At least with writing, you have to have gone through the effort to churn out the words and invested the time and energy to put together a story. But expending effort on it alone doesn't make it good... "Literary" fiction tends to fall into this trap a lot, and leans hard towards overwrought character studies of really awful, boring people and their sordid little lives. Every time I see a pickle dish, I have PTSD flashbacks to junior year English and beating Ethan Frome to death...