Arrogance

Alright, this is one of those "stop-the-presses-I-need-to-speak" moments, so I'll get back to the things I learned on my travels tomorrow.

While doing my daily blog reading, I came across one of my favorite blogs in which the blogger went to iUniverse (apparently a vanity publisher) and picked out some particularly bad books to laugh at. To be fair, most of them looked pretty bad. Like, spelling and grammar errors on the cover bad. The blogger came up with some subtitles for them that were funny, it was a funny post and I felt a bit bad for the people who had spent their money on vanity publishing only to be laughed at.

Then I opened up the comments section, intending to post something along the lines of "I feel bad for these people." What I found was grown-up, educated adults acting like the 12-14 year olds whose comments I have to see scrolling down the annoying sidebar chat features on every website that lets you watch Anime. "I feel bad for those people" is arrogant enough. Some of the things I read in there made me cringe with their self-righteousness. I won't reproduce them here, but suffice to say they were unashamedly mocking enough to make me quite sad.

As people in the know, writers who understand the publishing process and can write grammatically correct, if not always good, prose, are we really that much better than those who don't and can't? There was a point in every writer's life when they wrote a bad story full of mistakes and loved it, even if that time was as a child. There was a time when a stupid title sounded good to them, and they didn't understand why their book wouldn't sell, and they thought they were a much better writer than they were (most people, I think, remain in this boat--even some of the best authors).

When did we forget the lesson learned in grade school that those who mock others tend to do so to cover up their own insecurities? Has the grind of writing, criticism, revision, and rejection driven the humanity out of the writers of the world? Or have we simply wrapped ourselves in our painfully gained knowledge like a cloak, from the safe confines of which we can hurl sticks and stones at those without one that matches it?