Thread by @scumbelievable

Okay, 1 like = 1 book opinion

People are always like "oh so you think there should be more rape in fiction? well then you must want to see people have diarrhea in books" and like aside from the fact that this is a cruel, stupid comparison, yes I do think books should include more pooping in general.

i am a little bitch sucker for stories about medieval aristocrats being shitty and failing and hating themselves, but come on, man, there are a thousand kinds of period tradespeople to tell stories about!

related, but I love it when a book is about work. I love scenes of people working. I think it's just as interesting and ripe for prose experimentation as action or sex scenes.

"elevated horror" is a fake idea made up to sell shit

"men writing women" and that whole vein of literary "criticism" are disastrously stupid and wrongheaded. the end goal of the field of prose literature cannot be siloing everyone into writing only about their own bodies and experiences.

Almost all covers are boring and ugly, and it would actually be wildly easy to fix this. Just go on deviantart or here or whatever and hire random artists.

i love lavish descriptions of clothes and appearances and scenery and natural environment. the more the better. fuck minimalism

books have no moral obligation to model moral behavior for their readers. books are not dreams or miracles or the word of god or whatever. a book is a person going on a spacewalk and giving you the opportunity to come meet them between your two perspectives

books should remain unrated and unregulated. anything else would result in an instant crackdown on queer and POC writers harsher than the restrictions already silently imposed by economic necessity and editorial/publishing prejudice.

i hate it so passionately when characters in a fantasy setting make modern-sounding jokes or speak in modern ways.

books should have more sex in them. if you're writing a book, put more sex in it. america is too prudish

the endless reactionary debates over whether the canon is good or bad tend to avoid the nuanced conclusion that it's just extremely limited and requires massive expansion. the answer isn't to stop reading Ulysses, it's to read Ulysses and The God of Small Things, etc

you have to challenge yourself as a reader if you want to produce something of worth, but it's fine to produce trivial art. you can just riff on your stuff and stay in the shallow end if you want to.

plot means almost nothing to me. who cares? if the imagery is good and the characters are interesting i will happily wander around a total narrative wasteland for months.

we have as a culture completely misplaced where and how the concept of "empowerment" can be meaningful in fiction. mostly we use it to pretend that the oppressed are masters of their own fate on an individual basis.

Space Opera should make a comeback.

Michael Crichton doesn't own dinosaurs. Write a book about dinosaurs.

Kill more Nazis in your books. We've been slacking on Nazi-killing since they stopped making Indiana Jones movies

more working-class writers, please. i have read enough books by people who clearly have never overdrafted their bank account paying rent every single month for two years

it is okay to write stories about queer people who fucking suck and are nightmare disasters.

books need more fat people. why the hell is a medium with no casting constraints, totally unbeholden to hollywood's cult of sanded, perfect mannequins not producing more meaningful work about and centering fatness?

related, but fatness in horror is so totally unexplored outside the realm of knee-jerk disgust. living in a fat body is some of the most under-scrutinized shit in all of horror art.

more medieval horror.

i think people gravely overestimate the power of books to make us do and believe things we weren't already going to

never write with a defensive attitude. don't try to anticipate what your readers will feel, or what a certain type of reader might think. your job is to communicate, theirs is to engage with that communication.

writing is a job. you're just some shmuck, same as me.

There's a lot to be learned from paperback barons like Crichton and King, both stylistically and in parsing the thematic landscape of genre fiction.

Melanie Tem belongs alongside King, Barker, Jackson, and the other modern horror greats.

Moby Dick is very funny, and contrary to its reputation it's pretty accessible for anyone with a little bit of patience.

It's good for a writer to read plays, learn blocking, timing, read dialogue aloud. Get a feel for production.

Italians aren't real and they can't hurt you.

Maybe more important than anything else here: do not stick to major publishers, or even fringe publishers. Go find what your peers are writing. Go to zine fests. Buy chapbooks. Browse through self-published stuff. Richer, wilder, and more wonderful by far.