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There's a sort of lean-startup model for nonfiction and I understand it well enough to even teach now. I think I could get any reasonably competent English speaker writing decent blog post level essays within a couple of months. There's a reliably executable learning curve.
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Fiction though, lacks both the agile startup learning curve AND any pedagogical model anyone can guarantee. There's a vast industry of people offering education, but none strikes me as reliably capable of getting you to a first good story even assuming you have decent ideas.
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i have recently started thinking philosophical treatises are just ideas written by people who don't know how to write a story
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seriously though consider somebody like ayn rand, whose manifestly terrible ideas run like wildfire, when like iunno, rawls or somebody is graduate-level obscurity —brandolini's law, philosophical edition
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yeah, there's a quality dimension here. I'd rather fail to ever write fiction than produce something like Atlas Shrugged. Some things are... anti-aspirational.
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there's something about her reach that is not actually earned, since her books are circulated by an evangelical cadre ... like gideon's bibles have a huge circulation but shouldn't be considered a best-selling edition of the bible... they cheat with hotels, and nobody reads them
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Like most people, I haven't actually bought her books. I read Atlas Shrugged in college because there was a copy floating around, and some charismatic bozos insisting everybody ought to read it. So I read it and immediately flipped the bozobit on the evangelists.
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haha yeah and the ceo of lululemon (the fountainhead and atlas shrugged are—or at least were—including in the employee onboarding schwag)