. In order to do this, I have to express the male lead’s emotions appropriately. That includes expressions of struggling to contain strong emotions and struggling to continue to function in spite of overwhelming circumstances that cause strong emotions. This kind of portrayal of both men and women is what allows the reader to fully identify with the characters. Men feel emotions at exactly the same strength that women feel them. Men struggle to cope with strong emotions exactly the same way women do. Both men and women struggle between the desire to ask for help and the desire to appear strong enough not to need to ask for help. None of these things are unique to either men or women. A man expressing emotion doesn’t make him weak nor does portraying a male character as grappling with strong emotions detract from his ability to be a hero. Exactly the same can be said for women and female characters. How we depict these characters expressing emotion and how we depict them coping with their circumstances is what determines if the character will come across as heroic. Two people can wind up in exactly the same situation and respond to it in opposite ways. One person could run away from the problem and leave others to suffer as a result of the person’s inaction. We will all automatically see this person as weak and selfish—and we’ll be correct in that judgement. Another person faced with exactly the same challenge could choose to engage with the problem, risk it all, and end up sacrificing themselves to benefit others. The second person is the one who will be seen as a hero. All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. I recently became aware that quite a few of my latest posts focused on calling out the lamentable state of the modern fiction industry.
So I thought I’d swing the pendulum the other way by highlighting examples of what I consider some of the best modern fiction doing it right. In this week’s post, we turn our attention to the movie Shotcaller (2017) directed by Roman Waugh. This movie was a powerhouse of all the necessary elements of masterful storytelling all wrapped up in one package. I find it interesting to compare this movie to Breaking Bad. The two works cover most of the same themes of how one man can spiral into criminality and become a murderous monster everyone hates. Both the film and the TV show were brilliantly acted and shot. Both examined the intensity of the criminal mindset and how a man can become the absolute worst that society has to offer. I find it instructive to distinguish where Breaking Bad went wrong and how Shotcaller hit all the marks Breaking Bad tried to hit and missed. Warning: Spoiler Alert!! I will be including spoilers for both Shotcaller and Breaking Bad, so if you haven’t seen one of them, you might want to do that first. The story of Shotcaller follows the descent of a mild-mannered family man into criminality and brutal violence. The events eventually lead him to become the Heisenberg of the Aryan Brotherhood within the California prison system. The main character, Jacob Harlon, is living his normal life with his wife and young son when he gets convicted to a two-year prison sentence for DUI. He survives the violence of the prison world by asserting himself and responding in kind. He does what he has to do to survive, including joining the Aryan Brotherhood at the bottom of the hierarchy, killing people, participating in riots, and transporting drugs among other things. His activities lead him deeper and deeper into this world until he can’t get out of it. The process completely ruins his relationship with his wife and son. By the time Harlon gets released from prison, his son is in high school and understandably resentful about his father’s life choices. Their relationship becomes estranged, and when Harlon gets released, he divorces his wife and completely pushes both her and their son out of his life for good. He can’t escape the Brotherhood’s presence even on the outside. When he balks at following some of the Brotherhood’s orders and they threaten his family, he makes a terrible choice between finding a way out or spending the rest of his life in prison. All of this leads him to his final Heisenberg moment when he confronts the Aryan Brotherhood’s main leader, kills him, and takes the man’s place as shotcaller for the entire organization. He does this to ensure the continuing safety of his family on the outside. In the ending, he is confined to his cell twenty-three hours out of every day. He spends his one hour outdoors locked in a cage where he can’t get near any other prisoners. He spends the rest of the time reading in his cell. In the final scene, he receives a letter from his son telling Harlon that his son forgives him. This moment brings about a resolution to the entire storyline—a resolution we don’t get from Breaking Bad. Harlon earns this forgiveness—not by being a murderous psycho, but by making the ultimate sacrifice for his family. Everything he does is to this end. Walter White doesn’t do anything for selfless reasons. Walter White really is a murderous psycho. He never balks at destroying the lives of those around him simply because it serves his interest to do so. He blackmails Jesse Pinkman into starting their drug operation in the first place. Walter allows Jane to overdose, poisons a child, and then sells Jesse to his enemies out of sheer spite. The ending of Breaking Bad doesn’t redeem Walter White because he doesn’t free Jesse for selfless reasons. Walter only frees Jesse because Walter knows he’s already dying and has nothing to lose. Freeing Jesse costs Walter nothing. He wouldn’t do it at all if it did. This is the distinction that makes Jacob Harlon a true anti-hero. A murderous, sadistic psychopath doesn’t become an anti-hero simply by being the main point-of-view character in the storyline. A true anti-hero is someone who does everything wrong in the eyes of society and still comes off as heroic. Jacob Harlon is a hero because he does everything wrong in the eyes of society, yet he does it for all the right reasons. He isn’t a murderous psychopath. He’s a caring, protective, selfless family man even when he’s killing people in the most brutal possible way. This is what makes him worthy of his son’s forgiveness at the end. This ending brings about a powerful resolution to the setup of everything else that happens. Unlike Breaking Bad, this film isn’t about all the gang violence, brutality, and intrigue. It’s about human relationships—Harlon’s relationships with his family. In the final scene, we see that he still keeps the same photographs of his wife and son on the wall of his cell. He still considers himself a husband, father, and protector even after he’s already lost everything, including them. This resolution is only possible because the film sets up these relationships and payoffs throughout the film. As I mentioned in my post on George R.R. Martin, these setups and payoffs aren’t possible if you don’t plan the ending in advance. The writers of Breaking Bad just wanted to keep the show going for as long as possible. They would have kept it going indefinitely if they could have gotten away with it. It wasn’t possible for them to set up a satisfying ending because they had no idea when or how the ending would happen. This is why the ending came off as somewhat contrived. It doesn’t do anything to redeem Walter, either in the eyes of the audience and especially not in Jesse’s eyes. He knows Walter too well to be fooled by Walter’s supposedly selfless act. The ending of Shotcaller brings about a much more satisfying resolution. It’s the culmination of all the setups throughout the entire film right up to the first scenes. It follows the main character’s development arc, which Breaking Bad doesn’t do. Walter White doesn’t develop. He basically dies the same narcissistic asshole at the end that he was at the beginning. And before everyone starts jumping up and down screaming about what a hero Walter was, go back and rewatch the scene where Walter blackmails Jesse into going into business with him. Walter White was a high school science teacher. Jesse was his former student. A truly selfless family man who cared about anyone but himself would never have led Jesse into a life of drugs, crime, and destruction. A truly selfless family man would have done just about anything to save one of his students from that life. Walter wouldn’t have forced Jesse into it against his will. No amount of money would have been worth a young man’s life. A good person would have too much integrity to go that far. This scene shows how sociopathic, self-centered, and vindictive Walter was right from the beginning. He would do anything and throw anyone under the bus to get his way. That never changed throughout the whole show and he died exactly the same way. His criminal activities simply gave him a playground to let his psychotic tendencies run as wild as he wanted to let them run. He constantly dodged the consequences of his actions. He constantly manipulated those around him. He continuously chose the routes and actions that would cause those around him the most pain and devastation possible. In his own words, he did this because he could get away with it and because he enjoyed it. He never did anything selflessly. Eventually, he got to the point where he could be certain he wouldn’t lose anything himself. Only then did he consider doing something for someone else. There is nothing admirable about Walter White. Some might call Breaking Bad a cautionary tale about avoiding criminal behavior in the first place. Shotcaller is vastly more effective at communicating this message. The film shows how the smallest misstep, even an accidental one, can lead to life-destroying consequences. It also shows how a truly good person doesn’t change into a bad person just because you throw them into an environment where they’re surrounded by bad people. A good person remains a good person. A person dedicated to doing the right thing will continue to do the right thing no matter what. Jacob Harlon never broke bad. He did a lot of incredibly heinous shit. He became a monster like all the monsters around him. And yet he’s a hero. Everything he did was admirable and done for the right reasons. He earned the ultimate reward for his sacrifice and he deserved that reward. He deserved every ounce of peace his son’s forgiveness gave him in the end. Shotcaller is a beautiful film despite its graphic violence and brutal themes. It’s beautiful because it portrays the purity of a human heart and the lengths one man will go to keep showing his love for his family against all odds. Sometimes I look at TV shows like Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones and I think, “Why? What’s the point?” These shows offer nothing to the conversation about what makes life worth living or what makes human life mean something. Yes, these shows were well shot, well acted, well scripted, and well produced. Is that all they are? Is there any real reason we should subject ourselves to the violence, bloodshed, and the wholesale destruction of human life? Is their only value in being a bunch of fluffy, mindless entertainment? Is this really what we find entertaining—watching a man act as sadistically cruel, destructive, and hurtful as possible for no reason whatsoever? This is nothing but body horror. It’s equivalent to rubbernecking by the side of the road and watching ambulances pull mangled bodies out of the wreckage of destroyed cars while we leer and hope to catch a glimpse the carnage. This is coliseum-style bloodsport entertainment. Its only purpose is to satisfy our bloodlust. It allows us to watch women getting raped, children being burned at the stake, men being torn apart by dogs, and pregnant women getting their bellies slashed open in ways we don’t get to see in real life. This kind of so-called entertainment cheapens all of us, makes us stupider, teaches us nothing, elevates nothing, and ultimately accomplishes nothing. It doesn’t enlighten us or make us better. It turns us into bloodthirsty animals who get a sick thrill out of watching other people suffer. Nothing in these shows was beautiful or added anything to making the people or the world or society better. These shows didn’t even try to ask or answer any questions about what the stories might mean because they don’t mean anything. This is the ultimate purpose of all art—to offer something of value to its audience beyond just some kind of stimulation for us to look at. Art can teach us something. It can improve our lives by giving us insight into our own experience. It can make the world a better place by making us see things from another perspective. Art is an ongoing conversation about the human experience. Art opens a dialogue that allows us to explore, learn, and understand our lives and those around us in ways we wouldn’t be able to understand them otherwise. If a work of art isn’t doing that or at least trying, it’s basically useless. It’s so much noise in a sea of other noise taking up the airwaves. In some cases when done wrong, it can actually make our lives worse by blocking us from understanding or relating to anyone or anything. Every minute of Shotcaller was pure gold. Every minute of the film meant something. The final message sealed the deal by bringing all the violence, bloodshed, and the wholesale destruction of human life back around to making it actually mean something. The film subordinated all the violence and bloodshed to the highest virtues of love, family, and self-sacrifice for something greater than the individual. That’s what I call a masterpiece. There I was, cruising the internet as I sometimes do.
I trawled through a lot of garbage and I started to think, “I need something decent to read.” I ran a search and came up with a listicle titled, “The Best Blogs of 2024,” or something like that. I started working my way down the list and came across a blog that came highly recommended. The writer claimed this blog was one of the most insightful and widely read blogs on the internet. I clicked over to it and scrolled down the author’s list of posts. One particular post caught my attention. The title read, “The Best Book Ever Written.” I thought, “That looks interesting. I wonder what he thinks is the best book ever written.” I clicked on the title and started reading the article. Imagine my shock when I discovered that this author actually claimed that his own book was the best book ever written. At first, I thought it was a joke. I thought the author must be taking the piss out of himself. Then I thought he might be making a backhanded comment about how authors always find fault with their own work. But no. As I read on, it became clear that this author really was convinced, and trying to convince his audience, that his own book was in fact the greatest book ever written. Better than Don Quixote. Better than Moby Dick. Better than The Bible. Better than Homer’s The Iliad and The Odyssey. Even more amazing were the comments from this author’s readership actually agreeing with him. They told him the book was a masterpiece. I was so stunned that I had to look deeper into this matter. It only took me a few seconds to find out that the book in question was titled, How to Live. From reading the very brief description the author gives of the book, it appears to be a collection of the kind of shallow, vacuous, common-sense drivel we’ve come to expect from the so-called self-help industry. In fact, this author’s catalogue is a continuous lineup of the same throwaway trash, including such epics as, Hell Yes or No. Apparently, none of us are smart enough to figure that out on our own and no one else in human history has ever made that point before. After a little more digging, I discovered that this author wrote the book, How to Live, when he was fifty-two years old. He wrote this blog article when he was fifty-five. I’m going to take a wild leap and suggest that he just might learn a few things in the next twenty or thirty years that he didn’t know when he wrote, How to Live. In the best-case scenario, he’ll look back on both the book and this article and think what a naïve, self-centered moron he was—which is what all intelligent people think when they look back on the person they were and the work they produced ten or twenty years ago. I doubt that will happen because this author is too arrogant even to realize what he doesn’t know. Every writer looks at their latest work and thinks, “This is the best work I’ve ever done so far.” Every great writer—every writer who is any good at all—also looks at their latest work and thinks, “I can do better.” This is how we improve. I have never encountered any writer—ever—who thought their latest work was the greatest book ever written. I’m also going to go out on a limb and suggest that The Upanishads, The Bhagavad Gita, The Bible, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead have a few things to say about how to live that aren’t included in this author’s book. The author’s description of his book states that he has devoted two whole chapters to the question of whether someone should dedicate themselves to a single career or stay flexible and independent. This is the subject matter that’s supposed to rock the ages with its wisdom, innovation, and ground-breaking insight. In fact, I had never heard of this author or his book before I saw his name on another blogger’s page. His book is obviously not well known nor is he. His book isn’t being taught in university writing, philosophy, and comparative religion classes. He is not known as one of the great authors or thinkers in the English language tradition. He’s a scarecrow with a titanic ego. This author is just one year older than I am and he doesn’t share my life experience. He was born in Berkely, California, held a variety of jobs, and became successful in the tech world. I would bet cold hard cash that I know a few things about how to live that he has never even thought of. I’ve also written a crap-ton more books than he has and I have never once thought that one of my books was the best book ever written. I would never think that because I recognize just how great the classics of literary history are. I realize how much I have to learn and how much I can improve. I know this because I know what good writing looks like. An interviewer once asked world-renowned violin virtuoso Itzhak Perlman at the age of eighty why he still practiced for three hours every day. Perlman replied, “Because I still see room for improvement.” I only read half of this article before I stopped reading and left the site. I made up my mind right then and there. Not only would I never read this book or any of the author’s other books. I made up my mind that I would never read another word of this author’s content. My first thought on reading this author’s post was, “He’s deranged.” As in—not just colloquially saying he’s weird or quirky or eccentric. He’s actually certifiably insane. He’s delusional. He is completely divorced from reality. This author obviously has no perspective on life, his work, or reality if he could write this post. He not only believes this about his own work. He actually wrote a blog article about it and posted it on the internet for everyone to read. He actually believes his work is the best book ever written. Better than Heart of Darkness. Better than Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, and Nicholas Nickleby. Better than War and Peace. Better than The Divine Comedy. Seriously? If I can’t trust the author’s judgment when it comes to assessing the relative quality of his own work, then I can’t trust his judgment on anything else. He could be wrong about a lot of things and probably is. He could be wrong about everything and probably is. I also can’t trust him to keep his mouth shut when it comes to tooting his own horn and announcing to the world how fantastic he thinks he is when he actually sucks. We all suck compared to the greats of literary history. It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt. If he has so little perspective and is so close-minded that he could actually publish something like this, how can I believe a word he says? I can’t. Stupid people think they’re smart. Smart people think they’re stupid. Why? Because smart people realize just how much they don’t know. They realize there’s a whole world of information out there that we don’t know and can never know. Smart people take an always-learning attitude. They spend their lives learning and never stop until the day they die. Stupid people think they know it all, so they don’t bother to learn anything—which is why they’re so stupid. Legendary science educator Bill Nye famously stated, “Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don’t.” The same goes for writers. Good writers constantly criticize their own work. Good writers are notoriously hard on themselves and pick out the tiniest, seemingly insignificant flaws in their own work. When I proofread one of my own books, I’ll often find myself thinking, “Damn, this is a great book!” and it’s a book that I wrote. That’s a wonderful feeling. It’s one of the greatest rewards of my job. I am also constantly looking for errors and ways to improve my work. I’m constantly striving to do better next time. Because I’m constantly striving to do better next time, I always do. This is what makes a good writer—someone who constantly tries to improve and works to make the next book better than the last. A crappy writer thinks they’re the greatest, so they stay a crappy writer forever. All content on the Crimes Against Fiction blog are © 2024 by Theo Mann. You are free to distribute and repost this work on condition that you credit the original author. |
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