Writers are made in life, not classrooms

It shocks me how bad at writing successful writers are sometimes. I’m currently watching a very popular show with my wife and the writing is so awful sometimes that I hope to God it’s AI. But I know the truth. It’s not AI that’s writing the show, it’s a kid straight out of college. AI is, therefore, probably doing a lot of the heavy lifting, but ultimately it’s the kid that’s reading his or her copy at the end of the day and saying to themselves, “yep, that’s definitely the way human beings talk to each other. Also, this plot definitely makes sense.” It makes me think about my own writing from when I was in high school or college, and how utterly cringey it is to me now. I had no idea how to write people of different ages or personalities, largely because my experience with those kinds of conversations was so limited. I also couldn’t write a logical or interesting plot because my life had yet to follow a logical or interesting path. I had limited experience with complex sequences of events because school is a simple, sometimes illogical universe. It’s not a real place, with realistic consequences. You can get in a fistfight in a classroom and it’ll result in detention. If you bomb an assignment, you don’t get fired, you get a bad grade. School isn’t a real place, and the people in it, including the teachers, frequently have no concept of the real world. So, the fact that the entertainment industry keeps churning out drivel shouldn’t be a shock to anyone. How do you expect to have a realistic storyline with actual human dialogue if your writers all go from college (not reality) to the entertainment industry (also not reality). Say what you will about the alcoholic writers of yesteryear, but most of them lived a real life before they landed a job as a writer (that’s why they’re alcoholics). That real life experience transfers directly into interesting storylines and compelling dialogue. And, I’m not saying I’m one of them, but I can say definitively that the rather complex life I’ve lived to this point has shaped me into the best version of a writer I can be. I’m not saying that I’m great, you can judge that for yourself by buying my book, dangit, but I am saying that without all that life experience I would be a whole lot worse.