A few weekends ago I came across this article in the Independent on Sunday (thanks to a tweet from Professor Sue Thomas). The article itself trotted out the cliches on ebooks, with John Walsh saying “[ebook] callowness makes you weep” and hence we go back to dead wood fetishes and the boredom of square one in the great ebook debate. The usual suspects- Nicholas Carr, Sven Birkerts- were quoted arguing that in the 21st century nobody reads War and Peace anymore because our brains are too withered, our attention spans too shot and fractured, to even care about the notional existence of great literature and that we would rather consume endless amounts of intellectual junk food like social networking sites and crap TV. Ok then. Like, whatever.
More interesting were the opinions offered by various commentators at the end of the article. One however caught my eye for the wrong reasons. Andrew Cowan, a lecturer on the UEA’s famous Creative Writing MA was talking about the attitudes of his students to digital publishing. Here are some quotes:
- “As a student 20 years ago, I did the MA that I now teach in prose fiction and I see no change in the approach and ambitions of my own students to that of me and my peers back then.”
- “Ahead of this interview, I talked to them about digitisation and not one of them had heard of Twitter, and they were all hostile to the idea of e-books.”
- “None of them keeps a blog, though one admitted sheepishly that she’d started one, and the others were all smirking about it. This is the new generation of writers.”
Whoa. It is frankly bizarre that this school boy attitude runs rampant on a course designed to foster creativity. Not only does it show a woeful lack of imagination, vision and sense of possibility in different forms and genres of writing but it also shows an utterly and foolishly blinkered attitude to the modern business of publishing.
Cowan says “Their ambition is to be on sale in high-street bookshops and published in book form by a mainstream publisher”, yet they seemed to think that a luddite view on blogging, ebooks and new media generally is clever in a climate where publishing is become increasingly engaged with and reliant on digital marketing strategies, and where authors (especially debut authors) are expected to be actively involved with promotion of their books. Their thoughts on writing seem to extend to getting published- but not actually selling any books. In the current retail climate this is possibly unwise.
The technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008 report makes fascinating reading in contrast. Outlining how blogs and blogging have become, in the words of Joicih Ito, “a global main-stream activity”, it describes a flourishing and heterogeneous media landscape. It makes cleaer that as with books there are countless kinds of blogs, from personal diaries to rich news sites; as with books the potential for creativity and communication is near limitless. Decent traffic figures right down the tail and the widespread potential for monetizing blogs both stood out to me as examples of how blogging remains a viable platform for publishing.
While some aspiring novelists spurn blogging others are making a success of it. Think of people like Alison Norrington or Scott Sigler who have used blogging technologies to tell and promote their novels. While many people cherish the opinion that their unique vision stands out the sheer mass of the estimated 188 million blogs seems to curl the lips and spike the arrogance of those who can’t see that this is now part of the writosphere as much as scribbling sestinas and neo-Freudian meditations on childhood.
Creative writing is as much about tweeting and posting on blogs as anything; or if not then it will be, or at least, if writers accept the challenge, could be. The novel to was once seen as a rather shabby medium, not fit for the Augustan literary elite.
Times changed.
7 Comments
No one reads War and Peace anymore? Chris Meade told us at the SYP event that he’s reading Anna Karenina on his PRS-505.
Well, I’ve read War and Peace. Obviously. I wasn’t saying it’s true, just that Nicholas Carr et al think it is.
I know that MA programs attract more erudite writers, and further know that such adjectives in some mouths for some reason imply hostility toward modern technology, but in the undergrad CW program through which I passed in the States, course blogs of a sort were set up through an intramural internet community used by most of my professors. My classmates and I read and commented on excerpts of one another’s work, our professors provided relevant reading material and extracurricular writing opportunities, and not once was the system treated as an intruder in the classroom. Cowen’s comments bring to mind the image of a father speaking for his adult children. (“Their ambition is to take over the family farm…” as one sits practicing cello upstairs and another is doodling blueprints.)
I read a similar complaint by Daniel Mendelsohn on Ed Champion’s blog that no one reads “books, magazines, and newspapers” on the New Jersey subway. No one!
Thanks for the post, Michael, and the same to everyone for this site. My boss at Creative Byline (which is partnered with St. Martin’s Press and Tor/Forge in the US) forwarded it to me, and I’m glad he did.
Cheers Peter. That sounds like a really co0ol system for sharing work- it also raises a number of interesting possibilities in terms of collaborative, iterative story telling. Has anybody started to play around with it? Part of the appeal of the Creative Writing MAs is that people have a very romantic image of writing and being a writer- the only trouble is being a writer probably isn’t as romantic and artistically satisfying as many might have (was ever thus- think NEW GRUB STREET).
Very cool indeed to see Creative Byline, hadn’t come across it before, will have to a play.
I can think of more than a few occasions when one person decided not to use a word or a sentence or an image or some other organ of their work and “donated” it to someone else who could use it. In the wake of the program I’m more open than I otherwise would be, I think, to working with other writers, whether it’s in a purely advisory capacity or collaborating with them on a story or some other project.
As I live the life of a working writer I find myself more frequently thinking this job is one notch above latrine-digging, one notch below scrubbing the outer hull of a ship with steel wool and dish soap.
Do give CB a go. Feel free to contact me or our Client Services with any questions or snags.
A very interesting article, and thank you for putting an alternative view out there.
Personally, I think digitalisation is a fantastic advance. I do not believe it should ever replace traditional print media (although it undoubtedly will in certain areas), but I feel the two can coexist as different forms of creative expression, neither of which is worth more than the other. In essence, I love nothing more than the smell and feel of a good book – but I revel in the joys of a whole plethora of new media! We live in a fabulous age with the best of both worlds… and what could possibly be bad about that?!
Dear Michael,
I am a MA Publishing student at London College of Communication and I am writing a dissertation about the topic you are dealing with here starting from some ideas kept in the Sara Lloyd’s Manifesto.
I have tried to contact you directly, looking for your email address on the Web and then contact you by Tweeter where just a line I cannot well express myself, sorry!
In a word, my dissertation deals both with reading books and blogs and if the blog could be the book of the future
and your ideas and opinion s would be very precious for my work, so would you give me a written interview about this topic?
Thanks anyway!
all best, Sara
In the case you can help me, my address is s.trabalzini1@lcc.arts.ac.uk
Hope to heard from you,
Sara