![[Logo]](/images/101ReasonsLogo.png "101 Reasons to Stop Writing")
In 1796, Scottish poet Robert Burns stopped writing the hard way, and began the more rewarding task of being a national hero. He wrote the world’s most famous drinking song.
In 1899, poet Hart Crane began his lifelong struggle with being the second-most famous writer born on July 21, 1899. He eventually committed suicide in characteristically cryptic fashion, and still his nemesis found a way to overshadow him.
In 1899, friend of the bottle and enemy of the bull Ernest Hemingway was born. His parents put him in a dress for his first baby pictures, and he spent the rest of his life slaughtering wild animals, punching drunks, volunteering for foreign wars and eliminating faggy adjectives from his prose to make up for it. He later won the Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature for a short story (which he padded out to over a hundred pages) about a guy who caught a fish — but back then they were practically giving them away. He put the final full stop through his brain in 1961.
In 1933, novelist and literary critic John Gardner was born. As well as writing the best damn story about Grendel for more than a thousand years, he is most famous for his book On Moral Fiction, in which he argued that all fiction should strive to explore universal human values. (Bet you’re glad he’s not in charge of the pens and paper.)
In 1969, the Golden Age of science fiction reached its zenith when Edwin ‘Buzzkill’ Aldrin stepped onto the surface of the Moon and declared it “magnificent desolation”, moments after Neil Armstrong flubbed his famous “One small step for (a) man” line. The genre began a rapid decline when people realised that the long promised little green men were just as fictional as the “magnificent”.
In 2007, the much ballyhooed “Fantasy Boom” ended with a whimper as children (and adults with the critical faculties of children) rushed out to purchase the seventh and final Harry Potter novel at a ridiculous discount from chain bookstores trying to compete with supermarkets, skipped to the ending, wondered for a moment what they were going to read now, then went back to watching television.
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Am I the only person who’s looking at the desolation that will lie upon the fantasy genre now that Harry Potter Mania is finally over? After all, fantasy publishers have had eight years to produce something “just as good as Harry Potter”, and they have nuthin’. They’ve had eight years to hype up the inane meme of how “well, if Harry Potter fans go into the store and can’t get their copy, then they’ll browse through the rest of the store’s selection,” deliberately ignoring the legions that wander into a bookstore for their first time in their lives, mumble “hrrypttr”, and immediately walk out, never to return, if they’re told “Sorry, we’re out” or “come back tomorrow”. We’ve had eight years of publishers, distributors, Publisher’s Weekly hacks, and the proprietors of Frumpy Fiftysomething’s Used Books and Quiet Desperation Emporia (with branches in every city and small town) telling themselves that this year will be the one where the fans finally decide to pick up something else, and I’ll be laughing my ass off in six months when these same people cry about how the costs of selling Harry Potter books actually killed their businesses. Scholastic itself is in a world of hurt, Borders is inches away from bankruptcy, and I figure we’re on the edge of a sea change in publishing, where a lot of people will Stop Writing (and Stop Editing, and Stop Promoting, and Stop Selling) because they won’t have any other options. Oh, there’s going to be a world of completely unemployable English and Marketing majors all out fighting for the last cashier position at Barnes & Noble, and I’m going to be laughing and pointing the whole time.
And you know the best part? The final Harry Potter book’s release means that we’ll never have to read one of Teresa Hayden’s pie-in-the-sky proclamations about “Harry Potter Fever” translating into a revival of fantasy. Thirty fucking years ago, we heard the same proclamations about how Star Wars was going to do the same thing, and what did we get for our troubles? The same exact response as what fantasy received from Harry Potter: a legion of children only wanting official product, not knockoffs, and a horde of Cat Piss Men smirking about how all this hype somehow validated their obsessions. In another five years, even the children will have moved on to other things, and the Cat Piss Men are more than welcome to the ruins.