Writers Rule The World
By Amanda Jentsch, Culture Editorial Assistant
There’s a population that secretly rules the entire world, governing our lives—and there is no way to escape them. They have command of the news, impact a major portion of the economy, and in the end, determine our legacies.
Writers. A writer is, by definition, a person who writes books, stories or articles as a job or regular occupation (Merriam-Webster). That may not sound threatening but remember: a writer wrote that definition. They determine how the general population views them. In reality, they control a terrifying amount of our world.
The most powerful type is the broadcast journalist. These news reporters determine what stories see the light of day and which the public does not need to know about. They are responsible for investigating leads and deciding how to present the material. What would the world look like without their filter? Different, certainly.
But they’ve built themselves a safety mechanism: without writers, how would we find out about anything that’s going on in the world? Who would tell us what celebrities got married or what new atrocity Twitter has unearthed from someone’s history? Who would have told the world that the Titanic sank, or that man walked on the moon, or that the Jonas Brothers were back together? We don’t know what we’d do without them, and that is EXACTLY what makes them so powerful.
In the modern-day, writers have also coerced the entire entertainment industry to rely almost singularly upon their talents to survive. Without writers, many of the stories we love wouldn’t exist.
Take the Marvel movies, for instance. In total, the Marvel movies series has made over $8.5 BILLION dollars—just from adapting the stories and comics created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby (TheNumbers). Beyond that, the merchandise and licensing associated with any blockbuster movie creates a chain of dependence on writers and creatives—they control the existing ideas that spread between industries.
From these ideas spring billions of dollars in revenue and thousands of jobs in the film, advertising, manufacturing and retail industries, among countless others. Without writers’ ideas, none of that would exist and the world would be worse off. Writers are in control of not only a large sector of the economy but also people’s livelihoods.
A line from the hit musical Hamilton warns, “You have no control. Who lives, who dies, who tells your story” (Lin-Manuel Miranda). And it’s true: writers control the narrative. Not only of their fictional worlds, but of the real world we live in.
How will you be remembered? When you depart this Earth, will the only announcement be a simple name and death date in the newspaper’s obituary section? Or will a writer have pity on you and decide that your story should be told to the entire world?
If they so elect to bring you back to life in their poetry, their lyrics, their words—how will they memorialize you? In the end, they determine how you—how all of us as a generation, and as a society, will be remembered in the future to come.
I have risked much in revealing this to you. Any moment now, they might come for me, for exposing their secrets and for giving their captive audiences a glimpse of reality. We must think before we believe, try to see the full picture through the filters of the people behind the narrative.
I should know. I am a writer.
Sources:
“Box Office History for Marvel Cinematic Universe Movies.” TheNumbers.com. 2019. Accessed 1 Oct 2019.
“Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Tells Your Story.” 46. Atlantic, 2015, musical. Lin-Manuel Miranda and the Original Broadway Cast of Hamilton.
“Writer.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Accessed October 31, 2019.