Fallout From the Lynn Shepherd Bomb
I understand the urge to go online and just post a bunch of inflammatory gibberish and see what brings home the most clicks. I get that. What I don't get is the pretense that you're doing something else: maybe something meaningful, funny or somehow beneficial to society.
Trolling is trolling, plain and simple, and acting like you're not doing it (or, perhaps, that you didn't realize you were doing it) is just so much more trollery. So, I think I'm going to devote some time to just calling out some of the higher profile trolling I've come across lately.
I don't expect this will accomplish anything. I won't claim I'm doing society any good. If pressed, I'll even admit that I'm just trolling the trolls. The first entry in my ongoing troll coverage goes a little something like this:
"If JK Rowling Cares About Writing, She Should Stop Doing It"
In this Huffpost piece, underselling author Lynn Shepherd takes Rowling to task for being too successful. Shepherd, who is quick to point out that she's not dissing Rowling on artistic merit (as she says, "I've never read a word... so I can't comment on whether the books were good",) she lambasts Rowling for having the nerve to keep selling lots and lots of books. By her reasoning, every book Rowling sells is a book Shepherd doesn't. (Which, as I understand it, means Shepherd has sold minus several million books.)
Now, I understand wanting to do something like this. I mean, I could go on and on about my own seething jealousy of Rowling, (and I've never hidden the fact that I'm open to engaging in an ongoing press war with someone more famous,) but at least if I did I'd take the time to read one of her books first. Shepherd almost seemed proud that she was bashing a writer she'd never bothered to read.
Her pride was met with scores of people flocking to Amazon to give her one star reviews on the basis that they'd never read anything of hers, but that shouldn't stop them from calling her a terrible writer.
A few days later, after pretty much everyone who ever wrote a book came out and called her on her idiotic trolling, Shepherd made a sort of non-apology, saying she was sorry if she had upset anyone, but that the world needs to know what a zero sum game writing really is.
Personally, I'd have respected her more if she had come out and said, "Look, I'm a working writer. I needed a paycheck, and HuffPost eats this kind of stuff up. It was a no brainer and it paid my rent this month. Sorry if that offends you. Hate the game, not the player..." And so on.
Again, if you're going to knowingly write idiocy to boost your ad revenue, at least have the decency to own up to it later.