Let’s jettison last century’s anchors
Well into retirement age, it’s time for me to ask what I want to achieve in this final phase of my literary career? What it means to be a 21st Century writer? It’s never been an easy vocation; and that truism has never been more applicable than it is on the cusp of this New Year.
I began my working career as a reporter, hammering out stories on an Underwood typewriter; I’m writing this introspective on my laptop, standing up in my dining room, occasionally interrupted by the ‘Ding!’ of another email landing in my in-box; I could just as easily be thumb-writing in ‘Notes’ on my iPhone, in the middle of a busy intersection or at a socially distanced café.
Conclusion: The world has changed. If we writers don’t adapt to the blizzard of social and technological innovation that’s whipping round us, we will lose our vital role as voices in the storm. In a future post I want to go into more detail about just how vital the role of literature is, and how sorry a loss it will be, if we fail to rise to the challenges of the times, but for now I’m going to map out how I want to go about adapting to our new reality, not the why of it.
I’ll begin with my oft-repeated, favourite saying: Writing isn’t about writing. It’s about delving into meaningful experiences and sharing those adventures with appreciative audiences. And it’s not about ‘books’ in any clearly defined sense of the word, it’s about insinuating our ways into the minds of audiences.
Please note the use of the world ‘audience’ instead of ‘readers’ in that last paragraph. Ultimately literature comes down to books in some form or another, of course. But my minimalist definition of a book is: A code of squiggles and dots on a series of pages or screens; or a vocalization of those squiggles and dots into words and sentences, which any creature other than a human would interpret as the grunting and growling of an animal suffering terminal indigestion.
The allure of literature, its special place in the arts pantheon, is its symbolic delivery. Every reader or listener has to make up the presented story in his or her own imagination. Until then, books are inert lumps of masticated wood and ink on library and bookstore shelves, or confusing assemblages of wires and circuits in peoples briefcases and pockets. Reading and its derivatives are creative acts as much as the art of writing.
Alas, getting people to choose reading over the plethora of other media available to them has become an increasingly hard sell, especially if you define literature as a subset of entertainment. Think about it! A hundred and fifty years ago there were no radios, no televisions, computers, video games, the Internet, virtual realities, movie theatres – and so on. Candle light story-telling, live theatre, and parlour music or pub songs were the free-time activities people turned to, and books the only transportable repositories of thought and entertainment.
That unique portability has long-since been overwhelmed by powerful broadcast media, and I believe authors and publishers are increasingly going to have to seek out niche audiences, and find affordable, widely dispersed channels for sharing literature in this crazed new world. Books are going to have to connect seamlessly to digital media and keep up with the fast paced bursts of attention modern audiences give new ideas.
Learning how to effectively use new media has become part of my creative process, and I hope to share my successes and pratfalls as I go. I don’t see digital technology as a replacement for ‘books’, but as an essential adjunct. My upcoming edition of The Boy From Under is my third run at what I have dubbed Direct-to-Web publishing, the first edition (now offline) was my inaugural run. My second effort is a novel in progress, The Mural Gazer.
I’ll celebrate if, late in life, I can become a crotchety advocate of new media as the neural network for modern fiction and creative writing… Heck! I’ll celebrate even if my only achievement is to get literary types to stop using Underwood typewriters and quill pens as their trademark symbols in this frenetic here-and-now!
CraigSpenceWriter.ca
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