Why Do Writers So Often Write From Other Fiction Instead of Life?

Where the answer to the question that is this post's title is concerned my thought had long been that it was a matter of plain and simple laziness--hacks taking the path of least resistance, and relentlessly encouraged in this by the Dauriats of the industry, whose determination to pay for what is most easily sold within the market they have created through the exercise of their power to the crassest ends leaves them open to only a painfully limited range of material.

Yet considering the view that artists are a "sensitive" lot working in unconscious and impressionistic rather than conscious and analytical ways suggests that there is something more. They go by their impressions--and the reality is that, in a mediated world, their impressions will be mediated ones, especially in regard to anything outside what is usually rather a narrow range of personal experience. Depicting, for example, police investigations, they are apt to have a head full of episodes of procedurals, and so this unavoidably influences what they are likely to write when they pen an episode of a procedural themselves--easily producing results like those atrocious episodes of Castle which I watched unsure of whether I was supposed to be taking it as a parody or not.