#litereacy

We have fallen out of love with good writing

As a fiction writer who teaches, I often speak about what I love in fiction, what to me makes it powerful and engaging. This is a version of a talk I have been giving for years to students and other interested parties; it is a talk I’ve become — what is the right word? — uncertain about in the last five years, not because I don’t believe what I’m saying or that I care about it less but because I’m not sure that people can find it meaningful anymore.

There are a number of reasons I feel this, most of which have to do with how we take in knowledge and information and how that has changed the nature of perception. I’m not saying anything new here: think iPhones and the constant staring there at, a skull-fracturing change which plainly has consequences beyond how people understand the reading and writing of fiction.

If you can read this post, you are one of the lucky ones. 

Did you know about 770 million people around the world cannot read or write?📚 

by Tom Abba & Baldur Bjarnason

To see the present clearly, you need a view of the now and the past that isn’t obstructed by your hopes, speculations, and dreams about the future. Seeing the now requires the beast’s left eye to be firmly in your mind.

This isn’t about the future of publishing. We haven’t set out to examine how we’ve arrived at this point, nor does we propose any grand solutions for the next few decades. It isn’t about the challenges for the industry, or the shift to digital.

This is about now.

This is not a book. But it is:

… an old-fashioned hypertext about writing for digital.

… full of notes on digital as an artistic medium.

… not a text that considers digital to be a remediation or dilution of other media.

… a throwback to the days of the early web.

… written by a couple of over-educated opinion-givers. The ‘I’ in this text could refer to either one of us.

… over 40 000 words of observations you can easily ignore.

… woefully incomplete and still in progress.

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