My fouth year Creative Writing instructor informed us on the first day that by the end of the year we should be producing material that was written at a professional level, ready to be published.
(Strange, considering this was a man who had never published anything, and the one time that the topic of real-world publishing advice was even broached, he went into a twenty minute rage about how his own academic purity and the sanctity of art would not be violated by anything as crass as reality. I'm so glad to be out of school, but I'm less glad that I used the word 'broached' in the previous sentence, 'cause I'm not sure I used it correctly, given that it's the thing you pin on your date's dress for the prom, right, so how can it be a verb, too?)
And yes, there actually are degrees in Creative Writing. I swear. Most people look at it on a c.v. and get a kind of puzzled expression, as if I majored in Paper Airplane Design or something. (That's so patently ridiculous;I only minored in Paper Airplane Design, alright? And I still can't make one of the damn things...)
This was all back in 1997. I was not on-line. I didn't know what that term even meant. To be a writer was a worthy, back-breaking calling; it took years and years of precise honing, discipline and dedication. After killing yourself day after day for decades on end, you might be able to get something published by the time you were, say, forty.
Cut to now:
How difficult is it to publish this post?
Um, not so difficult. I write; I push a button; voila.
In essence, the entire notion of 'writing' and 'publishing' has been turned upside down, shaken upside the head the way I used to shake my little cousin as a newborn. (That's a joke. I swear.)
Recently, Stephen King was given a lifetime achievement award by the group that hands out the National Book Awards. His speech centred upon the divisions between 'popular' fiction and 'literature' -- and how those chasms are largely elitist, self-imposed and arbitrary, since the overflow between the two realms is now constant and abundant.
There's another, even greater gap that is being filled, and it has to do with writing itself, the notion of writing, the point of writing.
You have kids ten, eleven years old that have blogs far more sophisticated (and probably more entertaining) than mine. They have their own code, some kind of linguistic shorthand that is impenetrable to my twenty-nine year old eyes but perfectly clear, I'm sure, to those under fifteen.
At first I thought e-mail was somewhat troubling, because notions of grammar and spelling were no longer, um, necessary. Now we have websites and blogs written by everyone and anyone in the world, available for all to see at a moment's notice, and words and concepts can be spelled and expressed any way at all.
Is this good or bad?
I dunno.
I still think it's mindblowing that you can write something, push a button, and have it (potentially) read by millions within a second or two.
You have kids in orphanges in Cambodia (www.futurelight.net) who are able to shoot the breeze with the CEOs of major corporations -- theoretically, true, but everything begins theoretically, right?
If you want to write a novel, you can now have it published with the push of a button. (True, this doesn't mean you'll make any money off of it, no, but it can be out there, in the world, ready and waiting for all to see.)
If you want to write a manifesto proclaiming that the later Police Academy films, the ones without Steve Guttenberg in the lead (Assignment Miami Beach, City Under Siege and Mission to Moscow) as the height of cinematic artistry, surpassing The Aviator and Million Dollar Baby and Hotel Rwanda and even, believe it or not, Cannonball Run II, then bang, it's out there in the cybersphere, ready for argument.
(I would disagree, because Guttenberg added so much more than he is ever given credit for to the series, especially the third and fourth ones, Back in Training and Citizens on Patrol, where the quality started to drop but were saved, if not redeemed, by Guttenberg's mere presence. Ditto with Burt Reynolds in The Cannonball Run sequel. )
The future Faulkner or Barker or Grisham or Atwood or Mailer or Mishima doesn't have to wait; they can post their stuff now, get feedback, make adjustments. I'm not saying that this is how the publishing world should work now, or how it will work in the future, but the point is, there are so many permutations that pop up even when you think about this issue for a moment or two. What's going to happen in five years, ten years? How can we hold authors in esteem when everyone's an author, if only online?
It's a wildly democratizing process, to be sure. No more snootiness. No more condescension or insecurity because one's own, deeply personal ramblings were rejected by the misunderstanding publishing elite.
No more excuses, either.
At its best, what this process means is that you can hard-wire your thoughts to another's within the space of moments. You can see something on the street or in the sky that makes you pause, or reminds you of something you once believed in, but have now rejected, and you can then transform these erractic musings into poetry, instantly, and let it fly.
Your vision of poetry, untouched by others hands and invisible editorial adjustments.
It's a brave new world we're in, shifting second-by-second, and the true authors of our lives are now ourselves.
Which, paradoxically enough, is how it's always been.
