Question: does anyone still write with a typewriter?
Let’s say you do, and it needs repair, where would you take it? There used to be a great typewriter repair center down the road from me. But the owner saw the future, traded his life’s work in for a Winnebago, and as far as I know, is still chugging the Interstates in search of the the ultimate RV park.
Over the next few weeks, an unusually full cornucopia of new feature films will hit the theaters nationwide. The New York Times took special note of this near-glut of plenty. Hm. Do we hear a lot of ballyhoo about this month’s novels? Or any month’s novels?
(Hello . . . ?)
A guy who blogs from the Phillipines writes this:
“Fiction just doesn’t interest me,” said Bob Ryan, 41, who works for a construction company in Guntersville, Ala. “If I’m going to get a story, I’ll get a movie.”
Perhaps that’s it. Reading as a form of storytelling has been overtaken by other forms (film and video, to name them, and perhaps soon interactive versions of the same via computers).”
And he goes on to explore a comparison between fiction and the pony express.
Well, okay, nothing is deader than a dead technology: it doesn’t move over and coexist, it’s just…gone. But fiction isn’t a technology. It uses technologies as a way of delivering a story. This is not a zero-sum game, so rather than die, fiction shares space with other, newer ways to deliver narrative. Watching its space shrink, however, is like monitoring global warming: lots of indicators, but no one can say exactly what the result will be, when, or how long before…? The outlook does seem gloomy, no matter how you look at it.
Novels and stories once held the field unchallenged. What else was there, for narrative entertainment? Now fiction has to bunk not only with movies and TV, but the flashier digital narrative attractions–your PDA, your iPod, lately even your cellphone. If you’re a Luddite or literary purist, you’ll say we’ve sacrificed the deep sophistication of literary consciousness for the dreck of eye candy, but here’s my view: with all due respect, at the turn of the 20th century, most published fiction sucked!
You don’t believe me? Read some. Not the few enduring classics that survive, but the average novel of the
90s–the 1890s, that is. I bet you’ll find it slack, sleek, fat, lazy, cloying, overstuffed, and sentimental. And I’ll bet you won’t finish it. This wasn’t a problem back when your entertainment alternatives were the Bible, the nearest Opera House, and Uncle Hugo’s Civil War stories. Fiction, even bad fiction, got you by default.
Is what we’re seeing now a shakeout or “adjustment?” A righteous reaction to fiction’s overinflated dominance?
I confess I lean toward that point-of-view. I sincerely love movies. I’ve written for them. I adore theater–my mother was a playwright. And I have a 55-inch HDTV in my basement because “quality TV” has never been better. (Will you purists ever speak to me again?) But fiction is my master game, and I love it as I love my wife–always and forever. I feel I know its true worth, so I don’t mind sharing the wealth. Movies may have cut into our audience, but they challenged fiction writers to raise their game.
And because we have to fight for our place on the stage, fiction, for those readers who stick with it, has never seen a richer age. Never.
So what do you think, my fellow fiction writers? Are we okay–or a threatened species? We’ve only been around for a few hundred years as a class of storytellers. Will we be be around for a few hundred more? Will our great-great-great grandchildren still know the experience of projecting language-based stories on the screens of their minds as they read?
Talk to me.
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