On Futurebook, Porter Anderson has been doing a lot of thinking about the writing community lately. In particular, they’re wondering whether “community” is a good or bad thing.
“Community” can have a lot of shades of meaning when it comes to writing. For example, there are shared universes in which writers work together. Those have been around for a while—Thieves World, Liavek, Wild Cards, for example—but they really hit their stride with the Internet, and you saw things like Elizabeth Bear’s “Shadow Unit” or Neal Stephenson’s “Mongoliad.”
But the sense in which they’re talking about it now is somewhat more prosaic: is it a good thing for writers to share their work and get encouragement from other people? Might that encouragement lead them to self-publish things that would have been rightly rejected by publishers in ages past? Might involvement in communities take writers’ time and attention away from their writing and actually make them worse writers?
The Church of Inspi-Vation — By far the biggest lure, in my opinion, is that of the "support group." What the digital age seems to tell us is that not one single writer ever wanted to work in solitude, and in fact they’re all out there crying, crying, I tell you, for fellowship. I don’t believe this for a moment. I think that the best writers are temperamentally suited for the genius of creativity uncoloured by others’ personalities and that most of the would-be writers who flock to these congregations aren’t the real thing. They’re our hobbyists in their thousands. You may challenge me severely on this in #FutureChat, but I don’t think our best literary producers are hanging around bragging about today’s word count at TearsOfHappiness.com. Kumbaya yourself.
Anderson seems to be making a great deal of the “splendid isolation of writers” of bygone eras in which writers (I suppose the archetypal example would be Henry David Thoreau) wrote without interruption and produced Great Works. We don’t have that now that everyone has the Internet in their computer and a smartphone in their pocket. Is this truly a lost literary golden age?
I’m going to stick my neck out and say “no.” For one thing, hindsight has a tendency to make the good look better and the bad forgettable. I have little doubt there was just as much tripe written in bygone decades as there is now; it’s just that the tripe doesn’t have the staying power of the good stuff. It wastes away forgotten in dusty libraries or, these days, public domain e-book repositories where nobody ever notices it except as names they don’t recognize while they’re scrolling down the list to look for Conan Doyle or Mark Twain. If today’s writing looks significantly “worse” than the writing of old, it’s because we’re not seeing the whole picture.
When the landscape changes, it’s kind of natural to miss the old landscape. Deborah Cooke has a post listing off all the things she misses about “traditional” publishing, including missing having someone to tell her “no”.
But who will tell an indie author if he or she has it totally wrong? As tedious as it can be to build consensus, there is merit in listening to other voices. Where will I find that voice? Everyone I consult in this market is being paid by me. I’m the client of my freelance editor, which reverses the balance of power between us. Just as in the traditional publishing market, I couldn’t tell my editor that I wouldn’t make change X to my book (or do it by Y date), my editor now can’t tell me to make change X. A freelance editor might believe she can’t tell a client indie author things that author won’t want to hear.
But JW Manus points out in response that just because someone tells you no doesn’t mean your work actually isn’t any good. It may just mean the agent or editor doesn’t personally like it, or doesn’t know what to do with it. And that was just as true in the era of the splendidly-isolated writer as it is now. The difference is that now we have the self-publishing avenues available to work around those rejections.
It’s natural for people to be concerned about the status quo when things change. People look back at the days of old, find the current era wanting by comparison to those times from which people only remember the good stuff, and look for other reasons to explain it. Do uncritical members of the community urge others on to publish stuff that would have been better left on the shelf? Maybe. But there is no shortage of commercial editors approving or even commissioning outright crap because they think it will sell, either. (Snooki, anyone?) I find it awfully hard to weigh one against the other.
I think it’s great that these communities exist. I’ve had lots of fun writing in on-line communities, and I’m sure that my writing has gotten better from all the practice. Without those communities with whom to share my work, get feedback, and interact with other people, I can’t imagine I would have practiced writing nearly as much or gotten nearly as good as I have by now. I suppose I might have managed somehow—writers did for centuries, after all—but I don’t know if I would have had the willpower to keep at it without feedback, or the ability to improve based on it. If other communities help other people find the joy of writing, well, why shouldn’t they?
