Books of the Times

It's funny: the last post I wrote ended with the declaration that I would write the next day on the difference between writing on a computer, writing on a typewriter and writing by hand. That was over a week ago. What happened? Where did I go?

The truth is I had a crisis of conscience over the worth of blogging. What's the point of talking to oneself in cyberspace? I'm not a news blogger, exposing coverups that the New York Times orchestrated; I'm not a well-known blogger associated with a traditional old-media publication, and I'm not writing about some arcane, niche topic - there are plenty of literary blogs out there. I'm just another writer out here in the void trying to feel my way through this changing media environment, experimenting with it, and playing with the form. I'd rather be focusing on my fiction.

And yet, here I am again. So what brought me back?

To answer that, let me begin by picking up where I left off.

When I was young, like most people who grew up when I did, (early 80's) I did all my writing by hand. I still have notebooks filled with stories I wrote as a child. Writing by hand is a slow process, and even up through the early 2000's I insisted on doing all my first drafts by hand. Other writers I knew couldn't understand that; they thought more quickly than they could write by hand, they would argue. Well, that's true. Thoughts do travel faster than one writes, but there's a filtering process that happens when you write by hand that doesn't exist when you type. The writing is also more sparse; for some reason it seems like it takes me less words to say the same thing when I write by hand. This still surprises me when I write letters to my friend in jail; they never seem to be as long as they would be if I'd typed them. I wonder why that is?

I learned to type on a typewriter. I remember I used to dream of the day when I'd be able to afford those old electronic typewriters that let you edit a line first electronically before printing the line on the page. It was always such an arduous, slow-going process writing on the typewriter. Every typo was a minor tragedy. A first draft on a typewriter was almost unthinkable. So, I'm not sure what the writing would have been like if I had. I'd be interested to hear what others have to say.

Writing on a computer is an entirely different game altogether. You can almost fall into a trance doing it, the way pianists seem to fall into a trance at the keyboard. This can be great, but it can also lead to a lot of sloppy writing. Sloppy writing can easily be edited and cleaned up later, but the damage is done; and if you're not the best editor of your own work, then the computer has a lot of pitfalls for the writer. Sometimes it's not such a good thing to write as quickly as you think. Writing requires the filtering and arranging of thoughts.

New media has brought a proliferation of amateur writers and bloggers (what's the difference between the two, I wonder?) to the scene. News media sources now seriously compete with new media writers. In all the noise it's hard to know what sources we should pay attention to, and which ones we shouldn't. The music business has changed radically in the last ten years because of new media, and it looks like publishing is next. The idea of the literary superstar, championed mostly by the increasingly myopic hit minded publishers, is being challenged. It's an unsustainable model, and they know it. They're biding their time, watching to see what happens, trying to make the most money as possible in the process, and trying to stay relevant at the same time.

In an age where we're more conscious of the environment, and where 200,000 books are published a year and most of the copies of those books end up being destroyed because the book only hit the mid-list, I don't think the day is long off when print on demand will become the norm. How publishers will integrate their businesses into this model is still unclear. Chances are they'll just wait to see which print on demand books make it big, and then go about getting in touch with those authors. But what will they be able to offer these authors, who have already proved successful on their own? It's unclear.

What is clear is that writers have to manage their own careers these days. So, I'm looking at this blog as a portfolio of sorts; it's also good writing practice, while I'm inbetween books. Which is why I'm back. And while I may not post something every day, I do plan to post here on a fairly regular basis.