If you are going to give a violet criminal leniency (warranted or unwarranted), should you not be held accountable for what they might do, on some level?
Maybe judges at least?
I think the point here was that bad writers, churning out bad stories, can lead to bad outcomes.
And that’s not even including when they make bad decisions directly.
I mean, good-grief what a horrible story.
After Mailer spent the early years of his career writing about himself, making himself into a character and then a sad caricature, we find him hustling a book on punk-killer Gary Gilmore, using the advance money to pay alimony to his five ex-wives. He was the same literary giant who used his influence to win the release of Jack Henry Abbott from a Utah prison. While serving a long sentence for forgery and murder, Abbott wrote Mailer a number of letters. Mailer thought he detected great literary talent, helped Abbott find a book publisher, and lobbied to get him paroled from prison. “A few weeks after being released, in June 1981, Mr. Abbott, now a darling in leftist literary circles, stabbed to death a waiter in a Lower East Side restaurant,” thus confirming an observation made by Martin Amis, that Mailer had a weakness for “any old killer who has puzzled his way through a few pages of Marx.” [McGrath 2007:1 and 30]
-John Erickson, Story Craft (Amazon)
