CalliArcale":1ldliy2j said:
That was awesome. ;-) I stridently disagree with him (but would be much too scared to say so in front of him) on the Internet ruining writing, but you gotta love his style. Nobody can rant like Ellison.
You know, I think I'm starting to agree with him more every day. (Yes, another TLDR Alp post inbound...)
There are volumes of crap on the shelves. The Science Fiction/Fantasy section is littered with garbage. On occasion, I've been placed in the unfortunate circumstance of having to read some of it.
For the past year and a half, I have been been making a very serious study into the subject of bad writing. I am dutifully contributing my fair share to my own collection while attempting to learn the differences between good writing and transcribed diarrhea. The differences can be subtle and one can't always detect the ripened odor until one finishes reading the book. It's starting to become an all too common occurrence that a book I pick up seems to show itself as a relief from the tide of worthless gibberish loading the shelves yet, in the end, turns out to be as unwelcome as a wet fart. I am collecting a small stack of such masterpieces of poo to remind me that publishers don't always care about content, literary merit or enjoyable stories written for discriminating readers.
The Internetz facilitates the creation of poo. A computer's main job is to create and display information. The User can choose to create quality information or cat-macros, it's their choice. Not that there's anything wrong with entertaining people with cat-macros.. Ceiling Cat have mercy upon us, they are often much needed social commentary. But, not as often as their creators would hope. If the world is filled with Cat Macros, something else is going to have to stand aside.
The ease of one being able to subject the unwashed masses to an assault of garbage has never been more pronounced than it is today. There's an entire industry, the Vanity Press, that bilks hopeful authors of thousands of dollars to publish whatever it is they feel like writing. Hoards of unscrupulous agents and freelance editors also prey on the desires of those who want to become writers, but aren't suitably motivated to try to put some effort into it and learn how to write. They'll lavish their efforts with praise as long as the would-be author writes them a check. The internet will proudly host whatever you are willing to pay for and many things you'd never have to pay for... or want to. Every where you turn, there are new avenues for information. That's generally a good thing, until you actually decide you want quality. Then, your world is reduced to a five-hour quest to find the best search terms to plug into Google in order to return a list of thousands of results, three of which might actually be worth clicking on.
Not too long ago, I visited a "blog" by a self-proclaimed "writer." (I don't want to get started on blogs.. But, there's a reason why the owner has to pay someone to host it and why they usually find it so difficult to make any money doing it.) This person had published several books and an entire series of.. something. So, eager to learn about his personal experiences, I drilled down his list of published works to see what companies had been paying attention to him. I discovered that every single title was a product of a Vanity Press. In other words, he published his own work... That's not such a bad thing, really. Some subjects just don't get good attention by publishers and there could really be gems that publishers, editors and agents have missed. But, by and large, self-publishing is a lot like.. playing with oneself. It's really not very useful for anyone else and usually ends up being a mess.
This "author" made a comment that I think heralds a new Age of Disaster for quality writing - The emergence of the Digital Press. That would be Kindle and its highly competitive rivals. This particular "author" was able to get his works listed on Kindle and was ecstatic that he had actually made more money with revenue from his Kindle downloads than he could have made with his crates and cargo containers of self-published wiping paper. I read some excerpts from his work and some story synopses. Let's just say that they were overvalued at the fifteen to twenty cents a pop people were paying for them in a digital download. Am I being too critical? Probably. Is it completely undeserved criticism? No.
What Ellison has to say on the matter seems to me to be very credible commentary. While he's talking a bit more to the subject of screenwriting, I think it's just as applicable to Print. There was a time when Science Fiction was starving for new material and interesting stories. There was a time when cranking out a page of text involved much more than banging on a keyboard. Heck, look at what I write on this forum! I can generate pounds of internet ink a second, without pause to switch to a new sheet of paper or bother with ink ribbons. I can multiply my garbage ten fold with a keystroke and expose thousands of people to it a day, if I was so inclined. But, that doesn't mean that one pixel of it is worth any more than a pixel generated by someone else. Today, there's not a great deal of effort that is required just to get a book published. But, to get a book published by anyone besides
oneself, takes a great deal of personal effort. To add further insult, the competition present at the publisher's end is not entirely fair.. and it's growing.
I think there's a bit too much noise in publishing fiction today, especially in the trade paperback market. That market hasn't always been the most discerning to begin with, but many of our favorite authors who are noted for the quality of their work are heavily represented within it. Now, we have the Digital Press beginning its rise which competes directly with the convenient and economical trade paperback. With the flack already obscuring literary merit on the shelf, I think the Digital Press is only going to add to the confusion. There are already too many writers out there willing to accept next to nothing for their work in order to be recognized as being apart from the hoard of the unpublished. There are agencies out there that take advantage of that fact to pick the pockets of hopeful writers and get some cheap profits from trumped up novels riding on the crest of the latest fad. Now, there's a new outlet for the angst-ridden writer who never bothered to devote themselves to actually learning the craft - The Undiscerning Digital Press. The Digital Press is literary E-Bay. I think we're all going to suffer for it long before we'll reap any benefits.
I've learned a lot through my years as a reader. Now, I'm starting to learn what it takes to put oneself on the other side of the book. I'm finding out that success is not as frequently determined by merit as one would hope. It seems that writing is plagued by the same advances that have caused the demise of the beloved family-run restaurant - There's too-damned-many fast food eateries and drive-thrus.
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