01Mar

The Dilemma of the 21st Century Writer

• Saved in: Craft, Technology & the Internet, Writing Experiences, Writing Tools
• by Chris Orcutt
• with 2 Comments

I had big plans for this blog entry. BIG plans.

When I orig­i­nal­ly envis­aged this piece, it was going to be a 5,000-word polemic on the dif­fi­cul­ties of being a writer in the inter­net age. I was going to sketch a detailed con­trast between what was involved in being a writer 80 to 100 years ago and what is involved today. I was going to describe, and give exam­ples of, all of the inter­net text medi­ums in use today, their indi­vid­ual strengths and weak­ness­es, the audi­ence’s insa­tiable appetite for more and more con­tent, and the addic­tion of writ­ers to instant feed­back, instant val­i­da­tion, instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion.

I was going to do all of that. But since what I want­ed to say was pret­ty sim­ple, I fig­ured, why both­er? Just make your point and be done with it.

To illus­trate my point, I imag­ined satir­i­cal sce­nar­ios where­in famous writ­ers from the past were forced to use today’s inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion medi­ums, and I was going to write par­o­dies of them work­ing in those medi­ums:

• Flaubert “con­vers­ing” with Mau­pas­sant on AIM about Mau­pas­san­t’s lat­est sto­ry.
• Chekhov updat­ing his Face­book page to answer the lat­est “25 Ran­dom Things” or “Mem­o­ries from High School” note that his favored actress, Muse and girl­friend Olga Knip­per “tagged” him with.
• Hem­ing­way adding to his Twit­ter (“Got tight on absinthe last night. Did knife tricks.”) and fret­ting about the fact that he has few­er than 500 fol­low­ers when a cat has over 100,000.

I was going to add quotes from my fel­low blog­gers about how they some­times feel over­whelmed “main­tain­ing” these mon­sters they’ve cre­at­ed. I was going to dis­cuss how, when done in mod­er­a­tion, I have found blog­ging, and espe­cial­ly Twit­ter­ing, to be great for devel­op­ing my impro­vi­sa­tion skills—the lit­er­ary equiv­a­lent of jazz. And final­ly, I was going to com­pare the strengths of 21st cen­tu­ry communication—connecting writ­ers with an audi­ence, build­ing a fol­low­ing or “plat­form,” and pro­mot­ing a writer’s work—with the pri­ma­ry val­ue of more tra­di­tion­al writ­ing and pub­lish­ing (non-instant), which is the slow and steady improve­ment of craft.

Again, I was going to write about all of those things, but I want­ed to keep it sim­ple. So here it is:

The num­ber one chal­lenge fac­ing writ­ers today is bal­anc­ing build­ing and main­tain­ing a fol­low­ing with con­tin­u­al­ly improv­ing their craft.

It comes down to Craft vs. Pro­mo­tion, plain and sim­ple:

• CRAFT: To devel­op one’s craft requires (for most of us) qui­et, study, focus, and detach­ment from the vicis­si­tudes of the mar­ket­place. This is dif­fi­cult to do in blogs and oth­er Inter­net medi­ums like Twit­ter because the ele­ment of instant-grat­i­fi­ca­tion and instant feed­back can too eas­i­ly sway us to write what we may think our audi­ence wants to hear, or to feel as though a piece of writ­ing is “good enough” because, hell, “it’s just going on my blog.”
• PROMOTION: To pro­mote one­self requires being plugged into the cyber­sphere, mak­ing con­tacts, reply­ing to com­ments, giv­ing feed­back, read­ing opin­ions, fol­low­ing oth­ers’ blogs and Twit­ters and projects and engag­ing in mean­ing­ful con­ver­sa­tion about all of them. How­ev­er, just as it’s more dif­fi­cult for writ­ers to devel­op their craft in the online sphere, they also can’t pro­mote them­selves and their work in a vac­u­um.

The trick is find­ing a bal­ance.

Recent­ly, I start­ed writ­ing new book. The genre or sub­ject does­n’t mat­ter, but what does is this: Writ­ing any book length man­u­script requires focus over the long haul (weeks, months, or years—Charles Fra­zier’s Cold Moun­tain comes to mind) and a reliance on CRAFT, and if the writer finds her­self con­tin­u­al­ly forced to put out the fires of PROMOTION, she is going to be a very long time fin­ish­ing the book—if ever.

The con­clu­sion I’ve come to is that if you’re going to err one way or the other—towards craft or promotion—you’re bet­ter off lean­ing towards craft, every time. The tools and tech­nolo­gies we use in the pro­mo­tion side of things change so quick­ly that any invest­ment you make in them in could go away overnight. Sure, you might have built up a siz­able audi­ence for your blog, and if that’s the case, great. But more impor­tant than the size of the audi­ence is the idea that when they come to your site, you have some­thing to say, and the kind of deep reflec­tion that pro­duces good writ­ing usu­al­ly only comes with atten­tion to craft. One of my favorite quotes about writ­ing, by F. Scott Fitzger­ald, and which I use at the bot­tom of my email sig­na­ture, speaks direct­ly to this point:

“You don’t write because you want to say some­thing. You write because you have some­thing to say.”

This brings up anoth­er draw­back to the inter­net medi­ums, which is that we often don’t fig­ure out what we want to say with­out a long peri­od of ger­mi­na­tion and revi­sion. Tru­ly, ideas are seeds that require water, light and time to grow. They can’t be rushed, which is exact­ly what the inter­net medi­ums often do to our ideas—they rush them.

We feel rushed as blog­gers and Twit­ter­ers because we’re try­ing to be recep­tive to, and giv­ing to, our audi­ence. And in the worst case sce­nar­ios, we’re sec­ond-guess­ing our audi­ence. This, said the great teacher of screen­writ­ing and author of STORY, Robert McK­ee, is the def­i­n­i­tion of a hack.

When we focus on our audi­ence, we lose the Muse. The Muse says, “You don’t want to lis­ten to me? Fine! I’ll find some­body who does.” But when we lis­ten to our Muse, no amount of ups and downs in our audi­ence will take away from our improved craft. Bet­ter writ­ing is bet­ter writ­ing any­where you go, in any medi­um. But con­verse­ly, if you have lit­tle craft, or noth­ing to say, it does­n’t mat­ter how big your audi­ence is.

New tech­nolo­gies, new inter­net com­mu­ni­ca­tion medi­ums, will come and go, but this dilem­ma isn’t going any­where. It will only become hard­er to achieve bal­ance, and ulti­mate­ly each writer will have to find that balance—his com­fort level—for him­self.

Remem­ber when I said I was­n’t going to have quotes from fel­low blog­gers? Well, I lied. Twist­ed Princess, a friend and fel­low blog­ger, defines her com­fort lev­el this way:

“I need the blog, okay? I love the instant feed­back. I’m addict­ed to it. But Twit­ter? For­get about it. Twit­ter and I are only ever going to have a casu­al rela­tion­ship. Noth­ing but booty calls.”

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