The CW Fallacial Law 2.0

I wrote the first version of this a long time ago, I decided to spruce it up a little. So here it is. I edited and included some suggestions from the comments on the first version.

The CW Fallacial Law

<>As the amount of pubescent teenagers available on MT:CW nears 1, so does the occurance of the 'CW Fallacial Law' and its colloraries exponentially increase. <>

The CW Fallacial law are ultimately subcategories of Appeal to Authority and the Association Fallacy. <>It lies in the nature of having your writing critiqued that on occasion you will hear some less-than-uplifting things about your work. We all understand that writing is a craft you put a lot of effort into and as such, a rebuttal of your work can be misinterpreted as a rebuttal of your person. Occasionally when a writer is so rebuffed they find themselves unable to handle it in a mature manner and will attempt to make up excuses and justifications for their errors. <>

They seem to believe that merely by explaining what they actually intended to do; the error and the harsh feelings will go away. Naturally, this does not work and eventually, many will fall back on the CW Fallacial Law.

Writers guilty of this fallacy tend to make statements such as:

"If Shakespeare wrote this you would've loved it." Or,

"Cummings wrote like this"

Usually when a remark is made about writing here they are making a remark on the execution of said work. It's got little to do with WHY something is in a story it's HOW you insert it that creates problems. Referring back to a famous author or poet proves nothing. A writer that emulates or imitates somebody else’s style is not necessarily good at it. As a matter of fact, imitating the masters is one of the hardest things one can attempt, because they were the best, and they regularly attempted styles that are by nature hard to work with, or geared to the mindset of people who lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago. It will not easily endear you to your audience in the early 21^st century.

The real issue is that the writers who fall back on the CW Fallacial Law expects to be given the benefit of the doubt. S/he wrongly assumes that famous writers are given this benefit because of their fame, rather than the fact that their skill and talent brought them their fame.

<>Writing does not exist in a vacuum, as most crafts, it has developed over time. While certain true masters of the craft (like, you guessed it, Shakespeare) have managed to write things that truly and genuinely still move and engage us centuries after the fact, it does not remove the historical aspect of their work. Shakespeare is not only enjoyable because of his great skill, he is enjoyable as high water-mark of classical sonnets and 16th century play-writing. Trying to duplicate his archaic syntax just because you like your poetry to be flowery is completely missing the point of why it works for him and not for you, just like most fantasy writers who want to be Tolkien manages to miss that the The Lord of The Rings is a by-product of a life-time spent creating an alternate-world Europe, which is what carries the books through in the end. <>

While there are a few choice exceptions in these Fallacies, such as writing a 16th century styled Sonnet, archaic syntax to boot to better understand such sonnets overall, or to increase your mastery of language, budding writers would do best to let these fallacies go, along with their pride.