It’s interesting, I’m also a screenwriter and a penguin. I don’t give away any aspect of my identity online. It’s how I avoid this sort of nonsense.
There are a few things happening all at once that are worth discussing I think. The first is the emergence of an identity agenda in the arts. It is more important who you are rather than what you write…. This, for the most part, has been spearheaded by white liberals, who go out of their way to get ‘authentic new voices’ - but don’t look very far. They don’t curate good stories, they curate the sort of didactic mess they think they should see. This is more evident in theatre than TV and you need only look at the leading U.K. theatres to see how ubiquitous woke theatre has become.
Sadly, these white liberals often select voices from within their own class. That one Indian girl from their boarding school, the black trans guy who showed up at their theatre and got fast-tracked. If they don’t shape these voices and applaud anything these writers do, they will set these writers up for a fall in the long run. If you can’t do narrative and you insist on beating people over the head with a message, people will stop watching. You can feel it already in the U.K. theatre scene. Those writers will be discarded and woefully under developed. BIPOC writers are supposed to write about BIPOC issues and you can see the disappointment writ large on the faces of those white liberals if they elect not to.
The second thing to say is that writing work, wherever possible should be anonymised…. Completions, routes into the industry and specifically those who ‘select’ - patterson needs not be swapped out, he’s a good writer and he’s got his stuff… the people who need to be swapped out are the publishers. You need to find the writers (whatever their heritage) that appeal to those people who select.
And this is what these frustratingly woke liberals miss…. If they genuinely wanted to make changes in the arts - they’d give up their roles as artitistiv managers, literary agents and publishers. They’d shut down the internships from private schools via someone’s uncle that mean they’re invariably the people picking the writers. At the moment they’re picking what makes them look good - and it’s a short term fix. But they won’t do that - because they aren’t the problem you see…. It’s the lack of diversity in the art, not in who selects the art.
The penguin solution is to get the best stories as selected by the people with the widest cultural experience…. Different things speak to different people. At the moment it’s a white woke hegemony and they’re so blinded by their own virtue signalling they haven’t works out they’re the problem and it’s nothing to do with Patterson, you or any penguins who happen to be passing. :o)
