The downgrading of literature

I, like so many other writers and artists, have aspired for the wrong thing, making our end goal getting a movie made from our creative works. We forget to make them something to be enjoyed on their own.  

The crowds that go to movies are often the lowest common denominator, so the films reflect what is popular and unoriginal. Simple stories. "Good cheeseburgers."

It takes a person with an imagination and an attention span to read. That's why the best books are unfilmable. 

I thought about how Christian fiction rarely gets movies, how mainly bible stories get filmed.  We don't have a Christian equivalent to Star Wars because Christians believe that kind of huge budget should go to the poor, or a gospel film. 

But it's not just that. Christians are "people of the book," and they have an attention span. And imagination. Christians can be satisfied with books.

Although there are Narnia films and Left Behind movies, things like that are rare, and often flawed.  Christians don't need those anyway. They can read.

Another thing: I fail to understand the rating systems of fiction websites. I think if you are adult enough to have the patience and skill to read a book, you shouldn't be told you can't read it until you're 13 or 17. It's a restriction they took from movies and tried to make it apply to plain text.

Prose generally has no pictures. You have to come up with those in your mind. If your kid's mind is thinking up pictures inappropriate for a child under 13, then they've already been looking at actual photographs or video they shouldn't have seen in the first place. 

I think the blame really should be placed on the countless thoughtlessly unimaginative authors constantly uploading stories to those websites. Their excessive use of profanity and lack of vocabulary makes the more respectable authors look bad, especially when it comes to the writing of romance and erotica. Some so-called "erotica" is so coarse and tasteless that I often wonder if the author is a rapist writing from jail.