Text and Hubris

A quick addendum to my last post. I do not think the novel as a form is going away. That would be—to put it mildly — silly. What I am saying is that we to have an ever increasing array of ways to tell a story. Conversely, we have an equally increasing number of ways in which to experience a story. This should be a cause for publishers and authors to celebrate not mourn. I would hope that we all know that the supposed death of the industry is—as I already mentioned —very silly. Rather than panicking and fearing the 99 cent novel or whatever comes next in the long line of tech scare fads, laugh, write, create and be glad there are so many ways to share your story.

I can understand that the idea of the 99 cent e-book is a disturbing one for many. After all, both publishers and authors are used to charging much larger fees for their work. The 99 cent price tag can almost feel like an insult. That’s why I wasn’t surprised to see that attitude expressed in a recent post on IndieHorror that painted authors who price their books at 99 cents as uncaring or untalented hacks [nbcite refID="4" refName="creepy1"].

The truth is, in some cases, the author is absolutely right. We’ve all seen some terribly formatted e-books in our time. Usually, a lower price means less editing and a less polished final work (hence my occasional typos). This has been a typical argument against self-publishing for years and in a lot of cases it is spot on. There is also a deep fear that a low price point will hurt authors. At such a low price new authors may not be able to afford, as Margaret Atwood put it in her talk at ToC, “their cheese sandwiches.” This is a concern, I suppose, but I think it misses the greater point.

The point is that how we buy literature is changing. We all know this. Production and distribution, especially in digital formats, continues to get easier and cheaper. No, print isn’t going away. In fact, with print on demand (P.O.D.), I think that is all but assured. We simply have more options now and that’s not a bad thing. The 99 cent e-book novel is simply a part of that process of change.

Rather than shifting our models with these changes, I think we get bogged down in concerns over form. People seem to forget that the novel isn’t some sacred idol of book technology. It’s only one of innumerable ways to tell a story. Rather than bemoaning a shift in one form of writing why not find ways to deliver content that fits both your readers and your economic needs. No, I don’t think that digital novels will start selling, in the long-term, for 99 cents. I think chapters will. That’s what matters. I think in some ways we are seeing the rise of serials and I’m not opposed to that. To be perfectly honest, that is what’s been going on in YA and genre fiction for a while anyway. Harry Potter was a serial. It was just published in larger sections.

Yes. Writing and publishing is a business. I know it sometimes hurts to think of it like that but it is. For some, writing is a job. They dedicate themselves to their craft and that is important. We need authors and poets. They provide context and create the culture and the personality of our nation. In this country, that means they need to make money. I just hope that most are willing to change with the times.

Creepywalker on IndieHorror is right to call out poor quality and sales gimmicks. Neither work. A wholesale rejection of the 99 cent model isn’t wise either, though. In some cases, it probably is the most practical pricing structure.

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Woah! Lance Mannion linked to my post. That’s definitely a nice thing to see. Unfortunately, I’ve been pretty quiet this week. I’ve been trying to wrap things up before Spring Break. I am glad I was able to make time for his talk, though. It was well worth it.

In other news, I got to witness a brief battle in the age old war of prose vs. poetry today as I listened to a short lecture on the use of rhythm in prose. It wasn’t that the lecturer (a prose partisan, to be sure) was actually wrong. He wasn’t. I just didn’t feel he was complete enough. Essentially, he discussed how prose uses rhythm and word placement to emphasize specific words or phrases and how that can alter the feel or meaning of a paragraph. In this case we were examining the effect of different translations of the same work. While all of this was rather evident, what caught my attention was his description of the musical nature of prose that allowed it to count rests as beats in the rhythm. He conspicuously left that ability out of poetry and even went as far as to show how poetry does not include rests in its definition of meter.

On the latter point, I believe he is correct. In technical terms, a pause is not counted. We do have hypermetrical lines and headless iambs but those are still roughly categorized according to a generalized metrical structure. I don’t see an issue with this, though. The meter is a guide not a declaration of sound or even a distinct rhythm. All music in 4/4 does not sound the same. The rests and pauses exist as readily in poetry as they do in prose. End-stops, caesuras, white space, along with word choice and word placement all provide the poet with a full arsenal of tools capable of defining and playing with pauses and spaces in his or her work.

As is usual with these discussions, I always end up feeling like a little kid watching mommy and daddy fight. They really don’t need to. One of the interesting developments in some of the more recent works that I have been reading, both online and off, has been their melding of poetry and prose. This melding isn’t even all that new anymore and I don’t think it’s a trend that will be stopping anytime soon. If anything, our increasingly networked minds seem to crave these moments of text that press on the definition of prose and poetry and expand them outward into new and exciting forms.

For me, that’s the space to be in.

Post-PC world? Really? Tell me, how many apps (Apple or Android) are developed without a PC? Post-PC simply means buying read-only devices. It means an acceptance of the projected norm and a surrender of creative control to those who still have… PC’s.
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The fastest way to stop writing is to begin to think of all of this as a brand.

I’m job hunting right now. I’ve applied for a fellowship but I’m not sure where I stand in the running. I think I would be a great fit but one never knows exactly what is being looked for. If I get the fellowship I will be in great shape because it runs for a full year and will easily set me for grad school in 2012 (assuming no sudden end-of-the-world scenario).

I’m not counting on it, though. I’ve done my due diligence. I have my LinkedIn site set up- feel free to connect to me. I’ve done countless Google searches on myself and my data and everything comes up looking good. The Geoff brand is coming along. I am more a child of the digital age than even I suspected. I was really enjoying building this online identity until I realized it was invading every part of my psyche. In truth, it had already been there. It began when I started trying to decide if I was prose or poetry writer. That’s a stupid- stupid -thing to decide. I knew that. I knew that before I entered college. The point is always to write what connects, what’s real. Here I’ve been caught up trying to fit in. I want to be part of the cool kids, the literary maestros. Maybe it’s more important that I just be who I am and damn the rest.

I sat down in a class today and listened to people tell stories about their lives. I watched them perform themselves. For an hour and half, masks came down and we touched something real. If you have the opportunity to do that in any class, do it. This class is probably the second most important class I have taken in college because it reminded me why I do this. It reminded me why I came back to English, to the very words themselves. We are storytellers. Writers or not, actors or not, it does not matter. Every one of us has a story to tell and I want to hear those stories. I want to share those stories. I love workshop. I love it because we share stories. We share things that are important to us. Pieces, chapters of ourselves – or at least we should.

I stopped doing that. My prose and poetry has become staid and rule-centric. It’s boring and flat because I ripped the life out of it. I’d rather have a page of chaotic nonsense that touched the real than a gem of text constructed by the numbers. I love new media, but this is a trap that haunts us even more than the rest. Why? Because we have analytics. I know exactly how many readers hit this site (a small but growing number). I know how each post affects the hit count and how that integrates with twitter posts and the like. I monitor all of it. Numbers are everywhere and I can see a direct relation between what I write and the numbers. This gets addicting, I know. It’s like a video without an broad base of possibilities and it’s tempting to build for the numbers. That’s doesn’t work, though (if it did, this would be a porn site). It’s important to remember that the numbers are ex post-facto. The are not the goal, merely a detail of data tangentially related to the story at hand. That story is important. The numbers…well they just rise and fall.

If we can remember that. If I can remember that, then everything seems a bit more clear.