http://www.wired.com/beyond_the_beyond/2009/05/eighteen-challenges-in-contemporary-literature
Here are two comments I made in response to the above article on Wired.Com; I thought the content was interesting enough to post here as well.
Eight Reasons Why The Above Is Mostly Specious
1. Story telling is still the most fundamental way that humans seek to make sense of their lives. Listen to yourself; listen to other people. Everybody’s telling stories constantly. It’s not going away anytime soon.
2. The greatest, most artfully created and meaningful of these stories form the world’s great literature
3. Great literature is language-bound but not technology-bound. It is an experience more than a product, even though publishing promotes and sell books poorly these days.
4. Any work of literature is news that stays news, because it only happens within the imagination and it only happens now.
5. Most of what we are dealing with is a marketing problem… a challenging marketing problem, but little more than that.
6. Most publishers have made themselves largely irrelevant and obsolete, because they no longer provide compelling value to the literary process
7. The most compelling value a publisher might offer would be the ability to accurately identify and engage cost-effectively the potential audience for a specific and significant body of work.
8. The job of marketing will continue to fall largely on the individual artist’s shoulders for some time, until a new type of publisher emerges. For an example see: http://www.aSiteAboutSomething.com
“The biggest challenge to contemporary literature is that the internet has made it easier for people to post garbage”
With respect, I have to disagree with this point almost entirely. While it is certainly true that there is an unimaginable amount of everything on the Internet including garbage, that fact by itself has nothing very much to do with why an excellent writer of contemporary fiction has such a hard time forging a successful career as a “published” author.
First, let’s dispel a myth or two. At this moment, there is more excellent fiction and more wonderful music being created than at any time in history. No one could possibly read or listen to it all even with the best of intentions and if that is all they did with their time.
Second, attend any serious writers’ group or songwriters’ group just about anywhere (and by serious I mean that the members actually write as opposed to talk about writing) and you will find people with well-crafted stories and songs, which in all likelihood you will never encounter or hear. There are great artists performing right now who you will never hear about, because no one either knows how or is prepared to make the investment in dollars and energy to figure out how to market them.
The biggest challenge for any artist at this moment in history is finding the people who are looking for him or her… discovering where in this unbelievable sea of plenty are the people who are actively seeking what he or she is creating. And they are out there….
We are in the midst of a second Reformation born of the Internet that is reshaping everything globally… universal access to global markets… universal access to information, etc. And, like the first, it is a turbulent, exciting and empowering time. Having said that, I would argue that this is one of the greatest times in all history to be a teller of tales and a singer of stories: http://aSiteAboutSomething.com.