2008 & 2009
Writers Digest Best Writers' Site
2010 Critters Best Writers' Info Site
THIS WEEK'S ARTICLE:
On Being a
Modern Writer
Rob Parnell
Does anyone actually
read articles anymore?
I'm not sure.
I know from my own experience that when I'm surfing the
Net, I generally don't sit and read articles all the way
through.
For most of us the purpose of surfing is get information
quickly. And reading off a screen can be tiring. So we
tend to skim.
Surfing is actually a good word for it. We rarely dive in
and explore the sea of information available. We ride the
surface of it, soaking in the spray, barely getting our
feet wet...
Okay, enough of this metaphor!
Scientists have proven that we don't actually read words
anyway. What we do is recognize phrases - collections of
words - that create mental images in our minds. It's
those images that we use to absorb the information we
need.
Not the words at all.
Hence the need for quick bites of info - the way
news is reported nowadays, in pulses designed to
hook us, but rarely do. Mainly because those pulses are
so effective, we don't feel the need to dig deeper.
I guess this is one of the challenges we face as writers
for the modern world.
Sorry to burst your bubble but all those sites that
advertize for article writers aren't in the least bit
interested in your writing. The reason for their
existence is the advertizing revenue created by all the
Google ads that surround them.
It's always been this way in fact. All those glossy
magazines in the supermarket only exist because large
corporate companies pay to have their ads in them. Almost
never can a magazine survive on the strength of its
editorial - or the quality of its writing.
It's worth remembering this when writing for publication.
That commercial considerations are fundamental to any
kind of success.
Writers may be principled and concerned about more
important issues than money - but we are perhaps the only
ones.
Book publishers play this game with writers.
They pretend they're interested in good writing. They may
even delude themselves into believing it, but it's not
true - just ask the marketing department.
The bottom line is sales. And if a crap writer sells more
books than a good one, the crap writer is king.
We visited a book shop in town yesterday where this
phenomenon was self evident. The shelves were full of so
called bestsellers - Harry Potter, Dan Brown, Twilight,
The Secret and all their spin-offs - and that was about
it.
Sure there were other authors and lots of celebrity and
TV related books, a section for sport and cooking - but
there was no real sense of the literary in the shop. It
existed to make money - and as a result was largely
empty. We talked to the staff about this - and they
confirmed that declining sales for books had resulted in
the sketchy fare available in their shop - a well known
chain too.
I have a feeling that this diminishing regard for the
written word is a trend that will continue. But as I've
said before, even if the demand for good writing
apparently falters, there is still a great need for
writers.
Because without writers there are no ideas. No stories.
No movies. No news. No media. No computer games. No
Internet. Nothing.
It's almost as if there's a deliberate attempt to hide
writing in plain sight. The media is a largely visual
medium these days. Everything moves - has momentum and
color and impact created by lights dancing in front of
our eyes. But this is an illusion, because the media
is built on the written word, translated into images for
consumption.
Even the bites of information created for the Net I
talked about earlier, play along with this notion.
Headlines are visuals - and it's worth bearing this in
mind when you write them.
I recently read an interview with James Patterson about
his books. His chapters are short and there's a lot of
white space in his books as a result. The interviewer
mentioned this and James smiled and said this was
deliberate - to draw in the new breed of reluctant
readers that populate this planet. Too many words, you
see, and we switch off.
A Neilson poll once revealed that only 5% of book buyers
actually finish the books they buy. As an avid reader -
someone who couldn't possibly NOT finish a book I'd
started, I found this fact alarming - and left me
wondering why they bought them at all!
They must have liked the covers. And who said people
shouldn't judge a book by its cover? Probably a writer,
not a publisher or a consumer, that's for sure.
It's kind of ironic that I'm writing an article about
people not reading articles.
And if you've reached this point you can pat yourself on
the back for being one of the tiny percentage of people
that will ever get this far.
But hey, someone out there must be reading things all the
way through!
