r/familyguy

How and why exactly is Brian Griffin actually a bad writer? Is he just inherently bad at writing or does his problem stem from something else like a combination of ego and laziness?

He’s one of my three anti-inspirations for becoming a writer (alongside BoJack Horseman’s father Butterscotch Horseman and Spider-Man’s Mary Jane Watson’s father Philip Watson), so I want specifics.

For some context, here’s his “bibliography”:

-Faster Than the Speed of Love: His published novel, which is a knockoff of the Iron Eagle film series.

-Wish It, Want It, Do It: His published self-help book with a redundant title that was a surprising success until Bill Maher, Arianna Huffington and Dana Gould destroyed it on air.

-An untitled fictional novel about a guy who lost everything but finds a new life in Canada and the whole book is an E-mail to his daughter who's dead.

-A Passing Fancy: His play that was brilliant by Quahog’s mediocre standards, but terrible by real standards of professional playwrights. Stewie says that it uses overdone clichés and blatant plagiarism, including a line from Seinfeld.

-What I Learned on Jefferson Street: His pilot for a drama (before James Woods turned it into a sitcom called Classholes!) that was painted in-universe as a masterpiece with wasted potential, but the one piece of dialogue heard was a pretentious cliche.

-Something he was typing on his laptop where his dialogue was "A writer who inherits a magic typewriter that writes for him… but then it turns out the typewriter… is racist?!"

-Parent Boppers: A detective show on the Disney Channel he was a scriptwriter on that starred his son Dylan (which is how Brian got the job in the first place) and that Brian would get fired from for going behind the writers’ backs by slipping in material too mature for a kids’ show.

-Attempted to write a sequel to Ernest Hemmingway's The Old Man and the Sea: Stewie asked if that’s allowed and yes, I’m pretty sure it is.

-A 70's funk musical about William Howard Taft: The one song heard was clearly a knockoff of the Shaft theme.

-The Holy Brible: His attempted autobiography, which included a hypocritical title (he’s an atheist).

-Swishy the Football Baby: His published humiliating children’s book (and possibly his only solo success) in response to Stewie basing his own humiliating children’s book series, Flunky The Dumb White Dog, on Brian.

-Chasing My Tale: His published autobiography, which had a poor reception.

-Stewie's Spooky Quahog Nightmare Dance: A Halloween song he wrote with Stewie that’s certainly well-liked in the real world.

-A movie screenplay that Stewie, when he hears it opens in a space brothel, thinks it actually has potential.

-An essay that allowed him to win the New England Rising Writer’s award for an essay he wrote, which he later revealed to have plagiarized from Summer of '42.

-During one of his and Stewie’s time travel episodes, Brian advised his new past self to take false and undeserved credit for the Harry Potter novels.

-During another one of his and Stewie’s time travel episodes, they bring Mark Twain to the present to improve Brian’s own writing, bringing the manuscript for The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with them. Believing that the writing is more important than the author behind it, Brian attempts to preserve Twain's legacy by publishing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn under his own name without ever reading it or changing the outdated language and content that was acceptable in the 1880s, despite claiming it to be a master work. This only lead him to getting cancelled and expelled from his writing class (where he wasn’t even doing the work).