The Digital Writer |
The digital writer is an entrepreneur with boundless optimism about the success of his project. No matter how many failures and discouragement come his way, the path he has taken sees him through.
So, are we excited about the history we travel through? Yes. Do we view it as real? Yes. Is one of the prime functions of being a writer to be excited about the history he or she is passing through? Not necessarily, since there is nothing worse than travelling through a history you are not excited about. And we have passed over those waterless regions filled with ghouls of every description. We see the death of nations but go on. We see the mad energy ready to pounce out at the slight turn of events but don't give up.
We did not create the digital world but we are here having a grand time of it, not even at the beginning of what we have envisioned.
We like to say, "why not play with the implications?"
The system is raw and trying to replicate the established publishing system at the cost of real innovation. It's quite natural that is the case, especially since the technology runs far ahead of the habits of readers.
The two most obvious qualities the writer resists on the Net are it's anonymity and it's inability to give up the coin-of- the-realm.
I've come to appreciate the new medium as an interface where transactions occur between two people on either side of the screen. This, again, puts the advantage to the writer who is always seeking that personal medium that can, however, involve more than one.
The writer on the Net writes for one, the perfect reader; that perfectly shaped-brain filled with interesting shapes and a thirst for more freedom and more adventure.
Two fascinating things have happened to creative writing in the past thirty years. For one thing, the act of writing has become, once again, a private act and removed from the center of the public space. Pro wrestlers and actors have assumed the center of the public space. Creative writing is a private act, once again, but not a desperate one.
Just as this occurred; just as the large, technical arts, like TV, movies, music performance, sports appeared to capture the public, history delivered up a profound new device which says, in effect, "the public is irrelevant. The market counts for nothing for herein is production value and distribution for a tenth of the cost..."
A private art riding, then, along the infrastructure of the most revolutionary communications technology since the printing press! What this does is inspire the mind to the highest attainments possible. This is the significance of the Net and what we've emphasized from the beginning. We even, in our private moments, call it the grace of God. The oppressive puppy-dogs who would want to herd everyone in a circle to hold hands and not disturb the peace want the Net for their own. I hope the self-respecting netizens never allow it to happen.
Why different arts occupy different space in different times is beyond us at this point. Why does the public love the theater one generation and reject it the next? Or, why does it support great novels one generation and scorns them the next? Or, why do people love the movies that have hardly any real information in them over novels that can have a great deal of information is beyond us. We only know it is so. But then, a soul in love with truth and life and light will always go to Emerson or Whitman.
The life of letters moves through one soul at a time.
The writer says to the age he's thrown into, "if you don't have a soul yet, then I have no interest in you..."
And you, age that thinks it has done away with the soul are on the dark edge of a precipice that will devour you and all you hold high in esteem.
We write then for beautiful souls who have moved us in real-time. She is a spirit like some red sun that creeps over the horizon driving over the vast, empty plains between the mountain ranges.
There are rules in writing. But law, that enormous concept of justice and rightness, is something that is discovered in any specific piece of writing. This is one principle that allows the writer to escape from the natural repression's of the larger world and discover his or her own justice and rightness. Writing, then, has a soul.
The relevant definition of law is, 'something that must be obeyed or believed, as in, his word was law.' Well, if we discover that 'his word is a law' we both benefit no doubt!
There is something purely American that doesn't want law to be imposed. Rules, we obey. In the infrastructure of life we know we must obey the rules to get along; we want to live and work in peace. But writing struggles to find a grand and inner law in the body of the work that gives it legs, gives it life.
Often writing has the same motive as people who migrate. They are restless and feel oppressed and dive into the heart of a land surrounded by complexity and strange languages. They don't want to be defined by what they leave behind but, rather, want to discover a new life, a new spirit.
This law is built in the writer's mind until it lives; until he or she can see the law animate his fictions and is curious about its properties.
It's astounding to me how many writers don't view the digital publishing system as anything but a pleasant toy. It's not real to them. The old habits of writing and publishing die hard. Yet, what has the present literary system produced but dumbed-down genre novels and celebrity tomes that marginalizes everything else? It was destroyed by the same greed that destroys everything else.
I don't recommend the digital publishing system for all writers. The poets will lead the way because the art and act of poetry is made ten times more effective on the Net than in print. The poets will lead the way because what the poets dream becomes true. And just as the publishing system is renovated, later will come the educational system and, even, the political system. They will, at the end of the 21st century, mark an X where we stand today and understand the power unleashed today.
A writer who feels the publishing system marginalizes and scorns everything he holds sacred is ready for the digital system. It will be one group first, then all will follow.
David
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