Look this is happening everywhere but it is genuinely worse in the USA and your idiot politicians want use banning books to "make America great". Your country is screwed

Just to underline exactly who they are they say "make our country great".

And MAGA heads get so offended when called out on their violent/terroistic BS.

Your country is screwed

>Do you think that in the future can AI replace writers?

No. Do I think bad writers will be replaced - yeah. Content creation is dead. Only art will survive.

AI can't imagine. But it can put basic info into established structures. So James Patterson can let his ghostwriters go and use AI - I'm not sure his fans would see much difference.

Same with cheap TV scripts.

The only things that will survive the AI industrial revolution is genuine imagination and originality.

Because stealing is a crime.

>I thought she was a good writer.

Her writing/prose is appalling. Her word choice is bizarre. Her grammar and syntax are awful. Her writing is genuinely the strangest I have ever come across apart from Dan Brown (she is better than him though).

Her romanticization of SA and rape is just repulsive. Her stuff is basically a 50 Shades of Fae but worse on every conceivable level.

I'd say she's a very strange writer.

He's a Psychopath. He's Glib. His choice of music are all hyper produced, shallow, just like him. His Huey Lewis bit is a lecture on conformity. They are him manufacturing himself by proxy - which is what psychopath's do. They have no identity of their own so they need to find and borrow/steal bits from other people's to make themselves real. Andrew Cunanan is a good RL example of this.

The music is a stable thing he can fix on and a material icon of success (Phil Collins' story in Genesis for example, sort of mirrors his own in his family).

They're bad.

The writing's bad. The message is bad. The plot twists and conventions are obvious.

They are yet another example of abuse as romance targetted at girls and young women. A LOT of people find that reprehensible.

100% this. If you don't want to buy a book ask your local library to order it in.

Don't pirate

His plays are designed to be theatrical. There are very few stage directions and the dialogue is doing all the work.

As others suggest reading aloud is good. So is watching the plays in uncut form. The Hollow Crown is a very good tv version. Patrick Stewart's Macbeth is excellent. Brannagh's Hamlet is good but if you can see David Tennant playing Hamlet his performances are incredible.

Yeah, I'm sad that we don't have the next GGK or Gaiman or LeGuin coming through. In fact I suspect it's because publishers _want _ the Sando type (volume over quality, YA over lit) that we aren't.

>he belongs in the YA section and has pulled the entire fantasy genre as a whole more toward YA and less toward more complexly written literature.

This is probably the best summing up of half of the damage Sanderson has inadvertently done to the genre. He's cemented the idea that it is a kids' & teenagers' genre.

The other half is made up of his laws, his volume of production and his impact on the readers but that's another story.

Simple prose is not always the same thing as good prose either.

His prose isn't simple -- it's poor, it's artless. His fans say prose, characters and dialogue aren't his strong suit. Fine. Just don't proclaim to the rest of us that he's a good writer then.

>You can't be a good fiction writer without being a good storyteller, is what I'm saying.

The whole of modernist literature disagrees with you. And postmodern literature. And the Romantic poets. And all contemporary poetry. I mean what's really the plot of Invisible Cities, or Ulysses or Death in Venice. Your definition is the limited one I'm afraid. A book doesn't need a story or a plot per se.

>Being a good fiction writer has to involve being a good storyteller and being able to plot. If you can't do that, you are not a good writer.

To be a popular novelist sure. But writing page turners doesn't make you a good writer. It makes you a prolific and successful content creator. I mean Dan Brown is hugely successful and still a crap writer. Paolo Coehlo too. Sarah J Maas, Coleen Hoover & Sally Rooney are all successful some critically acclaimed - none good.

• Being a writer is about writing skill. The clue is in the word. It's a craft.
• Being a storyteller is about storytelling skill. It's a related but different craft.
• Being a content creator is about content - creation skill. It's what publishers and the markets wants - more and more and more and more.
• Being a worldbuilder is world building skill. It's a totally different craft especially in SFF. And Sanderson is good at this.

These are different things and they are mutually exclusive. And there's nothing wrong with that. But Brandon Sanderson isn't a good writer. Due to the fact that his writing is poor, bland, hastily written and under developed. And all of that is due to the fact that the guy pumps out 300k+ word books way too quickly. He doesn't refine the writing - he just does more. Sorry but that's content creation.

And writers do need to be content creators. It just shouldn't be all they are.

I'd venture further that his own upbringing as a Mormon was pretty sheltered from really interesting writing (poetry, modernist literature, postmodernist literature). You know all the good stuff that deals with what Eliot and Yeats called Sex and Death. All the books the LDS hates. The "dirty" stuff. All the stuff that informs writers as they learn about that craft and how to create characters. You see this in a number of LDS writers - Meyer, Dan Wells - not 100% certain why but I dated a Mormon and she wasn't allowed to be well read.

Also - yes:

>Many renown artists might not use the tools so technically well, but portray ideas, emotion, and story so much better with a splash of paint.

That's voice/style. That's mastery. That's being good at the craft. Compare Sanderson's ability to construct worlds and magic systems and plots with his ability to use prose. He's got 3 out of 4. That's more than most people. I mean GRRM can write & world build but his content creation skill is functionally zero at this point.

And here's the thing some great writers are really boring. Saying someone is a great writer doesn't mean they write successful or page turning books. It means they're an artist.

Sanderson is not an artist with words but he is a multi millionaire - so fair play to him.

I'm not saying he's a bad novelist btw - just a bad writer.

Sanderson is a good content creator in the field of books. He's a good plotter and world builder. But none of that makes him a writer. Not to mention a good one.

A writer has two tools - dialogue and prose. Saying someone is a good writer despite being bad at these two things (the writing) is like saying a house is "well built despite the crappy building job - but the architectural plan is great!"

Plot is just a schema - a structure. And worldbuilding is not writing.

I like the person BTW - I don't hate Brandon Sanderson - he's just not a "good writer". He's a hugely successful one. A hugely popular one. But no just because he can worldbuild and plot does not make him a "good" writer. He's a good storyteller sure, but not a good writer. That's why I call him a content creator TBH.

The fanboys are going to downvote this to hell, but, Brandon Sanderson isn't a good writer. By this I mean his writing is bad. His prose and dialogue are utilitarian. Despite his deep world building, despite his plotting, his writing is poor.

That is a silly thing to say. No art for is primarily about the story. Not film, theatre, painting or literature. Each art form is about itself first. Then the story. Never the other way around.

And the art of storytelling - it's about how you tell them.

I agree but honestly for me it was the scenes with Triss having diarrhea and descriptions of the Sorceresses that lost the work points. This and the whole piece on Ciri's periods in Kaer Morhen (this remains one of the worst pieces on menstruation ever written in fantasy) and her multiple SAs from book 3 onward by different elves. Sapowski could have left all of this out. You have to forgive this to enjoy the series.

No that's factually inaccurate. The games "resulted in a billion dollar merchandise and media industry" more specifically Witcher 2 & 3.

Up till then outside Eastern Europe the books were relatively unlnown. Proof of this is that they only finished translating the books into English after the Witcher 3 was released.

After Witcher 2 was released there was 1 set of short stories and maybe 2 of the novels in English.

So no. This is just not true. At least in English speaking world.

I would say the short stories are the masterpiece TBH. I thought the novels were fascinating and probably a better example of grim dark than anything other than Abercrombie and GRRM but I enjoyed the short stories much more.

Yeah the pricing of ebooks is extremely predatory.and again the author's seeing v. little if it's a traditionally published ebook.

Not the author. They might make $1-$1.50 on that. 50% of that cost is the retailer at 100% mark-up. 50% of the rest is publisher and the rest is print and logistics costs.

Oh FFS. Stop posting this jackarsery. This is how house fires start. It is not safe to put book paper in a home oven.

C'mon. Srsly now. If you're a germaphobe you know how disinfectants work. You have seen them work. Leather, glue and paper do not mix with bleach based chemicals.

Sorry I'm not sugar coating this. If you have an anxiety about germs don't borrow other people's old learher-bound books.

There are a lot of alternatives that don't involve damaging perishable materials (leather, animal glue, paper) with modern chemicals. Like ebooks.

How the hell would you feel if you lent some else an antique or family heirloom only for them to destroy it.

What the actual.

You have got to be trolling. If not please do the world a solid and stay away from old books with any "disinfectants"