I have given up mentoring as an "established" writer, with six backlisted books and growing but not exploding sales. I no longer read manuscripts, even of friends and relatives, and I offer no advice—except here, as a goodbye to all that. I don't know which among recent straws was heaviest. Maybe it was the epic poem about transgender cyborgs, sent to me whole (along with a boast about its record-breaking length) by the bard after he saw a review of my Aeneid translation—wouldn't I champion this man's work? Maybe it was the persistent requests for me to edit pro bono a rival Aeneid translation by someone who refused to learn any Latin. More likely, it's a close friend's efforts to sell a first novel; she has no publishing experience but is doing a great deal of work on the premise that a publisher will gamble on the book with a large advance.
I am wrong to be impatient with my friend, a trusting (as well as a talented) person. Flashy agents, and many promoters in the large publishing houses, are competing with digital entrepreneurs in telling Cinderella stories. Both sides claim that only they can fulfill aspiring writers' dreams and deliver their entitlements. And even some successful and prominent writers have, whether lazily or cynically, gone along with the narrative of an all-important tug-of-war, with writers "caught in the middle." To read the writerly threnodies, you would think that all our energies were devoted to strategizing our way out of that position, and none to choosing better projects and executing them better—though in a marketplace in upheaval, it kind of seems as if that would help us.
In our self-pity (which is, alas, no secret—the media we produce set out our concerns in gross disproportion to everybody else's), we are not an internationally dominant industry's main inventors, designers, and producers, who will save or ruin that industry with our shrewdness or fatuity, our diligence or our love of Netflix, our fostering of intellectual and cultural community or our exhibitionism and rent-seeking.
The "writer's plight" was the purport of a New York Times op-ed on June 20 by the history writer and journalist Tony Horwitz, about a fraught and precarious digital publishing venture. Horwitz seems unsure whether to discount, discard, or just prostitute his own power. He tells, however, of a happy meeting of the minds between himself and quick-buck entrepreneurs concerning the come-on for his digital book, Boom. The issue behind the book is the proposed Keystone Pipeline, but the words "Cowboys" and "Strippers" actually come before "Keystone" in the subtitle.
This hardly sounds like a compelling demand to be included in current energy and environmental debates. If the book (which I haven't seen) did in fact have a core separate from its own marketing, then the people most apt to cut into that core and test and taste it—and to spread the word if they were impressed—were hardly going to be attracted in large numbers in the first place.
Other readers, who bought the book at face value, weren't going to concede to it or its author any engagement or memory or loyalty; most of them probably didn't read beyond the cowboys and strippers, or were irritated at any links between these and public policy. In their eyes, the book may have argued strongly for its own lack of competitiveness. The Web isn't short on cheaper thrills, after all—in fact, in many places on the Web, thrills are free. My Corgi is fascinated by the YouTube video of the Corgis playing tetherball. She never buys books, never mind reading them all the way through and supporting the careers of their authors.
That's because she has the mind of a Corgi. It's cute in her, but it's quite different from the sort of communing mind that's able to nurture a nation's journalism and worthwhile pop culture and literature (or blends of these), the mind ambitious authors need to reach. It's odd that actual professionals should linger for more than a few days in the notion that what they ought to do, to secure their future, is to come down on the side of the attitude that opts for dying in traffic in the cause of pursuing a fast-moving chipmunk.
In fact, the writer's commercial "dilemma" illustrates a pervasive degradation in our ideas about how things work. The hype of self-gratification makes technology out to be something supernatural, which can substitute for human talent, thought, sacrifice, or luck in one of the most dismal callings on earth, as well as for everything else. Our ethics must be unspeakably distorted from trying to accommodate such a mammoth untruth. Information technology is, of course, just a set of tools, very useful ones, but in no way diminishing human responsibility. On the contrary, they expand it through their easily activated physical power and the great range of their uses. The privilege of ordering a shirt via a mouse click calls us momentously to account, in defiance of any dumb delusion along the lines of "my computer and credit card give me shirts."
The inevitable disappointments and embarrassments invite the opposite lie, that the technology is the devil, who by nature employs his minions to prey on the weak, and can never be brought into the realm of law and redemption; but this devil is actually winning against the forces of light, among them traditional publishing, where the true believer in succor once found it and perhaps still could: up there is "discovery," the big advance for a first book out of nowhere, the bestseller list, then eternity on a Tahitian beach. In larger, societal connections, the technology is supposed to be bad, because it doesn't love us and look out for us, because it takes ("sucks up") what we give it (time, money, effort, trust), and we are helpless to refuse, or to bargain or backtrack with the people behind it.
Admittedly, it's hard for writers—especially aspiring writers—to own up to our situation, which is that we are as essential and as disposable and as justly subject to hardship and obscurity and uncongenial deployments as soldiers in a world war. That's not an overdramatic simile, given the forces of tyranny and terror active against the priceless common possessions that allow writing to begin with.
Writing a music or dance review, writing anything about anything on the assumption that it will be fine for things (like writing) to go on here the way we've collectively and individually chosen, is a life-or-death fight against those forces. The review—or poem, or novel, or parody, or memoir, or news report, or blog—should be intelligent and careful; it should fight the good fight instead of discrediting it. A soldier's proper concern is not to pilot his destiny but to be a good soldier—or not to be a soldier at all. As Horace wrote, it's not like other professions: excel or do something else. Writers would, of course, much rather believe that we are Corgis ourselves—so adorable, our reactions so diverting, our very existence wrapped up in the obligation to treat us kindly and provide for us and encourage us as the creatures who, so obviously, we were born to be.
And didn't—as we've heard too often—traditional publishing use to do this? Didn't the one insightful editor seize the brilliant manuscript rejected by a hundred dim-witted time-servers (who must be gnashing their teeth now)? Didn't the kindly publisher finance the five-year-long creation of the masterpiece? Didn't the agent, during the bender brought on by the stress of creation, drop by with hot food and reassurances of immortality?
It's a fantasy profitable to traditional publishers, because on the mere hint that it will come true someday, they can get a manuscript worth, say, $20,000 to them for a $1,000 advance, to be repaid, and further author revenue to be allotted, out of "net profit"—which the company's accountants of course define liberally in the company's favor. If somebody's gotta tapdance, and is convinced that people just have to see her "out there" tapdancing for everything to come right, and if it also happens that she isn't bad at tapdancing, she's going to be tapdancing for food (if that) for a very long time.
These realizations are greatly slowed down nowadays by the "magic" of technology, making it seem much easier to advance writerly ambition. If you can't spell or form sentences all that well, spelling and grammar checks are at hand. It used to take an hour or two to draft a query letter, revise it, address it, and mail it, to say nothing of the research on its addressee necessary for getting started on it; now fifty publishers or agents (their contact info cut and pasted from the Web) can get the same cut and pasted query letter on the same morning.
Potential readers used to be as remote and whimsical as potential lovers, wandering in bookstores somewhere or glimpsed as they flipped through magazines on subways. The author's dear ones smiled crookedly when gifted with her books, and as a rule never opened them. Now a readership that, according to a whole list of criteria, ought to be amenable can be found and solicited online.
But for most younger writers, it's a scam. It sounds so easy—it is so easy to follow the directions and click the buttons. How could it go wrong? What could be the matter with substituting an artificial, automatic intelligence—the same one everyone else is using—for your own in pursuing the art of rhetoric and selling the results? And no problem if the latter activity eats up any amount of time! Truly, I've been told, from high up, that I would succeed once I spent half my time networking and marketing. Had I listened, I could not possibly have gained the skill and knowledge I needed.
Beyond this, the self-frustrations of technology for writers are frightful. Maybe there are net gains in reaching readers—who knows?—but access to established publishers—our traditional first love, who most of us never get over—has decreased proportionately. Technology is much more effective as a wall than as a collection of siege machinery, for anybody but an identity thief in Minsk.
When I was a sub-intern (don't ask) at Johns Hopkins University Press in the late Nineties, every paper query and submission, no matter how silly, got an official reply on the good paper with the letterhead. The ban on email approaches apparently still meant a net savings in the editors' time, as petitioners were fewer and more serious, their own time and money coming into their calculations. Now the general lifting of that ban is counterbalanced by a great dip in the willingness of editors to take cognizance of anything unsolicited or unagented. No reply comes to the email of an unknown author; her message is easier to zap than it is to send: it can even be filtered out automatically.
The decreasing availability of editors at most national publishing houses and magazines—even to established authors, even to authors they know, and even to authors working on an assignment or a contract—motivates me to aim back at its sources the griping about the Catch-22 of talented obscurity, and the stubbornness of gatekeepers. What tax on the attention of these would be reasonable, and how would it be levied?
But it's chastening for me to write this, because for years I was out there, not having all that much to say but insistent that people in there—listen—to me. The technology of "access" was abused, and the reactions were inevitable. I would have responded the same way. I am responding the same way.
On the digital side, "volunteers" write and edit as the spirit leads them, and are granted leave to do more of these things the more they "participate" (that is, provide the page views the company can monetize by running ads on the site). I'm tired of decrying the iniquity of such arrangements, and instead I'm asking, "Well, could writers perhaps be less perfect victims?"
I have never seen any sustained speculation about the effect of information technology on the quality of writing, but my own impression from reviewing scholarly and popular books on ancient literature and religion is a sorry one. Online abstracts and articles answer the mousy summons and quickly yield bibliographies fifty or a hundred pages long, and patchy exegesis with nothing original but the connecting thread of commendation and quibbles, and no synthesis or analysis worthy of those terms. In case you want to know why I can describe the way it's done, it's because I've done it, assembling text databases and prestigiously published print books from the mass of peer-reviewed medical literature, as an editor in an "informatics" company.
But it was long before that episode that I imbibed my muted skepticism about the technological boom—muted, because I like trees, and I use the technology every day to my great benefit, and I look forward to a new dispensation that's more fair and constructive than the old one. We just have to clothe the machines with custom.
In any case, the invitation to think my way around them came in the form of hands only loosely attached to my brain. I had to drop out of junior high typing class and do my best to learn typing on my own. Handwriting was not a good substitute even where it was allowed, because mine is bad—not as in insouciantly illegible, but as in not under control. I skip ahead in sentences, writing one word or phrase for another. I leave out letters and switch tenses and parts of speech even though the sounds and the logic are clear in my mind. But I'm not dyslexic; I've always read like a fiend. With no problem in any known category, I had to struggle on my own.
Fortunately, when I was fifteen, my family moved to an apartment in the Wood County Historical Museum, because my mother had become manager of the surrounding park, and I was allowed to use the IBM Selectric in the front office on evenings and weekends. It had a correction function that reduced the amount of white-out I needed to plaster on my high school compositions. Yet college and the first year of graduate school (I started a doctoral program at twenty-one) saw me convinced I was doomed. On the cheap typewriter I could afford, there was no way I could write long papers and become a professional scholar.
But around this time, in the mid-Eighties, the Apple revolution was beginning. I bought a Mac with stubby feet, like my Corgi's now; but it was much more cooperative than she is. I could type my best, correct, type again, correct again, all on the same document. But I still typed with such weird incompetence that I had to compose alertly, suspecting every word and going through documents in their entirety several times.
In the course of that, I began to enjoy rethinking sentences and paragraphs. I sharpened them up even after they were acceptable, and I took to picturing exactly what I wanted and pushing towards it. Classical philology couldn't provide enough fun of this sort, so I revived other ambitions. Week after week, I could keep reworking a poem, without the humiliation of failing to make it look physically standard; I could print it and show it off without feeling like a seven-year-old playing office.
Communications technology wasn't for me a means to do my work more quickly and easily (as I found my students doing theirs once I started teaching—perhaps nine out of ten essays were patent first drafts); it was a tool that allowed me to work, period. And, as it happened, it encouraged me to work much harder on the thing itself, the product, the offering. I didn't think technology was magical, any more than a paraplegic would think of her wheelchair as a Batmobile, conferring or augmenting superpowers, instead of just as a means to participate and contribute more. If writers can treat technology of any kind as a mere tool, a means to pay more attention, not less, to their work as a thing in itself, publishing will come right.
But I can hardly intone this de haut en bas, swept along as I am from day to day on the current of mass solipsistic private publicity we call publishing, so alien to the streams of American communications in the past. Harvard and other early colleges were founded explicitly in order to keep clergy in the new land from being so ignorant, and sermons and pious pamphlets were for a long time the most common, the most respected, and the most exciting intellectual offerings.
There is also the tradition of civic self-expression, as glorified by the Norman Rockwell painting "Freedom of Speech," showing a man in homey clothes speaking earnestly at a town hall meeting. Many writers in this country, like John Greenleaf Whittier (who claimed never to have written anything more important than his signature on an inaugural anti-slavery petition), have been in essence crusading journalists.
Then there were the aesthetic and emotional pilgrims, Emily Dickinson occupying the extreme of unworldliness, Henry James the extreme of worldliness; and the entrepreneurs, on the model of Benjamin Franklin or Mark Twain; and the good losers, like Thoreau living with stacks of his self-published books; and the drop-outs and rebels, like Hemingway, most of whom happened to be canny self-promoters at the same time. Hemingway's war and wilderness fiction might be the best memo for aspiring writers now. You make it or you don't, the protagonists accept—in the last analysis, it hardly matters: what matters is to save as much as possible of your dignity.
Sarah Ruden is a visiting scholar in classics at Brown University. She recently finished translating the Oresteia of Aeschylus for the Modern Library series with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. The Music Inside the Whale, and Other Marvels: A Translator on the Beauty of the Bible is forthcoming from Knopf early in 2015.
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