The unsolicited sermon.
Have you ever listened to a young musical prodigy who plays a roaring piano improvisation that makes you go, “Okay, that’s impressive, dude. But I can’t connect to whatever the hell it is you’re playing, so I gotta go. This is such a waste of time. Goodbye.” Then you put on Erik Satie’s minimalistic, wistful piano piece and you’re immediately transported.
The problem is the young musical prodigy only has one goal in mind: to impress his audience with how skillful and fast his fingers run around the piano keys. It’s a stunt. A pretentious stunt. The sad thing about it is no one cares. The audience is there for the music. They expect to be entertained by the music that’s supposed to come out from someone who’s supposed to deliver it to them effortlessly. The piano is his tool. He is the instrument. He must know what type of melody his audience wants before he even decides to perform in front of them.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with him having such an incredible ability to create storms out of the piano but this is not the place for it.
The audience wants something that they can emotionally digest in an instant. They want something sincere, real, and memorable. They want a life experience. They don’t want to sit through with disgust and a harrowing pit in their stomach. They want to be moved. They want their curiosity to rise: “I must know how this piece is going to end. I bet it’s going to be a total blast.” And a total blast, indeed. No matter how simple, whether or not the cathartic crescendo sneaks in, yet the audience is now left in awe and questioning his life choices.
I’m paraphrasing but this is how I explained it to a Gen Z co-worker in connection with his writing.
Gen Z food blogger – The Peeves
He has talent. He has the enormous drive to make it work. He loves his niche. He adheres to his schedule. He dedicates a time to visit a restaurant and write a piece about it. The ironic thing is the way he talks about food has a hundred percent honesty rate to it. But the way he writes about it – it’s overblown and disingenuous. I can tell how the words are meticulously chosen and woven together to create a thought that he believes to be “impressive” enough to make it into the narrative.
He acts like he’s the “ultimate man”. He carries an arrogant energy that I avoid him as much as I can. His sarcasm goes through the roof. I don’t react. I keep my cool. He talks too much. He moves too much. He plods around as he jots down Chinese characters on his notebook, claiming that it’s a part of his learning process, and he does this relentlessly at work during downtime. You give him a piece of compliment and it sticks to his head like he’s “all that”. There is no doubt that he’s intelligent. Yet, most of the time though, he has the subtle ability to frown upon you with his rabid, “big” words, underestimating your extensive vocabulary vault. But when I open my mouth and start ranting with more “big” words that I can hurl, he stays silent. His brain flips upside down. Shame transpires in his face. All of a sudden, he’s one helpless creature that even his “intelligence” cannot rescue him anymore.
He’s a narcissist. He will only listen once you talk about him and his work. My mistake was I fed his ego. I told him things that were too early for me to even realize in a solid form. I used the same tactic that I would pull off on young talents back in the day. In the late 90s (in my Philippine hometown), I was a scriptwriter and floor director of a local variety show. A side blur of my job was to choose the right talents for a segment. No matter how talented and amazing the kids were, there would be times when they would say things like, “Am I good enough to make this work on camera? Will the audience like me? Will the audience applaud?” So, I would uplift their spirit. I would make sure they believed in themselves first – with a full tank in their confidence engine. And it always worked. The audience loved them. They had the applause. They became the “talk of the town”. But in his case, it turned him into a wolf with a stealthy rhythm to bite you off guard. I regret it all – the encouragement and support, my genuine intentions to offer him a bit of guidance, and certainly the part when I said, “You have talent. I admire what you do. Keep at it.”
He doesn’t read. He only reads Social Media posts and comments. He claims to have an affinity with Anthony Bourdain. At one point, I told him, “He’s got books. You should read his stuff.” He ignored it. It’s an innate rule of thumb that if you want to be a writer, you must have a history of reading first. Heck, he doesn’t know any other food writers at all – like Ina Garten. I’m not even a food writer but I know who Ina Garten is, for crying out loud. He has never read a book in his life but he can certainly name all the anime shows that are circulating around his generation sphere. And yet, he claims to be a food writer. A food writer who dives deeper into the Thesaurus ocean to find the most outrageous words ever invented in human civilization in the hopes of stirring his readers with “cerebral stimulation” that no one gives a damn about.
He’s describing the aesthetics of the food. I even had a funny realization that all his content was written by AI with specific prompts. I wanted to ask him, “Did ChatGPT describe the photos for you?” Of course it wouldn’t be ethical for me to assume such a degrading thing. Besides, I didn’t want to make him feel “little” about himself, let alone insult his “intellectual prowess”. But boy, did I ever let him have it one time ’cause I just couldn’t take it any longer. It was too much. Even our other co-worker who’s a photographer and sensitive writer takes a jab at it out of “confusion”.
The unsolicited advice given to a Gen Z writer who’s just starting out.
Here’s what I told him: I may paraphrase in some aspects but most of these phrases were accurate to the best of my acumen. Dig in.
If you want to be a food writer, you need to read. Read, read, read. Never stop reading. Perhaps, study other writers in your genre, see how they write. From that, you can learn to establish your own voice, come up with your unique perspectives – a perspective that is untapped. Maybe a perspective that will make us go, “Ah, huh, I never thought of it before.” And when you write, you don’t need ostentatious and superfluous words at all. A reader doesn’t need that. As a reader, I don’t need that. It’s awkward and pretentious. I need to know how your experience with the meal went. I need “honest human experience” bouncing out of it. You can be witty, you can use simple metaphors, just be an honest human. I want to know the texture of the food, the taste, what you were feeling at that very moment. I don’t need to know what the food looks like anymore, how it’s plated, how gorgeous it is presented, because it is already given. I can see it in the picture. It’s right there. You don’t need to articulate that out for readers to see it for themselves. What they need is your personal experience with the food – whether or not it’s worth it for them to try. Is it worth the time and money? What makes this food spectacular or special anyway? That’s what we need to know.
If you’re with “serious” writers, the first thing that they would ask you, “who’s your literary influence?” Sure, you would say, “I write about food and I like Anthony Bourdain.” And yet you haven’t even read any of his books yet, and even the idea of reading already puts you off. You have watched his show, but the big question is, “Did Anthony Bourdain ever describe food using “extravagant, highfalutin” words?” Never. Most of the time, he would gush over it and say, “Ah, this is incredible. My god, this is unbelievable.” That’s everyday language. Simple and direct with genuine enthusiasm vibing out of his personal experience. Sure, he would talk about how it was cooked, how the ingredients would infuse together, how it was served, but had he ever used “swanky” words that would make us scramble our way to either Google or a dictionary? Nope. That is why the audience loved him. He was relatable. He could connect easily. He was human with a privilege to have a unique human experience along with his unique worldview and easy storytelling style. That’s what made him successful. If that’s the path you want to follow, then you’ve got a lot of learning curves to go through.
You are not writing about food to impress readers with how vast your vocabulary grasp is. You are doing this because you’re sharing your experience with them; the joy of it, the warmth, the comfort – in words that they can all appreciate. It’s not about dumbing the readers down at all because the truth is no reader is dumb and you better believe it. Trust me, readers are a lot smarter than you may have realized. They can smell “pretentious writers” from a mile away and they do not give a rat’s ass about how much time and energy you’ve spent on a piece. Now, that’s a newsflash for you.
It’s about clarity.
The point is, if you want to make this food blog work, make it simple. Pull us in. Tell us with your own “real” words; what it felt like having the food, even something interesting that happened before you sat down in the restaurant that eventually made the experience worthwhile, would you recommend it to us? It’s not so much about the review. It’s all about the experience. The experience. That is all that matters, really. That is what we want to know. Would it compel us to run to the restaurant on our day off? What would we get out of this content? What’s your North Star? What makes it worth reading?
You approach it the wrong way. There’s no honesty in it at all. No honesty. And it makes me cringe. Don’t waste your talent away all because your ego wants to be the star of your own show instead.
My conclusion.
He is not blogging about food. He’s in a “vocabulary” competition with food as the backdrop. That is how I would describe his pursuit.
How did he respond to my unsolicited advice? A shrug. That he went on to start bombarding me about how important it was for him to learn another language, to “master” pinyin – when he knew for a fact that we were discussing his food blog.
Is it a biased opinion? Is it an unjust observation? Am I missing something? Or is this just how their generation operates.
Also, we had a Japanese Gen Z colleague who trampled me down at one point and wanted to dominate despite her lack of experience in the food industry – apart from the fact that it was a struggle for her to communicate in English. But I knocked her weapon off big time first before she could even poise for a second attempt. Like, “who are you to command me what to do when you don’t even know which prep needs to be done first, how things are supposed to be done, how to be efficient, why time management is important (we don’t spend an hour on dicing mangoes alone and they don’t need to be in perfect cubes), and how to put things away properly?”
The only difference between her and the food blogger is – she accepted her mistakes and showed humility after I laid out my stance and reminded her of her place. From then on, our shifts ran smoothly that we would even sing along together and chat about Broadway musicals and books in between. In the end, we were just two different people who found a fun common bond in the midst of life exhaustion. And I enjoyed every bit of it. Work didn’t feel heavy anymore.
Whereas, the Gen Z food blogger still believes he’s the epitome of human dictionary to have ever graced the planet and no amount of Ina Garten can ever convince him otherwise.
Dude, c’mon. Also, be nice.
I rest my case.
AE
Image by: AE
