Thread 24672600

How come every English (or adjacent) major I've ever met is a mediocre writer?
Went to a poetry club and about 99% of people were English alumni. None of their shit incited anything in me, it was all fairly dull and predictable.
Best 2 poems of the night came from a 20 something software engineer and a retired doctor.

>Best 2 poems of the night came from a 20 something software engineer and a retired doctor.
Unique backgrounds lead to more interesting writing. The best writers in general are people who don’t identity solely with writing: they have other talents, interests, and areas of expertise that their writing happens to draw from. Not saying hobbyists are better: you need to have a strong writing focus, but it shouldn’t be surprising that people with technical skill and unique backgrounds would make better writers.

English majors tend to identify solely with writing, and the whole insufferable community of academic retards attached to that. No one needs more fart-smelling autofiction of rich twenty-somethings struggling to cultivate a poetic consciousness.

>>24672600 (OP)
i'm an English Lit graduate and i'm an excellent writer

>>24672635
Okay probably not every. But the majority seem to be mid af.
They all have this exact same way of writing.

>>24672600 (OP)
still in school? If you "make it" you get a school to bid for your tenure as a teacher.
Easy money's.
> Doesn't factor in the human to take advantage of such a system.

Why is this thing only producing rotten fruits?

Because MFA degrees don't teach you what to write. That comes from leading an interesting life.

>>24672600 (OP)
Retarded take. Clearly if you take English majors and non-English majors (or any sub-group of non-English majors, with maybe some exception for other humanity students) as two separate groups, the first will have a higher percentage of good and successful writers than any other group.
>>24672634 doesn't justify anything. The vast majority of writers comes from at least partly a literary studies background, and the writers who do are generally superior from every technical point of view. Of course you should have an outlook and an interest for aspects of life that aren't solely related to writing, but that is sort of a given. And yes it does happen that people from non-humanities background make amazing contributions to literature, but if you take their profession as a whole they are in a significantly lower percentage than those coming from literature and humanities background.
If you have any category that you seem to think is particularly gifted in literature (engineers, doctors and lawyers would seem like the bes candidates) and would like to provide a list, I am pretty sure that I can name at least three decent writers with a literature/humanities background for every name you drop.

>>24672600 (OP)
English majors are not going to school for writing, they are going to school to study English. You probably meant English lit majors? Pretty much the same answer, they are studying English lit, not writing.

>>24672600 (OP)
People that go outside are just mediocre in general. Human beings are rare among the crowds of men and women

>>24673906
>The vast majority of writers comes from at least partly a literary studies background
Nothing in my reply contradicted that. Literally said you need to have a “strong writing focus,” you’re just sperging out over being told people who identify solely as writers are boring. Which they are. And the idea of an English bachelors alone signaling a “strong writing background” is hilarious given the vast majority of those students just do the bare minimum and look up summaries online. And LLMs are just making this worse.

By the way, most well known writers held jobs unrelated to writing to finance their endeavors. Turns out having more experiences traveling the world and engaging with people outside of academia will transfer to better writing. A bachelors degree in English means less than nothing.

>>24673907
This. To study english is to hate it to such an extent that you wish to disect it laboriously and repeatedly, reducing the "artistic" merit to a collection of tropes and techniques. To write is to channel the divine and to write well is to embody humanity.

>>24673906
>the first will have a higher percentage of good and successful writers than any other group.
The first will have a higher percentage of serious writers IN ALL CATEGORIES than any other group.
More good writers but also more bad writers.

Using simple 80/20 ratios:

80% of serious writers are English majors
80% of English Majors are bad writers.

That will yield a majority of shitty writers being English majors, no matter what the breakdown of "good and successful" writers happens to be.

>>24673906
>If you have any category that you seem to think is particularly gifted in literature (engineers, doctors and lawyers would seem like the bes candidates)
It's an error to presume any one category produces the best writers.

Tolstoy - military.
Kafka - lawyer.
Joyce - musician.
Mark Twain - a printer/typesetter
Faulkner - military, technically an English major but flunked it in college.
Dickens - Worked in a factory as child labor while father was in debtor's prison, then became a journalist.

Some less "literary" examples

Michael Crichton - Medical Doctor
Don Winslow - History major who worked in government.
Tom Clancy - Started as Physics and downgraded to English because it was easier.
Robert Ludlum - Theater/Drama, Military (Marine corps)
John Grisham - Baseball, Economics/Accounting, Lawyer
Timothy Zahn - Physics

btw I was literally just pulling famous male authors from memory and looking up their backgrounds. The first English major I came to was Dan Brown.

>>24672635
No you aren’t. Post some writing