Another Roxane Gay® observation gets the Caleb jumping-on-board treatment. In her post over at HTML Giant, Gay talks about the James Frey writing factory, and how its existence speaks to the strange desperation of writers (particularly MFA-pursuing writers) to be published, even when facing little to no financial or celebrity gain. The following line caught me, and while powerful in its own right, my mis-reading is what really got me thinking. Brackets: MINE ( I had to insert something of myself into this statement as a meta-nod to the topic)
“The desire to be published, for some [reason], is so desperate and so intense they will do whatever it takes.”
Why?
Answer: We are trained to be ego maniacs.
The loudest, most boastful vainglorious attitude gets applauded while humility gets ignored. This is not surprising, as the very act of braggadocia is a stimuli. It doesn’t matter that silence (which implies humility) is the very nature of books. Reality TV continues to be made, and reality TV stars continue to get book deals.
Social networking and Blogging have taught us that even if what we have to say isn’t worth anything, we are for some reason less human if we don’t say it. And because the worldwide target marketing demographic thinks so too, those who say the most, the loudest, will find favor with publishers.
I’ve got to give credit to the reading populace, though. Books have managed to outlast other forms of leisure in terms of resisting the ego. First magazines. Then TV. Then Movies. But now, unfortunately, it seems books are only successful when they inspire the hope of a movie adaptation.
The truth is, not everyone has something worthy of wide attention. Yes, each person has something important to say, but often that thing is important to a small group of people (family and friends – which is where Vanity and Print on Demand come into play, but that’s for another post). Book publishing was at one time the main way give the widely-important IDEAS (caps intentional) a larger audience. Today, literally every thought, whether minutely or widely important, has the same range. I have as much potential to reach the world with my Tweeted fart joke as the President does with his Tweeted fart joke. Social blogging culture has simultaneously trained us to over-inflate the importance of our ideas AND give us a world-wide platform for those ideas. Hell, I’m a victim to this right now.
But as with everything, even idea saturation (and the vanishing author advances that comes with it) does have benefits.
As a physically weak man, I embrace that people are allowed to exist in their heads, now. Manual labor isn’t necessarily the common proof of societal participation and benefit. Words and thoughts are now as visible as sweat and dirt. You used to have to afford a suit and nice care to be thought of as beneficial to society in terms of your intellect. Now, a base understanding of HTML and an internet connection will do just fine.
And hopefully, if monetary gain becomes less viable, only the widely important ideas will rise.
