The Invite is a whole movie that takes place in a single, extremely beautiful, apartment in San Francisco. There are a grand total of four actors—two neighboring couples that have a dinner party. The runtime is 1 hour and 47 minutes. This week’s newsletter considered the cultural regression this year in publishing has been. The Invite is a more welcome kind of throwback. A time twenty or thirty years ago when you could walk into a theater without buying a ticket in advance, go see a movie whose runtime was under two hours, walk out while the sun is still shining and go about the rest of your day. One old New York lady behind us in the theater remarked “it could’ve been a play” (delightful, but wrong). In a world where every director feels like they’re a dinner guest overstaying their welcome, The Invite is a film based on super constraints—one setting, four people in a room— that results in more creativity than your average four-hour fantasy, sci-fi, superhero blockbuster.

The film, directed by Oliva Wilde and written by Cesc Gay, Will McCormack, and Rashida Jones, got me thinking about the role extremely confined stories play in enhancing creative freedom. Very few artists, even great ones, do their best work with unlimited resources and choices. Even directors and writers like Martin Scorsese or Stephen King, who are still putting out amazing work, were at their best when they didn’t have unlimited run times and page counts.

This is DHM Confidential (Vol. #2), a new series for paid subscribers. Reminder: the free weekly newsletter continue uninterrupted. Thank you all for your support.

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This week I made the somewhat provocative statement that “No One Knows What Good Writing Is.” I joked in one of the footnotes that voters might prove this statement wrong depending on how they judged a few writing samples. However, I was pleasantly surprised to be…completely right.

Readers roundly voted on nine sentences and paragraphs from incredibly well-respected books and authors as mostly passable or actively bad. The best rating any of the writing samples received was a 50% “good” rating (shoutout, as always, to Jen Beagin). These results proved a bit of a hypothesis. The poll results, reactions, and reader commentary gave me a few extra thoughts on the three ways I pointed out that readers are subconsciously judging what good writing is. It also made me consider, in contrast, what is bad writing and what exactly are most readers taking for granted?

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