Why You Suck At Writing

On Writing in the Modern World

To the logic & lit bros, your writing will always suck.

A few weeks back, Reddit was performing their monthly tribunal on why I am a terrible writer and content creator who shouldn’t be listened to. However, none of them had read my writing.

Someone posted, “Hey, someone should post his writing so we can see how bad it is.”

A literary crusader (thank you to whoever this was) decided to post an excerpt from a James Joyce novel and claim it was my writing.

Their reaction changed how I view writing online forever.

The Standard of a Literary Renaissance

In the era of deconstructing & destroying, logic bros have created an Aristotelian utopia where any piece of art can be dismissed.

Watching a group of grown men on Reddit shit on James Joyce (while thinking it was my writing) showed me there is no way to appease the mob.

If you want to write online in 2025, the standard is that you don’t just have to write better than James Joyce (because he sucks) but write light years beyond his ability!

I also don’t want this to turn into a relativist “all art is sacred” circle-jerk because, in our post-literate age, the mob has elevated countless terrible authors.

So, what is the middle ground?

Your Ancestral Writing Mission

In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Paul Atreides and the Bene Gesserits can tap into memories of their ancestors. Our job as modern authors is no different.

If I asked you

“What writing lineage are you in right now? Have you read every book by every author in that lineage? How are you honoring what they did before you? What’s your plan to take it to the next level?”

How would you answer?

Many artists fall into the ignorant attitude that they’re libertarian messiahs, unique because they’re the smartest cookie in their group of friends who play fantasy football, whack off to who knows what when their girlfriend is sleeping, and haven’t read since Mr. Carson assigned Catcher in the Rye.

With books on writing, channels like this, university workshops, and access to great books, it’s easier than ever for anyone to reach an average level of creative writing.

Yet, most authors/artists are living on narcissistic islands, thinking that just because they like/read other authors, that means they exist in their lineage. However, unless you’ve deliberately studied those authors over the years and surpassed them in their arena, you still aren’t ready to set out on your own.

Chaucer was a product of Bocaccio’s The Decameron and took it to the next level.

Shakespeare took The Canterbury Tales to the next level and look how far his influence has spread.

Recently, an author told me he didn’t need to do imitation exercises on Cormac McCarthy’s work because he had surpassed “one-to-one imitation.” But unless you’re writing better than an author, you’re not above them.

I’ve been to the Cormac McCarthy and David Foster Wallace archives, and both did one-to-one imitations and outright stole from other authors until their dying days.

David Foster Wallace mind-fucked himself with trying to be independent from the anxiety of influence in The Pale King and threw himself into writer’s block.

Every great athlete and artist first lived in and dominated a system, sometimes for decades, before moving into their greatness. Why do you think you’re special?

Why Your Writing Sucks

You will always suck at writing because even if you follow the advice above, your writing will be too polarizing for the average reader. This is why making people care about your writing in the modern world is so hard.

The general population is not becoming better readers. The average literary fiction reader has gotten worse at reading over the past few decades. But, our ability to write and be experimental has become limitless in the modern era as authors.

So, it would be silly to expect that writing in a previously misunderstood and unaccepted lineage by the masses would become more viable in a decreasing literary fiction/poetry market.

I continue the Li Po » Ezra Pound » James Wright/Bly » Synder » lineage of nature poetry. But my work will feel a million miles away to the average individual who sits inside all day on their phone and thinks the standard of good poetry is Shakespeare, Slyvia Plath, T.S. Eliot, E.E.Cummings, and Ocean Vuong.

I don’t want to do the whole, mew mew, woe is me, I’m a sad boy misunderstood artist, but back in 1965, when James Wright wrote To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota kids, teenagers, and adults still spent time outside and hadn’t been consumed by the television and the cultural hypnotic societal mechanism yet. So they could understand a poem like this on a soul level. When I show my students poems like this, they turn them into logical abstractions, another thing to dominate and assign meaning to.

To the Evening Star: Central Minnesota

Under the water tower at the edge of town
A huge Airedale ponders a long ripple
In the grass fields beyond.
Miles off, a whole grove silently
Flies up into the darkness.
One light comes on in the sky,
One lamp on the prairie.

Beautiful daylight of the body, your hands carry seashells.
West of this wide plain,
Animals wilder than ours
Come down from the green mountains in the darkness.
Now they can see you, they know
The open meadows are safe.

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Feel the depth of love in that second stanza… That is something no bullshit confessional poet can fathom. A love wilder than petty emotions.

I understand our job as poets/writers is to bridge the gap and get people interested in our work, and I am here motivating thousands of people to do that.

But, the strife sometimes feels futile in a world of spiritually void dopamine cyborgs looking for the next shocking thing in literature.

I have no advice or solution, at least in this post, but if you can write a poem with the power of James Wright, then at least God knows you don’t suck at writing :)