Literature and the Web

This is a misleading title– I’m trying at least to pretend that my new blog is staying on topic.  This is actually more about an old revoution in reading and writing, as background for the new, digital revolution.

The bottom line as I see it is that with all the energy going to writing in blogs like this — let alone texting, facebooking, twittering, and all the other ways to express yourself in words that are happening on the web– there will be more and more amateur writing  and less writing for income.

Yes, J.P. Rowling got rich.  Yes, Stephen King is still churning out popular books, and what’s her name has the Twilight gold mine.  But even getting one book published  is no longer a solid step on a career path.  It may help you get a job if your desire is to be a writer in an academic setting.

I have lots to say about these topics, but here I want to say that creative writing as an amateur activity has, as I read literary history, actually been the norm, and creative writing as a means to make a living is what is unusual in history.

Just to take a couple of our Greatest White Males of the English language, you’ve got Chaucer, who was a bureaucrat and sometime diplomat, and Shakespeare, who did not make a living from writing his plays (and certainly not from his sonnets!), but from a many-faceted career in theater:  playing Polonius, investing in building theaters, and writing a few plays as well.

Moving on to Great White English language Females, you’ve got Jane Austen whose books were published late in her life, and while they were popular were not what put bread and tea on her table.  The Bronte sisters began as self-publishers– and then– finally, you have George Eliot who was part of the golden age of novels as art and entertainment, along with Dickens and Thackery and Mrs. Gaskell and that whole crew of lucky Victorians who lived at a time when there was a growing reading population with leisure and enough money to buy or rent books.  These people made a living at it, and it remained possible  (for novelists, anyhow–  not for our great American Victorian poets Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman) well into the twentieth century.

But when the entertainment dollar began to be split among movies and television as well as books and magazines–long before the popularity of the Internet– and when literature itself began to split between popular and literary– that’s when making a living as a writer became, once again,  an amateur activity, done for the love of it,  for more and more writers.