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ALL THE SAD YOUNG LITERARY CISHET white MEN

A Writer Whose One Weird Trick Can Ruin Any Piece Of Writing, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'

Molly Bradley
Molly Bradley
A Writer Whose One Weird Trick Can Ruin Any Piece Of Writing, And More Of This Week's 'One Main Character'
This week we've also got a woman who thinks helping friends is for chumps, a nepo baby/shitposter who just plain sucks and a journalist who would like to extend her compliments to a CEO doing layoffs.
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Every day somebody says or does something that earns them the scorn of the internet. Here at Digg, as part of our mission to curate what the internet is talking about right now, we rounded up the main characters on Twitter from this past week and held them accountable for their actions.



This week’s characters include a woman who thinks helping friends is for chumps, a nepo baby/shitposter who just plain sucks, a writer whose one weird trick can ruin any piece of writing and a journalist who would like to extend her compliments to a CEO doing layoffs.



Sunday

Cathryn Lavery

The character: Cathryn Lavery, “bootstrapped founder,” person who pays for Twitter, not a fan of friendly help

The plot: Cathryn, whose Twitter profile says that she’s a very successful business person, found herself back on the move and tweeted about it.

“As an adult, don’t ask your friends to help you move. Hire movers, save a friendship,” she said and triumphantly shared a screencap of a text she sent to a friend who offered to help move.



Honestly, this is a power move, or flex, if you will. The poster in this case can clearly afford movers and wants to flaunt it. And you know what, if you can afford it, tweet it — but be smart about it. Don’t tarnish the name of adult friendship, just say you’re rich or something. That way people might hate you a little less.


The repercussion: People pointed out how benign this pointed sentiment was, some being more meaner than others. Cathryn did offer a clarification a whole two days later, with a passive-aggressive thumbs-up emoji, but who are we kidding — all the heavy lifting was already taken care of.



Adwait Patil



Tuesday

Ben Dreyfuss

The character: Ben Dreyfuss, journalist, actor, nepo baby, shitposter

The plot: Sometimes you just give people enough rope and they hang themselves with it. And sometimes that person happens to be an infamous Twitter troll with a history of problematic tweets, who just… outdoes himself. We don’t know what spurred this thread and quite frankly, we don’t want to know.



The repercussion: There was a thread, and then a claim that it was all just jokes, and then a sort-of-apology, and it’s just so messy and awful that the plot got lost real quick. The reactions were fast and fierce, almost as if this has already happened with Ben.

There’s a reason a parody robot account called “Ben Dreyfuss bot” exists to mock this man, because there’s just too much to simply make fun of.


                   

Jared Russo



Matthew Salesses

The character: Matthew Salesses, writer, creative writing MFA instructor, apparently some sort of misguided paralegal

The plot: Matthew Salesses is a talented and thoughtful author who — in this writer’s opinion — is mostly a force of good in the world. He wrote an excellent book on writing called “Craft in the Real World,” and seems like a nice guy.

But he’s had an unfortunate day or two on Twitter, and the most recent incident came this past week, when he shared a “contract” that he said he made his grad students sign at the start of the semester, “because if I’m going to commit to them then they need to commit to themselves.”



Lots to unpack here. Let’s start big-picture: it’s not uncommon to lay out some classroom ground rules in the syllabus, because different professors have different expectations — particularly in creative writing workshops, which tend to be quite structured.

But, for one, saying “they need to commit to themselves” feels awfully paternalistic as justification for making students sign a very heavy-handed contract that determines not just assignments and classroom behavior but enthusiasm and social media habits.

For another, at least one of the “agreements” laid out here feels like the kind of thing a right-winger would invent as a hyperbolic parody of what progressive leftists want. I’ll let the reactions to Salesses’s contract speak to that and demonstrate the ways in which it will actually lead to painfully bad writing.

I could go on about this for quite a long time — I think some of the elements of this contract are more reasonable than others, and some are the kind of thing that you should do even if no one really does it (ahem, #4). And I disagree with some of the prevalent reactions — for instance, though it’s phrased clumsily in point #7, writing is a series of identifiable choices; it’s just that ideally those choices lead to a sense of magic and provoke feeling.

But I’ll stop here, and give the floor to some of the very excellent responses to Salesses.


The repercussion: Salesses very quickly locked his account as responses began to flood in, but there were plenty of tweets in response to the people who shared screenshots from before the account was locked. People — including writers and peers of Salesses’s — balked at the idea of making students sign such a lengthy, specific and strict contract.

They also had some pretty on-point examples that demonstrated why, among other elements of the contract, #1 — “Name the race and gender of any character at first introduction” — is a recipe for some of the world’s most unintentionally hilarious sentences, particularly when you amend existing famous literature to comply with the rule.



Molly Bradley



Friday

Sara Fischer

The character: Sara Fischer, media reporter, Jim Bankoff fan, advice machine

The plot: Fischer, Axios’s media reporter, was among the first people to report about layoffs at Vox Media. “Media leaders & CEOs, if you want to know how to communicate layoffs effectively, Jim Bankoff is good example,” she wrote, and proceeded to list how he did it.



Fischer is a trusted and solid media reporter, but it’s safe to say she baffled a lot of folks with the framing of her tweet. Why one earth would she, a non-partisan media reporter, laud a media CEO for doing a good job with layoffs, many of whom are her peers? The intentions remain unclear and the aftertaste is bad.


The repercussion: Coming for journalists on Twitter, especially on a day like this, is never a good idea, and people let Fischer know how they felt.



Adwait Patil


———

Read the previous edition of our One Main Character column, which included Logan Paul and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Gwen Stefani being Gwen Stefani.

Did we miss a main character from this week? Please send tips to [email protected].

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