It's an odd feeling to know that you're becoming irrelevant. But that was indeed how I felt after giving a talk at a local university about my life as a writer - and trying to give tips to young, aspiring writers.
The core of this irrelevance was simply that the kinds of challenges and aspirations facing young writers has changed. For centuries - virtually since the invention of the printing press - one of the biggest obstacles for any writer was to get published. Sure, there were a few hardy souls who wrote for the love of writing. But the most prolific (think Charles Dickens or Arthur Conan Doyle or, more latterly, Stephen King) were all about getting their work published and in front of large numbers of readers. And, of course, they wanted to get paid so they could make a living doing what they loved.
Now, anyone with Internet access and a free account on Blogger, can be a published online writer. And if you want to write a book, Amazon makes it pretty easy and economic to self-publish - and sell - Kindle versions of your work (at a minimal cost and, of course, agreeing to share revenue with Amazon). The part about getting paid, however, is a little more tricky in this new world. You need to handle that yourself - by getting advertising on your blog, selling eBooks directly - or be one of those rare bloggers whose work makes it from the blog to the big screen (hello, Julie and Julia).
But the real point is that writers no longer have to live and die professionally by the whims of editors and publishers - even if they are willing to be 'starving artists'. And I'm not totally convinced that's a good thing. Editors and publishers (good ones, anyway) can add a great deal to the quality and value of any written work - from magazine article to grand historical novel. Left to handle everything on their own, today's new writers have to be their own editors and publishers.
The smart ones will, I think, seek out others to fulfill that role for them. It's very hard to edit your own work - and even harder to be a judge of its appeal to readers. Being your own publisher means having to set your own quality bar. I, for example, have to tell myself (not always successfully) that readers may not enjoy having sentences constantly broken up by dashes, parentheses and odd asides within the narrative. But I'm my own publisher and editor, so who's going to stop me?
The answer seems to be that I'm going to have to stop myself. And that's hard. But maybe it's a better challenge than having to pester editors and publishers with my ideas until I find one that appeals to them. I personally don't think so.
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