Writing Conundrum: stories to inform VS. stories to entertain.

TL;DR warning. (Part rant, part query.)

I often get the impression - and this impression has been around for most of my reading life - that just about every book and every film I've experienced thus far seem a bit...pointless. Meaningless, even. I don't expect fiction to be an instructional manual for how to live, but when I do consume fiction books or film I do think there should at least be some form of metaphor about life and the people playing upon its stage written by master craftsmen (and women) who know how to tell a great original story.

I know that the moral of the story is something often in the domain of fables, but does it have to be solely the case? Ancient Greek myths often have a point to them, some deeper meaning than what is on the surface. Yet nobody need possess the intellectual capacity of Einstein to grasp it, nor would a "commoner" need a classic education (or any education at all for that matter) to understand what Shakespeare had to say about the nature of love in Romeo and Juliet.

I find I learn more about how power corrupts within the establishment of law when I experience the various telling of the legend of Billy the Kid. But I find myself guilty of reaching when experiencing the various accounts of Robin Hood whereby I feel like I'm trying to force onto that legend an ulterior point whereby it might not actually exist.

Am I right in thinking that the quality of stories today are in decline because there has been generation upon generation of writing that doesn't exactly explore any particular insightful thoughts expressed within fictional tales that act as a visual/literary mirror to this thing we call the "human condition"?

I'm not sure what I was supposed to learn after having watched Transformers or The Avengers or any of the plethora of superhero tales being made in Hollywood today. Although Pixar may continue in the tradition of moral tales, their fatal flaw is in regurgitating what has already been done a thousand times before and don't really offer anything new or unpredictable.

Yet when it comes to tales of mighty superheroes going at it tooth and nail, I learn plenty about the futility and ultimate foolish destructiveness of war after reading The Iliad. But I absolutely cannot fathom out what I'm supposed to "get" after reading/watching the Lord of the Rings ensemble (magical rings are evil so throw them in a volcano? Do this over the course of three unnecessarily brick-thick books?).

I see plenty of occurrences of science fiction writers trying to shoehorn in some sort of spiritual supernaturalism within the sci-fi genre, but it almost comes across as a desperate attempt at trying to be "deep" by posturing about humanity's place within a highly unlikely post-modernistic, deadtech environment. But that doesn't really imbibe it with any meaningful point because it doesn't really conclude anything.

What exactly are you trying to show me when you populate your books with dudes with barrel chests with girly long hair brandishing a magical and ridiculous broadsword who is known by the locals with a stupid over-the-top name and who flies on the back of a fire-breathing dragon fighting the evil forces of a grey/white haired old bloke who wields magical spells?

What new knowledge have we all gained about the nature of psychopathy with year after year of new releases of crime novels? What new concepts of reality have we all gained that science fiction writers have given us? What new ideas have we gained about marriages and relationships from soap operas that have evolved us from the stuffy Victorian mentalities of our ancestors? Have we really gained any insightful knowledge about the self-deceiving nature of drug-addiction from the likes of Irvine Welsh?

How is your story of a wizard attending a school of wizardry for wizards to learn the art and craft of wizardry any different to those other stories of wizards attending a school of wizardry for wizards to learn the art and craft of wizardry?

What are you trying to show me about the nature of the afterlife with your 100,000th production of a zombie film?

Is the modern day practice of writing stories that seem to be ultimately meaningless actually a rebellious act of creative expression that no longer needs to burden writers with the necessity of insightful observation of little bits and pieces of the foibles of humanity and expressing such within a narrative that says "this is humanity as it appears...and this is why..."?

Or is it a case that the reason is because these stories that we consume on a daily basis are written by an overwhelming number of authors that aren't as talented in storytelling as they/we are led to believe and that there really are no master craftsman with a mythmaker mind anymore today and that they have all died out leaving us all in a literary dark ages whereby derivative plots are de rigueur and par for the course?

I figure that there are plenty of stories written today that say nothing because the author actually has nothing to say...about anything. Is this evidence of a lack of inductive reasoning skills as well as the non-existence of insightful perception? I don't see any reason why stories can't be both informative AND entertaining.

I've seen various documentaries now that claim that there's nothing new under the sun (to paraphrase that part in the bible). But I don't see this as a fact of the impossibility of originality. I see this as a misconstrued fact that actually proves that there is today a lack of insightful creativity. And one reason I suspect is that in today's academia, what is being taught too much is how a writer can learn how to write. What I'm not seeing are students being taught how to tell a story.

And that is a big difference.

One can merely gaze upon a rock and claim that this is nothing more than a rock. Or one can develop the creative insight that despite it being one of the hardest substances known to man it can be eroded over time by one of the softest substances known to man: water. And armed with a creative imagination, one could hopefully imagine the cognitive workings of the mythmaking mind that would've Zen the shit out of this concept to give birth to the River Lethe - the river of forgetfulness. For what else do we all know other than rocks being ground down by water that also erodes over the passage of time? Thoughts, memories and dreams.

The ancient mythmakers lived thousands of years ago who developed great stories that would impart more meaning and wisdom to the listener than any academic dictionary today ever could. So what the hell excuse do writers have in the 20th/21st Century in not having developed even greater intelligent insight about nature and humanity, with a plethora of genres and subgenres to put them in, and putting this mirror in front of a willing reader?

The next time an author wants to waste my time with their pointless stories then I'm going to pay for them with monopoly money. Because if you're willing to waste my time with something that's meaningless then I'm going to pay for it with something that's valueless.

Deal?