Are you a writer? Do you admire the writing of Joan Didion? Do you want to express this admiration? Here's a good way to do it: Read some Didion to yourself, and then go out and write a good essay about something, in a voice that sounds like you and reflects your era.

James Franco published a terrible short story at Vice this week. People don't and shouldn't take Franco seriously as a writer but that often keeps us from discussing the precise nature of his badness. It is this: He is the kind of bad that suggests the End of Literature would be no skin off anyone's nose.

I, Ambler Man, was there. Were you there? If you or someone you love wrote something equally as cringe-inducing and overwrought as this in the aftermath of America's Greatest Tragedy, please share a link in the discussion system below.