Art & Creativity Quote by Brian P. Cleary

A slap across the face of tidy storytelling, this line treats the classic three-act arc like yesterday's technology: useful, ubiquitous, now suffocating. By invoking Gone With the Wind, Cleary deliberately picks a symbol of Big Capital-S Story - sprawling, prestigious, comfortingly linear. The title functions as a cultural yardstick: if you want that old pleasure of immersion and inevitability, the canon has you covered. What he's defending is everything that refuses to behave.

The provocation is in the redefinition. Calling certain books "joke books" isn't just an insult; it's a claim about how meaning lands. Jokes are engineered for timing, compression, and surprise. They reward lateral thinking over emotional telegraphing. Cleary's subtext is that contemporary readers (and writers) are over-trained to demand narrative handrails, to treat coherence as virtue and ambiguity as failure. He flips that hierarchy: the rigid beginning-middle-end isn't sophisticated craft, it's a dead convention kept alive by habit.

Context matters: as a working author, Cleary is also staking out professional space for forms that get dismissed as lesser - comedic writing, short-form structures, punchline-driven books, playful hybrids. He's arguing against the cultural bias that equates seriousness with length and linearity. The line's bite comes from its impatience: not a manifesto, a dare. If you still need the old arc, fine. But don't mistake that craving for the only way art can move.