Thought For the Day
"My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell."
--David Simon, creator of The Wire
The first journalism class I had, one of the first things they told us was to "write to a 10th grade education." I always hated that idea. Perpetuates stupidity. A barrier to challenging readers/viewers.
(Read the full Simon interview with Nick Hornby here.)
posted by Joe Speaker @ 12:56 PM
8 comments
8 Comments:
Your back. Dear God. You are back!
What happened? I read Rooster's post and freaked! Aw Ted, don't be dead, dude! And like a previous post, I played GH for the first time over Christmas. Slow Ride, hit 80% on easy for my first try. Must not ever buy one, or my life will be over.
A-fucking-Men. I still fight this from my editors a lot, and my response is it's perfectly fine to get them to look up a word every once in a while.
Thanks man! Show up on IRC so we can look at old 80s thrash metal videos on YouTube!
Please don't Go.
"Me fail English? That's unpossible." - Ralph Wiggum
Fookin' A.
Although, I might have gone with "Fuck them. Right in their stupid asses."
Tomato, tomahto :)
Back when I was a budding high school journalist I went to a conference. They had us in a story competition where we were supposed to be covering a press conference by McDonald's. I just stenographed the whole thing, dumbed it down and made a short inverted pyramid, and won a gold medal. That was about the day my fantasy of journamilism died.
The thing about The Wire is, there are ninety million characters and they're all real and every time I see another episode my fantasy of screenwriteralism dies a little too, because how the hell can I ever write something that good?
awesome quote. and inspiring.
off to read the interview.
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