The Digital Writer |
We want to write. We want to shape our words and thoughts with form and point them toward truth or, even, once in a great while, embody a truth, let the words lick the truth or, pursue the beauty implicit in them having a life. Why not?
It's useless to compete with the camera. One day the people will tire of the camera and see how duped they've been and in their shame look for something more adequate for free and liberal, democratic people. Unless, that is, they are destined to be melted down into a slag heap, a massive zero-sumness from which they will not arise as a people. If that's that case then it's a moot question to begin with.
The generosities that are expressed through a great culture like this one!
There is an opportunity for the digital writer to perform his work. The fact that newspapers are trying out a new idea of reading selections from the daily edition and then allowing subscribers to download and burn a CD with them, so they can play it on their way to work is very interesting. It seems ponderous now but once a system is worked out, writers and poets will have an opportunity to penetrate a large market. Every writer should read his or her work into a tape recorder and then play it on a good stereo system.
The writer wants it done for him. And why not? We expect people to look out for our best interest if work and money are involved. However, the digital writer doesn't have that luxury. There aren't the agents and publishers firmly established in the ways and means of doing anything on the Net. The digital writer has to take things into his own hands. A day will come when it will be as professional and as efficient as the print world is now but, again, we can hardly wait for the day. We have sailed off into a career we believed was going to happen years before. We met the transformer. It stepped things up to the level that one could only dream about in a former life. And that old life slides, now, furiously away as a series of lessons and a few seeds not yet browned by the sun.
The digital writer confronts several barriers. One is that the audience is overwhelmed with choices. Secondly, the audience doesn't know how to use this beast. The majority of people on it don't use it to their best advantage. Third, readers have come to expect the distinguishing marks of print publishing, including editing and placement of a variety of books in stores and libraries.
The biggest barrier is the writer himself if he thinks it's easy or if he thinks he's pulling a fast one on the establishment he despises. The truth of the matter is that a reader, someone who would buy written material, asks himself, "why should I benefit this guy just because he is in a digital format? Where is my benefit? I don't give a lick about his career or his philosophy and the print market presents a vast array of stuff that is better edited."
Those are hard facts to overcome.
The digital writer has to come up with written material that can't be delivered anywhere else and the price of the material must be very reasonable to insure that the reader feels they are getting a value.
This article, in Information Today, is a clear and precise description of the state of e-books. It's the best assessment I've seen and emphasizes where potential growth in the market will come. Thank god for students!
We focus on the corruption of the publishing system and these other systems to emphasize something that can live in the new, fresh publishing milieu. We don't want to be subdued by systems. We want to understand them and use them well. We want to respect them. We don't want them to clobber us over the heads with their arrogance. We don't believe the establishment really takes risks. It is still jointed to a century we have fled. Yes, we try to understand the century we've just left but we leave it lock, stock, and barrel. Societies, systems, establishments can't afford to do this. Individual talents must do this.
The business and industry of publishing will take a long time in changing. Individual talents, however, can work with velocity through the opportunity that's been handed to them. One remarkable fact: A writer can write at the highest level he or she is capable of, answer to no one, gain some audience, keep cultivating great resources, and still find a way to make a livlihood or semblance of one on the beast.
Publishing has always benefited from the fact that there were more writers or those who wanted to write than space to fill in magazines or books. The laws of supply and demand have kept the writer from experiencing the same kind of growth in other professions. And the publishing world will continually keep the cost of writer's depressed because it benefits them.
The writer has every right to find his benefit as a writer. And who defines that? The benefit in publishing digitally can be psychological as well as financial.
The great protest in a modern world is the pursuit of truth and beauty. The modern world is entertained by its political conflicts and loves to see the political actors rampaging in the streets. The cops alway win and the TV audience is gratified.
Truth and beauty through what exists, not looking back into what existed.
The literary imagination is in this dilemma. On the one hand it is locked up in an academic, intellectual culture that is now entombed by politics and its self- conscious decision to pursue power rather than truth or beauty. And, on the other hand, a marketplace that is built on the lowest common denominator; mainly sex, violence, and addiction. It may raise above these occasionally, but it can't stray too far from those foundations. Any sensibility that puts itself at the center of these things deserves what it gets. And it will get pulverized. Rather, it must find a way to grow and develop on its own, with its own heroes, with goals that are meaningful to the talent of the individual, and it must fulfill the potential of the individual since that is the fine, rich myth at the bottom of the real culture. That's the whole thing, after all. To serve the real culture, of men and women, and insist that they live freely without being manipulated as they are by industries dependent on sex, violence, and addiction.
It doesn't surprise me that, since September 11th of last year, the people want to be witnesses, even journalists, since they are able to connect with primary resources and have research tools in front of them. With amateurs, however, bias is transparent. Many amateur journalists are simply rearranging facts to fit their prejudices, as all propagandists do. If they state, at the outset, that they are making an argument, that's something else. And the sort of objectivity that would return integrity to journalism comes from a high degree of self-discipline, not simply training.
What is more important than the daily presentation of the news is our memory of events that have passed through us. What good is the news without the experience and knowledge to structure it all in interesting ways that lead to a valuable substance? Human beings love to be shocked, bedazzled, titillated, terrified as long as they can return to a safe spot. In that sense the media is a form of entertainment.
America is a beast you either know through itself or forever wander around the margins throwing little stones into its vast emptiness.
At the very least we are implicated in it and wish it better. We really can't tell it anything but we want our freedom to say exactly what we want to say.
The digital writer is not against the well-oiled machine, simply bored at the predictable nature of it. The liberal, democratic culture needs a few shots of adrenaline. The boring spectacle of sex and violence is not adrenaline or, at least, its that type of adrenaline that keeps shooting through a corpse that the medical examiner notes in her report.
Forms of openness are all around, in the simplest places.
Machines produce a world that gets addicted to its anonymity.
The unquenchable heaven within us opens its eye and greets us.
The digital writer is not against anything but hypnotism.
Even though the actual practice is not yet here, not yet real, we know that we can write and publish for whomever has the temerity to call themselves free without the ponderous but necessary devices in place. I know, for instance, why fiction is such a tough sell these days. I go down to Barnes and Noble and thumb through the new fiction. I have never been stopped in my tracks with the thought, "I must buy this novel." And I've read many novels and began my writing career wanting to write them. Through some of the pages I can see talent struggling with itself, trying in so many painful ways, to conform to what the teachers said make for a good and important novel. The novel seems straddled over the rivers of poetry and journal confession. At any rate, most fiction is not worth plowing through anymore. Fiction writers would do well to reduce their fictions to a few lines of poetry and begin, humbly, at that point. That would improve the art considerably.
I suppose the novel, like America and freedom, is what you make it to be. That is the key thing after all. That's why its so disturbing to see the novel as some mouthpiece for discredited political ideas or false aesthetics taught to the students by frustrated writers who still read surrealism.
The crux of the matter is that the novelist him or herself has to go through a process that brings them up into the modern world. The writer must bring more resource to the table than the specialist/bureaucrat who reads them. And that knowledge/resource must be more than some dumb-ass theory of everything that so stuns the young mind and keeps it frozen for a generation.
The real problem is that it's hard to write a novel without experience and knowledge. And it's very difficult to write anything well unless there is a maturity of those qualities. This is a great problem in America today, as a culture.
David