writing
Original: writing on Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Transcript
Panel 1:
A bearded man (the novelist): "How'd you like my novel?"
A bespectacled man in a suit (the critic), seated at a desk: "Fine."
Panel 2:
The critic: "That's not terribly useful. Come on. Give me your honest reaction."
Panel 3:
The critic: "All of the sentences in your novel — individually and as a group — are garbage. I would have to create new mathematics just to describe how dimensionless your characters are. You are so bad at writing that if the shape of letters weren't standardized, you'd probably be bad at that too. You could make your novel better by being someone else who would write a different novel."
Panel 4:
The bearded novelist looks crestfallen and silent.
Panel 5 (shown in silhouette):
The novelist: "Okay, but would you be willing to write a blurb?"
The critic: "'Best novel of its kind.'"
Votey:
The critic (a close-up of his face): "I can spell those words for you if you need me to."
A bearded man (the novelist): "How'd you like my novel?"
A bespectacled man in a suit (the critic), seated at a desk: "Fine."
Panel 2:
The critic: "That's not terribly useful. Come on. Give me your honest reaction."
Panel 3:
The critic: "All of the sentences in your novel — individually and as a group — are garbage. I would have to create new mathematics just to describe how dimensionless your characters are. You are so bad at writing that if the shape of letters weren't standardized, you'd probably be bad at that too. You could make your novel better by being someone else who would write a different novel."
Panel 4:
The bearded novelist looks crestfallen and silent.
Panel 5 (shown in silhouette):
The novelist: "Okay, but would you be willing to write a blurb?"
The critic: "'Best novel of its kind.'"
Votey:
The critic (a close-up of his face): "I can spell those words for you if you need me to."
Alt text
A five-panel SMBC comic. A bearded novelist asks a bespectacled critic seated at a desk, "How'd you like my novel?" The critic replies, "Fine." Pressed for an honest reaction, the critic delivers a brutal monologue: the sentences are all garbage, he'd need to invent new mathematics to describe how dimensionless the characters are, the writer is so bad that he'd probably be bad at writing letters too if their shapes weren't standardized, and the novel could only improve if written by an entirely different person. The novelist looks crushed. In the final silhouetted panel, he asks anyway, "Okay, but would you be willing to write a blurb?" — and the critic answers, "'Best novel of its kind.'" In the votey aftercomic, a close-up of the critic's face adds, "I can spell those words for you if you need me to."
Transcribed by Claude Opus 4.8.